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  • 7 Habits of Highly Effective Media Queries - by Brad Frost

    - by ihaynes
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/ihaynes/archive/2013/10/11/7-habits-of-highly-effective-media-queries---by-brad.aspxBrad Frost, one of the original proponents of responsive design, has written a great article on the "7 Habits of Highly Effective Media Queries".Let content determine breakpointsTreat layout as an enhancementUse major and minor breakpointsUse relative unitsGo beyond widthUse media queries for conditional loadingDon't go overboardGot you wondering? Read Brad's full article.Oh, and if you haven't read Steven Covey's original "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" book, it's a valuable read too, and might just change the way you relate to others and the world around you.

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  • How to make Rect of irregular shape sprite?

    - by Anil gupta
    I used masking for breaking an image as the below mention pattern now its breaking in different pieces but now i have one issue to make the Rect of each pieces, i need to drag the broken pieces and to adjust at correct position so that i can make again actual images. To drag and put at right positing i need to make Rect but i am not getting idea how to make Rect of this irregular shape, I will be very thankful to you, any idea or code to make rect . My previous Question is: How do I break an image into 6 or 8 pieces of different shapes? Thanks.

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  • Need ideas for an algorithm to draw irregular blotchy shapes

    - by Yttermayn
    I'm looking to draw irregular shapes on an x,y grid, and I'd like to come up with a simple, fast method if possible. My only idea so far is to draw a bunch of circles of random sizes very near each other, but at a random distance apart from a more or less central coordinate, then fill in any blank spaces. I realize this is a clunky, inelegant method, hopefully it will give you a rough idea of the kinds of rounded, random blotchy shapesI'm shooting for. Please suggest methods to accomplish this, I'm not so much interested in code. I can noodle that part out myself. Thanks!

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  • Locomotion-system with irregular IK

    - by htaunay
    Im having some trouble with locomtions (Unity3D asset) IK feet placement. I wouldn't call it "very bad", but it definitely isn't as smooth as the Locomotion System Examples. The strangest behavior (that is probably linked to the problem) are the rendered foot markers that "guess" where the characters next step will be. In the demo, they are smooth and stable. However, in my project, they keep flickering, as if Locomotion changed its "guess" every frame, and sometimes, the automatic defined step is too close to the previous step, or sometimes, too distant, creating a very irregular pattern. The configuration is (apparently)Identical to the human example in the demo, so I guessing the problem is my model and/or animation. Problem is, I can't figure out was it is =S Has anyone experienced the same problem? I uploaded a video of the bug to help interpreting the issue (excuse the HORRIBLE quality, I was in a hurry).

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  • Venezuela's Highly Inflationary Economy Means Changes to Financial Statements

    - by Theresa Hickman
    This is a bit of an esoteric topic, but given the number of U.S. Companies (particularly oil companies) that operate and have subsidiaries in Venezuela, I think it is worthy of an honorable mention. As you may or may not know, Venezuela's currency has had some changes over the years. In 2008, the Venezuelan Bolivar became the Bolivar Fuerte which dropped three zeros. So Bs.10,000 became Bs.F.10 and all their bills and coins were changed to reflect this. Then on Jan. 8, 2010, the government devalued the currency by 100%. The conversion from VEF to USD dropped from 2.15 to 4.30. (I always wanted to visit Venezuela; I guess it's time to book my vacation). The SEC recently labeled Venezuela a highly inflationary economy. This means that US companies with investments/subsidiaries in Venezuela will need to apply highly inflationary accounting rules starting on Jan. 1, 2010. In addition, companies need to make more detailed disclosures when the Venezuelan reported balances differ from the actual US dollar denominated balances. In a nut shell, if you formerly used translation, then starting Jan 1 of this year, you must now use remeasurement (or temporal method) to restate your Venezuelan entity's financial statements. See ASC topic 830, Foreign Currency Matters, which states that "[t]he financial statements of a foreign entity in a highly inflationary economy shall be remeasured as if the functional currency were the reporting currency." For you non-accountants that I haven't bored and are still reading at this point, the reason why the SEC is doing this is to ensure financial statements are presented as accurately as possible. Hyperinflationary economies have volatile currencies, such as Venezuela (it's not every day a currency devalues 100% overnight) which can distort financial statements if the local currency (Venezuelan Bolivar Fuerte) is used as the functional currency. To make financial statements more accurate, the reporting currency of the U.S. parent (US dollars) should be used as the functional currency. FASB.orgactually has a nice write-up on this.

