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• In MMO game, how to handle user characters, who are offline?

  - by Deele

  In my medieval MMO game, players have their own character, that represents themselves inside game. Like a King. Players could have cities and armies, but King acts as main driving force. Then it comes to player, going offline/vacation/disconnect. How to deal with "offline King", to keep some sort of reality in game, without ruining everything for player. I have never liked unrealistic stuff in games, like appearing/dissapearing from thin air, like in WoW or other MMO RPG's, when it comes to connect/disconnect, like in Matrix movie, when you are disconnected, your "avatar" inside the system just vaninshes. Ok, if player char stays where it was left, other players who are online could kick his ass like offline player char was frozen? I see only one solution - give player char, while offline, some sort of AI, that controls char. Is there any other solutions? May be, some sort of legend/story, could make users only as inner-voice, leaving King just passively controlled by user, or other stuff... Please, help! I hope you understand my question.

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• Game: Age of Empires sound good but video "out of range"

  - by Ezekiel

  I'm new to the Ubuntu realm. Currently i'm using Linux Mint 12 with Wine 1.4 and PLAYONLINUX as game loading/playing programs. Video card is MSI GeForce FX5200 (NVIDIA) and is 3d enabled. I can play "Call of Duty 5 demo just fine. My real love is the Age of Empires series games. I loaded the WINE version of AOE 1 demo. No sound and no picture. Black screen with "Out of Range" window in red. I loaded my CD version of AOE 1 through PLAYONLINUX. I get the sound just fine but again the black screen with "Out of Range" window in red. I have used all the monitor settings in both the "settings" and in winecfg. None of the eight monitor options worked in any combination. I have checked all the questions and blogs on this error and tried all I found and no one seems to come up with a real fix. I guess I need to know exactly what the "Out of Range" means. Any help? Anywhere? Thanks

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• Building a linux system

  - by webyankee

  I am worried about hardware compatibility. I have several older PCs with various hardware and wish to install Linux onto them. I have several ideas about what I would like to do. first, I am a novice and know just enough to get me into trouble in a lot of areas. I can not find adequate descriptions of the usage between a desktop and a server version of Linux. When would you want to choose to build a server instead of a desktop and can you change a desktop to a server if you need higher functionality? I wonder if I should use 32 or 64 bit? I believe 32 bit on older (P1 or P2 systems) would be the safe way to go. what is the extent can these systems be used? Can they used to play high end graphics on-line games or just simple browsing and word processing? How do I determine what programs the system can use? I have pondered on the idea of linking several systems together to make one big computer. I know this can be done with some functionality improvement. Any Ideas about this?

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• When mapping the surface of a sphere with tiles, how might you deal with polar distortion?

  - by clweeks

  It's easy to deal with the way locations interact on a clean Cartesian grid. It's just vanilla math. And you can kind of ignore the geometry of the sphere's surface for a bunch of it if you want to just truncate the poles or something. But I keep coming up with ideas for games where the polar space matters. Geo-coded ARGs and global roguelikes and stuff. I want square(ish?) locations -- reasonably representable by square tiles of the same size across the globe, anyway. This has to be a solved problem, right? What are the solutions? ETA: At the equator -- and assuming that your square locations are reasonably small, it's close enough to true that you can get away with having one square in the rows north and south of the most equatorial row. And you could probably get away with that by just hand-waving the difference up to like 45-degrees or so. But eventually, you need to have fewer squares in a pole-ward circumferential row. If I reduce the length of the row by one and offset the squares by 1/2 then they're just like hexes and it's relatively easy to do the coding to keep track of the connections. But as you get pole-ward, it gets more and more extreme. Projecting the surface of the world onto the surface of a cube is tempting. But I figured there must be more elegant solutions already in use. If I did the cube thing (not dissecting it further through geodesy) Are there any pros and cons related to placing the pole at the center of a face or at the vertex of three sides?

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• Using Google App Engine to Perform World Updates vs an Authoritative Server

  - by Error 454

  I am considering different game server architectures that use GAE. The types of games I am considering are turn-based where the world status would need to be updated about once per minute. I am looking for an answer that persuades me to either perform the world update on the google servers OR an authoritative server that syncs with the datastore. The main goal here would be to minimize GAE daily quotas. For some rough numbers, I am assuming 10,000 entities requiring updates. Each entity update would require: Reading 5 private entity variables (fetched from datastore) Fetching as many as 20 static variables (from datastore or persisted in server memory) Writing 5 entity variables Clients of the game would authenticate and set state directly against GAE as well as pull the latest world state from GAE. Running the update on GAE would consist of a cron job launched every minute. This would update all of the entities and save the results to the datastore. This would be more CPU intensive for GAE. Running the update on an authoritative server would consist of fetching entity data from the GAE datastore, calculating the new entity states and pushing the new state variables back to the datastore. This would be more bandwidth intensive for the datastore.

