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• How to build a 4x game?

  - by Marco

  I'm trying to study how succefully implement a 4x game. Area of interest: 1) map data: how to store stellars systems (graphs?), how to generate them and so on.. 2) multiplayer: how to organize code in a non graphical server and a client to display it 3) command system: what are patters to catch user and ai decisions and handle them, adding at first "explore" and "colonize" then "combat", "research", "spy" and so on (commands can affect ships, planets, research, etc..) 4) ai system: ai can use commands to expand, upgrade planets and ship I know is a big questions, so help is appreciated :D 1) Map data Best choice is have a graph to model a galaxy. A node is a stellar system and every system have a list of planets. Ship cannot travel outside of predefined paths, like in Ascendancy: http://www.abandonia.com/files/games/221/Ascendancy_2.png Every connection between two stellar systems have a cost, in turns. Generate a galaxy is only a matter of: - dimension: number of stellar systems, - variety: randomize number of planets and types (desertic, earth, etc..), - positions of each stellar system on game space - connections: assure that exist a path between every node, so graph is "connected" (not sure if this a matematically correct term) 2) Multiplayer Game is organized in turns: player 1, player 2, ai1, ai2. Server take care of all data and clients just diplay it and collect data change. Because is a turn game, latency is not a problem :D 3) Command system I would like to design a hierarchy of commands to take care of this aspect: abstract Genericcommand (target) ExploreCommand (Ship) extends genericcommand colonizeCommand (Ship) buildcommand(planet, object) and so on. In my head all this commands are stored in a queue for every planets, ships or reasearch center or spy, and each turn a command is sent to a server to apply command and change data state 4) ai system I don't have any idea about this. Is a big topic and what I want is a simple ai. Something like "expand and fight against everyone". I think about a behaviour tree to control ai moves, so I can develop an ai that try to build ships to expand and then colonize planets, upgrade them throught science and combat enemies. Could be done with a finite state machine too ? any ideas, resources, article are welcome!

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• Determining cause of random latency and loading issues

  - by Sherwin Flight

  I'm not sure exactly what details to post in regards to my issue, because I'm not sure what is relevant. Prior to the end of September my websites all loaded quickly, in almost all cases. Loading time wasn't usually more than a few seconds. However, since the end of September I noticed a big increase in page loading times. In some cases pages were taking 30 seconds or more to load. I do have a remote monitoring service monitoring some of the sites as well, and the image below shows the response times over the past month. The response times shown at the beginning of this graph were what the usual response times were prior to this issue occurring. You can see that there has been a significant increase in response times from the beginning to the end of this graph. The thing is, the problem is not happening 100% of the time. If I click through the site, or even just keep refreshing the page, about 25% of the time the pages load quickly, the remaining 75% of the time they load slowly. Sometimes the pages take so long to load that they time out, and don't load at all. I have contacted my hosting provider, and they said things at their end was fine. I don't believe the problem is my home internet provider, because all other websites load without a problem. The server is located in Texas, USA. This also raises another interesting point. My remote monitor checks my site from two locations, California, USA, and London, England. As you can see in the chart below the response time is actually shorter when checked from London, which doesn't seem to make sense, since the server is physically closer to the California monitoring location. I would have expected the London monitoring location to have higher response times since they are physically farther away. I should also point out that in some traceroute test I've done it seem like the first connection to the server seems to take the longest, then after that the rest of the page loads quickly. Below is a little chart showing the times for the first connection to the server. So, what could be causing this problem, and what steps can I take to resolve it or at least narrow down the problem? Sending the request to the server was very quick, and receiving the reply back seems pretty quick, but the WAIT time is really long. So it connects, sends the request, but then waits close to 30 seconds before it starts receiving data back. I am also aware that there are things I can do to speed up page loading times, like reducing the number of CSS and JS files used on a page, compressing images, etc. This is not really what the source of the problem is though, because nothing has really changed on the site since before the problem started, and other sites on the same server are loading slowly as well.