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  • Behaviour Trees with irregular updates

    - by Robominister
    I'm interested in behaviour trees that aren't iterated every game tick, but every so often. (Edit: the tree could specify how many frames within the main game loop to wait before running its tick function again). Every theoretical implementation I have seen of behaviour trees talks of the tree search being carried out every game update - which seems necessary, because a leaf node (eg a behaviour, like 'return to base') needs to be constantly checked to see if is still running, failed or completed. Can anyone suggest how I might start implementing a tree that isnt run every tick, or point me in the direction of good material specific to this case (I am struggling to find anything)? My thoughts so far: action leaf nodes (when they start) must only push some kind of action object onto a list for an entity, rather than directly calling any code that makes the entity do something. The list of actions for the entity would be run every frame (update any that need to run, pop any that have completed from the list). the return state from a given action must be fed back into the tree, so that when we run the tree iteration again (and reach the same action leaf node - so the tree has so far determined that we ought to still be trying this action) - that the action has completed, or is still running etc. If my actual action code is running from an action list on an entity, then I possibly need to cancel previously running actions in the list - i am thinking that I can just delete the entire stack of queued up actions. I've seen the idea of ActionLists which block lower priority actions when a higher priority one is added, but this seems like very close logic to behaviour trees, and I dont want to be duplicating behaviour. This leaves me with some questions 1) How would I feed the action return state back into the tree? Its obvious I need to store some information relating to 'currently executing actions' on the entity, and check that in the tree tick, but I can't imagine how. 2) Does having a seperate behaviour tree (for deciding behaviour) and action list (for carrying out actual queued up actions) sound like a reasonable approach? 3) Is the approach of updating a behaviour tree irregularly actually used by anyone? It seems like a nice idea for budgeting ai search time when you have a lot of ai entities to process. (Edit) - I am also thinking about storing a single instance of a given behaviour tree in memory, and providing it by reference to any entity that uses it. So any information about what action was last selected for execution on an entity must be stored in a data context relative to the entity (which the tree can check). (I am probably answering my own questions as i go!) I hope I have expressed my questions adequately! Thanks in advance for any help :)

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  • Modelling highly specific business requirements

    - by AndyBursh
    How can one go about modelling highly specific business requirements, which have no precedent in the system? Take for example the following requirement: When a purchase order contains N lines, is over X value in total and is being recorded against project Y, an email needs to be sent to persons A and B with the details This requirement supplements other requirements surrounding purchase orders, but comes in at a much later date in response to some ongoing problem elsewhere in the business. Persons A and B are not part of any role or group in the system, and don't hold any specific responsibility; they are simply the two people the business has appointed to receive these emails in this very specific case. Projects are also data driven, so project Y has no special properties to distinguish it from any other project. The only way to identify it is to compare its identifier to a magic number. How can one go about modelling this kind of case without introducing too much additional complexity? That I can think of right now, there are a couple of options. Perform the checks and actions inline with the existing code. Here we find the correct spot in the code, check the conditions in the requirement and send the emails to hardcoded addresses. Of course this is fraught with issues. At the very least it stops working if one of these people leaves or changes their email address. At worst you have to ensure that any tests and test data are aware that additional actions are taken for a specific set of criteria. Introduce some form of events system. Here we introduce an eventing system, so that we might react to some event, and fulfil the requirement outside of the usual path of execution. This sounds like a cleaner solution than option 1, but the work involved is ultimately probably slightly overkill for this one small requirement. That said, having it in place does allow the system to handle these kinds of specific requirements consistently and easily in the future. Are there any other (good/better) ways of handling highly specific requirements? I mean other than telling the other parts of the business no!