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• Best peer-to-peer game architecture

  - by Dejw

  Consider a setup where game clients: have quite small computing resources (mobile devices, smartphones) are all connected to a common router (LAN, hotspot etc) The users want to play a multiplayer game, without an external server. One solution is to host an authoritative server on one phone, which in this case would be also a client. Considering point 1 this solution is not acceptable, since the phone's computing resources are not sufficient. So, I want to design a peer-to-peer architecture that will distribute the game's simulation load among the clients. Because of point 2 the system needn't be complex with regards to optimization; the latency will be very low. Each client can be an authoritative source of data about himself and his immediate environment (for example bullets.) What would be the best approach to designing such an architecture? Are there any known examples of such a LAN-level peer-to-peer protocol? Notes: Some of the problems are addressed here, but the concepts listed there are too high-level for me. Security I know that not having one authoritative server is a security issue, but it is not relevant in this case as I'm willing to trust the clients. Edit: I forgot to mention: it will be a rather fast-paced game (a shooter). Also, I have already read about networking architectures at Gaffer on Games.

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• Is there any place to find real-world usage-style tutorials for programming languages?

  - by OleDid

  Let's face it. When you want to learn something completely new, be it mathematics or foreign languages, it's easiest to learn when you get real world scenarios in front of you, with theory applied. For example, trigonometry can be extremely interesting when applied to creation of 2D platform games. Norwegian can be really interesting to learn if you live in Norway. When I try to look at a new programming language, I always find these steps the hardest: What tools do I need to compile and how do I do it Introduction-step: Why is this programming language so cool? Where and how is it used? (The step I am looking for, real-world scenarios) The rest, deep diving into the language, pure theory and such, is often much easier if you have completed step 1 and 2. Because now you know what it's all about, and can just read the specification when you need to. What I ask is, do you have any recommendations for places I can find such material for programming languages? Be it websites or companies selling books in this style, I'm interested. Also, I am interested in all languages. (If I had found a "real-world usage" explained for even INTERCAL, I would be interested). In some other thread here, I found a book called "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks". This is kind of what I am looking for, but I believe there must be "more like this".

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• The Correct Usage of DLLs with a DirectX Game?

  - by smoth190

  I'm using DirectX 10 (in C++) to make a game engine, and a test driver program on top of it. Now that I've written many messy rough drafts of an engine, I want to make the final (or sorta final) clean version. I choose to follow how I've seen other engines do it, and that's to have all the core nasty messy crap in a DLL, and then you can create games with just a few functions (well, not really :D). However, I'm unsure of what nasty messy crap to put in that DLL. I don't know about speed restrictions with DLLs. What I've done is put my winproc in the DLL, and have a class that takes the messages, and sends them through to the program using the DLL. Then that program does what it needs to do, and calls a rendering functions back in the DLL that renders everything. Only problem is it gets very low FPS (2, to be exact...). I've looked through everything, and I don't know if the way I'm using DLLs in causing this, or its something different. Whether it's the DLLs or not, I still want to know how to use a DLL correctly with a game engine. I like being neat, I hate having to see all those long names of DirectX classes. I use typedef a lot.

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• Bejeweled-like game, managing different gem/powerup behaviors?

  - by Wissam

  I thought I'd ask a question and look forward to some insight from this very compelling community. In a Bejeweled-like (Match 3) game, the standard behavior once a valid swap of two adjacent tiles is made is that the resulting matching tiles are destroyed, any tiles now sitting over empty spaces fall to the position above the next present-tile, and any void created above is filled with new tiles. In richer Match-3 games like Bejeweled, 4 in a row (as opposed to just 3) modifies this behavior such that the tile that was swapped is retained, turned into a "flaming" gem, it falls, and then the empty space above is filled. The next time that "flaming gem" is played it explodes and destroys the 8 perimeter tiles, triggers a different animation sequence (neighbors of those 8 tiles being destroyed look like they've been hit by a shockwave then they fall to their respective positions). Scoring is different, the triggered sounds are different, etc. There are even more elaborate behaviors for Match5, Match-cross-pattern, and many powerups that can be purchased, each which produces a more elaborate sequence of events, sounds, animations, scoring, etc... What is the best approach to developing all these different behaviors that respond to players' "move" and her current "performance" and that deviate from the standard sequence of events, scoring, animation, sounds etc, in such a way that we can always flexibly introduce a new "powerup" ? What we are doing now is hard-coding the events of each one, but the task is long and arduous and seems like the wrong approach especially since the game-designers and testers often offer (later) valuable insight on what works better in-game, which means that the code itself may have to be re-written even for minor changes in behavior (say, destroy only 7 neighboring tiles, instead of all 8 in an explosion). ANY pointers for good practices here would be highly appreciated.