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• Office 2010 Professional Plus (Top 10 reasons to upgrade)

  - by mbcrump

  Being a huge nerd, I decided that I would go ahead and upgrade to the latest and greatest office. That being, Office 2010 Professional Plus. The biggest concern that I had was loosing all my mail settings from Outlook 2007. Thankfully, it upgrade gracefully and worked like a charm. So lets start this top 10 list. 1) You can upgrade without fear of loosing all your stuff! As you can tell by the screenshot below, you can select what you want to do. I selected to remove all previous versions.    2) Outlook conversations: Just like GMail, you can now group emails by conversations. This is simply awesome and a must have. 3) The ability to ignore conversations. If you are on a email thread that has nothing to do with you. Simply “ignore” the conversation and all emails go into the deleted folder. 4) Quick Steps, do you send an email to the same team member or group constantly. With quick steps, its just one click away. 5) Spell check in the Subject line! 6)  Easier Screenshots, built in just click the button. No more ALT-Printscreen for those that are not aware of the awesome SnagIT 10 that's out. 7) Open in protected view. When you open a document from an email attachment, it lets you know the file may be unsafe. You can click a button to enable editing. This is great for preventing macros.       8) Excel has always had a variety of charts and graphs available to visually depict data and trends. With Excel 2010, though, Microsoft has added a new feature called Sparklines, which allows you to place a mini-graph or trend line in a single cell. The Sparklines are a cool way to quickly and simply add a visual element without having to go through the effort of inserting a graph or chart that overwhelms the worksheet. 9) Contact actions. If you hover over a name in the form or fields on an email, you get a popup giving you several actions you can perform on the person such as adding them to your Outlook contacts, scheduling a meeting, viewing their stored contact information if they are already in your contacts, sending an instant message or even starting a telephone call. 10) Windows 7 Task Bar Context Menu – I love the jumplist. I don’t know how much that I would actually use it but it just rocks.

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• Getting user generated content with no titles to rank

  - by hugo

  We are creating a site that allows users to generate content. The user is provided with a text field only (no title), similar to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Each piece of content created by the users will have a dedicated page/URL. Since the page has no title, I was wondering how search engines will index and display our pages. If the content was shared on other social networks, what will those results look like if there is no title for the open graph or Twitter tags?

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• Speaking this week at Richmond SQL Server User Group

  - by drsql

  Thursday night, at 6:00 (or so) I will be speaking in Richmond ( http://richmondsql.org/cs2007/ ), talking about How to Implement a Hierarchy using SQL Server. The abstract is: One of the most common structures you will come across in the real world is a hierarchy (either a single parent "tree" or a multi-parent "graph"). Many systems will implement the obvious examples, such as a corporate managerial structure or a bill of materials. It turns out that almost any many-to-many relationship can be...(read more)

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• Data structures for a 2D multi-layered and multi-region map?

  - by DevilWithin

  I am working on a 2D world editor and a world format subsequently. If I were to handle the game "world" being created just as a layered set of structures, either in top or side views, it would be considerably simple to do most things. But, since this editor is meant for 3rd parties, I have no clue how big worlds one will want to make and I need to keep in mind that eventually it will become simply too much to check, handling and comparing stuff that are happening completely away from the player position. I know the solution for this is to subdivide my world into sub regions and stream them on the fly, loading and unloading resources and other data. This way I know a virtually infinite game area is achievable. But, while I know theoretically what to do, I really have a few questions I'd hoped to get answered for some hints about the topic. The logic way to handle the regions is some kind of grid, would you pick evenly distributed blocks with equal sizes or would you let the user subdivide areas by taste with irregular sized rectangles? In case of even grids, would you use some kind of block/chunk neighbouring system to check when the player transposes the limit or just put all those in a simple array? Being a region a different data structure than its owner "game world", when streaming a region, would you deliver the objects to the parent structures and track them for unloading later, or retain the objects in each region for a more "hard-limit" approach? Introducing the subdivision approach to the project, and already having a multi layered scene graph structure on place, how would i make it support the new concept? Would you have the parent node have the layers as children, and replicate in each layer node, a node per region? Or the opposite, parent node owns all the regions possible, and each region has multiple layers as children? Or would you just put the region logic outside the graph completely(compatible with the first suggestion in Q.3) When I say virtually infinite worlds, I mean it of course under the contraints of the variable sizes and so on. Using float positions, a HUGE world can already be made. Do you think its sane to think beyond that? Because I think its ok to stick to this limit since it will never be reached so easily.. As for when to stream a region, I'm implementing it as a collection of watcher cameras, which the streaming system works with to know what to load/unload. The problem here is, i will be needing some kind of warps/teleports built in for my game, and there is a chance i will be teleporting a player to a unloaded region far away. How would you approach something like this? Is it sane to load any region to memory which can be teleported to by a warp within a radius from the player? Sorry for the huge question, any answers are helpful!

