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• Multiplayer mobile games and coping with high latency

  - by liortal

  I'm currently researching regarding a design for an online (realtime) mobile multiplayer game. As such, i'm taking into consideration that latencies (lag) is going to be high (perhaps higher than PC/consoles). I'd like to know if there are ways to overcome this or minimize the issues of high latency? The model i'll be using is peer-to-peer (using Photon cloud to broadcast messages to all other players). How do i deal with a scenario where a message about a local object's state at time t will only get to other players at *t + HUGE_LAG* ?

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• Exploring your database schema with SQL

  In the second part of Phil's series of articles on finding stuff (such as objects, scripts, entities, metadata) in SQL Server, he offers some scripts that should be handy for the developer faced with tracking down problem areas and potential weaknesses in a database.

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• Why Adobe Air is so underrated for building mobile apps?

  - by Marcelo de Assis

  I worked with Adobe Flash related technologies for the last 5 years, although not being a big fan of Adobe. I see some little bugs happening in some apps, but I cannot imagine why a lot of big companies do not even think to use use Adobe Air as a good technology for their mobile apps. I see a lot of mobile developer positions asking for experts in Android or iOS , but very much less positions asking for Adobe Air, even when Adobe Air apps have the advantage of being multi-plataform, with the same app working in Blackberry, iOS and Android. Is so much easier to develop a game using Flash, than using Android SDK, for example. It really have flaws (that I never saw) or it is just some kind of mass prejudgement? I also would like to hear what a project manager or a indie developer takes when choosing a plataform for building apps.

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• Someone tell me why people writing GNU code use { like that?

  - by Deus Deceit

  I saw the rules on how to type code for UNITY project or GNU software in general. Why do they write code in such an ugly form? Is there a particular reason why they don't put brackets the way (from what I know) most people do? Why like this: for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) { //do something } and not like this: for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) { //Do something } or this: for(i = 0; i < 5l i++) { //Do Something } ???

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• Triangle Strips and Tangent Space Normal Mapping

  - by Koarl

  Short: Do triangle strips and Tangent Space Normal mapping go together? According to quite a lot of tutorials on bump mapping, it seems common practice to derive tangent space matrices in a vertex program and transform the light direction vector(s) to tangent space and then pass them on to a fragment program. However, if one was using triangle strips or index buffers, it is a given that the vertex buffer contains vertices that sit at border edges and would thus require more than one normal to derive tangent space matrices to interpolate between in fragment programs. Is there any reasonable way to not have duplicate vertices in your buffer and still use tangent space normal mapping? Which one do you think is better: Having normal and tangent encoded in the assets and just optimize the geometry handling to alleviate the cost of duplicate vertices or using triangle strips and computing normals/tangents completely at run time? Thinking about it, the more reasonable answer seems to be the first one, but why might my professor still be fussing about triangle strips when it seems so obvious?

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• Languages on embedded systems in aeronautic and spatial sector

  - by Niels

  I know that my question is very broad but a general answer would be nice. I would like to know which are the main languages used in aeronautic and spatial sector. I know that the OS which run on embedded systems are RTOS (Real time OS) and I think that, this languages must be checked correctly by different methods (formal methods, unit tests) and must permit a sure verification of whole process of a program.

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• Is reference to bug/issue in commit message considered good practice?

  - by Christian P

  I'm working on a project where we have the source control set up to automatically write notes in the bug tracker. We simply write the bug issue ID in the commit message and the commit message is added as a note to the bug tracker. I can see only a few downsides for this practice. If sometime in the future the source code gets separated from the bug tracking software (or the reported bugs/issues are somehow lost). Or when someone is looking in the history of commits but doesn't have access to our bug tracker. My question is if having a bug/issue reference in the commit message is considered good practice? Are there some other downsides?

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• What does "context-free" mean in the term "context-free grammar"?

  - by rick

  Given the amount of material that tries to explain what a context-free grammar (CFG) is, I found it surprising that very few (in my sample, less than 1 in 20) give an explanation on why such grammars are called "context-free". And, to my mind, none succeeds in doing so. My question is, why are context-free grammars called context-free? What is "the context"? I had an intuition that the context could be other language constructs surrounding the currently analyzed construct, but that seems not to be the case. Could anyone provide a precise explanation?

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• What's a nice explanation for pointers?