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• Is this technique for stat tracking without a database workable?

  - by baptzmoffire

  If I wanted to create a chess game, for iOS, that tracked both player moves (for retracing the progression of a game and for player stats), what would be the simplest route to take? To clarify, I want to track not only the moves a player has made in a particular game, but how often that player has made that move in past games. For example I want to be able to track: How many times a given player has opened by moving the king pawn up two squares (e4) as white, on move number one. What is the percentage of time the player responds to white's e4 opening move, with moving his own king pawn to e5? What percentage of time does he respond by moving his queenside bishop pawn to c5? And so on. If it's not clear, the stat tracking system should also be able to report how many times this player, as black, move his queen to h1, on move number 30. I'm using Parse.com for my back-end as a server (BaaS) service. If I were to create a class that writes strings that identify move number, player color, moved piece, algebraic notation of the square (e.g. "d8") to a file, locally in the file system saves the file to Parse, and deletes the temporary file from file system upon opening the same game in my tableview (a la a "With Friends" game), download this file from Parse, parse through it and retrieve all stats/history, assign all relevant values to variables Is this plan viable, or is there an easier way?

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• JEOS

  - by john.graves(at)oracle.com

  JEOS stands for Just Enough Operating System.  It is  great environment for building virtual machines without all the clutter of a windowing system, games, office products, etc.  It is from Ubuntu and you install it using the Ubuntu server install, but rather than picking a standard install, press F4 and choose “Install a minimal system.” Note: The “Install a minimal virtual machine” is specific to VMWare and I plan to use VirtualBox. Be sure to include Open SSH in the install so that it installs sshd. *** Also, if you plan to install XE, you’ll need to modify the partitions to have a larger swap space (at least 1.5 G). *** Once the install is done, I find it useful to install a few other items. Update Ubuntu apt-get update Install some other tools apt-get openjdk-6-jre Yes, java will be included in any of the WebLogic installs, but I need this one if I want to do remote display (for config wizards, etc). apt-get gcc Some apps require to rebuild the kernel modules, so you’ll need a basic compiler. Install guest additions (Choose the VirtualBox Devices->Install Guest Additions…” option.  This sets up a /dev/cdrom or /dev/cdrom1.  You’ll need to manually mount this temporarily: sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt Then run the linux .bin file. Update nofile limits.  Most java apps fail with the standard ubuntu settings: edit /etc/security/limits.conf and add these lines at the end: *     soft nofile 65535 *     hard nofile 65535 root  soft nofile 65535 root  hard nofile 65535 These numbers are very high and I wouldn’t do this on a production system, but for this environment it is fin. To get rid of the annoying piix error on boot, add the following line to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file blacklist i2c_piix4

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• How to avoid game objects accidentally deleting themselves in C++

  - by Tom Dalling

  Let's say my game has a monster that can kamikaze explode on the player. Let's pick a name for this monster at random: a Creeper. So, the Creeper class has a method that looks something like this: void Creeper::kamikaze() { EventSystem::postEvent(ENTITY_DEATH, this); Explosion* e = new Explosion; e->setLocation(this->location()); this->world->addEntity(e); } The events are not queued, they get dispatched immediately. This causes the Creeper object to get deleted somewhere inside the call to postEvent. Something like this: void World::handleEvent(int type, void* context) { if(type == ENTITY_DEATH){ Entity* ent = dynamic_cast<Entity*>(context); removeEntity(ent); delete ent; } } Because the Creeper object gets deleted while the kamikaze method is still running, it will crash when it tries to access this->location(). One solution is to queue the events into a buffer and dispatch them later. Is that the common solution in C++ games? It feels like a bit of a hack, but that might just be because of my experience with other languages with different memory management practices. In C++, is there a better general solution to this problem where an object accidentally deletes itself from inside one of its methods?

