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• Beginner's steps to game programming [on hold]

  - by CodeTrasher

  I have graduated from university less than 6 months ago and became a B.Eng in Software Engineering. I have moderate understanding of programming experience from languages like C++, Java and C#. But mostly on simple desktop and mobile applications. I've tried some simple Pong-like games but never finished even the smallest game. I have a couple of nice ideas growing (IMO, at least...) in my mind but don't really know where to begin. 2D is way to go, of course, at the beginning. I just want to hear from more experienced game devs how they started out. Should I make a rough outline of the core idea and mechanics and start working on a prototype of core gameplay? Or should I just practice more by making Pong, Asteroids and that sort of games and get an understanding of those before moving on? Thanks to all!

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• Informing GUI objects about screen size - Designing

  - by Mosquito

  I have a problem with designing classes for my game which I create. In my app, there is: class CGame which contains all the information about game itself, e.g. screen width, screen height, etc. In the main() function I create a pointer to CGame instance. class CGUIObject which includes fields specifying it's position and draw() method, which should know how to draw an object according to screen size. class CGUIManager which is a singleton and it includes a list of CGUIObject's. For each object in a list it just calls draw() method. For clarity's sake, I'll put some simple code: class CGame { int screenWidth; int screenHeight; }; class CGUIObject { CPoint position; void draw(); // this one needs to know what is a screen's width and height }; class CGUIManager // it's a singleton { vector<CGUIObject*> guiObjects; void drawObjects(); }; And the main.cpp: CGame* g; int main() { g = new CGame(); while(1) { CGUIManager::Instance().drawObjects(); } return 0; } Now the problem is, that each CGUIObject needs to know the screen size which is held by CGame, but I find it very dumb to include pointer to CGame instance in every object. Could anyone, please, tell me what would be the best approach to achieve this?

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• How can I get better at explaining complex software processes to developers?

  - by Lostsoul

  I'm really struggling with my software specs. I am not a professional programmer but enjoy doing it for fun and made some software that I want to sell later but I'm not happy with the code quality. So I wanted to hire a real developer to rewrite my software in a more professional way so it will be maintainable by other developers in the future. I read and found some sample specs and made my own by applying their structure to my document and wanted to get my developer friend to read it and give me advice. After an hour and a half he understood exactly what I was trying to do and how I did it(my algorithms,stack,etc.). How can I get better at explaining things to developers? I add many details and explanations for everything(including working code) but I'm unsure the best way I can learn to pass detailed domain knowledge(my software applies big data, machine learning, graph theory to finance). My end goal is to get them to understand as much as possible from the document and then ask anything they do not understand, but right now it seems they need to extract alot of information from me. How can I get better at communicating domain knowledge to developers?

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• Draw "vision cone" / targetting element onto game world

  - by gkimsey

  I'm wanting to indicate various things using a "pie slice" sort of shape as below. Similar to vision cones in stealth game minimaps, or targetting indicators in RTS type games for frontal area attacks. Something generic enough to be used for both would be ideal. I need to be able to procedurally (and efficiently) change things like the slice width and length, color, transparency, position in the world, etc. For my particular situation, there's no concern with elevation, funky terrain, or really any third axis at all as far as this element is concerned. I have two first inclinations on how to accomplish this: 1) Manually generate the vertices for a main triangle, (possibly two, superimposed to get the border effect), a handful more to approximate the arc at the end, and roll it into a mesh. 2) Use some sort of 2D drawing library to create a circle and mask it off at the right angles, render to texture, and use that. For reference, I have some experience with Ogre3D, but I'm not attached to it as this is a mostly academic pursuit at the moment. Other technologies that might be better at accomplishing this are more than welcome. Finally, I'm kind of curious about how to do a "flashlight" or similar 3D effect that could produce the same result, but on all surfaces in the lit area.

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• Implementing `let` without using a macro

  - by Matt Fenwick

  I'm learning Lisp, and I've just gotten to let, which I don't quite understand (the implementation of). A common definition for it is given in terms of lambda as a macro. However, nowhere have I seen that let must be implemented as a macro or in terms of lambda. Is it possible to define let without using a macro or lambda? I know it can be implemented as a primitive, but I want to know whether it can be implemented in Lisp without creating a macro -- by creating a special form or a function.

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• Moving dozens of existing standalone retail sites to one central inventory database: what should I know going in?

