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• What are the reasons for MMOs to have level caps [on hold]

  - by SamStephens

  In many MMOs players character progression is artificially capped, e.g. by level 60 or 90 or 100 or whatever. Why do MMOs have these level caps in the first place? Why not just allow characters to continue to arbitrary levels with a mathematically designed leveling system that keeps the leveling experience interesting and endless? Answers to this question may help us to see the reason behind the feature and decide if and how this should be implemented in our MMOs.

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• Dependency injection and IOC containers in a closed project

  - by Puckl

  Does it make sense to assemble my project with dependency injection containers if I am the only one who will use the code of that project? The question came up when I read this IOC Article http://martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html The justification for using dependency injection in this article is that friends can reuse a class, and replace depending classes with their own classes because they get injected and not instantiated in the class. I would only use it to inject objects where they are needed instead of passing them through layers to their target. (Which is not so bad I learned here: Is it bad practice to pass instances through several layers?) (Maybe I will reuse parts of the project, who knows, but I don´t know if that is a good justification)

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• Ensuring non conflicting components in a modular system

  - by Hailwood

  So lets say we are creating a simple "modular system" framework. The bare bones might be the user management. But we want things like the Page Manager, the Blog, the Image Gallery to all be "optional" components. So a developer could install the Page Manager to allow their client to add a static home page and about page with content they can easily edit with a wysiwyg editor. The developer could then also install the Blog component to allow the client to add blog entries. The developer could then also install the Gallery component to allow the client to show off a bunch of images. The thing is, all these components are designed to be independent, so how do we go about ensuring they don't clash? E.g. ensuring the client doesn't create a /gallery page with the Page Manager and then wonder why the gallery stopped working, or the same issue with the Blog component, assuming we allow the users to customize the URL structure of the blog (because remember, the Page Manager doesn't necessarily have to be there, so we might not wan't our blog posts to be Date/Title formatted), likewise our clients aren't always going to be happy to have their pages under pages/title formatting. My core question here is, when building a modular system how to we ensure that the modules don't conflict without restricting functionality? Do we just leave it up to the clients/developer using the modules to ensure they get setup in a way that does not conflict?

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• Inheritance vs composition in this example

  - by Gerenuk

  I'm wondering about the differences between inheritance and composition examined with concrete code relevant arguments. In particular my example was Inheritance: class Do: def do(self): self.doA() self.doB() def doA(self): pass def doB(self): pass class MyDo(Do): def doA(self): print("A") def doB(self): print("B") x=MyDo() vs Composition: class Do: def __init__(self, a, b): self.a=a self.b=b def do(self): self.a.do() self.b.do() x=Do(DoA(), DoB()) (Note for composition I'm missing code so it's not actually shorter) Can you name particular advantages of one or the other? I'm think of: composition is useful if you plan to reuse DoA() in another context inheritance seems easier; no additional references/variables/initialization method doA can access internal variable (be it a good or bad thing :) ) inheritance groups logic A and B together; even though you could equally introduce a grouped delegate object inheritance provides a preset class for the users; with composition you'd have to encapsule the initialization in a factory so that the user does have to assemble the logic and the skeleton ... Basically I'd like to examine the implications of inheritance vs composition. I heard often composition is prefered, but I'd like to understand that by example. Of course I can always start with one and refactor later to the other.

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• What makes puzzle games addictive?

  - by Bryan Denny

  I'm currently developing a puzzle game for Android that is sort of along the lines of Alchemy. I was wondering what makes games like Alchemy or Bejeweled so addicting? How do I keep players interested in the game to want to play it over and over? Is it the scores? Level advancement? The challenges? What should I be doing to try and keep a player engaged with a puzzle game since they are often quite repetitive?