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• Multiplayer online game engine/pipeline

  - by Slav

  I am implementing online multiplayer game where client must be written in AS3 (Flash) to embed game into browser and server in C++ (abstract part of which is already written and used with other games). Networking models may differ from each other, but currently I'm looking toward game's logic run on both client and server parts but they're written on different languages while it's not the main problem. My previous game (pretty big one - was implemented with efforts of ~5 programmers in 1.5 years) was mainly "written" within electronic tables as structured objects with implemented inheritance: was written standalone tool which generated AS3 and C++ (languages of platforms to which the game was published) using specified electronic tables file (.xls or .ods). That file contained ~50 tables with ~50 rows and ~50 columns each and was mainly written by game designers which do not know any programming languages. But that game was single-player. Having declared problem with my currently implementing MMO, I'm looking toward some vast pipeline, where will be resolved such problems like: game objects descriptions (which starships exist within game, how much HP they have, how fast move, what damage deal...) actions descriptions (what players or NPCs can do: attack each other, collect resources, build structures, move, teleport, cast spells) - actions are transmitted through server between clients influences (what happens when specified action applied on specified object, e.i "Ship A attacked Ship B: field "HP" of Ship B reduced by amount of field "damage" of Ship A" Influences can be much more difficult, yes, e.i. "damage is twice it's size when Ship has =5 allies around him in a 200 units range during night" and so on. If to be able to write such logic within some "design document" it will be easily possible to: let designers to do their job without programmer's intervention or any bug-prone programming validate described logic transfer (transform, convert) to any programming language where it will be executed Did somebody worked on something like that? Is there some tools/engines/pipelines which concernes with it? How to handle all of this problems simultaneously in a best way or do I properly imagine my tasks and problems to myself?

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• how to make a continuous machine gun sound-effect

  - by Jan

  I am trying to make an entity fire one or more machine-guns. For each gun I store the time between shots (1.0 / firing rate) and the time since the last shot. Also I've loaded ~10 different gun-shot sound-effects. Now, for each gun I do the following: function update(deltatime): timeSinceLastShot += deltatime if timeSinceLastShot >= timeBetweenShots + verySmallRandomValue(): timeSinceLastShot -= timeBetweenShots if gunIsFiring: displayMuzzleFlash() spawnBullet() selectRandomSound().play() But now I often get a crackling noise (which I assume is when two or more guns are firing at the same time and confuse the sound-device). My question is whether A) This a common problem and there is a well-known solution, maybe to do with the channels or something, or B) I am using a completely wrong approach to the task. I had a look at some sound-assets for other games and they used complete burst with multiple shots. I suppose I could try that, but I would like to have organic little hickups in the gun-fire (that's what the random value is for) to make the game more gritty and dirty. I am using Panda3D, but I had the exact same problem in PyGame and SDL. [edit] Thanks a lot for the answers so far! One more problem with faking it though: Now how do I stop the sound? Let's say I have an effect with 5 bangs... *bang* *bang* *bang* *bang* *bang* And I magically manage to loop it so that there's no gap or overlap if the player fires more than 5 shots. Now, what do I do if the player stops firing halfway through the third bang? How do I know how long to keep playing the sample so that the third bang is completed and I can start playing the rumbling echo of the last shot? Of course I can look up the shot/pause timing of that sound-sample and code accordingly, but it feels extremely hacky.

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• Navigation in Win8 Metro Style applications