  - by palintropos

  This will be the first project of this scale that I have attempted, and the first time I have run a website at all (much less dozens) using an off-site database. In particular, I'd like to know: what sort of optimizations I should read up on to make this run as smoothly as possible? any pitfalls/gotchas wiser, more experienced folk are aware of I should be on the lookout for, and what damage-control and preventative measures I should take against the nightmare scenario of the main server (hosting the database) having an outage, grinding over 100 websites to a halt (because they have no access to the product data).

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• More Tables or More Databases?

  - by BuckWoody

  I got an e-mail from someone that has an interesting situation. He has 15,000 customers, and he asks if he should have a database for their data per customer. Without a LOT more data it’s impossible to say, of course, but there are some general concepts to keep in mind. Whenever you’re segmenting data, it’s all about boundary choices. You have not only boundaries around how big the data will get, but things like how many objects (tables, stored procedures and so on) that will be involved, if there are any cross-sections of data (do they share location or product information) and – very important – what are the security requirements? From the answer to these types of questions, you now have the choice of making multiple tables in a single database, or using multiple databases. A database carries some overhead – it needs a certain amount of memory for locking and so on. But it has a very clean boundary – everything from objects to security can be kept apart. Having multiple users in the same database is possible as well, using things like a Schema. But keeping 15,000 schemas can be challenging as well. My recommendation in complex situations like this is similar to a post on decisions that I did earlier – I lay out the choices on a spreadsheet in rows, and then my requirements at the top in the columns. I  give each choice a number based on how well it meets each requirement. At the end, the highest number wins. And many times it’s a mix – perhaps this person could segment customers into larger regions or districts or products, in a database. Within that database might be multiple schemas for the customers. Of course, he needs to query across all customers, that becomes another requirement. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Where to get PNG icons/graphics for game development for kids? [closed]

  - by at.

  Possible Duplicate: Where can I find free sprites and images? I'm teaching kids to program using Ruby and the gaming framework Gosu/Chingu. Kids love it, including the part where they have to look for the icons/graphics for their game objects. I direct them to iconarchive.com, but the selection is sometimes very limited, the graphics aren't always with transparent backgrounds and sometimes the art requires payment. I don't mind paying for an educational license of some sort, but I want the kids to easily select graphics they can use in their games. Is there another resource better suited for this purpose? I don't have a good solution for this, but would also love a site they can get cool background images for their games.

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• Mobile Compatibility: traditional website look vs native application ?

  - by Siddiqui

  I have a question related to mobile compatible websites, I have seen two type of websites One in which they adopt traditional website look and adjust website according to mobile screen, if they have lot of information which can not be adjust according to screen then they expand the height of page, so that user can scroll the page to see more information... In the second approach they used native application look means use navigation-bar, tab-bar, tool-bar, scroll-view just like in native applications. Height and width of page adjust according to screen size, if they have more information then they use scroll-view etc... My question is: which approach is better then other, in which approach you feel more comfortable to use website.

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• How to calculate production when player is offline

  - by Kaizer

  What is the best way to do for example food growth based on how many food buildings you have? Lets say I have a webbased game where you can build a farm wich generates 60 food units per hour. A player has 1 farm in his possession. What is the best way to keep on producing these units even when the player is offline? Should I do the math when the player get's back online again? If so..how can I do this without having to save his last online time every 5 seconds so I can do some maths with it when he logs back in (datetime.now - lastonlinetime)? Next thing is when the player is online, should I refresh his resource count every 5 seconds or so by going to the database and back? This would seem weird to do for every logged on player. I hope you understand my question. kind regards

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• Is there a better way to organize my module tests that avoids an explosion of new source files?

