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• Structuring database for multi-object "activity" and "following" functionalities

  - by romaninsh

  I am working on a web application which operate with different types of objects such as user, profiles, pages etc. All objects have unique object_id. When objects interact it may produce "activity", such as user posting on the page or profile. Activity may be related to multiple objects through their object_id. Users may also follow "objects" and they need to be able to see stream of relevant activity. Could you provide me with some data structure suggestions which would be efficient and scalable? My goal is to show activity limited to the objects which user is following I am not limited by relational databases. Update As I'm getting advices on ORM and how index things, I'd like to again, stress my question. According to my current design model the database structure looks like this: As you can see - it's quite easy to implement database like that. Activity and Follower tables do contain much larger amount of records than the upper level but it's tolerable. But when it comes for me to create a "timeline" table, it becomes a nightmare. For every user I need to reference all the object activities which he follows. In terms of records it easily gets out of control. Please suggest me how to change this structure to avoid timeline creation and also be abel to quickly retrieve activity for any given user. Thanks.

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• Cost to licence characters or ships for a game

  - by Michael Jasper

  I am producing a game pitch document for a university game design class, and I am looking for examples of licencing cost for using characters or ships from other IP holders in a game. For example: cost of using an X-Wing in a game, licencing from Lucas cost of using the Enterprise in a game, licencing from Paramount cost of using the Space Shuttle (if any), licencing from Nasa EDIT The closest information I can find is from an article about Nights of the Old Republic, but isn't nearly specific enough for my needs: What Kotick means by Lucas being the principal beneficiary of the success of The Old Republic is that there are most likely clauses in the license agreement that give percentages, points, or another denomination of revenue out to Lucas and his people just for the Star Wars name, and that amount is presumed to be a great deal of money. Kotick is saying that because the cost of the license is so prohibitive, as he has personally had experience with in his position as CEO of Activision Blizzard, that EA will not be able to be profitable because of the hemorrhaging of money to the licensor. EDIT 2 Another vague source stating that FOX uses a "five-figure rule" (assuming between $10,000 - $99,000) It seems FOX, like most studios, will not license individuals to create new works based upon their products. They will only commission individuals of their choosing if they elect to branch out into expanded product lines related to those licenses. Alternately, they are open to making the licencing available to large corporations with access to global markets, but only if those corporations agree to what Ms Friedman called a "five-figure guarantee". Presumably this means that the corporation seeking the licensing must agree to pay a 5-figure sum for that license, and be confident that their product will sell enough volume to recoup that fee, and to produce sufficient profits to make the acquisition worth their while. Thank you!

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• Browser-based GUI for a python application

  - by ack__

  I want to create a web/browser-based GUI for a command-line python application. The goal is to make use of HTML/JS technologies to create this GUI. As the application itself, it needs to run on Linux and Windows, and the interface will be accessible only from localhost (not exposed to internet). The GUI will contain 5 to 10 pages. I don't want a traditional desktop GUI that includes HTML/JS, but just a bunch of html files and some kind of controller between those and the application. I also want to make use of asynchronous programming (ajax like) so I can load and print data in the GUI without refreshing the whole page. I'd probably use jQuery for that and a couple other things. How would you recommend to design this? Performance is not the key here, I'm rather looking at reliability, portability and simplicity. I'm thinking of using a lightweight python HTTP server / framework (like CherryPy) and maybe later a Python templating system (at the begining it will just be a couple pages). EDIT: I'm looking for ideas/recommendations how to build this, not for alternatives to browser/web-based GUI.

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• Character progression through leveling, skills or items?

  - by Anton

  I'm working on a design for an RPG game, and I'm having some doubts about the skill and level system. I'm going for a more casual, explorative gaming experience and so thought about lowering the game complexity by simplifying character progression. But I'm having trouble deciding between the following: Progression through leveling, no complex skill progression, leveling increases base stats. Progression through skills, no leveling or base stat changes, skills progress through usage. Progression through items, more focus on stat-changing items, items confer skills, no leveling. However, I'm uncertain what the effects on gameplay might be in the end. So, my question is this: What would be the effects of choosing one of the above alternatives over the others? (Particularly with regards to the style and feel of the gameplay) My take on it is that the first sacrifices more frequent rewards and customization in favor of a simpler gameplay; the second sacrifices explicit customization and player control in favor of more frequent rewards and a somewhat simpler gameplay; while the third sacrifices inventory simplicity and a player metric in favor of player control, customization and progression simplicity. Addendum: I'm not really limiting myself to the above three, they are just the ones I liked most and am primarily interested in.