  - by Macneil

  In your own studies (on your own, or for a class) did you have an "ah ha" moment when you finally, really understood pointers? Do you have an explanation you use for beginner programmers that seems particularly effective? For example, when beginners first encounter pointers in C, they might just add &s and *s until it compiles (as I myself once did). Maybe it was a picture, or a really well motivated example, that made pointers "click" for you or your student. What was it, and what did you try before that didn't seem to work? Were any topics prerequisites (e.g. structs, or arrays)? In other words, what was necessary to understand the meaning of &s and *, when you could use them with confidence? Learning the syntax and terminology or the use cases isn't enough, at some point the idea needs to be internalized. Update: I really like the answers so far; please keep them coming. There are a lot of great perspectives here, but I think many are good explanations/slogans for ourselves after we've internalized the concept. I'm looking for the detailed contexts and circumstances when it dawned on you. For example: I only somewhat understood pointers syntactically in C. I heard two of my friends explaining pointers to another friend, who asked why a struct was passed with a pointer. The first friend talked about how it needed to be referenced and modified, but it was just a short comment from the other friend where it hit me: "It's also more efficient." Passing 4 bytes instead of 16 bytes was the final conceptual shift I needed.

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• How do I implement a score database in Android?

  - by Michael Seun Araromi

  I making a 2D game for Android using OpenGL-ES technology. It is a space shooting game where the player shoots enemy ships. I want to keep a track of score for the amount of enemy ships destroyed and a record of a local highscore. The score should be incremented whenever an enemy is destroyed. I also want a way of displaying both the current score and highscore on the game screen. I am not familiar with databases at all and I will appreciate a clear answer or a link to a good tutorial for my cause. Thanks.

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• Why do some people hate Dart? [closed]

  - by Hassan

  First, I'd like to note that this question is not intended to compare two languages or technologies, but is only asking about criticisms aimed at a language. I've always thought it a good idea to somehow get rid of Javascript. It works, but it's just so messy. I think many will agree with me there. And that's how I interpreted Google's release of Dart. It seems to me like a very good alternative to Javascript. Now, it looks like some are not very happy that Google has released this new language. Take a look at this Wikipedia page to see what I'm talking about. If you don't feel like reading it, I'll tell you now that some seem to think that Dart is similar to Microsoft's VBScript, in that it only works on Microsoft's browsers. This goes against the web's openness. But it's my understanding that Dart can be compiled to Javascript, which will allow it to be run on any modern browser (as the Wikipedia article also states). So my question is: are these criticisms valid? Is there a real fear that Google is trying to control the web's front-end to be more compatible with its browser?

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• if/else statements or exceptions

  - by Thaven

  I don't know, that this question fit better on this board, or stackoverflow, but because my question is connected rather to practices, that some specified problem. So, consider an object that does something. And this something can (but should not!) can go wrong. So, this situation can be resolved in two way: first, with exceptions: DoSomethingClass exampleObject = new DoSomethingClass(); try { exampleObject.DoSomething(); } catch (ThisCanGoWrongException ex) { [...] } And second, with if statement: DoSomethingClass exampleObject = new DoSomethingClass(); if(!exampleObject.DoSomething()) { [...] } Second case in more sophisticated way: DoSomethingClass exampleObject = new DoSomethingClass(); ErrorHandler error = exampleObject.DoSomething(); if (error.HasError) { if(error.ErrorType == ErrorType.DivideByPotato) { [...] } } which way is better? In one hand, I heard that exception should be used only for real unexpected situations, and if programist know, that something may happen, he should used if/else. In second hand, Robert C. Martin in his book Clean Code Wrote, that exception are far more object oriented, and more simple to keep clean.

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• Does a mature agile team requires any management?

  - by ashy_32bit

  After a recent heated debate over Scrum, I realized my problem is that I think of management as a quite unnecessary and redundant activity in a fully agile team. I believe a mature Agile team does not require management or any non-technical decision making process whatsoever. To my (apparently erring) eyes it is more than obvious that the only one suitable and capable of managing a mature development team is their coach (who is the most technically competent colleague with proper communication skills). I can't imagine how a Scrum master can contribute to such a team. I am having great difficulty realizing and understanding the value of such things in Scrum and the manager as someone who is not a veteran developer but is well skilled in planning the production cycles when a coach exists in the team. What does that even mean? How on earth can someone with no edge-skills of development manage a highly technical team? Perhaps management here means something else? I see management as a total waste of time and a by-product of immaturity. In my understanding a mature team is fully self-managing. Apparently I'm mistaken since many great people say the contrary but I can't convince myself.

