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• Trying to make a universe [on hold]

  - by caters

  I am wanting to program a universe so that it starts with a big bang and atoms form and then molecules form and stars start to form and planets start to form and then moons around those planets. I have a few questions. If 400 IPMUs(In Program Mass Units) = 1 solar mass than how would I calculate the number of IPMUs for a spectral class of star given the range of solar masses for a main sequence star in that spectral class? How can I have planets not look like stars? Since whether it is a subdwarf, main sequence star, subgiant, giant, bright giant, supergiant, or hypergiant is mainly dependent on the radius and luminosity how can I have the radius and luminosity independent of the mass?

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• How common are circular references? Would reference-counting GC work just fine?

  - by user9521

  How common are circular references? The less common they are, the fewer hard cases you have if you are writing in a language with only reference counting-GC. Are there any cases where it wouldn't work well to make one of the references a "weak" reference so that reference counting still works? It seems like you should be able to have a language only use reference counting and weak references and have things work just fine most of the time, with the goal of efficiency. You could also have tools to help you detect memory leaks caused by circular references. Thoughts, anyone? It seems that Python uses references counting (I don't know if it uses a tracing collector occasionally or not for sure) and I know that Vala uses reference counting with weak references; I know that it's been done before, but how well would it work?

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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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• 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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• Random/Procedural vs. Previously Made Level Generation

  - by PythonInProgress

  I am making a game (called "Glory") that is a top-down explorer game, and am wondering what the advantages/disadvantages of using random/procedural generation vs. pre-made levels are. There seems to be few that i can think of, other than the fact that items may be a problem to distribute in randomly generated terrain, and that the generated terrain may look weird. The downside to previously made levels is that I would need to make a level editor, though. I cannot decide what is better to use.

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• Expiring timed actions a good idea?

  - by Bart van Heukelom

  We have an online game where players sometimes have to wait a while (say 30 minutes) before a process they intiated completes. This encourages them to come back later. An example of this is growing crops in Farmville or basically any action in the Sims Play4Free. Now, however, there is the idea to let these processes expire, so if the player doesn't 'reap' them in time (e.g. within 4 hours) they are aborted. I'm a bit sceptical about this. How will this make players come back more often? Is not the reward of reaping the process enough for that? Can we expect players to fit their daily schedule around our game, maybe even set the alarm clock at night? Won't this just cause players to give up on starting these processes in the first place? I realise this may be too subjective for this site, so I'll end with a concrete question: Do (m)any other online free-to-play games employ this technique?

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• Designing exceptions for conversion failures

  - by Mr.C64

  Suppose there are some methods to convert from "X" to "Y" and vice versa; the conversion may fail in some cases, and exceptions are used to signal conversion errors in those cases. Which would be the best option for defining exception classes in this context? A single XYConversionException class, with an attribute (e.g. an enum) specifying the direction of the conversion (e.g. ConversionFromXToY, ConversionFromYToX). A XYConversionException class, with two derived classes ConversionFromXToYException and ConversionFromYToXException. ConversionFromXToYException and ConversionFromYToXException classes without a common base class.

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• Is there such a thing as having too many private functions/methods?

  - by shovonr

  I understand the importance of well documented code. But I also understand the importance of self-documenting code. The easier it is to visually read a particular function, the faster we can move on during software maintenance. With that said, I like to separate big functions into other smaller ones. But I do so to a point where a class can have upwards of five of them just to serve one public method. Now multiply five private methods by five public ones, and you get around twenty-five hidden methods that are probably going to be called only once by those public ones. Sure, it's now easier to read those public methods, but I can't help but think that having too many functions is bad practice.

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• generating maps

  - by gardian06

  This is a conglomeration question when answering please specify which part you are addressing. I am looking at creating a maze type game that utilizes elevation. I have a few features I would like to have, but am unsure as to some of the implementation. I have done work doing fileIO maze generation (using a key to read the file, and then generate the level based on that file), but I am unsure how to think about this with elevation in the mix. I think height maps might be a good approach, but don't know how to represent them effectively. for a height map which is more beneficial XML(containing h[u,v] data and key definition), CSV (item1 is key reference, item2 is elevation), or another approach that I have not thought of yet? When it comes to placing the elevation values themselves what kind of deltah values are appropriate to have it noticeable at about a 60degree angle while not really effecting gravity driven physics (assuming some effect while moving up/down hill)? I am thinking of maybe going to procedural generation at some point, but am wondering if it is practical to have a procedurally generated grid (wall squares possibly same dimensions as the open space squares), or if designing to a thin wall open spaces is better? this decision will effect the amount of work need on the graphics end for uniform vs. irregular walls. EDIT: game will be a elevation maze shooter. levels/maps will be mazes with elevation the player has to negotiate. elevations will have effects on "combat" vision, and movement

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• How to fix this navigation issue in my site?

  - by David

  First off I use webs.com for the creation of my site. I have a very basic layout. List of links of the left and content on the right with a heading up top. Now in my list of links every link is an article that I wrote, I have about 25 links going down the left hand side of my site. Problem is when I try out new themes that support horizontal navigation as opposed to vertical navigation I get either a messy overflow of links Or a link called "more" which lists the rest of the articles in a drop down-list across my site. What I wish I had was a simple horizontal navigation like" "home, about, articles" and when the user clicks on articles it would then bring them to a page containing all my articles there. I would prefer it to be in a table like display. That way is not a long list. Anyways any ideas on how I can fix this issue im having? Please let me know if you need more information.