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• Designing a Content-Based ETL Process with .NET and SFDC

  - by Patrick

  As my firm makes the transition to using SFDC as our main operational system, we've spun together a couple of SFDC portals where we can post customer-specific documents to be viewed at will. As such, we've had the need for pseudo-ETL applications to be implemented that are able to extract metadata from the documents our analysts generate internally (most are industry-standard PDFs, XML, or MS Office formats) and place in networked "queue" folders. From there, our applications scoop of the queued documents and upload them to the appropriate SFDC CRM Content Library along with some select pieces of metadata. I've mostly used DbAmp to broker communication with SFDC (DbAmp is a Linked Server provider that allows you to use SQL conventions to interact with your SFDC Org data). I've been able to create [console] applications in C# that work pretty well, and they're usually structured something like this: static void Main() { // Load parameters from app.config. // Get documents from queue. var files = someInterface.GetFiles(someFilterOrRegexPattern); foreach (var file in files) { // Extract metadata from the file. // Validate some attributes of the file; add any validation errors to an in-memory // structure (e.g. List<ValidationErrors>). if (isValid) { var fileData = File.ReadAllBytes(file); // Upload using some wrapper for an ORM or DAL someInterface.Upload(fileData, meta.Param1, meta.Param2, ...); } else { // Bounce the file } } // Report any validation errors (via message bus or SMTP or some such). } And that's pretty much it. Most of the time I wrap all these operations in a "Worker" class that takes the needed interfaces as constructor parameters. This approach has worked reasonably well, but I just get this feeling in my gut that there's something awful about it and would love some feedback. Is writing an ETL process as a C# Console app a bad idea? I'm also wondering if there are some design patterns that would be useful in this scenario that I'm clearly overlooking. Thanks in advance!

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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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• What are the factors affecting a new programming language?

  - by Saurav Sengupta

  I am developing a new general-purpose programming language of my own design. It's currently my own personal project. I have read of some experts saying that new languages do not usually survive (unfortunately I can't find a reference to that right now). What are the most substantial problems that a new language faces? The language syntax is similar to C/Python families, it does not use S-expressions, and it is an imperative language, but I'm doing first-class functions in it to provide the facilities of currying. In particular, I am concentrating on translating the source language to an intermediate language for execution by an interpreter, but I'm not in a position to translate to native code yet. What would be the issues with that? I've not personally used many non-native code languages, so I'm not well aware of the performance issues on today's machines. I also can't decide upon a lexer and parser generator. What would be the pros and cons of Flex and Yacc vs. hand-made? And what benefits will LLVM provide? I need to get the interpreter ready as quickly as possible. Finally, what factors will affect the language's use post release? I am planning a small library of essentials and full documentation for the first phase.

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• VBO and shaders confusion, what's their connection?

  - by Jeffrey

  Considering OpenGL 2.1 VBOs and 1.20 GLSL shaders: When creating an entity like "Zombie", is it good to initialize just the VBO buffer with the data once and do N glDrawArrays() calls per each N zombies? Is there a more efficient way? (With a single call we cannot pass different uniforms to the shader to calculate an offset, see point 3) When dealing with logical object (player, tree, cube etc), should I always use the same shader or should I customize (or be able to customize) the shaders per each object? Considering an entity class, should I create and define the shader at object initialization? When having a movable object such as a human, is there any more powerful way to deal with its coordinates than to initialize its VBO object at 0,0 and define an uniform offset to pass to the shader to calculate its real position? Could you make an example of the Data Oriented Design on creating a generic zombie class? Is the following good? Zombielist class: class ZombieList { GLuint vbo; // generic zombie vertex model std::vector<color>; // object default color std::vector<texture>; // objects textures std::vector<vector3D>; // objects positions public: unsigned int create(); // return object id void move(unsigned int objId, vector3D offset); void rotate(unsigned int objId, float angle); void setColor(unsigned int objId, color c); void setPosition(unsigned int objId, color c); void setTexture(unsigned int, unsigned int); ... void update(Player*); // move towards player, attack if near } Example: Player p; Zombielist zl; unsigned int first = zl.create(); zl.setPosition(first, vector3D(50, 50)); zl.setTexture(first, texture("zombie1.png")); ... while (running) { // main loop ... zl.update(&p); zl.draw(); // draw every zombie }