  - by luser droog

  I've got a neat (so I thought) way of having each of my modules produce a unit-test executable if compiled with the -DTESTMODULE flag. This flag guards a main() function that can access all static data and functions in the module, without #including a C file. From the README: -- Modules -- The various modules were written and tested separately before being coupled together to achieve the necessary basic functionality. Each module retains its unit-test, its main() function, guarded by #ifdef TESTMODULE. `make test` will compile and execute all the unit tests, producing copious output, but importantly exitting with an appropriate success or failure code, so the `make test` command will fail if any of the tests fail. Module TOC __________ test obj src header structures CONSTANTS ---- --- --- --- -------------------- m m.o m.c m.h mfile mtab TABSZ s s.o s.c s.h stack STACKSEGSZ v v.o v.c v.h saverec_ f.o f.c f.h file ob ob.o ob.c ob.h object ar ar.o ar.c ar.h array st st.o st.c st.h string di di.o di.c di.h dichead dictionary nm nm.o nm.c nm.h name gc gc.o gc.c gc.h garbage collector itp itp.c itp.h context osunix.o osunix.c osunix.h unix-dependent functions It's compile by a tricky bit of makefile, m:m.c ob.h ob.o err.o $(CORE) itp.o $(OP) cc $(CFLAGS) -DTESTMODULE $(LDLIBS) -o $@ $< err.o ob.o s.o ar.o st.o v.o di.o gc.o nm.o itp.o $(OP) f.o where the module is compiled with its own C file plus every other object file except itself. But it's creating difficulties for the kindly programmer who offered to write the Autotools files for me. So the obvious way to make it "less weird" would be to bust-out all the main functions into separate source files. But, but ... Do I gotta?

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• What most games would benefit from having

  - by Phil

  I think I've seen "questions" like this on stackoverflow but sorry if I'm overstepping any bounds. Inspired by my recent question and all the nice answers (Checklist for finished game?) I think every gamedev out there has something he/she thinks that almost every game should have. That knowledge is welcome here! So this is probably going to be an inspirational subjective list of some sorts and the point is that anyone reading this question will see a point or two that they've overlooked in their own development and might benefit from adding. I think a good example might be: "some sort of manual or help section. Of course it should be proportional to how advanced the game is. Some users won't need it and won't go looking for it but the other ones that do will become very frustrated if they can't remember how to do something specific that should be in the manual". A bad example might be "good gameplay". Of course every game benefits from this but the answer is not very helpful.

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• Browser problem for background-size property [migrated]

  - by Sangram

  I am using one picture as my background of header of my blog. CSS i have used is #header-wrapper { height:125px; padding: 0px; margin: 0; background: url("http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_lxBSX0YJV58/TOspWPI1r-I/AAAAAAAAA34/uw872WFS3ME/s1600/headerbg.jpg") top center no-repeat; background-size: 1120px 124px; } original width of an image is 990 px and i made it 1120px using property background-size: 1120px 124px; It looks okay in firefox 4 and Opera 11 but doesn't work in IE 7, Palemoon etc. image size does not increases and remains 990 px. You can check my blog HERE Any help...how can i make it compatible with all browsers ?

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• Is it okay to introduce LESS to not so savvy UI Designers?

  - by Jason Nathan

  I just got a job as lead developer and I thought it would be best to seek the expertise of my peers (that's you) before proceeding! I had the opportunity to review my designers and they are mostly photoshop pros with dreamweaver as their main HTML/CSS editor. A more visual experience. I, on the other hand, have had much experience hand-writing all my code. From HTML markup to CSS. From my understanding, my designers have basic CSS knowledge and I am considering a simple 101 style set of tutorials for them to get a better grasp of markup before I moved into more advanced topics like accessibility and microformat markup. We need to get started up quickly. Do you think it's okay to dive into LESS from the get-go?

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• What are the advantages of storing xml in a relational database?

  - by Chris

  I was poking around the AdventureWorks database today and I noticed that a number of tables (HumanResources.JobCandidate and Sales.Individual for example) have a column which is storing xml data. What I would to know is, what is the advantage of storing basically a database table row's worth of data in another table's column? Doesn't this make it difficult to query off of this information? Or is the assumption that the data won't need to be queried and just needs to be stored?

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• Clarify the Single Responsibility Principle.

  - by dsimcha

  The Single Responsibility Principle states that a class should do one and only one thing. Some cases are pretty clear cut. Others, though, are difficult because what looks like "one thing" when viewed at a given level of abstraction may be multiple things when viewed at a lower level. I also fear that if the Single Responsibility Principle is honored at the lower levels, excessively decoupled, verbose ravioli code, where more lines are spent creating tiny classes for everything and plumbing information around than actually solving the problem at hand, can result. How would you describe what "one thing" means? What are some concrete signs that a class really does more than "one thing"?