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  In Windows 8, Touch is, as they say, a first class citizen. Now, to be honest: they also said that in Windows 7. However in Win8 this is actually true. Applications are meant to be used by touch. Yes, you can still use mouse, keyboard and pen and your apps should take that into account but touch is where you should focus on initially. Will all users have touch enabled devices? No, not in the first place. I don’t think touchscreens will be on every device sold next year. But in 5 years? Who knows? Don’t forget: if your app is successful it will be around for a long time and by that time touchscreens will be everywhere. Another reason to embrace touch is that it’s easier to develop a touch-oriented app and then to make sure that keyboard, nouse and pen work as doing it the other way around. Porting a mouse-based application to a touch based application almost never works. The reverse gives you much more chances for success. That being said, there are some things that you need to think about. Most people have more than one finger, while most users only use one mouse at the time. Still, most touch-developers translate their mouse-knowledge to the touch and think they did a good job. Martin Tirion from Microsoft said that since Touch is a new language people face the same challenges they do when learning a new real spoken language. The first thing people try when learning a new language is simply replace the words in their native language to the newly learned words. At first they don’t care about grammar. To a native speaker of that other language this sounds all wrong but they still will be able to understand what the intention was. If you don’t believe me: try Google translate to translate something for you from your language to another and then back and see what happens. The same thing happens with Touch. Most developers translate a mouse-click into a tap-event and think they’re done. Well matey, you’re not done. Not by far. There are things you can do with a mouse that you cannot do with touch. Think hover. A mouse has the ability to ‘slide’ over UI elements. Touch doesn’t (I know: with Pen you can do this but I’m talking about actual fingers here). A touch is either there or it isn’t. And right-click? Forget about it. A click is a click.  Yes, you have more than one finger but the machine doesn’t know which finger you use… The other way around is also true. Like I said: most users only have one mouse but they are likely to have more than one finger. So how do we take that into account? Thinking about this is really worth the time: you might come up with some surprisingly good ideas! Still: don’t forget that not every user has touch-enabled hardware so make sure your app is useable for both groups. Keep this in mind: we’re going to need it later on! Now. Apps should be easy to use. You don’t want your user to read through pages and pages of documentation before they can use the app. Imagine that spotter next to an airfield suddenly seeing a prototype of a Concorde 2 landing on the nearby runway. He probably wants to enter that information in our app NOW and not after he’s taken a 3 day course. Even if he still has to download the app, install it for the first time and then run it he should be on his way immediately. At least, fast enough to note down the details of that unique, rare and possibly exciting sighting he just did. So.. How do we do this? Well, I am not talking about games here. Games are in a league of their own. They fall outside the scope of the apps I am describing. But all the others can roughly be characterized as being one of two flavors: the navigation is either flat or hierarchical. That’s it. And if it’s hierarchical it’s no more than three levels deep. Not more. Your users will get lost otherwise and we don’t want that. Flat is simple. Just imagine we have one screen that is as high as our physical screen is and as wide as you need it to be. Don’t worry if it doesn’t fit on the screen: people can scroll to the right and left. Don’t combine up/down and left/right scrolling: it’s confusing. Next to that, since most users will hold their device in landscape mode it’s very natural to scroll horizontal. So let’s use that when we have a flat model. The same applies to the hierarchical model. Try to have at most three levels. If you need more space, find a way to group the items in such a way that you can fit it in three, very wide lanes. At the highest level we have the so called hub level. This is the entry point of the app and as such it should give the user an immediate feeling of what the app is all about. If your app has categories if items then you might show these categories here. And while you’re at it: also show 2 or 3 of the items itself here to give the user a taste of what lies beneath. If the user selects a category you go to the section part. Here you show several sections (again, go as wide as you need) with again some detail examples. After that: the details layer shows each item. By giving some samples of the underlaying layer you achieve several things: you make the layer attractive by showing several different things, you show some highlights so the user sees actual content and you provide a shortcut to the layers underneath. The image below is borrowed from the http://design.windows.com website which has tons and tons of examples: For our app we’ll use this layout. So what will we show? Well, let’s see what sorts of features our app has to offer. I’ll repeat them here: Note planes Add pictures of that plane Notify friends of new spots Share new spots on social media Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down the runway they take I am sure you can think of some more items but for now we'll use these. In the hub we’ll show something that represents “Spots”, “Friends”, “Social”. Apparently we have an inner list of spotter-friends that are in the app, while we also have to whole world in social. In the layer below we show something else, depending on what the user choose. When they choose “Spots” we’ll display the last spots, last spots by our friends (so we can actually jump from this category to the one next to it) and so on. When they choose a “spot” (or press the + icon in the App bar, which I’ll talk about next time) they go to the lowest and final level that shows details about that spot, including a picture, date and time and the notes belonging to that entry. You’d be amazed at how easy it is to organize your app this way. If you don’t have enough room in these three layers you probably could easily get away with grouping items. Take a look at our hub: we have three completely different things in one place. If you still can’t fit it all in in a logical and consistent way, chances are you are trying to do too much in this app. Go back to your mission statement, determine if it is specific enough and if your feature list helps that statement or makes it unclear. Go ahead. Give it a go! Next time we’ll talk about the look and feel, the charms and the app-bar….

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• How to configure ubuntu ldap client to get password policies from server?

  - by Rafaeldv

  I have a ldap server on CentOS, 389-ds. I configured the client, ubuntu 12.04, to authenticate on that base and it works very well. But it don't gets the password policies from server. For example, if i set the policy to force user to change the password on first login, ubuntu ignores it and logs him in, always. How can i setup the client to get the policies? Here are the client files: /etc/nsswitch.conf passwd: files ldap group: files ldap shadow: files ldap hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4 networks: files protocols: db files services: db files ethers: db files rpc: db files netgroup: nis sudoers: ldap files common-auth auth [success=2 default=ignore] pam_unix.so nullok_secure auth [success=1 default=ignore] pam_ldap.so use_first_pass auth requisite pam_deny.so auth required pam_permit.so auth optional pam_cap.so common-account account [success=2 new_authtok_reqd=done default=ignore] pam_unix.so account [success=1 default=ignore] pam_ldap.so account requisite pam_deny.so account required pam_permit.so common-password password requisite pam_cracklib.so retry=3 minlen=8 difok=3 password [success=2 default=ignore] pam_unix.so obscure use_authtok try_first_pass sha512 password [success=1 user_unknown=ignore default=die] pam_ldap.so use_authtok try_first_pass password requisite pam_deny.so password required pam_permit.so password optional pam_gnome_keyring.so common-session session [default=1] pam_permit.so session requisite pam_deny.so session required pam_permit.so session optional pam_umask.so session required pam_unix.so session optional pam_ldap.so session optional pam_ck_connector.so nox11 session optional pam_mkhomedir.so skel=/etc/skel umask=0022 /etc/ldap.conf base dc=a,dc=b,dc=c uri ldaps://a.b.c/ ldap_version 3 rootbinddn cn=directory manager pam_password md5 sudoers_base ou=SUDOers,dc=a,dc=b,dc=c pam_lookup_policy yes pam_check_host_attr yes nss_initgroups_ignoreusers avahi,avahi-autoipd,backup,bin,colord,daemon,games,gnats,hplip,irc,kernoops,libuuid,lightdm,list,lp,mail,man,messagebus,news,proxy,pulse,root,rtkit,saned,speech-dispatcher,sshd,sync,sys,syslog,usbmux,uucp,whoopsie,www-data /etc/ldap/ldap.conf BASE dc=a,dc=b,dc=c URI ldaps://a.b.c/ ssl on use_sasl no tls_checkpeer no sudoers_base ou=SUDOers,dc=a,dc=b,dc=c sudoers_debug 2 pam_lookup_policy yes pam_check_host_attr yes pam_lookup_policy yes pam_check_host_attr yes TLS_CACERT /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt TLS_REQCERT never