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• What is a good basic/flexible cms for a small website? [closed]

  - by Samuel

  Possible Duplicate: Which Content Management System (CMS) should I use? I'm designing a very basic portfolio website for an artist. It features a blog, portfolio, cv and contact page. I've handcoded the basics of this site in php/java, as it is a very small website (and I like coding by hand). But I need a simple cms backend for the dynamic parts of the website (the blog/portfolio). The big systems (ruby, joomla, wordpress) are far too invasive for my liking (and frankly a bit beyond my capabilities). Wordpress for example, requires too much adaptation of the design to the wordpress structure, and ruby is far too extensive for a simple site like this (in my opinion). So what I'm looking for is a (preferably open source) cms that has a simple backend for the artist to use as a blogger, with a mysql database for the content, that will allow me to insert content with simple tags (using smarty tags for example), but is otherwise not too invasive or demanding in terms of the required page structure. Does anyone know of a good cms that fits this description? p.s.: I have tried phpnews and cmsmadesimple, but phpnews was a litte too basic (but very close too what I'm looking for) and cmsmadesimple was way too slow (but otherwise also pretty close too what I wanted, though a bit too extensive).

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• Intelligence as a vector quantity

  - by Senthil Kumaran

  I am reading this wonderful book called "Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming" by Peter Seibel and I am at part wherein the conversation is with Joshua Bloch and I found this answer which is an important point for a programmer. The paragraph, goes something like this. There's this problem, which is, programming is so much of an intellectual meritocracy and often these people are the smartest people in the organization; therefore they figure they should be allowed to make all the decisions. But merely the fact they are the smartest people in the organization does not mean that they should be making all the decisions, because intelligence is not a scalar quantity; it's a vector quantity. Here at the last sentence, I fail to get the insight which is he trying to share. Can someone explain it in a little further as what he means by a vector quantity, possibly trying to present the same insight. Further down, I get the point that he is not taking about having an organization where non-technical people (sometimes clueless) can be managers of the technical people for some reason that they can spend more time to write emails well, because the very next statement following the above paragraph was. And if you lack empathy or emotional intelligence, then you shouldn't be designing APIs or GUIs or languages. I understand that he is saying that in Software engineering, programmers should know how the users will see their product and design for them. I felt the above paragraph was very interesting.

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• How was Git designed?

  - by Mark Canlas

  My workplace recently switched to Git and I've been loving (and hating!) it. I really do love it, and it is extremely powerful. The only part I hate is that sometimes it's too powerful (and maybe a bit terse/confusing). My question is... How was Git designed? Just using it for a short amount of time, you get the feel that it can handle many obscure workflows that other version control systems could not. But it also feels elegant underneath. And fast! This is no doubt in part to Linus's talent. But I'm wondering, was the overall design of git based off of something? I've read about BitKeeper but the accounts are scant on technical details. The compression, the graphs, getting rid of revision numbers, emphasizing branching, stashing, remotes... Where did it all come from? Linus really knocked this one out of the park and on pretty much the first try! It's quite good to use once you're past the learning curve.

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• Different methods of ammo resupply

  - by Chris Mantle

  I'm writing a small game at the moment. Presently, I have one or two design elements that aren't locked down yet, and I wanted to ask for input on one of these. For dramatic effect, the player's character in my game is immobilised, alone and has a supposedly limited amount of ammo for their weapons. However, I would like to periodically resupply the player with ammo (for the purpose of balancing the level of difficulty and to allow the player to continue if they're doing well). I'm trying to think of a method of resupply that's different to the more familiar strategies of making ammo magically appear or having the antagonists drop some when they die. I'd like to emphasise the notion of the player's isolation as much as possible, and finding a way of 'sneaking' ammo to the player without removing too much of that emphasis is basically what I'm trying to think of (it's definitely a valid argument that resupplying the player removes it anyway) I have considered a sort of simple in-game 'store', where kills get you points that you can spend on ammo for your favourite weapon. This might work well, and may also be good for supporting a simple micro-transaction business model within the game. However, you'd have to pause the game often to make purchases, which would interrupt the action, and it works against the notion of isolation. Any thoughts?