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• What would be the best mean for a gui with a lot of FX in Unity

  - by Lionel Barret

  The game I am working on (we are in R&D) is based almost exclusively on a windowed gui with a lot of FX (fading, growing, etc). We will also likely need custom widgets (like a sound recording graph). The game will be made with Unity and from what I heard, the default gui system has quite a bad rep, it is too slow for many usages. So, I wondering what would be the best way to do what we need.

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• HRESULT E_FAIL Exception! (5 replies)

  Hi, I am trying to generate a powerpoint presentation in C#. It works well on my local machine which is running XP. When I run the application on Windows Server 2003 (our Server) the presentation gives HRESULT E FAIL when I call the following code chart (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Graph.Chart)slide.Shapes.AddOLEObject (GetLeft(i), GetTop(i), GetWidth(i), GetHeight(i), &quot;MSGraph.Chart&quot;, &quot;&quot;, Microsoft....

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• How are Reads Distributed in a Workload

  - by Bill Graziano

  People have uploaded nearly one millions rows of trace data to TraceTune.  That’s enough data to start to look at the results in aggregate.  The first thing I want to look at is logical reads.  This is the easiest metric to identify and fix. When you upload a trace, I rank each statement based on the total number of logical reads.  I also calculate each statement’s percentage of the total logical reads.  I do the same thing for CPU, duration and logical writes.  When you view a statement you can see all the details like this: This single statement consumed 61.4% of the total logical reads on the system while we were tracing it.  I also wanted to see the distribution of reads across statements.  That graph looks like this: On average, the highest ranked statement consumed just under 50% of the reads on the system.  When I tune a system, I’m usually starting in one of two modes: this “piece” is slow or the whole system is slow.  If a given piece (screen, report, query, etc.) is slow you can usually find the specific statements behind it and tune it.  You can make that individual piece faster but you may not affect the whole system. When you’re trying to speed up an entire server you need to identity those queries that are using the most disk resources in aggregate.  Fixing those will make them faster and it will leave more disk throughput for the rest of the queries. Here are some of the things I’ve learned querying this data: The highest ranked query averages just under 50% of the total reads on the system. The top 3 ranked queries average 73% of the total reads on the system. The top 10 ranked queries average 91% of the total reads on the system. Remember these are averages across all the traces that have been uploaded.  And I’m guessing that people mainly upload traces where there are performance problems so your mileage may vary. I also learned that slow queries aren’t the problem.  Before I wrote ClearTrace I used to identify queries by filtering on high logical reads using Profiler.  That picked out individual queries but those rarely ran often enough to put a large load on the system. If you look at the execution count by rank you’d see that the highest ranked queries also have the highest execution counts.  The graph would look very similar to the one above but flatter.  These queries don’t look that bad individually but run so often that they hog the disk capacity. The take away from all this is that you really should be tuning the top 10 queries if you want to make your system faster.  Tuning individually slow queries will help those specific queries but won’t have much impact on the system as a whole.

