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  • Software development is (mostly) a trade, and what to do about it

    - by Jeff
    (This is another cross-post from my personal blog. I don’t even remember when I first started to write it, but I feel like my opinion is well enough baked to share.) I've been sitting on this for a long time, particularly as my opinion has changed dramatically over the last few years. That I've encountered more crappy code than maintainable, quality code in my career as a software developer only reinforces what I'm about to say. Software development is just a trade for most, and not a huge academic endeavor. For those of you with computer science degrees readying your pitchforks and collecting your algorithm interview questions, let me explain. This is not an assault on your way of life, and if you've been around, you know I'm right about the quality problem. You also know the HR problem is very real, or we wouldn't be paying top dollar for mediocre developers and importing people from all over the world to fill the jobs we can't fill. I'm going to try and outline what I see as some of the problems, and hopefully offer my views on how to address them. The recruiting problem I think a lot of companies are doing it wrong. Over the years, I've had two kinds of interview experiences. The first, and right, kind of experience involves talking about real life achievements, followed by some variation on white boarding in pseudo-code, drafting some basic system architecture, or even sitting down at a comprooder and pecking out some basic code to tackle a real problem. I can honestly say that I've had a job offer for every interview like this, save for one, because the task was to debug something and they didn't like me asking where to look ("everyone else in the company died in a plane crash"). The other interview experience, the wrong one, involves the classic torture test designed to make the candidate feel stupid and do things they never have, and never will do in their job. First they will question you about obscure academic material you've never seen, or don't care to remember. Then they'll ask you to white board some ridiculous algorithm involving prime numbers or some kind of string manipulation no one would ever do. In fact, if you had to do something like this, you'd Google for a solution instead of waste time on a solved problem. Some will tell you that the academic gauntlet interview is useful to see how people respond to pressure, how they engage in complex logic, etc. That might be true, unless of course you have someone who brushed up on the solutions to the silly puzzles, and they're playing you. But here's the real reason why the second experience is wrong: You're evaluating for things that aren't the job. These might have been useful tactics when you had to hire people to write machine language or C++, but in a world dominated by managed code in C#, or Java, people aren't managing memory or trying to be smarter than the compilers. They're using well known design patterns and techniques to deliver software. More to the point, these puzzle gauntlets don't evaluate things that really matter. They don't get into code design, issues of loose coupling and testability, knowledge of the basics around HTTP, or anything else that relates to building supportable and maintainable software. The first situation, involving real life problems, gives you an immediate idea of how the candidate will work out. One of my favorite experiences as an interviewee was with a guy who literally brought his work from that day and asked me how to deal with his problem. I had to demonstrate how I would design a class, make sure the unit testing coverage was solid, etc. I worked at that company for two years. So stop looking for algorithm puzzle crunchers, because a guy who can crush a Fibonacci sequence might also be a guy who writes a class with 5,000 lines of untestable code. Fashion your interview process on ways to reveal a developer who can write supportable and maintainable code. I would even go so far as to let them use the Google. If they want to cut-and-paste code, pass on them, but if they're looking for context or straight class references, hire them, because they're going to be life-long learners. The contractor problem I doubt anyone has ever worked in a place where contractors weren't used. The use of contractors seems like an obvious way to control costs. You can hire someone for just as long as you need them and then let them go. You can even give them the work that no one else wants to do. In practice, most places I've worked have retained and budgeted for the contractor year-round, meaning that the $90+ per hour they're paying (of which half goes to the person) would have been better spent on a full-time person with a $100k salary and benefits. But it's not even the cost that is an issue. It's the quality of work delivered. The accountability of a contractor is totally transient. They only need to deliver for as long as you keep them around, and chances are they'll never again touch the code. There's no incentive for them to get things right, there's little incentive to understand your system or learn anything. At the risk of making an unfair generalization, craftsmanship doesn't matter to most contractors. The education problem I don't know what they teach in college CS courses. I've believed for most of my adult life that a college degree was an essential part of being successful. Of course I would hold that bias, since I did it, and have the paper to show for it in a box somewhere in the basement. My first clue that maybe this wasn't a fully qualified opinion comes from the fact that I double-majored in journalism and radio/TV, not computer science. Eventually I worked with people who skipped college entirely, many of them at Microsoft. Then I worked with people who had a masters degree who sucked at writing code, next to the high school diploma types that rock it every day. I still think there's a lot to be said for the social development of someone who has the on-campus experience, but for software developers, college might not matter. As I mentioned before, most of us are not writing compilers, and we never will. It's actually surprising to find how many people are self-taught in the art of software development, and that should reveal some interesting truths about how we learn. The first truth is that we learn largely out of necessity. There's something that we want to achieve, so we do what I call just-in-time learning to meet those goals. We acquire knowledge when we need it. So what about the gaps in our knowledge? That's where the most valuable education occurs, via our mentors. They're the people we work next to and the people who write blogs. They are critical to our professional development. They don't need to be an encyclopedia of jargon, but they understand the craft. Even at this stage of my career, I probably can't tell you what SOLID stands for, but you can bet that I practice the principles behind that acronym every day. That comes from experience, augmented by my peers. I'm hell bent on passing that experience to others. Process issues If you're a manager type and don't do much in the way of writing code these days (shame on you for not messing around at least), then your job is to isolate your tradespeople from nonsense, while bringing your business into the realm of modern software development. That doesn't mean you slap up a white board with sticky notes and start calling yourself agile, it means getting all of your stakeholders to understand that frequent delivery of quality software is the best way to deal with change and evolving expectations. It also means that you have to play technical overlord to make sure the education and quality issues are dealt with. That's why I make the crack about sticky notes, because without the right technique being practiced among your code monkeys, you're just a guy with sticky notes. You're asking your business to accept frequent and iterative delivery, now make sure that the folks writing the code can handle the same thing. This means unit testing, the right instrumentation, integration tests, automated builds and deployments... all of the stuff that makes it easy to see when change breaks stuff. The prognosis I strongly believe that education is the most important part of what we do. I'm encouraged by things like The Starter League, and it's the kind of thing I'd love to see more of. I would go as far as to say I'd love to start something like this internally at an existing company. Most of all though, I can't emphasize enough how important it is that we mentor each other and share our knowledge. If you have people on your staff who don't want to learn, fire them. Seriously, get rid of them. A few months working with someone really good, who understands the craftsmanship required to build supportable and maintainable code, will change that person forever and increase their value immeasurably.

