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• Programming Language vs. Game Engine [on hold]

  - by hunteroatway17

  I understand that this question has been asked multiple times before. I am just asking this quick and simple question. I have been learning programming in C#, Java and C++ for the past 6 months; Just experimenting with each. I think that C++ is the one that I like most. What I would like to know and am wondering about is should I learn a programming language and use a 2D framework like Allegro; Or should I learn Unity and make 2D games in that because it is probably faster and easier. I want to learn something that I can get pretty good at, seeing as I am pursuing a career in indie game development. I also have a programmer's mind set and I am a left brain thinker so learning a language is not a issue. I just want to best and most future proof choice. Thanks.

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• What is a 'good number' of exceptions to implement for my library?

  - by Fuzz

  I've always wondered how many different exception classes I should implement and throw for various pieces of my software. My particular development is usually C++/C#/Java related, but I believe this is a question for all languages. I want to understand what is a good number of different exceptions to throw, and what the developer community expect of a good library. The trade-offs I see include: More exception classes can allow very fine grain levels of error handling for API users (prone to user configuration or data errors, or files not being found) More exception classes allows error specific information to be embedded in the exception, rather than just a string message or error code More exception classes can mean more code maintenance More exception classes can mean the API is less approachable to users The scenarios I wish to understand exception usage in include: During 'configuration' stage, which might include loading files or setting parameters During an 'operation' type phase where the library might be running tasks and doing some work, perhaps in another thread Other patterns of error reporting without using exceptions, or less exceptions (as a comparison) might include: Less exceptions, but embedding an error code that can be used as a lookup Returning error codes and flags directly from functions (sometimes not possible from threads) Implemented an event or callback system upon error (avoids stack unwinding) As developers, what do you prefer to see? If there are MANY exceptions, do you bother error handling them separately anyway? Do you have a preference for error handling types depending on the stage of operation?

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• Is having a class have a handleAction(type) method bad practice?

  - by zhenka

  My web application became a little too complicated to do everything in a controller so I had to build large wrapper classes for ORM models. The possible actions a user can trigger are all similar and after a certain point I realized that the best way to go would be to just have constructor method receive action type as a parameter to take care of the small differences internally, as opposed to either passing many arguments or doing a lot of things in the controller. Is this a good practice? I can't really give details for privacy issues.

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• Using "prevent execution of method" flags

  - by tpaksu

  First of all I want to point out my concern with some pseudocode (I think you'll understand better) Assume you have a global debug flag, or class variable named "debug", class a : var debug = FALSE and you use it to enable debug methods. There are two types of usage it as I know: first in a method : method a : if debug then call method b; method b : second in the method itself: method a : call method b; method b : if not debug exit And I want to know, is there any File IO or stack pointer wise difference between these two approaches. Which usage is better, safer and why?

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• Is it a good idea to use a formula to balance a game's complexity, in order to keep players in constant flow?

  - by user1107412

  I read a lot about Flow theory and its applications to video games, and I got an idea sticking in my mind. If a number of weight values are applied to different parameters of a certain game level (i.e. the size of the level, the number of enemies, their overal strength, the variance in their behavior, etc), then it should be technically possible to find an overal score mechanism for each level in the game. If a constant ratio of complexity increase were empirically defined, for instance 1,3333, or say, the Golden Ratio, would it be a good idea to arrange the levels in such an order that the increase of overal complexity tends to increase that much? Has somebody tried it?

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• What are the common character animation techniques used in tile based hack&slash games?

  - by Gorky

  I wonder what kind of animation techniques are used for creature and character animation in modern hack&slash type tile based games? Keyframing for different actions may be one option. Skeletal framing may be another. But how about the physics? Or do they use a totally hybrid system of inverse kinematics supported with a skeleton,physics and mixed with interpolated keyframing for more realistic animations? If so, how and for what reasons? I can think of many different solutions for the issues below but I wonder what's used and best suited for issues like: Walking or moving on an uneven terrain Combat interaction, combat physics and collisions Attaching rigid items to character and their iteractions ih physics world Soft body dynamics like hair, vegetation, clothes and fabric in line with animations and iteractions.