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• NoSQL MongoDb Overview

  In the current software industry that works around design patterns and OOPs there is a constant battle in converting the data from the database into the objects in the object graph and vice versa. MongoDb is a NoSQL database.  read moreBy prim sDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• NoSQL MongoDb overview

  In the current software industry that works around design patterns and OOPs there is a constant battle in converting the data from the database into the objects in the object graph and vice versa. MongoDb is a NoSQL database.  read moreBy prim sDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Determining cause of random latency/loading issues

  - by Sherwin Flight

  I'm not sure exactly what details to post in regards to my issue, because I'm not sure what is relevant. Prior to the end of September my websites all loaded quickly, in almost all cases. Loading time wasn't usually more than a few seconds. However, since the end of September I noticed a big increase in page loading times. In some cases pages were taking 30 seconds or more to load. I do have a remote monitoring service monitoring some of the sites as well, and the image below shows the response times over the past month. The response times shown at the beginning of this graph were what the usual response times were prior to this issue occurring. You can see that there has been a significant increase in response times from the beginning to the end of this graph. The thing is, the problem is not happening 100% of the time. If I click through the site, or even just keep refreshing the page, about 25% of the time the pages load quickly, the remaining 75% of the time they load slowly. Sometimes the pages take so long to load that they time out, and don't load at all. I have contacted my hosting provider, and they said things at their end was fine. I don't believe the problem is my home internet provider, because all other websites load without a problem. The server is located in Texas, USA. This also raises another interesting point. My remote monitor checks my site from two locations, California, USA, and London, England. As you can see in the chart below the response time is actually shorter when checked from London, which doesn't seem to make sense, since the server is physically closer to the California monitoring location. I would have expected the London monitoring location to have higher response times since they are physically farther away. I should also point out that in some traceroute test I've done it seem like the first connection to the server seems to take the longest, then after that the rest of the page loads quickly. Below is a little chart showing the times for the first connection to the server. So, what could be causing this problem, and what steps can I take to resolve it or at least narrow down the problem? Sending the request to the server was very quick, and receiving the reply back seems pretty quick, but the WAIT time is really long. So it connects, sends the request, but then waits close to 30 seconds before it starts receiving data back. I am also aware that there are things I can do to speed up page loading times, like reducing the number of css/js files used on a page, compressing images, etc. This is not really what the source of the problem is though, because nothing has really changed on the site since before the problem started, and other sites on the same server are loading slowly as well. Any help or advice is much appreciated.

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• Creating a Reporting Services Histogram Chart for Statistical Distribution Analysis

  Typically transactional data is quite detailed and analyzing an entire dataset on a graph is not feasible. Generally such data is analyzed using some form of aggregation or frequency distribution. One of the specialized charts generally used in Reporting Services for statistical distribution is Histogram Charts. In this tip we look at how Histogram Charts can be used for statistical distribution analysis and how to create and configure this type of chart in SSRS.

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• How can I tweak this A* search pathfinding algorithm to handle different terrain movement values?

  - by user422318

  I'm creating a 2D map-based action game with similar interaction design as Diablo II. In other words, the player clicks around a map to move their player. I just finished player movement and am moving on to pathfinding. In the game, enemies should charge the player's character. There are also five different terrain types that give different movement bonuses. I want the AI to take advantage of these terrain bonuses as they try to reach the player. I was told to check out the A* search algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm). I'm doing this game in HTML5 and JavaScript, and found a version in JavaScript: http://www.briangrinstead.com/blog/astar-search-algorithm-in-javascript I'm trying to figure out how to tweak it though. Below are my ideas about what I need to change. What else do I need to worry about? When I create a graph, I will need to initialize the 2D array I pass in passed on with a traversal of a map that corresponds to the different terrain types. in graph.js: "GraphNodeType" definition needs to be modified to handle the 5 terrain types. There will be no walls. in astar.js: The g and h scoring will need to be modified. How should I do this? in astar.js: isWall() should probably be removed. My game doesn't have walls. in astar.js: I'm not sure what this is. I think it indicates a node that isn't valid to be processed. When would this happen, though? At a high level, how do I change this algorithm from "oh, is there a wall there?" to "will this terrain get me to the player faster than the terrain around me?" Because of time, I'm also debating reusing my Bresenham algorithm for the enemies. Unfortunately, the different terrain movement bonuses won't be used by the AI, which will make the game suck. :/ I'd really like to have this in for the prototype, but I'm not a developer by trade nor am I a computer scientist. :D If you know of any code that does what I'm looking for, please share! Sanity check tips for this are also appreciated.