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• Auto update for application hosted on multiple servers on cloud

  - by mots_g

  I'm working on an application which will run on multiple Amazon EC2 instances. I wish to incorporate auto update feature for my application. The updater should update all the Ec2 instances. Also, there is a central server which governs the creation/termination of EC2 instances as per load. The central server creates a EC2 new instance from a pre-configured custom AMI (custom image which has our application pre-installed). Also, once there is an update, the pre-configured AMI needs to be updated too else it would create new instances which are not updated. Should the central server notify all the ec2 instances for an update and then the instances update themselves?Or should the application on Ec2 instance have a check for periodically updating themselves? Also how should the Amazon custom AMI be updated? Should a new instance be created from it, updated and then a new AMI be re-created and then new images be created from this AMI? What is the best way to incorporate an auto update feature for this architecture? The central server is written in Java and the application running on the cloud is written in C++. Is there a good framework available that can be used for this architecture? Please let me know on what I could be missing in the design and how it would help me to have a nice, extensible and fail safe auto update architecture. Thanks

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• Link to article on website libraries

  - by acidzombie24

  I just started another website and it has taken me 30mins to copy/paste my other website and delete stuff because I don't have a template. Theres lots of features I copied over that I haven't seen in libraries/templates. But I don't really know any libraries/templates. This site is ASP.NET. Some things I have is a string.format that escapes strings for HTML (so <hi> is text instead of a tag). Other features are adding or removing items in the url query, a class to pass in a ASP.NET error and log or convert it into a row in a db (I know about elmah but during development on my last site it wasn't Mono compatible), a mini AJAX library for success/fail/redirect/etc, a class to pass in a ASP.NET error and log or convert it into a row in a db and anything else I would use in every site. I don't like my (library) design because I wasn't expecting to do more then 2-3 websites and I am on my 5th. I don't know proper ASP.NET either so what is an article that explains how to make a great library/template for websites?

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• Should I create my own Assert class based on these reasons?

  - by Mike

  The main reason I don't like Debug.Assert is the fact that these assertions are disabled in Release. I know that there's a performance reason for that, but at least in my situation I believe the gains would outweigh the cost. (By the way, I'm guessing this is the situation in most cases). And yes, I know that you can use Trace.Assert instead. But even though that would work, I find the name Trace distracting, since I don't see this as tracing. The other reason to create my own class is laziness I guess, since I could write methods for the most usual cases like Assert.IsNotNull, Assert.Equals and so forth. The second part of my question has to do with using Environment.FailFast in this class. Would that be a good idea? I do like the ideas put forth in this document. That's pretty much where I got the idea from. One last point. Does creating a design like this imply having an untestable code path, as described in this answer by Eric Lippert on a different (but related) question?

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• Examples of 2D side-scrollers that achieve open non-linear feel?

  - by Milosz Falinski

  I'm working on a 2.5D platformer prototype that aims for an open feel while maintaining familiar core mechanics. Now, there's some obvious challenges with creating a non constricted feel in a spatially constricted environment. What I'm interested in, is examples of how game designers deal with the "here's a level, beat the bad guys/puzzles to get to the next level" design that seems so natural to most platformers (eg. Mario/Braid/Pid/Meat Boy to name a few). Some ideas for achieving openness I've come across include: One obvious successful example is Terraria, which achieves openness simply through complexity and flexibility of the game-system Another example that comes to mind is Cave Story. Game is non-linear, offers multiple choices and side-stories Mario, Rayman and some other 'classics' with a top-down level selection. I actually really dislike this as it never did anything for me emotionally and just seems like a bit of a lazy way to do things. Note: I've not actually had much experience with most of the 'classical' console platformers, apart from the obvious Marios/Zeldas/Metroids, since I've grown up on adventure games. By that I mean, it's entirely possible that I simply missed some games that solve the problem really well and are by some considered obvious 'classics'.