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• How to have a maintainable and manageable Javascript code base

  - by dade

  I am starting a new job soon as a frontend developer. The App I would be working on is 100% Javascript on the client side. all the server returns is an index page that loads all the Javascript files needed by the app. Now here is the problem: The whole of the application is built around having functions wrapped to different namespaces. And from what I see, a simple function like rendering the HTML of a page can be accomplished by having a call to 2 or more functions across different namespace... My initial thought was "this does not feel like the perfect solution" and I can just envisage a lot of issues with maintaining the code and extending it down the line. Now I would soon start working on taking the project forward and would like to have suggestions on good case practices when it comes to writing and managing a relatively large amount of javascript code.

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• How to begin in Game Development? [closed]

  - by Bladimir Ruiz

  It's been a while since I decide to get into game dev, but, there are so many ways to make a game, that i dont know where to begin, I got unity 3d license for PC/Android/Ios for free, but i Also got XNA dev tool, ALSO have CoronaSDK.. But I dont Know wich one to use. Till' now all i want is to make a Sidecroller lime Super Mario Bros, Just for start later on, i will like to make diferent games. In the future i would like to work in the game industry which tools will be the best to Start in that "Dream"?

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• Should I provide fallbacks for HTML5/CSS3 elements in a web page at this point?

  - by Abluescarab

  I'm wondering if I should bother providing a fallback for HTML5 tags and attributes and CSS3 styling at this point in time. I know that there's probably still a lot of people out there who use older versions of browsers and HTML5/CSS3 are still fairly new. I read this article: Should I use non-standard tags in a HTML page for highlighting words? and one answer mentioned that people kind of "cheat" with older browsers by using the new tags and attributes, but styling them in CSS to ensure they show up right. This question: Relevance of HTML5: Is now the time? was asked about two years ago and I don't know how relevant it is anymore. For example, I want to use the placeholder and required attributes in a web form I'm building and it has no labels to show what each <input> is. How do I handle this, or do I bother?

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• How to handle a player's level and its consequent privileges?

  - by Songo

  I'm building a game similar to Mafia Wars where a player can do tasks for his gang and gain experience and thus advancing his level. The game is built using PHP and a Mysql database. In the game I want to limit the resources allowed to player based on his level. For example: ________| (Max gold) | (Max army size) | (Max moves) | ... Level 1 | 1000 | 100 | 10 | ... Level 2 | 1500 | 200 | 20 | ... Level 3 | 3000 | 300 | 25 | ... . . . In addition certain features of the game won't be allowed until a certain level is reached such as players under Level 10 can't trade in the game market, players under Level 20 can't create alliances,...etc. The way I have modeled it is by implementing a very loooong ACL (Access Control List) with about 100 entries (an entry for each level). However, I think there may be a simpler approach to this seeing that this feature have been implemented in many games before.

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• Design pattern and best practices

  - by insane-36

  I am an iphone developer. I am quite confident on developing iphone application with some minimal feature. I would consider myself as a fair application developer but the code I write is not so much structured. I make vey little use of MVC because I dont seem to find places to impose MVC. Most of the time, I create application with viewcontrollers and very few models only. How could I improve the skill for making my code more reusable, standard, easy and maintainable. I have seen few books on design patterns and tried few chapters myself but I dont seem to skip my habit. I know few of them but I am not being able to apply those patterns into my app. What is the best way to learn the design patterns and coding habit. Any kind of suggestion is warmly welcomed.

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• Creating an expandable, cross-platform compatible program "core".