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• Web designer help needed [closed]

  - by Felipe Caiado

  I have a ongoing problem, not knowing where to start to learn how to program websites, and which languages I should learn first, I have already taken a good look on the web, and I havn't found a clear awnser yet. Help would be much apreciated, in the cents of finding some good languages to start to program; and a good learning source such as a book or a website that covers from the basiscs to the most advanced of those languages.

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• Ubiquitous Language and Custom types

  - by EdvRusj

  Note that my question is referring to those attributes that even on their own already represent a concept ( ie on their own provide a cohesive meaning ). Thus such attribute needs no additional functional support and as such is self-contained. I'm also well-aware that even with self-contained attributes the custom types may prove beneficial ( for example, they give the ability to add new behavior later, when business requirements change ). Thus, my question focuses only on whether custom types for self-contained attributes really enrich Ubiquitous Language UL a) I've read that in most cases, even simple, self-contained attributes should have custom, more descriptive types rather than basic value types ( double, string ... ), because among other things, descriptive types add to the UL, while the use of basic types instead weakens the language. I understand the importance of UL, but how does having a basic type for a self-contained attribute weaken the language, since with self-contained attributes the name of the attribute already adequately describes the concept and thus contributes to the UL vocabulary? For example, the term person_age already adequately explains the concept of quantifying the number of years a person has: class Person { string person_age; } so what could we possibly gain by also introducing the term ThingAge to the UL: class person { ThingAge person_age; } thanks

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• Could someone explain in detail simplex /or perlin noise?

  - by Ryan Szemplinski

  I am really interested in perlin/simplex noise but I am having a difficult time understanding it. I am not very good at math but I am willing to learn because it interests me greatly. If someone is willing to dedicate there time into this I would be immensely appreciative of this. To be more concise, an explanation of functions and some calculation inside the functions would be nice to understand. Thanks in advance!

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• How do I deal with the problems of a fast side-scroller?

  - by Ska

  I'm making a side scrolling airplane game and when I begin going very fast I begin to experience some problems as a player: Elements are not distinguishable, like power-ups from bullets, etc I start to feel dizzy and uncomfortable There isn't enough time to see what's coming How can I sort this out? Do I use less details in all the grahpics? Tiny Wings has the same horizontal movement speed as in my game but it doesn't suffer from these problems. Are there any other really fast side-scrollers I could take as a reference?

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• Is it a good approach to rely on 3rd party software ( not library )?

  - by gunbuster363

  We have program using a call to a winzip program or 7zip commandline tool to zip some files. Once I accidentally uninstall winzip on my computer and making one of our program( created by the programmer already left ) crashed. So we cannot uninstall the winzip program. Now I've come to a point which I need to decide a external tool for gzip in windows or I make a java program which I can call to gzip the file. Obviously a external tool such as 7z is convenient and we can avoid some extra coding with java. On the contrary, if 7z is uninstalled accidentally, our program will crash. What do you think?

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• How should compound words be handled when coding? Is there a definitive list of compound words? [closed]

  - by Ray

  QUESTION: How should you handle compound words when programming? Are there any good lists available online for developers of generally accepted technology-related compound words? I can see how this is highly ambiguous, so should I just use common-sense? EXAMPLE: I would be inclined to do this: filename NOT FileName or login NOT LogIn However, the microsoft documentation indicates that filename is not compound. So I wonder, is there a more definitive source? See also, this english.stackexchange discussion on filename. Under the section "Capitalization Rules for Compound Words and Common Terms" located here: Microsoft .NET Capitalization Conventions only offers a limited introduction into the topic, and leaves it up to the developer to use their intuition with the rest.

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• How to copy or replicate a complex website to local file and modify then

  - by Andre Chenier

  I am not good at designing the visual side of a website. I found a website which I gave 10 over 10 because its functionality suits my aims and also it seems very esthetical. I know HTML, PHP, mySQL and some degree of CSS. I don't know JS, Ajax, Jquery. So I want to replicate this web site (save completely) on my local and then modify it. (content, colors, icons etc.) I saved this web site in Chrome and IE. After clicking the site from my local folder, a saw an ugly & non-working site. My aim is to understand the functions of the parts that I don't know. For example when I delete a js in its page what will happen as the result of the deletion operation. Since the page is too complex it has lots of css, js files to download inside. I don't want to deal it manually. Is there any alternative and easy way to get the web page completely to my local which also works like a charm from local? regards

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• How do you save/export changes made in Firebug?