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  • A debugging experience with "highly compatible" ASP.NET 4.5

    - by Jeff
    I have to admit that I will pretty much upgrade software for no reason other than being on the latest version. I won't do it if it's super expensive (Adobe gets money from me about once every three or four years at best), but particularly with frameworks and stuff generally available as part of my MSDN subscription, I'll be bleeding edge. CoasterBuzz was running on the MVC 4 framework pretty much as soon as they did a "go live" license for it. I didn't really jump in head-first with Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012, in part because I just wasn't interested in doing the reinstalls for each new version. Turns out there weren't that many revisions anyway. But when the final versions were released a week and a half ago, I jumped in. I saw on one of the Microsoft sites that .Net 4.5 was a "highly compatible in-place update" to the framework. Good enough for me. I was obviously running it by default in Windows 8, and installed it on my production server. I suppose it's "highly compatible," except when it isn't. Three of my sites are running with various flavors of the MVC version of POP Forums. All of them stopped working under ASP.NET 4.5. It was not immediately obvious what the problem might be beyond an exception indicating that there were no repository classes registered with Ninject, which I use for dependency injection in the forums. This was made all the more weird by the fact that it ran fine locally in the dev Web host. My first instinct was to spin up a Windows Server VM on my local box and put the remote debugger on it. (Side note: running multiple VM's on a Retina MacBook Pro with 16 gigs of RAM is pretty much the most awesome thing ever. I can't believe this computer is for real, and not a 50-pound tower under my desk.) What might have been going on in IIS that doesn't happen in Visual Studio? In the debugging process, I realized that I might be looking in the wrong place. POP Forums creates a Ninject container using a method called from a PreApplicationStartMethod attribute, and at that time registers a module (what Ninject uses to map interfaces to implementations) that maps all of the core dependencies. It also creates an instance of an HttpModule that originally hosted the "services" (search indexing, mailer, etc.), but now just records errors. That's all well and good, but the actual repository mapping, where data is actually read or persisted, happens in Application_Start() in global.asax. The idea there is that you can swap out the SqlSingleWebServer repos for something tuned for multiple servers, Oracle or something else. Of course, if I used something like StructureMap, which does convention-based mapping for dependency injection (a class implementing ISettingsRepository called SettingsRepository is automagically mapped), I wouldn't have to worry about it. In any case, the HttpModule, being instantiated before Application_Start() gets to run, would throw because there was no repo mapped where it could get settings from the database. This makes total sense. The fix is sort of a hack, where I don't setup the innards of the HttpModule until a call to its BeginRequest is made. I say it's a hack, because its primary function, logging exceptions, won't work until the app has warmed up. Still, this brings up an interesting question about the race condition, and what changed in 4.5 when it's running in IIS. In ASP.NET 4, it would appear that the code called via the PreApplicationStartMethod was either failing silently, and running again later, or it was getting to that code after Application_Start was called. In any case, weird thing. The real pain point I'm experiencing now is a bug in MVC 4 that is extremely serious because it renders the mobile/alternate view functionality very much broken.

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  • Oracle Expands Sun Blade Portfolio for Cloud and Highly Virtualized Environments