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• What web technology could I use which would support a decision tree?

  - by Rami Alhamad

  I am a big game development fan but I haven't done any commercial work in the past. I have been asked by a non-profit to look at developing a game similar to the award-winning www.playspent.org They want the following features: support 5 scenarios mobile isn't important but compatibility with older browsers would be a big bonus they want it to be visual and audible bonus is to have it easily modifiable support 4 languages I don't have much knowledge of Flash and would rather avoid using it as a solution. I started breaking down the problem into segments that I will need to examine, they are as follows: ability to read the game flow from a file that they can produce (xml, etc.) db design to store decision tree language challenge browser compatibility I am leaning towards an Google app engine/GWT solution but I am not sure what technology is best for this. I am really hoping to get your opinion/recommendation on my approach and on what technology is best. A special thanks (and beer if you live in Toronto) will be awarded to anyone who can help give me a ballpark estimate on how much such a game should go for. I know it's tough to estimate but any rough figure will help (how much would you charge for building something like playspent.org?) Thanks in advance

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• Optimization ended up in casting an object at each method call

  - by Aybe

  I've been doing some optimization for the following piece of code : public void DrawLine(int x1, int y1, int x2, int y2, int color) { _bitmap.DrawLineBresenham(x1, y1, x2, y2, color); } After profiling it about 70% of the time spent was in getting a context for drawing and disposing it. I ended up sketching the following overload : public void DrawLine(int x1, int y1, int x2, int y2, int color, BitmapContext bitmapContext) { _bitmap.DrawLineBresenham(x1, y1, x2, y2, color, bitmapContext); } Until here no problems, all the user has to do is to pass a context and performance is really great as a context is created/disposed one time only (previously it was a thousand times per second). The next step was to make it generic in the sense it doesn't depend on a particular framework for rendering (besides .NET obvisouly). So I wrote this method : public void DrawLine(int x1, int y1, int x2, int y2, int color, IDisposable bitmapContext) { _bitmap.DrawLineBresenham(x1, y1, x2, y2, color, (BitmapContext)bitmapContext); } Now every time a line is drawn the generic context is casted, this was unexpected for me. Are there any approaches for fixing this design issue ? Note : _bitmap is a WriteableBitmap from WPF BitmapContext is from WriteableBitmapEx library DrawLineBresenham is an extension method from WriteableBitmapEx

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• Is it possible to build a single game to run in Facebook & Google+?

  - by Songo

  I was asked by my customer to build a Facebook game. The game would be something similar to Mafiawars.com where the game is hosted on a server and run through a frame on Facebook. The thing is after several days of negotiations with the customer and near the finalization of the requirements he mentioned something strange. He said that if the game was successful on Facebook then we may add it to Google+ too. I thought he meant that we'll develop a new version for Google+, but he refused as he argued that the game should be able to support both sites and he won't pay for the same game twice. Now I haven't developed neither Facebook nor Google+ games before, so I don't know if it is possible to build a single Facebook/Google+ game. How would you react to such requirement? How would you design such an application? Notes I confirmed with the customer that he wasn't talking about using Open ID he wanted full integration (sharing post, friend requests,..etc.) I really don't want to lose that customer for numerous reasons (He even agreed to extend the project time to compensate for the time I need to learn Facebook/Google+ APIs)

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• Finding a way to simplify complex queries on legacy application