  - by Thomas Clayson

  Hi there. Basically the brief is relatively simple. We need to create a program core. An engine that will power all sorts of programs with a large number of distinct potential applications and deployments. The core will be an analytics and algorithmic processor which will essentially take user-specific input and output scenarios based on the information it gets, whilst recording this information for reporting. It needs to be cross platform compatible. Something that can have platform specific layers put on top which can interface with the core. It also needs to be able to be expandable, for instance, modular with developers being able to write "add-ons" or "extensions" which can alter the function of the end program and can use the core to its full extent. (For instance, a good example of what I'm looking to create is a browser. It has its main core, the web-kit engine, for instance, and then on top of this is has a platform-specific GUI and can also have add-ons and extensions which can change the behavior of the program.) Our problem is that the extensions need to interface directly with the main core and expand/alter that functionality rather than the platform specific "layer". So, given that I have no experience in this whatsoever (I have a PHP background and recently objective-c), where should I start, and is there any knowledge/wisdom you can impart on me please? Thanks for all the help and advice you can give me. :) If you need any more explanation just ask. At the moment its in the very early stages of development, so we're just researching all possible routes of development. Thanks a lot

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• How to handle mutiple API calls using javascript/jquery

  - by James Privett

  I need to build a service that will call multiple API's at the same time and then output the results on the page (Think of how a price comparison site works for example). The idea being that as each API call completes the results are sent to the browser immediately and the page would get progressively bigger until all process are complete. Because these API calls may take several seconds each to return I would like to do this via javascript/jquery in order to create a better user experience. I have never done anything like this before using javascript/jquery so I was wondering if there was any frameworks/advice that anyone would be willing to share.

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• Overloading interface buttons, what are the best practices?

  - by XMLforDummies

  Imagine you'll have always a button labeled "Continue" in the same position in your app's GUI. Would you rather make a single button instance that takes different actions depending on the current state? private State currentState = State.Step1; private ContinueButton_Click() { switch(currentState) { case State.Step1: DoThis(); currentState = State.Step2; break; case State.Step2: DoThat(); break; } } Or would you rather have something like this? public Form() { this.ContinueStep2Button.Visible = false; } private ContinueStep1Button_Click() { DoThis(); this.ContinueStep1Button.Visible = false; this.ContinueStep2Button.Visible = true; } private ContinueStep2Button_Click() { DoThat(); }

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• Achieving certain rendering styles

  - by milesmeow

  I'm trying to assess the difficulty of creating a rendering style that is more like the game Okami and the Quake mods (as shown on this page...search for 'okami','quake npr'). Here's a better page describing the Quake rendering mod. Can a game engine such as Unity be used and programmed to achieve these kind of rendering styles? I'm doing research and am totally new to this so any insight into this would help tremendously.

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• Biggest mistake you've ever made

  - by Rogue Coder

  Similar to the question I read on Server Fault, what is the biggest mistake you've ever made in an IT related position. Some examples from friends: I needed to do some work on a production site so I decided to copy over the live database to the beta site. Pretty standard, but when I went to the beta site it was still pulling out-of-date info. OOPS! I had copied the beta database over to the live site! Thank god for backups. And for me, I created a form for an event that was to be held during a specific time range. Participants would fill out the form for a chance to win, and we would send the event organizers a CSV from the database. I went into the database, and found ONLY 1 ENTRY, MINE. Upon investigating, it appears as though I forgot an auto increment key, and because of the server setup there was no way to recover the lost data. I am aware this question is similar to ones on Stack Overflow but the ones I found seemed to receive generic answers instead of actual stories :) What is the biggest coding error/mistake ever…

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• Why not have a High Level Language based OS? Are Low Level Languages more efficient?

  - by rtindru

  Without being presumptuous, I would like you to consider the possibility of this. Most OS today are based on pretty low level languages (mainly C/C++) Even the new ones such as Android uses JNI & underlying implementation is in C In fact, (this is a personal observation) many programs written in C run a lot faster than their high level counterparts (eg: Transmission (a bittorrent client on Ubuntu) is a whole lot faster than Vuze(Java) or Deluge(Python)). Even python compilers are written in C, although PyPy is an exception. So is there a particular reason for this? Why is it that all our so called "High Level Languages" with the great "OOP" concepts can't be used in making a solid OS? So I have 2 questions basically. Why are applications written in low level languages more efficient than their HLL counterparts? Do low level languages perform better for the simple reason that they are low level and are translated to machine code easier? Why do we not have a full fledged OS based entirely on a High Level Language?

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• Stuff you should have learned in school but didn't pay attention to at the time

  - by HLGEM

  This question made me think that there was a better question to ask. What did you learn in school that you didn't care about at the time, but turned out to be useful or you had to relearn in the workplace because you had it in school, but didn't retain the information and you needed it? (I mean for software related jobs.) I think this might help college students identify some of what they really should be paying attention to while they are in school.

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