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• Effect of using dedicated NVidia card instead of Intel HD4000

  - by Sman789

  Short version: Can someone please advise me of the effect of adding a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M card to an Ubuntu laptop in terms of power consumption and performance gains/losses when doing general productivity tasks and booting up. Also, how good are the closed source, open source, and Bumblebee drivers for these newer cards compared to support for the Intel HD4000? Long version/Background, if any info here is helpful: I'm thinking of ordering a laptop from PC Specialist (a UK company who actually sell machines without Windows pre-installed) with the following specifications: Genesis IV: 15.6" AUO Matte 95% Gamut LED Widescreen (1920x1080) Intel® Core™i5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-3210M (2.50GHz) 3MB 4GB SAMSUNG 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (1 x 4GB) 120GB INTEL® 520 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW) Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® N135 802.11N (150Mbps) + BLUETOOTH Now, as I want this laptop mainly for work and not for games, I would be more than content with the HD4000 integrated chip which comes with the processor. However, for compatibility reasons, I am not able to get the specs I want unless I choose a NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M 1GB graphics card, which I don't have a great deal of use for. I'm willing to buy it, however, as it's still cheaper than any other laptop with the specs I want. However, I know that Linux power management isn't fantastic with open-source graphics drivers, and I don't much about Bumblebee. Basically, whilst I'm happy to 'tolerate' the card being there, I don't want to experience any negative effects on the rest of my system (battery, performance etc) and if there are likely to be any, I might reconsider my purchase. So if anyone can advise me on the effects, I would be very grateful, since I doubt I can just turn the card off. Thankyou for any assistance :)

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• Loadbalancing Questions

  - by Van Holtz

  I have been learning networking for about 4 months. Wrote a single standalone Multiplayer server and succeeded with authoritative approach. Now I want to extend it by splitting the single server into clusters to allow even more players to log in to avoid latency issues. Now I have protyped the Loadbalancing server and its running pretty good so far. This is my architecture, I have a master server which acts as a proxy, every sub servers(chat, login, game) connect to the master server as well as all the clients. when a client connects, Client Request: Send Request - MS(Master) - Decides which SS(SubServer) to forward to - Forwards Request to SS - SS - Analyze Message - Send Response to MS - Decides which Client to forward to - Forwards Response to Client Well, it looks like its going through lots of stages. it takes double the time to process the message than a single server approach. i feel like my model isnt the best or i may be wrong. is there any better model or the one they use in professional games? I still want a Master-SubServer approach. I just want to clarify that I'm going in the right direction before writing all my codes. Thanks for any answer :)

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• Where I'll Be At JavaOne 2012