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  • Are there any good html 5 mmo design tutorials? [on hold]

    - by Dwight Spencer
    Hey all. I got a rather inspired after playing gaia online's zOMG and wanted to revive an old project idea I've had laying around for a few years now. I'm looking to work with html5 (ie canvas, svg based sprites, & WebGL) to build a graphical web based MUD/MMO. Obviously, this is a new take on an old idea and after searching google I haven't really turned up many good resources. But does anyone have any tutorials or other resources to point me in the right direction?

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  • Software design for non object oriented paradigm

    - by Dean
    I'm currently working on a project where I'm writing the firmware for an electronic system in C, and have been asked to produce documentation on the development/evolution of the software for the embedded devices. Having developed software in the object oriented paradigm I know to use UML to document the software such as class diagrams with objects, however this does not work for documenting the development of my embedded system. So what should I produce to document the development of my firmware?

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  • How can I solve the same problems a CB-architecture is trying to solve without using hacks? [on hold]

    - by Jefffrey
    A component based system's goal is to solve the problems that derives from inheritance: for example the fact that some parts of the code (that are called components) are reused by very different classes that, hypothetically, would lie in a very different branch of the inheritance tree. That's a very nice concept, but I've found out that CBS is often hard to accomplish without using ugly hacks. Implementations of this system are often far from clean. But I don't want to discuss this any further. My question is: how can I solve the same problems a CBS try to solve with a very clean interface? (possibly with examples, there are a lot of abstract talks about the "perfect" design already). Here's an example I was going for before realizing I was just reinventing inheritance again: class Human { public: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; // other human specific components }; class Zombie { Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; // other zombie specific components }; After writing that I realized I needed an interface, otherwise I would have needed N containers for N different types of objects (or to use boost::variant to gather them all together). So I've thought of polymorphism (move what systems do in a CBS design into class specific functions): class Entity { public: virtual void on_event(Event) {} // not pure virtual on purpose virtual void on_update(World) {} virtual void on_draw(Window) {} }; class Human { private: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; public: virtual void on_event(Event) { ... } virtual void on_update(World) { ... } virtual void on_draw(Window) { ... } }; class Zombie { private: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; public: virtual void on_event(Event) { ... } virtual void on_update(World) { ... } virtual void on_draw(Window) { ... } }; Which was nice, except for the fact that now the outside world would not even be able to know where a Human is positioned (it does not have access to its position member). That would be useful to track the player position for collision detection or if on_update the Zombie would want to track down its nearest human to move towards him. So I added const Position& get_position() const; to both the Zombie and Human classes. And then I realized that both functionality were shared, so it should have gone to the common base class: Entity. Do you notice anything? Yes, with that methodology I would have a god Entity class full of common functionality (which is the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place).