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• State Transition Constraints

  Data Validation in a database is a lot more complex than seeing if a string parameter really is an integer. A commercial world is full of complex rules for sequences of procedures, of fixed or variable lifespans, Warranties, commercial offers and bids. All this requires considerable subtlety to prevent bad data getting in, and if it does, locating and fixing the problem. Joe Celko shows how useful a State transition graph can be, and how essential it can become with the time aspect added.

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• C Programming arrays, I dont understand how I would go about making this program, If anyone can just guide me through the basic outline please :) [on hold]

  - by Rashmi Kohli

  Problem The temperature of a car engine has been measured, from real-world experiments, as shown in the table and graph below: Time (min) Temperature (oC) 0 20 1 36 2 61 3 68 4 77 5 110 Use linear regression to find the engine’s temperature at 1.5 minutes, 4.3 minutes, and any other time specified by the user. Background In engineering, many times we measure several data points in an experiment, but then we need to predict a value that we have not measured which lies between two measured values, such as the problem statement above. If the relation between the measured parameters seems to be roughly linear, then we can use linear regression to find the relationship between those parameters. In the graph of the problem statement above, the relation seems to be roughly linear. Hence, we can apply linear regression to the above problem. Assuming y {y0, y1, …yn-1} has a linear relation with x {x0, x1, … xn-1}, we can say that: y = mx+b where m and b can be found with linear regression as follows: For the problem in this lab, using linear regression gives us the following line (in blue) compared to the measured curve (in red). As you can see, there is usually a difference between the measured values and the estimated (predicted) values. What linear regression does is to minimize those differences and still give us a straight line (blue). Other methods, such as non-linear regression, are also possible to achieve higher accuracy and better curve fitting. Requirements Your program should first print the table of the temperatures similar to the way it’s printed in the problem statement. It should then calculate the temperature at minute 1.5 and 4.3 and show the answers to the user. Next, it should prompt the user to enter a time in minutes (or -1 to quit), and after reading the user’s specified time it should give the value of the engine’s temperature at that time. It should then go back to the prompt. Hints •Use a one dimensional array to store the temperature values given in the problem statement. •Use functions to separate tasks such as calculating m, calculating b, calculating the temperature at a given time, printing the prompt, etc. You can then give your algorithm as well as you pseudo code per function, as opposed to one large algorithm diagram or one large sequence of pseudo code.

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• HRESULT E_FAIL Exception! (5 replies)

  Hi, I am trying to generate a powerpoint presentation in C#. It works well on my local machine which is running XP. When I run the application on Windows Server 2003 (our Server) the presentation gives HRESULT E FAIL when I call the following code chart (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Graph.Chart)slide.Shapes.AddOLEObject (GetLeft(i), GetTop(i), GetWidth(i), GetHeight(i), &quot;MSGraph.Chart&quot;, &quot;&quot;, Microsoft....

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• Not able to get graphs on screen with gnuplot

  - by user81194

  I have installed 12.04 along with Windows 7 and also installed gnuplot 4.6.0. When I type gnuplot on the terminal, I am getting the error message: Terminal type set to unknown. When I tried plot sin(x), the graph does not appear on the screen. However, I am able to make a postscript file. I tried set terminal 'x11', system responds with: unknown or ambiguous terminal. Please help me solve this problem.