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• Acceptable placement of the composition root using dependency injection and inversion of control containers

  - by Lumirris

  I've read in several sources including Mark Seemann's 'Ploeh' blog about how the appropriate placement of the composition root of an IoC container is as close as possible to the entry point of an application. In the .NET world, these applications seem to be commonly thought of as Web projects, WPF projects, console applications, things with a typical UI (read: not library projects). Is it really going against this sage advice to place the composition root at the entry point of a library project, when it represents the logical entry point of a group of library projects, and the client of a project group such as this is someone else's work, whose author can't or won't add the composition root to their project (a UI project or yet another library project, even)? I'm familiar with Ninject as an IoC container implementation, but I imagine many others work the same way in that they can scan for a module containing all the necessary binding configurations. This means I could put a binding module in its own library project to compile with my main library project's output, and if the client wanted to change the configuration (an unlikely scenario in my case), they could drop in a replacement dll to replace the library with the binding module. This seems to avoid the most common clients having to deal with dependency injection and composition roots at all, and would make for the cleanest API for the library project group. Yet this seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom on the issue. Is it just that most of the advice out there makes the assumption that the developer has some coordination with the development of the UI project(s) as well, rather than my case, in which I'm just developing libraries for others to use?

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• Infrastructure to effectively set up experiements and learn from them

  - by David

  Open-org.com is in the early stages of creating our first product, a place on the web, where one can ask lawyers questions at a fraction of their normal costs. An early stage front page can be found here. I got inspired by this video, which is recommended by Jeff Atwood, which talks about getting feedback faster, which is the reason for this question. The problem Needless to say, we want our conversion rates to be as high as possible. Therefore, we want to be able to rapidly set up a new experiment where we change something on the site (like moving an image slightly, rewriting a sentence etc.). We then want to present the modified page to a random subset of the users. After that we will compare the conversion rates of the experiment with another version. I could very well imagine that we want to run 10-100 experiments simultaneously and it would be nice to have features, where experiments that obviously have worse results will be ended before schedule. My question Does infrastructure to support the whole process exist? A short description of our infrastructure... We use EC2 and PHP and have a script to automatically start up new instances with all needed software. Still, starting up a new server for every experiment, seems like a bit of overkill, so I am wondering what other options exist. Btw. If you feel like working for Open-org.com, you can pick a task, and start working, or suggest a new task. All profits are given out to the contributors.

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• Write own messaging system vs. utilize existing ones

  - by A.Rashad

  We are trying to have our own startup, with a middleware application to glue small applications with enterprise legacy systems. for such middle-ware to function properly, we will need some sort of messaging system to make different components talk to each other in a reliable way. the alternatives are: use an existing messaging system, such as 0MQ, jBOSS, WebSphere MQ, etc. build our own messaging system the way we see the problem I am more biased towards the later option for the following reasons: to have more control over our final product to avoid any licensing problems later on to learn about messaging while writing the code to invent something new, that might cost us lots of $$$ if reused an existing system What would you do if in my shoes?

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• How can I store all my level data in a single file instead of spread out over many files?

  - by Jon

  I am currently generating my level data, and saving to disk to ensure that any modifications done to the level are saved. I am storing "chunks" of 2048x2048 pixels into a file. Whenever the player moves over a section that doesn't have a file associated with the position, a new file is created. This works great, and is very fast. My issue, is that as you are playing the file count gets larger and larger. I'm wondering what are techniques that can be used to alleviate the file count, without taking a performance hit. I am interested in how you would store/seek/update this data in a single file instead of multiple files efficiently.

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• Import SSIS Project in Denali CTP1

  For years Analysis Services has had the ability to take an existing database from a server and reverse engineer it into a BIDS project.  This is extremely useful when all you have is the running instance of the database and the project that created it has long since disappeared.  Reverse engineering has never been a feature of SSIS until now. Let me walk you through the simple steps. The first step is that you obviously have to have a project deployed to an SSIS Catalog.  I will do a video on this soon but in case you can’t wait then my good buddy Jamie Thomson has written it up here As you can see I have a project called imaginatively “Denali1” with one package “Package.dtsx” The next thing we need to do is fire up BIDS and choose the right project type (Integration Services Import Project) Now we just follow the wizard.  We make sure we specify on which server to find the Catalog and in which folder to look for the project. Next the setting are validated and we are greeted with the familiar review screen before the creation of our new project from the deployed project happens Hit Import and away we go The result is just what we wanted.

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• Where can I find "magic numbers" for classic game play mechanics?

  - by MrDatabase

  I'd like to find some "magic numbers" for the classic helicopter game. For example the numbers that determine how fast the helicopter accelerates up and down. Also perhaps the "randomness" of the obstacles (uniformly distributed? Gaussian?). Where can I find these numbers? p.s. I don't care about the particular platform... Flash on the desktop browser is just as good as some implementation on a mobile device.