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  • Collision detection, stop gravity

    - by Scott Beeson
    I just started using Gamemaker Studio and so far it seems fairly intuitive. However, I set a room to "Room is Physics World" and set gravity to 10. I then enabled physics on my player object and created a block object to match a platform on my background sprite. I set up a Collision Detection event for the player and the block objects that sets the gravity to 0 (and even sets the vspeed to 0). I also put a notification in the collision event and I don't get that either. I have my key down and key up events working well, moving the player left and right and changing the sprites appropriately, so I think I understand the event system. I must just be missing something simple with the physics. I've tried making both and neither of the objects "solid". Pretty frustrating since it looks so easy. The player starting point is directly above the block object in the grid and the player does fall through the block. I even made the block sprite solid red so I could see it (initially it was invisible, obviously).

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  • What language yields most rapid development of a SOAP client application

    - by mathematician1975
    I have written a SOAP client application. It started off as Perl but I needed it to have proper multithreaded capabilities, so I rewrote it in C++ which was a horrendous experience and the development time was many many times more than that of the Perl bot. I need to implement a new SOAP client and I was wondering what peoples opinions were about choice of language with regards to fastest development time. C++ is clearly not well suited to web services type programming so there is no way I am going to write in C++ again.

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  • How can I resolve component types in a way that supports adding new types relatively easily?

    - by John
    I am trying to build an Entity Component System for an interactive application developed using C++ and OpenGL. My question is quite simple. In my GameObject class I have a collection of Components. I can add and retrieve components. class GameObject: public Object { public: GameObject(std::string objectName); ~GameObject(void); Component * AddComponent(std::string name); Component * AddComponent(Component componentType); Component * GetComponent (std::string TypeName); Component * GetComponent (<Component Type Here>); private: std::map<std::string,Component*> m_components; }; I will have a collection of components that inherit from the base Components class. So if I have a meshRenderer component and would like to do the following GameObject * warship = new GameObject("myLovelyWarship"); MeshRenderer * meshRenderer = warship->AddComponent(MeshRenderer); or possibly MeshRenderer * meshRenderer = warship->AddComponent("MeshRenderer"); I could be make a Component Factory like this: class ComponentFactory { public: static Component * CreateComponent(const std::string &compTyp) { if(compTyp == "MeshRenderer") return new MeshRenderer; if(compTyp == "Collider") return new Collider; return NULL; } }; However, I feel like I should not have to keep updating the Component Factory every time I want to create a new custom Component but it is an option. Is there a more proper way to add and retrieve these components? Is standard templates another solution?

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  • Rule of thumb for enemy design

    - by Terrance
    I'm at the early stages of developing a 2d side scrolling open ended platformer (think metroidvania) and am having a bit of difficulty at enemy design inspiration for something of a scifi, nature, fantasy setting that isn't overly familar or obvious. I haven't seen too many articles blogs or books that talk about the subject at great length. Is there a fair rule of thumb when coming up with enemy design with respect to keeping your player engaged?

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  • Tetris Movement - Implementation

    - by James Brauman
    Hi gamedev, I'm developing a Tetris clone and working on the input at the moment. When I was prototyping, movement was triggered by releasing a directional key. However, in most Tetris games I've played the movement is a bit more complex. When a directional key is pressed, the shape moves one space in that direction. After a short interval, if the key is still held down, the shape starts moving in the direction continuously until the key is released. In the case of the down key being pressed, there is no pause between the initial movement and the subsequent continuous movement. I've come up with a solution, and it works well, but it's totally over-engineered. Hey, at least I can recognize when things are getting silly, right? :) public class TetrisMover { List registeredKeys; Dictionary continuousPressedTime; Dictionary totalPressedTime; Dictionary initialIntervals; Dictionary continousIntervals; Dictionary keyActions; Dictionary initialActionDone; KeyboardState currentKeyboardState; public TetrisMover() { *snip* } public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { currentKeyboardState = Keyboard.GetState(); foreach (Keys currentKey in registeredKeys) { if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyUp(currentKey)) { continuousPressedTime[currentKey] = TimeSpan.Zero; totalPressedTime[currentKey] = TimeSpan.Zero; initialActionDone[currentKey] = false; } else { if (initialActionDone[currentKey] == false) { keyActions[currentKey](); initialActionDone[currentKey] = true; } totalPressedTime[currentKey] += gameTime.ElapsedGameTime; if (totalPressedTime[currentKey] = initialIntervals[currentKey]) { continuousPressedTime[currentKey] += gameTime.ElapsedGameTime; if (continuousPressedTime[currentKey] = continousIntervals[currentKey]) { keyActions[currentKey](); continuousPressedTime[currentKey] = TimeSpan.Zero; } } } } } public void RegisterKey(Keys key, TimeSpan initialInterval, TimeSpan continuousInterval, Action keyAction) { if (registeredKeys.Contains(key)) throw new InvalidOperationException( string.Format("The key %s is already registered.", key)); registeredKeys.Add(key); continuousPressedTime.Add(key, TimeSpan.Zero); totalPressedTime.Add(key, TimeSpan.Zero); initialIntervals.Add(key, initialInterval); continousIntervals.Add(key, continuousInterval); keyActions.Add(key, keyAction); initialActionDone.Add(key, false); } public void UnregisterKey(Keys key) { *snip* } } I'm updating it every frame, and this is how I'm registering keys for movement: tetrisMover.RegisterKey( Keys.Left, keyHoldStartSpecialInterval, keyHoldMovementInterval, () = { Move(Direction.Left); }); tetrisMover.RegisterKey( Keys.Right, keyHoldStartSpecialInterval, keyHoldMovementInterval, () = { Move(Direction.Right); }); tetrisMover.RegisterKey( Keys.Down, TimeSpan.Zero, keyHoldMovementInterval, () = { PerformGravity(); }); Issues that this doesn't address: If both left and right are held down, the shape moves back and forth really quick. If a directional key is held down and the turn finishes and the shape is replaced by a new one, the new one will move quickly in that direction instead of the little pause it is supposed to have. I could fix the issues, but I think it will make the solution even worse. How would you implement this?