  - by blunders

  Using Firebug to edit CSS, how do I save/export changes made to the CSS? TOOLS: Firefox, Firebug MAJOR UPDATE: If you know of a way to lock the forward/back/refresh on a FireFox tab, please let me know. Otherwise, I've given up on using FireBug/FireDiff as an IDE for CSS, it's nice, but lol... press backspace at the wrong time and ALL your work is gone... funny. So, really like the browser highlighting to CSS/HTML in Firebug. Know any good CSS editors that do this? Really had hope FireBug would work, but for now only see it as being good for ad-hoc inspection and test; meaning using it for what it's made for. UPDATES: @Lèse majesté: Just as an update, "Web Developer add-on" does let you edit CSS, but it does not let you edit/save CSS changes made by Firebug. Meaning you use Firebug to ID and maybe test changes, but it does not let you save the changes from Firebug. Here's a "how to" covering how to use them together: FF + FB + WD @Lèse majesté: Still playing around with FireDiff. It works okay, found one bug already (although I'm just working around it), and there's no "how to" I've been able to find, so I'm just trying every feature and clicking around... (for example, to export a diff you must be over the last item in the list, right click, and select as "Save Diff". The ".diff" is just a text file, no idea why at this point the ext is .diff.

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• Square One to Game Development

  - by Ian Quach

  How does someone even get into developing a game. What would they need to know, how would someone find the knowledge to program a game? I've always looked at game development as a future career. Now that I'm getting closer to university I was hoping to find a way to head start this future in game development. What would be the best place to start? I would love any help or tips from anyone. Thanks for reading this. :)

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• I need an approach to the problem of preventing inserting duplicate records into the database

  - by Maurice

  Apologies is this question is asked on the incorrect "stack" A webservice that I call returns a list of data. The data from the webservice is updated periodically, so a call to the webservice done in one hour could return the same data as a call done in an hour. Also, the data is returned based on a start and end date. We have multiple users that can run the webservice search, and duplicate data is most likely to be returned (especially for historical data). However I don't want to insert this duplicate data in the database. I've created a db table in which the data is stored (most important columns are) Id int autoincrement PK Date date not null --The date to which the data set belongs. LastUpdate date not null --The date the data set was last updated. UserName varchar(50) --The name of the user doing the search. I use sql server 2008 express with c# 4.0 and visual studio 2010. Entity Framework is used as the ORM. If stored procedures could be avoided in the proposed solution, then that will be a plus. Another way of looking interpreting what I'm asking a solution for is as follows: I have a million unique records in my table. A user does a new search. The search results from the user contains around 300k of the data that is already in the db. An efficient solution to finding an inserting only the unique records is needed.

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• State Pattern - should a state know about its context?

  - by Extrakun

  I am referring to the state pattern as described in this link. In the example class diagram, a context has numerous states. However, it does not show how does a state communicates with a context (perhaps an input in a state has impact on a setting in the context). The two examples on the page shows either passing the context to the state via a function, or storing a reference to the context. Are those advisable? Are there other ways for a state to communicate with a context? Update to an edit: For instance, I am doing a remote control which can have several states. Say, the context has a setting for Volume, and I am in one of the states which allow me to tweak the volume. How should the state communicates with the context that the volume is being changed?

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• What are common patterns for handling possible pluralization in message properties?

  - by C. Ross

  Obviously users like to see text properly pluralized, and pluralization schemes vary in the various written languages one may encounter. When internationalizing an app, what pattern(s) are useful for handling messages with possible pluralization? What about messages with multiple possible pluralization? For example: "N review(s):" One pattern would be reviews.title.singular="{0} review:" reviews.title.singular="{0} reviews:" And this may not support all languages. Or a more complicated case: "Found M question(s) with N comment(s)." This would be difficult to support in English?