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• constructor should not call methods

  - by Stefano Borini

  I described to a colleague why a constructor calling a method is an antipattern. example (in my rusty C++) class C { public : C(int foo); void setFoo(int foo); private: int foo; } C::C(int foo) { setFoo(foo); } void C::setFoo(int foo) { this->foo = foo } I would like to motivate better this fact through your additional contribute. If you have examples, book references, blog pages, or names of principles, they would be very welcome. Edit: I'm talking in general, but we are coding in python.

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• Confused about javascript module pattern implementation

  - by Damon

  I have a class written on a project I'm working on that I've been told is using the module pattern, but it's doing things a little differently than the examples I've seen. It basically takes this form: (function ($, document, window, undefined) { var module = { foo : bar, aMethod : function (arg) { className.bMethod(arg); }, bMethod : function (arg) { console.log('spoons'); } }; window.ajaxTable = ajaxTable; })(jQuery, document, window); I get what's going on here. But I'm not sure how this relates to most of the definitions I've seen of the module (or revealing?) module pattern. like this one from briancray var module = (function () { // private variables and functions var foo = 'bar'; // constructor var module = function () { }; // prototype module.prototype = { constructor: module, something: function () { } }; // return module return module; })(); var my_module = new module(); Is the first example basically like the second except everything is in the constructor? I'm just wrapping my head around patterns and the little things at the beginnings and endings always make me not sure what I should be doing.

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• What's a good tool for Scrum Project Management in game development? [closed]

  - by BleakCabalist

  I'm looking for an efficient, easy-to-learn tool for Scrum project management not for proffesional use but to use it in my thesis concerning the use of Scrum in game development. Basically I want to visualize a production process of a hypothetical game. Some fragments of the production process should be really detailed to make my point, so basically user stories, tasks, burndown charts etc. are a must. I'm using Scrum, Kanban and some Lean practices for eliminating waste. I also want to use Extreme Programming practices in this production process including TDD and Continuous Integration. I have zero experience in proffesional project management so I need something that's fairly simple to use for a newb like me. Anyone can recommend a tool like that? For now I was thinking about TargetProcess and ScrumWorks. Thanks.

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• Help migrating from VB style programming to OO programming [closed]

  - by Agent47DarkSoul

  Being a hobbyist Java developer, I quickly took on with OO programming and understood its advantages over procedural code from C, that I did in college. But I couldn't grasp VB event based code (weird, right?). Bottom-line is OOP came natural to me. Curently I work in a small development firm developing C# applications. My peers here are a bit attached to VB style programming. Most of the C# code written is VB6 event handling code in C#'s skin. I tried explaining to them OOP with its advantages but it wasn't clear to them, maybe because I have never been much of a VB programmer. So can anybody provide any resources: books, web articles on how to migrate from VB style to OO style programming ?

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• My Last "Catch-Up" Post for 2010 Content

  - by KKline

  I did a lot of writing in 2010. Unfortunately, I didn't do a good job of keeping all of that writing equally distributed throughout all of the channels where I'm active. So here are a few more posts from my blog, put on-line during the months of November and December 2010, that I didn't get posted here on SQLBlog.com: 1. It's Time to Upgrade! So many of my customers and many of you, dear readers, are still on SQL Server 2005. Join Kevin Kline , SQL Server MVP and SQL Server Technology Strategist...(read more)

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• Designing an API on top with Java RMI and Rest APIs

  - by user1303881

  I'm working on the backend of a java web application. We have a document repository (Fedora Commons specifically) where we house xml files. I want to abstract the API of the repository internally so that we aren't tightly coupled to one product. I'd also like to give the flexibility of connecting to to a repository via Java RMI or REST APIs. I was hoping to get advice or resources on how to implement something like this. My thought it that I'd have some abstract repository class that had methods like getRecord, updateRecord, and deleteRecord. In the constructor I would pass the URI for the repository and the API method and port. This would allow some flexibility in the future so that if the REST api became more practical, but allow the flexibility or using RMI which could (should?) have better performance. Am I over thinking this or am I on the right path?