    - by Ferhat Hatay
    Oracle announced the expansion of Sun Blade Portfolio for cloud and highly virtualized environments that deliver powerful performance and simplified management as tightly integrated systems.  Along with the SPARC T3-1B blade server, Oracle VM blade cluster reference configuration and Oracle's optimized solution for Oracle WebLogic Suite, Oracle introduced the dual-node Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module with some impressive benchmark results.   Benchmarks on the Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module demonstrate the outstanding performance characteristics critical for running varied commercial applications used in cloud and highly virtualized environments.  These include best-in-class SPEC CPU2006 results with the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series, six Fluent world records and 1.8 times the price-performance of the IBM Power 755 running NAMD, a prominent bio-informatics workload.   Benchmarks for Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module  SPEC CPU2006  The Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module demonstrated best in class SPECint_rate2006 results for all published results using the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series, with a result of 679.  This result is 97% better than the HP BL460c G7 blade, 80% better than the IBM HS22V blade, and 79% better than the Dell M710 blade.  This result demonstrates the density advantage of the new Oracle's server module for space-constrained data centers.     Sun Blade X6275M2 (2 Nodes, Intel Xeon X5670 2.93GHz) - 679 SPECint_rate2006; HP ProLiant BL460c G7 (2.93 GHz, Intel Xeon X5670) - 347 SPECint_rate2006; IBM BladeCenter HS22V (Intel Xeon X5680)  - 377 SPECint_rate2006; Dell PowerEdge M710 (Intel Xeon X5680, 3.33 GHz) - 380 SPECint_rate2006.  SPEC, SPECint, SPECfp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 11/24/2010 and this report.    For more specifics about these results, please go to see http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf   Fluent The Sun Fire X6275 M2 server module produced world-record results on each of the six standard cases in the current "FLUENT 12" benchmark test suite at 8-, 12-, 24-, 32-, 64- and 96-core configurations. These results beat the most recent QLogic score with IBM DX 360 M series platforms and QLogic "Truescale" interconnects.  Results on sedan_4m test case on the Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module are 23% better than the HP C7000 system, and 20% better than the IBM DX 360 M2; Dell has not posted a result for this test case.  Results can be found at the FLUENT website.   ANSYS's FLUENT software solves fluid flow problems, and is based on a numerical technique called computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which is used in the automotive, aerospace, and consumer products industries. The FLUENT 12 benchmark test suite consists of seven models that are well suited for multi-node clustered environments and representative of modern engineering CFD clusters. Vendors benchmark their systems with the principal objective of providing comparative performance information for FLUENT software that, among other things, depends on compilers, optimization, interconnect, and the performance characteristics of the hardware.   FLUENT application performance is representative of other commercial applications that require memory and CPU resources to be available in a scalable cluster-ready format.  FLUENT benchmark has six conventional test cases (eddy_417k, turbo_500k, aircraft_2m, sedan_4m, truck_14m, truck_poly_14m) at various core counts.   All information on the FLUENT website (http://www.fluent.com) is Copyrighted1995-2010 by ANSYS Inc. Results as of November 24, 2010. For more specifics about these results, please go to see http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf   NAMD Results on the Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module running NAMD (a parallel molecular dynamics code designed for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems) show up to a 1.8X better price/performance than IBM's Power 7-based system.  For space-constrained environments, the ultra-dense Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module provides a 1.7X better price/performance per rack unit than IBM's system.     IBM Power 755 4-way Cluster (16U). Total price for cluster: $324,212. See IBM United States Hardware Announcement 110-008, dated February 9, 2010, pp. 4, 21 and 39-46.  Sun Blade X6275 M2 8-Blade Cluster (10U). Total price for cluster:  $193,939. Price/performance and performance/RU comparisons based on f1ATPase molecule test results. Sun Blade X6275 M2 cluster: $3,568/step/sec, 5.435 step/sec/RU. IBM Power 755 cluster: $6,355/step/sec, 3.189 step/sec/U. See http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/reports/system_perf.html. See http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/performance.html for more information, results as of 11/24/10.   For more specifics about these results, please go to see http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf   Reverse Time Migration The Reverse Time Migration is heavily used in geophysical imaging and modeling for Oil & Gas Exploration.  The Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module showed up to a 40% performance improvement over the previous generation server module with super-linear scalability to 16 nodes for the 9-Point Stencil used in this Reverse Time Migration computational kernel.  The balanced combination of Oracle's Sun Storage 7410 system with the Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module cluster showed linear scalability for the total application throughput, including the I/O and MPI communication, to produce a final 3-D seismic depth imaged cube for interpretation. The final image write time from the Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module nodes to Oracle's Sun Storage 7410 system achieved 10GbE line speed of 1.25 GBytes/second or better performance. Between subsequent runs, the effects of I/O buffer caching on the Sun Blade X6275 M2 server module nodes and write optimized caching on the Sun Storage 7410 system gave up to 1.8 GBytes/second effective write performance. The performance results and characterization of this Reverse Time Migration benchmark could serve as a useful measure for many other I/O intensive commercial applications. 3D VTI Reverse Time Migration Seismic Depth Imaging, see http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf/entry/3d_vti_reverse_time_migration for more information, results as of 11/14/2010.                            

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  • Floating point undesireable in highly critical code?

    - by Kirt Undercoffer
    Question 11 in the Software Quality section of "IEEE Computer Society Real-World Software Engineering Problems", Naveda, Seidman, lists fp computation as undesirable because "the accuracy of the computations cannot be guaranteed". This is in the context of computing acceleration for an emergency braking system for a high speed train. This thinking seems to be invoking possible errors in small differences between measurements of a moving object but small differences at slow speeds aren't a problem (or shouldn't be), small differences between two measurements at high speed are irrelevant - can there be a problem with small roundoff errors during deceleration for an emergency braking system? This problem has been observed with airplane braking systems resulting in hydroplaning but could this actually happen in the context of a high speed train? The concern about fp errors seems to not be well-founded in this context. Any insight? The fp is used for acceleration so perhaps the concern is inching over a speed limit? But fp should be just fine if they use a double in whatever implementation language. The actual problem in the text states: During the inspection of the code for the emergency braking system of a new high speed train (a highly critical, real-time application), the review team identifies several characteristics of the code. Which of these characteristics are generally viewed as undesirable? The code contains three recursive functions (well that one is obvious). The computation of acceleration uses floating point arithmetic. All other computations use integer arithmetic. The code contains one linked list that uses dynamic memory allocation (second obvious problem). All inputs are checked to determine that they are within expected bounds before they are used.