  - by Geertjan

  Fun and games for me at JavaOne 2012. Below are the sessions/BOFs/tutorials I'll be attending. The items in red are the sessions and BOFs where I'll be speaking, either as the main/only speaker or as a supporting speaker in someone else's presentation, while the other items (except for the NetBeans booth duties and mini presentations, which are included below) are items I'm interested in and so will be sitting in the audience: Sunday: NetBeans Day Monday: 10:00 - 12:00 TUT4801: Make Your Clients Richer: JavaFX and the NetBeans Platform 12:20 - 12:30 Mini Presentation in OTN Lounge: What's New in NetBeans IDE? 13:00 - 14:00 CON7050: How My Life Would Have Been So Much Better If We Had Used the NetBeans Platform 14:30 - 14:40 Mini Presentation in OTN Lounge: NetBeans and Java EE 15:00 - 16:00 CON4038: Project EASEL: Developing and Managing HTML5 in a Java World 16:30 - 17:15 BOF6151: NetBeans.Next: The Roadmap Ahead 17:30 - 18:15 BOF3332: Lessons Learned in Writing a PDF-to-JavaFX Converter for NetBeans 18:30 - 19:15 BOF4920: Runtime Class Reloading for Dummies Tuesday: 9:30 - 11:30 NetBeans Booth 11:30 - 12:30 CON6139: Lessons Learned in Building Enterprise and Desktop Applications with the NetBeans IDE 13:00 - 14:00 CON4387: Bringing Mylyn to NetBeans and OSGi, Bridging Their Worlds 14:30 - 14:40 Mini Presentation in OTN Lounge: NetBeans Java Editor 15:30 - 17:30 NetBeans Booth 17:30 - 18:15 BOF3665: Custom Static Code Analysis 18:30 - 19:15 BOF5806: Doing JSF Development in the NetBeans IDE  Wednesday: 8:30 - 9:30 CON5132: NetBeans Plug-in Development: JRebel Experience Report 10:00 - 11:00 CON2987: Unlocking the Java EE 6 Platform 11:30 - 12:30 CON10140: Delivering Bug-Free, More Efficient Code for the Java Platform 13:00 - 14:00 CON3826: Patterns for Modularity: What Modules Don’t Want You to Know 14:30 - 14:40 Mini Presentation in OTN Lounge: NetBeans Platform 15:00 - 16:00 CON3160: Dynamic Class Reloading in the Wild with Javeleon Thursday: 12:30 - 13:30 CON4952: NetBeans Platform Panel Discussion 14:00 - 15:00 CON11879: Getting Started with the NetBeans Platform There are several sessions/BOFs I would have liked to be able to attend, but because of clashes with other sessions that I need to see slightly more urgently, I won't be able to attend those, unfortunately. Will be a busy but interesting time, as always! The entire list of NetBeans-oriented sessions can be found here: http://netbeans.org/community/articles/javaone/2012/index.html

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• Problem graphics with ATI Radeon x1270 (RS690M) on Ubuntu 12.04

  - by Giuseppe Della Corte

  I'm Italian and so I apologize for my English! I'm a beginner to Ubuntu and I tried it on my desktop PC and it's fantastic, fast and fun! I decided to try it on my netbook Packard Bell DOT M/A and this is the configuration: AMD Athlon L110 1.2GHz 2GB of RAM ATI Radeon x1270 (RS690M) 150GB Hard Disk I installed Ubuntu 12.04 with Wubi (dualboot Windows 7 + Ubuntu 12.04), because the netbook does not have a DVD player! During the installation everything is OK, after it was installed I see mistakes in the graphical display! I see objects that are seen in different colors and moving (buttons, mouse pointer, text bar ... etc ...) At one point came not to see anything, such as this screenshot: The drivers are open, that is already installed in Ubuntu. Windows 7 video card runs fine, can run well Aero (transparent window effects), I can watch movies in HD and play some games with the Catalyst drivers from AMD. Now I ask a favor, you can help me solve this problem? Is there a fix for this driver or drivers different on the Internet? Thanks for your attention, good bye!

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• I have discovered a fundamental truth about TV shows and plots

  - by Steve Loethen

  For years, we have all known (okay, maybe I give people too much credit) that there is a very small finite number of plots.  I propose a project.  Let’s use the blogosphere to catalog those plotlines, and then find and document the episodes of shows that use them, including the show title. As evidence, how many shows have used the following plot line:? The standard “evil twin” plotline?  Once relegated to soaps, it has show up in crime shows, with the twist of DNA.  Step one, concentrate one this one.  Tell me about every show you recall that has used this plot.  I will collect and document the shows on my website (www.loethen.net) and we can build a database of the plots. Step two, what other common themes should I offer up?  How about the bigamist plot line?  The “bad guy was dead” plot line (revenge from the dead"?  The “vast government conspiracy” plotline? Let the games begin….

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• Putting Together a Game Design Team?

  - by Kaia

  I'm attempting to put together a game design team that is willing to help me design/program, test, and somewhat produce the game we make to the public. I need anyone who knows anything about programming/coding, designing, etc. Once we get it up and running and out into the world (over dramatic maybe? haha) I have ideas of generating a profit from it so there is a possibility of payment. My thinking on it (so far) is this: 2D (possibly. I haven't decided if I want it 2D or 3D. It really depends on what is easier) 3rd person. Adventure (I want there to be a point to it, but like a point with no real end) I want there to be a story to it. If you've ever played Dofus, think like that. There is a story to the game, but no real end. I want (if possible) to include mini-games. These could end up becoming a possible way for a player to aquire in-game money, quest items, etc. If anyone is interested in helping me create the story line/script (which we will finsih first, before creating the game) please contact me. I want to get this completed as soon as possible.