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• Go/Obj-C style interfaces with ability to extend compiled objects after initial release

  - by Skrylar

  I have a conceptual model for an object system which involves combining Go/Obj-C interfaces/protocols with being able to add virtual methods from any unit, not just the one which defines a class. The idea of this is to allow Ruby-ish open classes so you can take a minimalist approach to library development, and attach on small pieces of functionality as is actually needed by the whole program. Implementation of this involves a table of methods marked virtual in an RTTI table, which system functions are allowed to add to during module initialization. Upon typecasting an object to an interface, a Go-style lookup is done to create a vtable for that particular mapping and pass it off so you can have comparable performance to C/C++. In this case, methods may be added /afterwards/ which were not previously known and these new methods allow newer interfaces to be satisfied; while I like this idea because it seems like it would be very flexible (disregarding the potential for spaghetti code, which can happen with just about any model you use regardless). By wrapping the system calls for binding methods up in a set of clean C-compatible calls, one would also be able to integrate code with shared libraries and retain a decent amount of performance (Go does not do shared linking, and Objective-C does a dynamic lookup on each call.) Is there a valid use-case for this model that would make it worth the extra background plumbing? As much as this Dylan-style extensibility would be nice to have access to, I can't quite bring myself to a use case that would justify the overhead other than "it could make some kinds of code more extensible in future scenarios."

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• Distinguishing between UI command & domain commands

  - by SonOfPirate

  I am building a WPF client application using the MVVM pattern that provides an interface on top of an existing set of business logic residing in a library which is shared with other applications. The business library followed a domain-driven architecture using CQRS to separate the read and write models (no event sourcing). The combination of technologies and patterns has brought up an interesting conundrum: The MVVM pattern uses the command pattern for handling user-interaction with the view models. .NET provides an ICommand interface which is implemented by most MVVM frameworks, like MVVM Light's RelayCommand and Prism's DelegateCommand. For example, the view model would expose a number of command objects as properties that are bound to the UI and respond when the user performs actions like clicking buttons. Many implementations of the CQRS use the command pattern to isolate and encapsulate individual behaviors. In my business library, we have implemented the write model as command / command-handler pairs. As such, when we want to do some work, such as create a new order, we 'issue' a command (CreateOrderCommand) which is routed to the command-handler responsible for executing the command. This is great, clearly explained in many sources and I am good with it. However, take this scenario: I have a ToolbarViewModel which exposes a CreateNewOrderCommand property. This ICommand object is bound to a button in the UI. When clicked, the UI command creates and issues a new CreateOrderCommand object to the domain which is handled by the CreateOrderCommandHandler. This is difficult to explain to other developers and I am finding myself getting tongue-tied because everything is a command. I'm sure I'm not the first developer to have patterns overlap like this where the naming/terminology also overlap. How have you approached distinguishing your commands used in the UI from those used in the domain? (Edit: I should mention that the business library is UI-agnostic, i.e. no UI technology-specific code exists, or will exists, in this library.)

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• Do ORMs enable the creation of rich domain models?

  - by Augusto

  After using Hibernate on most of my projects for about 8 years, I've landed on a company that discourages its use and wants applications to only interact with the DB through stored procedures. After doing this for a couple of weeks, I haven't been able to create a rich domain model of the application I'm starting to build, and the application just looks like a (horrible) transactional script. Some of the issues I've found are: Cannot navigate object graph as the stored procedures just load the minimum amount of data, which means that sometimes we have similar objects with different fields. One example is: we have a stored procedure to retrieve all the data from a customer, and another to retrieve account information plus a few fields from the customer. Lots of the logic ends up in helper classes, so the code becomes more structured (with entities used as old C structs). More boring scaffolding code, as there's no framework that extracts result sets from a stored procedure and puts it in an entity. My questions are: has anyone been in a similar situation and didn't agree with the store procedure approch? what did you do? Is there an actual benefit of using stored procedures? appart from the silly point of "no one can issue a drop table". Is there a way to create a rich domain using stored procedures? I know that there's the posibility of using AOP to inject DAOs/Repositories into entities to be able to navigate the object graph. I don't like this option as it's very close to voodoo.