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  • Floating point undesirable in highly critical code?

    - by Kirt Undercoffer
    Question 11 in the Software Quality section of "IEEE Computer Society Real-World Software Engineering Problems", Naveda, Seidman, lists fp computation as undesirable because "the accuracy of the computations cannot be guaranteed". This is in the context of computing acceleration for an emergency braking system for a high speed train. This thinking seems to be invoking possible errors in small differences between measurements of a moving object but small differences at slow speeds aren't a problem (or shouldn't be), small differences between two measurements at high speed are irrelevant - can there be a problem with small roundoff errors during deceleration for an emergency braking system? This problem has been observed with airplane braking systems resulting in hydroplaning but could this actually happen in the context of a high speed train? The concern about fp errors seems to not be well-founded in this context. Any insight? The fp is used for acceleration so perhaps the concern is inching over a speed limit? But fp should be just fine if they use a double in whatever implementation language. The actual problem in the text states: During the inspection of the code for the emergency braking system of a new high speed train (a highly critical, real-time application), the review team identifies several characteristics of the code. Which of these characteristics are generally viewed as undesirable? The code contains three recursive functions (well that one is obvious). The computation of acceleration uses floating point arithmetic. All other computations use integer arithmetic. The code contains one linked list that uses dynamic memory allocation (second obvious problem). All inputs are checked to determine that they are within expected bounds before they are used.

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  • Redundant Interconnect with Highly Available IP (HAIP) ??

    - by JaneZhang(???)
      ?11.2.0.2??,Oracle ?????Grid Infrastructure(GI)????Redundant Interconnect with Highly Available IP(HAIP).  ?11.2.0.2??,???????????OS?????????,??HAIP??,?????????????????????  ???GI????,??????????????????,??:   ???,HAIP???????169.254.*.*,????????????HAIP ???1?,???4?(???????),???????????  ??:$ crsctl stat res -t -init NAME           TARGET  STATE        SERVER   STATE_DETAILS Cluster Resources--------------------------------------------------------------------------------ora.cluster_interconnect.haip       1        ONLINE  ONLINE       node2                       #ifconfig -aeth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:14:22:BD:59:DE  <=====????          inet addr:192.168.10.2  Bcast:192.168.10.255  Mask:255.255.255.0          inet6 addr: fe80::214:22ff:febd:59de/64 Scope:Link          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1          RX packets:54297359 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0          TX packets:58151488 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000           RX bytes:837602539 (798.8 MiB)  TX bytes:3809085161 (3.5 GiB)          Interrupt:169 eth1:1    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:14:22:BD:59:DE  <=====????????          inet addr:169.254.185.195  Bcast:169.254.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1          Interrupt:169 ???????HAIP??cluster interconnect: Cluster communication is configured to use the following interface(s) for this instance  169.254.185.195cluster interconnect IPC version:Oracle UDP/IP (generic)IPC Vendor 1 proto 2ASM ?????? HAIP ??cluster interconnect: Cluster communication is configured to use the following interface(s) for this instance  169.254.185.195cluster interconnect IPC version:Oracle UDP/IP (generic)IPC Vendor 1 proto 2  Oracle????ASM??????HAIP??????????????????????,????????????????????,???????????,????HAIP????????????????,???????????  HAIP ????????????,?????????????????   ??HAIP?????,???My Oracle Support Note ??1210883.1.

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  • Highly available iSCSI target

    - by sysetr
    I'm in the process of setting up iSCSI target on DRBD following the steps detailed here. I would appreciate if someone can answer and explain the following queries: Is there a way to set up just 1 resource for iscsi config and storage? Why does iscsi.config have to have a separate resource (in drbd.conf). Is it possible to put iscsi.config and iscsi.target in one disk? If not possible, what would be a good ratio (space wise) for iscsi.config and iscsi.target? Assuming I need to set up a 1TB iscsi.storage, how much space should I allocate for iscsi.config?