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• The SQL of Membership: Equivalence Classes & Cliques

  It is awkward to do 'Graph databases' in SQL to explore the sort of relationships and memberships in social networks because equivalence relations are classes (a set of sets) rather than sets. However one can explore graphs in SQL if the relationship has all three of the mathematical properties needed for an equivalence relationship. FREE eBook – "45 Database Performance Tips for Developers"Improve your database performance with 45 tips from SQL Server MVPs and industry experts. Get the eBook here.

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• See number of SVN Checkins per folder

  - by Farseeker

  I have a very large SVN repository (working copy of several gb) that has just reached its 20,000th checkin. As a bit of an interesting statistic for our team (and to partly celebrate our 20,000th checkin) I'd like to make a graph showing which folders in the repository have had the most checkins. Is there any way to do this? We mostly use integrated SVN clients in our IDE and Tortoise SVN, but I'm willing to get other tools for this one-off thing.

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• How to get "Friends who like/play games" list (similar to Farmville 2)

  - by FBAppDev

  I'm working on a Facebook app, and I'm trying to get a friends list similar to Farmville 2. They have a "friends who like games" list. My first thought is, I can get a list of all friends, then for each friend, see if they like any pages with type == "GAMES/TOYS". But ideally, I would like to get the list in one query (not by making one graph API or FQL request per friend). Is this possible, and if so, how?

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• Mimicking Network Databases in SQL

  Unlike the hierarchical database model, which created a tree structure in which to store data, the network model formed a generalized 'graph' structure that describes the relationships between the nodes. Nowadays, the relational model is used to solve the problems for which the network model was created, but the old 'network' solutions are still being implemented by programmers, even when they are less effective.

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• The need to reduce mesh count

  - by OJW

  In Panda3d, I load a model and place 10000 references to it in the scene-graph. It runs at (say) 2Hz. I load a 3d model containing 10000 copies of that exact same object, and it runs at (say) 60Hz. As does using the flattenStrong() command which is effectively the same thing but at runtime. So the question is: is this behaviour a peculiarity of Panda3d, or is it a fundamental law which applies to all games engines?

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• GPGPU

  WhatGPU obviously stands for Graphics Processing Unit (the silicon powering the display you are using to read this blog post). The extra GP in front of that stands for General Purpose computing.So, altogether GPGPU refers to computing we can perform on GPU for purposes beyond just drawing on the screen. In effect, we can use a GPGPU a bit like we already use a CPU: to perform some calculation (that doesn’t have to have any visual element to it). The attraction is that a GPGPU can be orders of magnitude faster than a CPU.WhyWhen I was at the SuperComputing conference in Portland last November, GPGPUs were all the rage. A quick online search reveals many articles introducing the GPGPU topic. I'll just share 3 here: pcper (ignoring all pages except the first, it is a good consumer perspective), gizmodo (nice take using mostly layman terms) and vizworld (answering the question on "what's the big deal").The GPGPU programming paradigm (from a high level) is simple: in your CPU program you define functions (aka kernels) that take some input, can perform the costly operation and return the output. The kernels are the things that execute on the GPGPU leveraging its power (and hence execute faster than what they could on the CPU) while the host CPU program waits for the results or asynchronously performs other tasks.However, GPGPUs have different characteristics to CPUs which means they are suitable only for certain classes of problem (i.e. data parallel algorithms) and not for others (e.g. algorithms with branching or recursion or other complex flow control). You also pay a high cost for transferring the input data from the CPU to the GPU (and vice versa the results back to the CPU), so the computation itself has to be long enough to justify the overhead transfer costs. If your problem space fits the criteria then you probably want to check out this technology.HowSo where can you get a graphics card to start playing with all this? At the time of writing, the two main vendors ATI (owned by AMD) and NVIDIA are the obvious players in this industry. You can read about GPGPU on this AMD page and also on this NVIDIA page. NVIDIA's website also has a free chapter on the topic from the "GPU Gems" book: A Toolkit for Computation on GPUs.If you followed the links above, then you've already come across some of the choices of programming models that are available today. Essentially, AMD is offering their ATI Stream technology accessible via a language they call Brook+; NVIDIA offers their CUDA platform which is accessible from CUDA C. Choosing either of those locks you into the GPU vendor and hence your code cannot run on systems with cards from the other vendor (e.g. imagine if your CPU code would run on Intel chips but not AMD chips). Having said that, both vendors plan to support a new emerging standard called OpenCL, which theoretically means your kernels can execute on any GPU that supports it. To learn more about all of these there is a website: gpgpu.org. The caveat about that site is that (currently) it completely ignores the Microsoft approach, which I touch on next.On Windows, there is already a cross-GPU-vendor way of programming GPUs and that is the DirectX API. Specifically, on Windows Vista and Windows 7, the DirectX 11 API offers a dedicated subset of the API for GPGPU programming: DirectCompute. You use this API on the CPU side, to set up and execute the kernels that run on the GPU. The kernels are written in a language called HLSL (High Level Shader Language). You can use DirectCompute with HLSL to write a "compute shader", which is the term DirectX uses for what I've been referring to in this post as a "kernel". For a comprehensive collection of links about this (including tutorials, videos and samples) please see my blog post: DirectCompute.Note that there are many efforts to build even higher level languages on top of DirectX that aim to expose GPGPU programming to a wider audience by making it as easy as today's mainstream programming models. I'll mention here just two of those efforts: Accelerator from MSR and Brahma by Ananth. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• What’s the use of code reuse?