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• can you have too many dto/bo - mapping method

  - by Fredou

  I have a windows service, 2 web services and a web interface that need to follow the same path (data wise). So I came up with two ways of creating my solution. My concern is the fact that the UI/WS/etc will have their own kind of DTO (let's say the model in ASP.Net MVC) that should be mapped to a DTO so the SL can then map it to a BO then mapping it to the proper EF6 DTO so that I can save it in a database. So I'm thinking of doing it this way to remove one level of mapping. Which one should I take? Or is there a 3rd solution?

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• Is having functionality in DB a road block to scalability?

  - by Estefany Velez

  I may not be able to give the right title to the question. But here it is, We are developing financial portal for wealth management. We are expecting over 10000 clients to use the application. The portal calculates various performance analytics based on the the technical analysis of the stock market. We developed lot of the functionality through Stored procedures, user defined functions, triggers etc. through Database. We thought we can gain huge performance boost doing stuff directly in database than through C# code. And we actually did get a huge performance boost. When I tried to brag about the achievement to our CTO, he counter questioned my decision of having functionality implemented in database rather than code. According to him such applications suffer scalability problems. In his words "These days things are kept in memory/cache. Clustered data is hard to manage over time. Facebook, Google have nothing in database. It is the era of thin servers and thick clients. DB is used only to store plain data and functionality should be completely decoupled from the database." Can you guys please give me some suggestions as to whether what he says is right. How to go about architect such an application?

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• Who should control navigation in an MVVM application?

  - by SonOfPirate

  Example #1: I have a view displayed in my MVVM application (let's use Silverlight for the purposes of the discussion) and I click on a button that should take me to a new page. Example #2: That same view has another button that, when clicked, should open up a details view in a child window (dialog). We know that there will be Command objects exposed by our ViewModel bound to the buttons with methods that respond to the user's click. But, what then? How do we complete the action? Even if we use a so-called NavigationService, what are we telling it? To be more specific, in a traditional View-first model (like URL-based navigation schemes such as on the web or the SL built-in navigation framework) the Command objects would have to know what View to display next. That seems to cross the line when it comes to the separation of concerns promoted by the pattern. On the other hand, if the button wasn't wired to a Command object and behaved like a hyperlink, the navigation rules could be defined in the markup. But do we want the Views to control application flow and isn't navigation just another type of business logic? (I can say yes in some cases and no in others.) To me, the utopian implementation of the MVVM pattern (and I've heard others profess this) would be to have the ViewModel wired in such a way that the application can run headless (i.e. no Views). This provides the most surface area for code-based testing and makes the Views a true skin on the application. And my ViewModel shouldn't care if it displayed in the main window, a floating panel or a child window, should it? According to this apprach, it is up to some other mechanism at runtime to 'bind' what View should be displayed for each ViewModel. But what if we want to share a View with multiple ViewModels or vice versa? So given the need to manage the View-ViewModel relationship so we know what to display when along with the need to navigate between views, including displaying child windows / dialogs, how do we truly accomplish this in the MVVM pattern?

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• DOT implementation

  - by Denis Ermolin

  I have some DOT(damage over time) implementation problems. My game runs on 30 FPS speed. Current implementation is: let's say hero cast spell which make 1 damage per second. So on every frame i do (pseudo code): damage_done = getRandomDamage() * delta_time; I accumulate damage and when it becomes more then 0 then subtract rounded damage from current health and so on. With 30 FPS and 1 DPS it will be 1/33 = 0.05... We know that floats a not precise enough to sum 30 circulating decimals and have exact 1 in the end. But HP is discrete value and that's why 1 DPS will not have 1 damage after 1 second because value will be 0.9999..... It's not so big deal when you have 100000 DPS - +/- 1 damage will not be noticeable. But if i have 1, 5 DPS? How modern RPG's implemented DOT's?

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• Resize broswer window below 400px on OS X

  - by David

  Resizing Firefox windows (by dragging) works fine, up until the window is about 400 px wide, at which point the width of the web page content cease to follow the window with. I'm pretty sure it's not a CSS issue, and the same thing goes for Chrome and Safari as well (they won't even let me resize the window < 400 px wide). I can't understand where this limitation comes from. Is it a setting in the browser? A bug? A limitation of the OS?

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