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  • techniques for an AI for a highly cramped turn-based tactics game

    - by Adam M.
    I'm trying to write an AI for a tactics game in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics or Vandal Hearts. I can't change the game rules in any way, only upgrade the AI. I have experience programming AI for classic board games (basically minimax and its variants), but I think the branching factor is too great for the approach to be reasonable here. I'll describe the game and some current AI flaws that I'd like to fix. I'd like to hear ideas for applicable techniques. I'm a decent enough programmer, so I only need the ideas, not an implementation (though that's always appreciated). I'd rather not expend effort chasing (too many) dead ends, so although speculation and brainstorming are good and probably helpful, I'd prefer to hear from somebody with actual experience solving this kind of problem. For those who know it, the game is the land battle mini-game in Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004) and you can skim/skip the next two paragraphs. For those who don't, here's briefly how it works. The battle is turn-based and takes place on a 16x16 grid. There are three terrain types: clear (no hindrance), forest (hinders movement, ranged attacks, and sight), and rock (impassible, but does not hinder attacks or sight). The map is randomly generated with roughly equal amounts of each type of terrain. Because there are many rock and forest tiles, movement is typically very cramped. This is tactically important. The terrain is not flat; higher terrain gives minor bonuses. The terrain is known to both sides. The player is always the attacker and the AI is always the defender, so it's perfectly valid for the AI to set up a defensive position and just wait. The player wins by killing all defenders or by getting a unit to the city gates (a tile on the other side of the map). There are very few units on each side, usually 4-8. Because of this, it's crucial not to take damage without gaining some advantage from it. Units can take multiple actions per turn. All units on one side move before any units on the other side. Order of execution is important, and interleaving of actions between units is often useful. Units have melee and ranged attacks. Melee attacks vary widely in strength; ranged attacks have the same strength but vary in range. The main challenges I face are these: Lots of useful move combinations start with a "useless" move that gains no immediate advantage, or even loses advantage, in order to set up a powerful flank attack in the future. And, since the player units are stronger and have longer range, the AI pretty much always has to take some losses before they can start to gain kills. The AI must be able to look ahead to distinguish between sacrificial actions that provide a future benefit and those that don't. Because the terrain is so cramped, most of the tactics come down to achieving good positioning with multiple units that work together to defend an area. For instance, two defenders can often dominate a narrow pass by positioning themselves so an enemy unit attempting to pass must expose itself to a flank attack. But one defender in the same pass would be useless, and three units can defend a slightly larger pass. Etc. The AI should be able to figure out where the player must go to reach the city gates and how to best position its few units to cover the approaches, shifting, splitting, or combining them appropriately as the player moves. Because flank attacks are extremely deadly (and engineering flank attacks is key to the player strategy), the AI should be competent at moving its units so that they cover each other's flanks unless the sacrifice of a unit would give a substantial benefit. They should also be able to force flank attacks on players, for instance by threatening a unit from two different directions such that responding to one threat exposes the flank to the other. The AI should attack if possible, but sometimes there are no good ways to approach the player's position. In that case, the AI should be able to recognize this and set up a defensive position of its own. But the AI shouldn't be vulnerable to a trivial exploit where the player repeatedly opens and closes a hole in his defense and shoots at the AI as it approaches and retreats. That is, the AI should ideally be able to recognize that the player is capable of establishing a solid defense of an area, even if the defense is not currently in place. (I suppose if a good unit allocation algorithm existed, as needed for the second bullet point, the AI could run it on the player units to see where they could defend.) Because it's important to choose a good order of action and interleave actions between units, it's not as simple as just finding the best move for each unit in turn. All of these can be accomplished with a minimax search in theory, but the search space is too large, so specialized techniques are needed. I thought about techniques such as influence mapping, but I don't see how to use the technique to great effect. I thought about assigning goals to the units. This can help them work together in some limited way, and the problem of "how do I accomplish this goal?" is easier to solve than "how do I win this battle?", but assigning good goals is a hard problem in itself, because it requires knowing whether the goal is achievable and whether it's a good use of resources. So, does anyone have specific ideas for techniques that can help cleverize this AI? Update: I found a related question on Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133273/ai-for-a-final-fantasy-tactics-like-game The selected answer gives a decent approach to choosing between alternative actions, but it doesn't seem to have much ability to look into the future and discern beneficial sacrifices from wasteful ones. It also focuses on a single unit at a time and it's not clear how it could be extended to support cooperation between units in defending or attacking.