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• How to deal with OpenGL and Fullscreen on OS X

  - by Armin Ronacher

  I do most of my development on OS X and for my current game project this is my target environment. However when I play games I play on Windows. As a windows gamer I am used to Alt+Tab switching from within the game to the last application that was open. On OS X I currently can't find either a game that supports that nor can I find a way to make it possible. My current project is based on SDL 1.3 and I can see that cmd+tab is a sequence that is sent directly to my application and not intercepted by the operating system. Now my first attempt was to hide the rendering window on cmd+tab which certainly works, but has the disadvantage that a hidden OpenGL window in SDL cannot be restored when the user tabs back to the application. First of all, there is no event fired for that or I can't find it, secondly the core problem is that when that application window is hidden, my game is still the active application, just that the window disappeared. That is incredible annoying. Any ideas how to approximate the windows / linux behavior for alt+tab?

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• How do you run XBMC on nvidia dual screen and stop it from taking over the keyboard and mouse?

  - by Paul Swartout

  I have set up dual screen under Ubuntu 12.04. I have a GeForce 8500 GT and have used the nVidia control panel to set up dual screen in "Separate screen mode". Here's the resulting xorg.conf # nvidia-settings: X configuration file generated by nvidia-settings # nvidia-settings: version 295.33 (buildd@zirconium) Fri Mar 30 13:38:49 UTC 2012 Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 Screen 1 "Screen1" RightOf "Screen0" InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard" InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer" Option "Xinerama" "0" EndSection Section "Files" EndSection Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Keyboard0" Driver "kbd" EndSection Section "Monitor" # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "Maxdata/Belinea B1925S1W" HorizSync 31.0 - 83.0 VertRefresh 56.0 - 75.0 Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Monitor" # HorizSync source: builtin, VertRefresh source: builtin Identifier "Monitor1" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "CRT-1" HorizSync 28.0 - 55.0 VertRefresh 43.0 - 72.0 Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" BoardName "GeForce 8500 GT" BusID "PCI:1:0:0" Screen 0 EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Device1" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" BoardName "GeForce 8500 GT" BusID "PCI:1:0:0" Screen 1 EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Device0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 24 Option "TwinView" "0" Option "metamodes" "CRT-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0" SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" # Removed Option "metamodes" "CRT-1: 1280x768 +0+0" Identifier "Screen1" Device "Device1" Monitor "Monitor1" DefaultDepth 24 Option "TwinView" "0" Option "metamodes" "CRT-1: 1360x768_60 +0+0" SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection All well and good and I have a nice blank XWindow displayed on my TV (the 2nd monitor). I then fire up XBMC from a terminal on the PC monitor using DISPLAY=:0.1 xbmc XBMC fires up quite nicely on the TV however I can no longer use the main PC monitor / mouse / keyboard as XBMC on the TV screen seems to have focus. I was hoping to have XBMC running on the TV and let the kids use the MCE remote whilst I get on with my work on the PC monitor. Does anyone have any idea how to overcome this? I'm presuming there's some xorg.conf fun and games needed but I've no idea where to start to be honest.

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• What's a way to implement a flexible buff/debuff system?

  - by gkimsey

  Overview: Lots of games which RPG-like statistics allow for character "buffs", ranging from simple "Deal 25% extra damage" to more complicated things like "Deal 15 damage back to attackers when hit." The specifics of each type of buff aren't really relevant. I'm looking for a (presumably object-oriented) way to handle arbitrary buffs. Details: In my particular case, I have multiple characters in a turn-based battle environment, so I envisioned buffs being tied to events like "OnTurnStart", "OnReceiveDamage", etc. Perhaps each buff is a subclass of a main Buff abstract class, where only the relevant events are overloaded. Then each character could have a vector of buffs currently applied. Does this solution make sense? I can certainly see dozens of event types being necessary, it feels like making a new subclass for each buff is overkill, and it doesn't seem to allow for any buff "interactions". That is, if I wanted to implement a cap on damage boosts so that even if you had 10 different buffs which all give 25% extra damage, you only do 100% extra instead of 250% extra. And there's more complicated situations that ideally I could control. I'm sure everyone can come up with examples of how more sophisticated buffs can potentially interact with each other in a way that as a game developer I may not want. As a relatively inexperienced C++ programmer (I generally have used C in embedded systems), I feel like my solution is simplistic and probably doesn't take full advantage of the object-oriented language. Thoughts? Has anyone here designed a fairly robust buff system before?

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