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• Android Bitmap: Collision Detecting

  - by Aekasitt Guruvanich

  I am writing an Android game right now and I would need some help in the collision of the Pawns on screen. I figured I could run a for loop on the Player class with all Pawn objects on the screen checking whether or not Width*Height intersects with each other, but is there a more efficient way to do this? And if you do it this way, many of the transparent pixel inside the rectangular area will also be considered as collision as well. Is there a way to check for collision between Bitmap on a Canvas that disregard transparent pixels? The class for player is below and the Pawn class uses the same method of display. Class Player { private Resources res; // Used for referencing Bitmap from predefined location private Bounds bounds; // Class that holds the boundary of the screen private Bitmap image; private float x, y; private Matrix position; private int width, height; private float velocity_x, velocity_y; public Player (Resources resources, Bounds boundary) { res = resources; bounds = boundary; image = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(res, R.drawable.player); width = image.getWidth(); height = image.getHeight(); position = new Matrix(); x = bounds.xMax / 2; // Initially puts the Player in the middle of screen y = bounds.yMax / 2; position.preTranslate(x,y); } public void draw(Canvas canvas) { canvas.drawBitmap(image, position, null); } }

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• JS / HTML 5 Compatablity issue on iOS 6

  - by Dhaval

  I'm using HTML 5 to play video and there are some content before the video so I'm using flexroll to scroll that whole window. I'm checking it on iPad, now problem is that in iOS 5 its working fine but when I update to iOS 6 then screen is not scrolling only video is scroll up and down, content is as it is in the position. I can't understand what is the exact problem. Is that js compatibility issue or HTML 5 video compatibility issue. Can anyone please help me to figure out, your help will really be appreciated.

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• What language(s) do I need to learn in order to develop an application like this?

  - by Josh

  I have an idea for making a web application. Ideally this application would have products which prices are increased each time a Retweet of the product at hand is made. Kind of like bids with tweets. Unfortunately my web development knowledge is very scarce. I know just basic HTML, virtually no CSS and that's it. I'm kindly asking for your insights on what you think would be best for making a web app like this. I have no good idea of where to start or what I need to get going. Your inputs are greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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• share code between check and process methods

  - by undu

  My job is to refactor an old library for GIS vector data processing. The main class encapsulates a collection of building outlines, and offers different methods for checking data consistency. Those checking functions have an optional parameter that allows to perform some process. For instance: std::vector<Point> checkIntersections(int process_mode = 0); This method tests if some building outlines are intersecting, and return the intersection points. But if you pass a non null argument, the method will modify the outlines to remove the intersection. I think it's pretty bad (at call site, a reader not familiar with the code base will assume that a method called checkSomething only performs a check and doesn't modifiy data) and I want to change this. I also want to avoid code duplication as check and process methods are mostly similar. So I was thinking to something like this: // a private worker std::vector<Point> workerIntersections(int process_mode = 0) { // it's the equivalent of the current checkIntersections, it may perform // a process depending on process_mode } // public interfaces for check and process std::vector<Point> checkIntersections() /* const */ { workerIntersections(0); } std::vector<Point> processIntersections(int process_mode /*I have different process modes*/) { workerIntersections(process_mode); } But that forces me to break const correctness as workerIntersections is a non-const method. How can I separate check and process, avoiding code duplication and keeping const-correctness?

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• How do you go from a so so programmer to a great one? [closed]

  - by Cervo

  How do you go from being an okay programmer to being able to write maintainable clean code? For example David Hansson was writing Basecamp when in the process he created Rails as part of writing Basecamp in a clean/maintainable way. But how do you know when there is value in a side project like that? I have a bachelors in computer science, and I am about to get a masters and I will say that colleges teach you to write code to solve problems, not neatly or anything. Basically you think of a problem, come up with a solution, and write it down...not necessarily the most maintainable way in the world. Also my first job was in a startup, and now my third is in a small team in a large company where the attitude was/is get it done yesterday (also most of my jobs are mainly database development with SQL with a few ASP.NET web pages/.NET apps on the side). So of course cut/paste is more favored than making things more cleanly. And they would rather have something yesterday even if you have to rewrite it next month rather than to have something in a week that lasts for a year. Also spaghetti code turns up all over the place, and it takes very smart people to write/understand/maintain spaghetti code...However it would be better to do things so simple/clean that even a caveman/woman could do maintenance. Also I get very bored/unmotivated having to go modify the same things cut/pasted in a few locations. Is this the type of skill that you need to learn by working with a serious software organization that has an emphasis on maintenance and maybe even an architect who designs a system architecture and reviews code? Could you really learn it by volunteering on an open source project (it seems to me that a full time programmer job is way more practice than a few hours a week on an open source project)? Is there some course where you can learn this? I can attest that graduate school and undergraduate school do not really emphasize clean software at all. They just teach the structures/algorithms and then send you off into the world to solve problems. Overall I think the first thing is learning to write clean/maintainable code within the bounds of the project in order to become a good programmer. Then the next thing is learning when you need to do a side project (like a framework) to make things more maintainable/clean even while you still deliver things for the deadline in order to become a great programmer. For example, you are making an SQL report and someone gives you 100 calculations for individual columns. At what point does it make sense to construct a domain specific language to encode the rules in simply and then generate all the SQL as opposed to cut/pasting the query from the table a bunch of times and then adjusting each query to do the appropriate calculations. This is the type of thing I would say a great programmer would know. He/she would maybe even know ways to avoid the domain specific language and to still do all the calculations without creating an unmaintainable mess or a ton of repetitive code to cut/paste everywhere.