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  • Highly recommended: "5 Things SQL Server does different from what many developers expect" by Nico Ja

    A couple of weeks ago, the Belgian Techdays were held in Antwerp. Together with Scott Hillier I presented the SharePoint pre-conference sessions (watch them online over here, search for pre-conference or SharePoint). Even though Belgium is not a very big country, the Microsoft team managed to get some high profile speakers like Anders Hejlsberg and Scott Hanselman. But if you have like 60 minutes to spare there is one session that I'd really recommend to check out, not related to SharePoint, but...Did 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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  • Highly scalable and dynamic "rule-based" applications?

    - by Prof Plum
    For a large enterprise app, everyone knows that being able to adjust to change is one of the most important aspects of design. I use a rule-based approach a lot of the time to deal with changing business logic, with each rule being stored in a DB. This allows for easy changes to be made without diving into nasty details. Now since C# cannot Eval("foo(bar);") this is accomplished by using formatted strings stored in rows that are then processed in JavaScript at runtime. This works fine, however, it is less than elegant, and would not be the most enjoyable for anyone else to pick up on once it becomes legacy. Is there a more elegant solution to this? When you get into thousands of rules that change fairly frequently it becomes a real bear, but this cannot be that uncommon of a problem that someone has not thought of a better way to do this. Any suggestions? Is this current method defensible? What are the alternatives? Edit: Just to clarify, this is a large enterprise app, so no matter which solution works, there will be plenty of people constantly maintaining its rules and data (around 10). Also, The data changes frequently enough to say that some sort of centralized server system is basically a must.

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  • Highly SEO optimised forum posts

    - by Tom Gullen
    Given the following forum post: Basics of how internals of Construct work I've used GameMaker in the past. And I know some C++ and have used a few 3d engines with it. I have also looked at Unity, though I didn't get too much into it. So I know my way around programming etc... My question is, how does construct work internally? I know it allows python scripting, which itself is "technically" interpreted, though python is pretty fast as far as being interpreted goes. But what about the rest? Is the executable that gets cre... The forum software will take the first 150 chars of the first post as the page meta description, and the title will be the thread title. All ok. So in Google it will appear as: Basics of how internals of Construct work I've used GameMaker in the past. And I know some C++ and have used a few 3d engines with it. I have also looked at Unity, though I didn't get too much... http://www.domain.com/forum/basics-of-how-internals-of-construct-work.html Now the problem is (not so much with this thread, but other ones) is the first 150 chars don't always create the best meta description. Is it worth my time to cherry pick threads and manually set their description/title tags so they read like: Internal workings of Construct 2 Events aren't converted to any other language. The runtime is a standalone compiled EXE application, which is optimised and actually very fast. Your events... http://www.domain.com/forum/basics-of-how-internals-of-construct-work.html The H1 on the page is still the original title, but we have overridden the title and description to look more friendly on search results. Is this advantageous forgetting the obvious time cost?

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  • Coarse Collision Detection in highly dynamic environment

    - by Millianz
    I'm currently working a 3D space game with A LOT of dynamic objects that are all moving (there is pretty much no static environment). I have the collision detection and resolution working just fine, but I am now trying to optimize the collision detection (which is currently O(N^2) -- linear search). I thought about multiple options, a bounding volume hierarchy, a Binary Spatial Partitioning tree, an Octree or a Grid. I however need some help with deciding what's best for my situation. A grid seems unfeasible simply due to the space requirements and cache coherence problems. Since everything is so dynamic however, it seems to be that trees aren't ideal either, since they would have to be completely rebuilt every frame. I must admit I never implemented a physics engine that required spatial partitioning, do I indeed need to rebuild the tree every frame (assuming that everything is constantly moving) or can I update the trees after integrating? Advice is much appreciated - to give some more background: You're flying a space ship in an asteroid field, and there are lots and lots of asteroids and some enemy ships, all of which shoot bullets. EDIT: I came across the "Sweep an Prune" algorithm, which seems like the right thing for my purposes. It appears like the right mixture of fast building of the data structures involved and detailed enough partitioning. This is the best resource I can find: http://www.codercorner.com/SAP.pdf If anyone has any suggestions whether or not I'm going in the right direction, please let me know.

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