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• Should a web designer know server-side coding?

  - by Rasoul Zabihi

  We're implementing an CMS based on ASP.NET MVC. Now, any designer should be able to provide themes for this CMS. But to write a theme, they need to be able to modify the generated HTML, thus the concept of View. In other words, they should be capable to either modify current views, or create new views from scratch, to fit their requirements. However, now we're not sure that we're taking the right path. Should a web designer (HTML, CSS, JavaScript + Photoshop) really know about server-side platforms like Razor or PHP, or classic ASP, or anything else?

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• How to store prices that have effective dates?

  - by lal00

  I have a list of products. Each of them is offered by N providers. Each providers quotes us a price for a specific date. That price is effective until that provider decides to set a new price. In that case, the provider will give the new price with a new date. The MySQL table header currently looks like: provider_id, product_id, price, date_price_effective Every other day, we compile a list of products/prices that are effective for the current day. For each product, the list contains a sorted list of the providers that have that particular product. In that way, we can order certain products from whoever happens to offer the best price. To get the effective prices, I have a SQL statement that returns all rows that have date_price_effective >= NOW(). That result set is processed with a ruby script that does the sorting and filtering necessary to obtain a file that looks like this: product_id_1,provider_1,provider_3,provider8,provider_10... product_id_2,provider_3,provider_2,provider1,provider_10... This works fine for our purposes, but I still have an itch that a SQL table is probably not the best way to store this kind of information. I have that feeling that this kind of problema has been solved previously in other more creative ways. Is there a better way to store this information other than in SQL? or, if using SQL, is there a better approach than the one I'm using?

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• Visually and audibly unambiguous subset of the Latin alphabet?

  - by elliot42

  Imagine you give someone a card with the code "5SBDO0" on it. In some fonts, the letter "S" is difficult to visually distinguish from the number five, (as with number zero and letter "O"). Reading the code out loud, it might be difficult to distinguish "B" from "D", necessitating saying "B as in boy," "D as in dog," or using a "phonetic alphabet" instead. What's the biggest subset of letters and numbers that will, in most cases, both look unambiguous visually and sound unambiguous when read aloud? Background: We want to generate a short string that can encode as many values as possible while still being easy to communicate. Imagine you have a 6-character string, "123456". In base 10 this can encode 10^6 values. In hex "1B23DF" you can encode 16^6 values in the same number of characters, but this can sound ambiguous when read aloud. ("B" vs. "D") Likewise for any string of N characters, you get (size of alphabet)^N values. The string is limited to a length of about six characters, due to wanting to fit easily within the capacity of human working memory capacity. Thus to find the max number of values we can encode, we need to find that largest unambiguous set of letters/numbers. There's no reason we can't consider the letters G-Z, and some common punctuation, but I don't want to have to go manually pairwise compare "does G sound like A?", "does G sound like B?", "does G sound like C" myself. As we know this would be O(n^2) linguistic work to do =)...

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• Creating a shared library that might be used with desktop applications and web projects