  - by Tony Davis

  All great developers write reusable code, don’t they? Well, maybe, but as with all statements regarding what “great” developers do or don’t do, it’s probably an over-simplification. A novice programmer, in particular, will encounter in the literature a general assumption of the importance of code reusability. They spend time worrying about DRY (don’t repeat yourself), moving logic into specific “helper” modules that they can then reuse, agonizing about the minutiae of the class structure, inheritance and interface design that will promote easy reuse. Unfortunately, writing code specifically for reuse often leads to complicated object hierarchies and inheritance models that are anything but reusable. If, instead, one strives to write simple code units that are highly maintainable and perform a single function, in a concise, isolated fashion then the potential for reuse simply “drops out” as a natural by-product. Programmers, of course, care about these principles, about encapsulation and clean interfaces that don’t expose inner workings and allow easy pluggability. This is great when it helps with the maintenance and development of code but how often, in practice, do we actually reuse our code? Most DBAs and database developers are familiar with the practical reasons for the limited opportunities to reuse database code and its potential downsides. However, surely elsewhere in our code base, reuse happens often. After all, we can all name examples, such as date/time handling modules, which if we write with enough care we can plug in to many places. I spoke to a developer just yesterday who looked me in the eye and told me that in 30+ years as a developer (a successful one, I’d add), he’d never once reused his own code. As I sat blinking in disbelief, he explained that, of course, he always thought he would reuse it. He’d often agonized over its design, certain that he was creating code of great significance that he and other generations would reuse, with grateful tears misting their eyes. In fact, it never happened. He had in his head, most of the algorithms he needed and would simply write the code from scratch each time, refining the algorithms and tailoring the code to meet the specific requirements. It was, he said, simply quicker to do that than dig out the old code, check it, correct the mistakes, and adapt it. Is this a common experience, or just a strange anomaly? Viewed in a certain light, building code with a focus on reusability seems to hark to a past age where people built cars and music systems with the idea that someone else could and would replace and reuse the parts. Technology advances so rapidly that the next time you need the “same” code, it’s likely a new technique, or a whole new language, has emerged in the meantime, better equipped to tackle the task. Maybe we should be less fearful of the idea that we could write code well suited to the system requirements, but with little regard for reuse potential, and then rewrite a better version from scratch the next time.

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