  - by glenatron

  I am working with an existing application built on Rails 3.1/MySql with much of the work taking place in a JavaScript interface, although the actual platforms are not tremendously relevant here, except in that they give context. The application is powerful, handles a reasonable amount of data and works well. As the number of customers using it and the complexity of the projects they create increases, however, we are starting to run into a few performance problems. As far as I can tell, the source of these problems is that the data represents a tree and it is very hard for ActiveRecord to deterministically know what data it should be retrieving. My model has many relationships like this: Project has_many Nodes has_many GlobalConditions Node has_one Parent has_many Nodes has_many WeightingFactors through NodeFactors has_many Tags through NodeTags GlobalCondition has_many Nodes ( referenced by Id, rather than replicating tree ) WeightingFactor has_many Nodes through NodeFactors Tag has_many Nodes through NodeTags The whole system has something in the region of thirty types which optionally hang off one or many nodes in the tree. My question is: What can I do to retrieve and construct this data faster? Having worked a lot with .Net, if I was in a similar situation there, I would look at building up a Stored Procedure to pull everything out of the database in one go but I would prefer to keep my logic in the application and from what I can tell it would be hard to take the queried data and build ActiveRecord objects from it without losing their integrity, which would cause more problems than it solves. It has also occurred to me that I could bunch the data up and send some of it across asynchronously, which would not improve performance but would improve the user perception of performance. However if sections of the data appeared after page load that could also be quite confusing. I am wondering whether it would be a useful strategy to make everything aware of it's parent project, so that one could pull all the records for that project and then build up the relationships later, but given the ubiquity of complex trees in day to day programming life I wouldn't be surprised if there were some better design patterns or standard approaches to this type of situation that I am not well versed in.

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• Designing Content-Based ETL Process with .NET and SFDC

  - by Patrick

  As my firm makes the transition to using SFDC as our main operational system, we've spun together a couple of SFDC portals where we can post customer-specific documents to be viewed at will. As such, we've had the need for pseudo-ETL applications to be implemented that are able to extract metadata from the documents our analysts generate internally (most are industry-standard PDFs, XML, or MS Office formats) and place in networked "queue" folders. From there, our applications scoop of the queued documents and upload them to the appropriate SFDC CRM Content Library along with some select pieces of metadata. I've mostly used DbAmp to broker communication with SFDC (DbAmp is a Linked Server provider that allows you to use SQL conventions to interact with your SFDC Org data). I've been able to create [console] applications in C# that work pretty well, and they're usually structured something like this: static void Main() { // Load parameters from app.config. // Get documents from queue. var files = someInterface.GetFiles(someFilterOrRegexPattern); foreach (var file in files) { // Extract metadata from the file. // Validate some attributes of the file; add any validation errors to an in-memory // structure (e.g. List<ValidationErrors>). if (isValid) { // Upload using some wrapper for an ORM an someInterface.Upload(meta.Param1, meta.Param2, ...); } else { // Bounce the file } } // Report any validation errors (via message bus or SMTP or some such). } And that's pretty much it. Most of the time I wrap all these operations in a "Worker" class that takes the needed interfaces as constructor parameters. This approach has worked reasonably well, but I just get this feeling in my gut that there's something awful about it and would love some feedback. Is writing an ETL process as a C# Console app a bad idea? I'm also wondering if there are some design patterns that would be useful in this scenario that I'm clearly overlooking. Thanks in advance!

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• Procedural world generation oriented on gameplay features

  - by Richard Fabian

  In large procedural landscape games, the land seems dull, but that's probably because the real world is largely dull, with only limited places where the scenery is dramatic or tactical. Looking at world generation from this point of view, a landscape generator for a game (that is, not for the sake of scenery, but for the sake of gameplay) needs to not follow the rules of landscaping, but instead some rules married to the expectations of the gamer. For example, there could be a choke point / route generator that creates hills ravines, rivers and mountains between cities, rather than the natural way cities arise, scattered on the land based on resources or conditions generated by the mountains and rainfall patterns. Is there any existing work being done like this? Start with cities or population centres and then add in terrain afterwards? The reason I'm asking is that I'd previously pondered taking existing maps from fantasy fiction (my own and others), putting the information into the system as a base point, and then generating a good world to play in from it. This seems covered by existing technology, that is, where the designer puts in all the necessary information such as the city populations, resources, biomes, road networks and rivers, then allows the PCG fill in the gaps. But now I'm wondering if it may be possible to have a content generator generate also the overall design. Generate the cities and population centres, balancing them so that there is a natural seeming need of commerce, then generate the positions and connectivity, then from the type of city produce the list of necessary resources that must be nearby, and only then, maybe given some rules on how to make the journey between cities both believable and interesting, generate the final content including the roads, the choke points, the bridges and tunnels, ferries and the terrain including the biomes and coastline necessary. If this has been done before, I'd like to know, and would like to know what went wrong, and what went right.