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• How can I better manage far-reaching changes in my code?

  - by neuviemeporte

  In my work (writing scientific software in C++), I often get asked by the people who use the software to get their work done to add some functionality or change the way things are done and organized right now. Most of the time this is just a matter of adding a new class or a function and applying some glue to do the job, but from time to time, a seemingly simple change turns out to have far-reaching consequences that require me to redesign a substantial amount of existing code, which takes a lot of time and effort, and is difficult to evaluate in terms of time required. I don't think it has as much to do with inter-dependence of modules, as with changing requirements (admittedly, on a smaller scale). To provide an example, I was thinking about the recently-added multi-user functionality in Android. I don't know whether they planned to introduce it from the very beginning, but assuming they didn't, it seems hard to predict all the areas that will be affected by the change (apps preferences, themes, need to store account info somehow, etc...?), even though the concept seems simple enough, and the code is well-organized. How do you deal with such situations? Do you just jump in to code and then sort out the cruft later like I do? Or do you do a detailed analysis beforehand of what will be affected, what needs to be updated and how, and what has to be rewritten? If so, what tools (if any) and approaches do you use?

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• Best Way to Handle Meta Information in a SQL Database

  - by danielhanly.com

  I've got a database where I want to store user information and user_meta information. The reason behind setting it up in this way was because the user_meta side may change over time and I would like to do this without disrupting the master user table. If possible, I would like some advice on how to best set up this meta data table. I can either set it as below: +----+---------+----------+--------------------+ | id | user_id | key | value | +----+---------+----------+--------------------+ | 1 | 1 | email | [email protected] | | 2 | 1 | name | user name | | 3 | 1 | address | test address | ... Or, I can set it as below: +----+---------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------+ | id | user_id | email | name | address | +----+---------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------+ | 1 | 1 | [email protected] | user name | test address | Obviously, the top verison is more flexible, but the bottom version is space saving and perhaps more efficient, returning all the data as a single record. Which is the best way to go about this? Or, am I going about this completely wrong and there's another way I've not thought of?

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• Would this data requirement suit a Document -Oriented database?

  - by codecowboy

  I have a requirement to allow users to fill in journal/diary entries per day. I want to provide a handful of known journal templates with x columns to fill in. An example might be a thought diary; a user has to record a thought in one column, describe the situation, rate how they felt etc. The other requirement is that a user should be able to create their own diary templates. They might have a need for a 10 column diary entry per day and might need to rate some aspect out of 50 instead of 10. In an RDBMS, I can see this getting quite complicated. I could have individual tables for my known templates as the fields will be fixed. But for custom diary templates I imagine I would would need a table storing custom_field_types (the diary columns), a table storing entries referencing their field types (custom_entries) and then a third custom_diary table which would store rows matching custom_entries to diaries. Leaving performance / scaling aside, would it be any simpler or make more sense to use a document oriented database like MongoDB to store this data? This is for a web application which might later need an API for mobile devices.

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• I want something ready to start with

  - by BDotA

  I am looking for something quick like a weblog in wordpress or blogspot maybe, that when I write a blog post I can put it there, for example if I write something about .NET or Java or Database,..some quick tutorial with some small code samples that visitors can use ... And I don't know anything about webdesign and I just want a ready-made thing to use for this purpose. What do you suggest? any samples of that that I can take a look?

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