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  • Designing generic render/graphics component in C++?

    - by s73v3r
    I'm trying to learn more about Component Entity systems. So I decided to write a Tetris clone. I'm using the "style" of component-entity system where the Entity is just a bag of Components, the Components are just data, a Node is a set of Components needed to accomplish something, and a System is a set of methods that operates on a Node. All of my components inherit from a basic IComponent interface. I'm trying to figure out how to design the Render/Graphics/Drawable Components. Originally, I was going to use SFML, and everything was going to be good. However, as this is an experimental system, I got the idea of being able to change out the render library at will. I thought that since the Rendering would be fairly componentized, this should be doable. However, I'm having problems figuring out how I would design a common Interface for the different types of Render Components. Should I be using C++ Template types? It seems that having the RenderComponent somehow return it's own mesh/sprite/whatever to the RenderSystem would be the simplest, but would be difficult to generalize. However, letting the RenderComponent just hold on to data about what it would render would make it hard to re-use this component for different renderable objects (background, falling piece, field of already fallen blocks, etc). I realize this is fairly over-engineered for a regular Tetris clone, but I'm trying to learn about component entity systems and making interchangeable components. It's just that rendering seems to be the hardest to split out for me.

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  • Rendering scaled-down card images

    - by user1065145
    I have high-quality SVG card images, but they drastically lose their quality when I downsize them. I have tried two ways of rendering cards (using Inkscape and Imagemagics): 1) Render SVG to high-res PNG and resize it then: inkscape -D --export-png=QS1024.png --export-width=1024 QS.svg convert QS1024.png -filter Lanczos -sampling-factor 1x1 -resize 71x QS71.png 2) Render SVG to image of proper size at once: inkscape -D --export-png=QS71.png --export-width=71 QS.svg Both approaches generate blurry card images, which looks even worse than old Windows cards. What are the best way to generate smaller card images from SVG sources and not to loose their quality a lot? UPDATE: I am using Inkscape to render SVG - PNG and ImageMagick then to downsize PNG. I've tried using convert -resize with couple of filters (Lanczos/Mitchell/etc), but result was pretty much the same. Original: 71x raster:

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  • Which purpose do armor points serve?

    - by Bane
    I have seen a mechanic which I call "armor points" in many games: Quake, Counter Strike, etc. Generally, while the player has these armor points, he takes less damage. However, they act in a similar fashion that health points do: you lose them by taking said damage. Why would you design such a feature? Is this just health 2.0, or am I missing something? To me, armor only makes sense in, for example, RPG games, where it is a constant that determines your resistance. But I don't see why would it need to be reduceable during combat.

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  • Microsoft Developers Development Laptops [closed]

    - by FidEliO
    Possible Duplicate: What should I be focusing on when building a development PC? I am a Microsoft Developer on Sharepoint and ASP.NET. I am tring to buy a new laptop since the one that I have is an old one. From my point of view, Microsoft Development tools are becomming more and more resource-consuming (I don't find a suitable reason for it though). So I thought I would go for a Lenovo U260 i-7. I do not know exactly if it is going to meet my requirement so that is why I wanted to ask specifically Microsoft Developers about the specification of CPU, RAM, and Storage Disk. Thanks in advance

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