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• Novice prototyping a massive multiplayer webpage based gaming system

  - by Sean Hendlin

  I'm trying to build a website based game in which various pages of the site act as different areas of the game. I am wondering what you would recommended as a design structure. Which languages would be best if building what will hopefully becomes a massive system able to scale to massive amounts of users. I am wondering if and how various elements from differing languages could be meshed to interact with each other. For example could I use html5, javascript, and PHP? What about asp.net how might that factor in? I'm a newbie programmer but I've been working on this idea for years and I want to build it to reality. Your comments and suggestions are appreciated. P.S.: The game is not all graphics and animation (though flash like appearance and some animation would be nice). What I am thinking of is essentially a heavily gamified system of forms. And LOTS of data in many different categories cross referencing each-other. I'm not sure how to go about structuring the collection of data. Also while I know javascript can be used to process some functions, I'm wondering what sort of base system I would need to handle the server side processing of what I am expecting to be some pretty significant algorithm processing. That is to say I expect to have many many many functions and I'm not sure how to mange this using javascript. I feel like they would be forgotten, mixed up, disorganizes as they essentially only exist where they are coded. I guess I need to learn something of libraries? OK, Thank you! Is enough from me for now.

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• Class hierarchy problem in this social network model

  - by Gerenuk

  I'm trying to design a class system for a social network data model - basically a link/object system. Now I have roughly the following structure (simplified and only relevant methods shown) class Data: "used to handle the data with mongodb" "can link, unlink data and also return other linked data" "is basically a proxy object that only stores _id and accesses mongodb on requests" "it looks like {_id: ..., _out: [id1, id2,...], _inc: [id3, id4, ...]}" def get_node(self, id) "create a new Data object from the underlying mongodb" "each data object can potentially create a reference object to new mongo data" "this is needed when the data returns the linked objects" class Node: """ this class proxies linking calls to .data it includes additional network logic operations whereas Data only contains a basic database solution """ def __init__(self, data): "the infrastructure realization is stored as composition by an included object data" "Node bascially proxies most calls to the infrastructure object data" def get_node(self, data): "creates a new object of class Object or Link depending on data" class Object(Node): "can have multiple connections to Link" class Link(Node): "has one 'in' and one 'out' connection to an Object" This system is working, however maybe wouldn't work outside Python. Note that after reading links Now I have two questions here: 1) I want to infrastructure of the data storage to be replacable. Earlier I had Data as a superclass of Node so that it provided the neccessary calls. But (without dirty Python tricks) you cannot replace the superclass dynamically. Is using composition therefore recommended? The drawback is that I have to proxy most calls (link, unlink etc). Any thoughts? 2) The class Node contains the common method .get_node which is used to built new Object or Link instances after reading out the data. Some attribute of data decided whether the object which is only stored by id should be instantiated as an Object or Link class. The problem here is that Node needs to know about Object and Link in advance, which seems dodgy. Do you see a different solution? Both Object and Link need to instantiate one of all possible types depending on what the find in their linked data. Are there any other ideas how to implement a flexible Object/Link structure where the underlying database storage is isolated?

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• Why, in WPF, do we set an object to Stretch via its Alignment properties instead of Width/Height?

  - by Jonathan Hobbs

  In WPF's XAML, we can tell an element to fill its container like this: <Button HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" /> Why is it that when we set an element to Stretch, we do it via the HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment properties? Why did the WPF design team decide to take this approach over having Width="Stretch" and Height="Stretch"? I presume it was a calculated decision, and I'm curious about the reasoning. CSS, among other technologies, follows the convention that stretching is done via the width and height properties, and that alignment affects positioning exclusively. This seems intuitive enough: stretching the element is manipulating its width and height, after all! Using the corresponding alignment property to stretch an element seems counter-intuitive and unusual in comparison. This makes me think they didn't just pick this option for no reason: they made a calculated decision and had reasons behind it. Width and Height use the double data type, which would ordinarily mean assigning it a string would be silly. However, WPF's Window objects can take Width="Auto", which gets treated as double.NaN. Couldn't Width="Stretch" be stored as double.PositiveInfinity or some other value?

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