  - by dreza

  I have been involved in a number of MVC.NET and c# desktop projects in our company over the last year or so while also managing to kept my nose poked into other projects (in a read-only learning capacity of course). From this I've noticed that across the various projects and teams there is a-lot of functionality that has been well designed against good interfaces and abstractions. Because we tend to like our own work at times, I noticed a couple of projects had the exact same class, method copied into it as it had obviously worked on one and so was easily moved to a new project (probably by the same developer who originally wrote it) I mentioned this fact in one of our programmer meetings we have occasionally and suggested we pull some of this functionality into a core company library that we can build up over time and use across multiple projects. Everyone agreed and I started looking into this possibility. However, I've come across a stumbling block pretty early on. Our team primarily focuses on MVC at the moment and we have projects mainly in 2.0 but are starting to branch to 3.0. We also have a number of desktop applications that might benefit from some shared classes and basic helper methods. Initially when creating this DLL I included some shared classes that could be used across any project type (Web, Client etc) but then I started looking at adding some shared modules that would be useful in our MVC applications only. However this meant I had to include a reference to some Microsoft Web DLL's in order to leverage some of the classes I was creating (at this stage MVC 2.0). Now my issue is that we have a shared DLL that has references to web specific libraries that could also possibly be used in a client application. Not only that, our DLL referenced initially MVC 2.0 and we will eventually move onto MVC 3.0 for all projects. But alot of the classes in this library I expect to still be relevant to MVC 3 etc Our code within this DLL is separated into it's own namespaces such as: CompanyDLL.Primitives CompanyDLL.Web.Mvc CompanyDLL.Helpers etc etc So, my questions are: Is it OK to do a shared library like this, or if we have web specific features in it should we create a separate web DLL only targeted at a specific framework or MVC version? If it's OK, what kind of issues might we face when using the library that references MVC 2 in a MVC 3 project for example. I would be thinking that we might run into some sort of compatibility issue, or even issues where the developers using the library doesn't realize they need MVC 2.0 libraries. They might only want to use some of the generic classes etc The concept seemed like a good idea at the time, but I'm starting to think maybe it's not really a practical solution. But the number of times I've seen copied classes and methods across projects because they are proven tested code is a bit unnerving to be perfectly honest!

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• How to have operations with character/items on binary with concrete operations on C++?

  - by Piperoman

  I have the next problem. A item can have a lot of states: NORMAL = 0000000 DRY = 0000001 HOT = 0000010 BURNING = 0000100 WET = 0001000 COLD = 0010000 FROZEN = 0100000 POISONED= 1000000 A item can have some states at same time but not all of them Is impossible to be dry and wet at same time. If you COLD a WET item, it turns into FROZEN. If you HOT a WET item, it turns into NORMAL A item can be BURNING and POISON Etc. I have tried to set binary flags to states, and use AND to combine different states, checking before if it is possible or not to do it, or change to another status. Does there exist a concrete approach to solve this problem efficiently without having an interminable switch that checks every state with every new state? It is relatively easy to check 2 different states, but if there exists a third state it is not trivial to do.

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• Dealing with bad/incomplete/unclear specifications?

  - by eagerMoose

  I'm working on a project where our dev team gets the specifications from the business part of the company. Both the business management and the IT management require estimates and deadline projections, as they should. The good thing is that estimates are mostly made by the actual developers who get to do the required features. The bad thing is that the specifications are usually either too simple (it turns out you're left with a lot of question marks over your head because a lot of information seems to be missing) or too complex(up to the point that you can't even visualize where everything would "fit" in the app). More often than not, the business part of the specs are either incomplete or unaware of what can and can't be done (given the previously implemented business logic). Dev team is given about a day per new spec to give an estimate and we do try to clear uncertainties, usually by meeting up with whoever did the spec. Most of the times it turns out that spec writers haven't really thought everything through, and it's usually only when we start designing and developing that we end up in trouble, as a lot of the spec seems to have holes. How do you deal with this? Are you generous on estimates in advance?

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• How to implment the database for event conditions and item bonuses for a browser based game

  - by Saifis

  I am currently creating a browser based game, and was wondering what was the standard approach in making diverse conditions and status bonuses database wise. Currently considering two cases. Event Conditions Needs min 1000 gold Needs min Lv 10 Needs certain item. Needs fulfillment of another event Status Bonus Reduces damage by 20% +100 attack points Deflects certain type of attack I wish to be able to continually change these parameters during the process of production and operation, so having them hard-coded isn't the best way. All I could come up with are the following two methods. Method 1 Create a table that contains each conditions with needed attributes Have a model named conditions with all the attributes it would need to set them conditions condition_type (level, money_min, money_max item, event_aquired) condition_amount prerequisite_condition_id prerequisite_item_id Method 2 write it in a DSL form that could be interpreted later in the code Perhaps something like yaml, have a text area in the setting form and have the code interpret it. condition_foo: condition_type :level min_level: 10 condition_type :item item_id: 2 At current Method 2 looks to be more practical and flexible for future changes, trade off being that all the flex must be done on the code side. Not to sure how this is supposed to be done, is it supposed to be hard coded? separate config file? Any help would be appreciated. Added For additional info, it will be implemented with Ruby on Rails

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