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• Designing and refactoring of payment logic

  - by jokklan

  Im currently working on an application that helps users to coordinate dinner clubs and all related accounting. (A dinner club is where people in a group, take turns to cook for the rest and then you pay a small amount to participate. This is pretty normal in dorms and colleges where im from). However there is some different models that all have a price and the accounting aspect is therefore a little spread. We both have DinnerClub, ShoppingItem and are about to implement the third Payment when users pay their debts (or get refunded for expenses). Each of these have a "price" attribute and a users expense (that he or she needs refunded) is calculated by the total of these "prices" minus what other users have bought and he or she have used/participated in. My question is then if someone have some hints to refactor this bring all this behavior together in one place? For now have i thought about a Transaction class that are responsible for this behaviour, but I'm a little worried about the performance impact on having to query for another polymorphic record each time i want to show the price on dinner clubs and shopping items (i have a standard index page with a list for both so it's a lot of extra records being queried)...

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• Story and news-feed ideas for social network games

  - by arpine

  I am currently working on a educational and fun 2-in-1 game. As I am not a professional, I need advice on story and news-feed. The goal is simple-get richer, the story is about a worker who is trying to get over his/her financial problems and become rich. During the whole gaming process there is a news-feed (every day there are a couple of fresh news about what is going on). The news are fresh and individual so I need to write about 2000 pieces of news for 2 year gaming, maybe more. The problem is that I am not sure whether repetitive news can interest in this game. What can be done to make the news-making process easier but not boring from the point of view of the player?

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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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• 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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• Procedural object generation and unique identification

  - by 2080

  My question relates to procedural content generation and data management of the emerging objects in a database. I assume a networked game, with a server-client model. Unspecified objects in the game world are generated while the game is running with procedural algorithms (for example perlin noise). The players (/clients) can modify the properties of these objects, but have to notify the server of these changes. How could this communication address unique objects, so that both the server and the client know of which object they are speaking? Not only the inner properties of the objects can differ, but also visible, such as the position. When the player wants to select one of these objects the game has to find out the id - does anyone know which methods or algorithms can accomplish that?

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• What are good ways to find collaborators for a coding weekend?

  - by tarrasch

  Not sure if this belongs here, feel free to push it somewhere else if needed. When i was at university we would sometimes come together into a room full of beer and fast food and crank out software in a weekend. Unfortunately the group has kind of split up and its just not possible any more. My question is now: Where can i find like-minded people on the Internet that would like to do something like this? I have an idea what i wanted to do next, but of course other people have ideas too.

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• What Language is unity written in?

  - by John

  What Language is Unity written in? Also, where can i get its source code? I have an idea for a windowing enviroment or shell (dont know what to call it). What i want to do is teach myself to create it. i like some of several ideas i have seen, but i want to redo all of them, also the concept of how a desktop works. I figured learning the language Unity is written in, and studying Unity and Gnomes code would be a good start. i am on Ubuntu 12.04 acer aspire 5920 3 gb ram 160 gb hard drive

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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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• Why don't languages include implication as a logical operator?

  - by Maciej Piechotka

  It might be a strange question, but why there is no implication as a logical operator in many languages (Java, C, C++, Python Haskell - although as last one have user defined operators its trivial to add it)? I find logical implication much clearer to write (particularly in asserts or assert-like expressions) then negation with or: encrypt(buf, key, mode, iv = null) { assert (mode != ECB --> iv != null); assert (mode == ECB || iv != null); assert (implies(mode != ECB, iv != null)); // User-defined function }

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• What is the general definition of something that can be included or excluded?

  - by gutch

  When an application presents a user with a list of items, it's pretty common that it permits the user to filter the items. Often a 'filter' feature is implemented as a set of include or exclude rules. For example: include all emails from [email protected], and exclude those emails without attachments I've seen this include/exclude pattern often; for example Maven and Google Analytics filter things this way. But now that I'm implementing something like this myself, I don't know what to call something that could be either included or excluded. In specific terms: If I have a database table of filter rules, each of which either includes or excludes matching items, what is an appropriate name of the field that stores include or exclude? When displaying a list of filters to a user, what is a good way to label the include or exclude value? (as a bonus, can anyone recommend a good implementation of this kind of filtering for inspiration?)

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• Provide an OnChange event for an internal property which is controlled externally?

  - by NGLN

  For fun and by request I am updating this ImageGrid component, a kind of listbox for images that has a FileNames property of type TStrings. For ease of writing, I have been misusing its FileNames.Objects property for bitmap storage. But since the TStrings type suggests that users of the component could or would want to use the Objects property for custom data, e.g. like TListBox.Items, I am rewriting the component to store the bitmaps elsewhere and leave FileNames.Objects untouched for unknown future usage. Now I am wondering whether to provide an OnChange event. And if so, whether to fire it when one or more FileNames.Objects changes. Trying to answer it myself, I dove in Delphi's own VCL and stumbled on: TMemo: has an OnChange event, but ignores Lines.Objects TListBox: has no OnChange event, but is capable of storing Items.Objects TStringGrid: has no OnChange event, but is capable of storing Objects, Rows.Objects, Cols.Objects So now I am somewhat puzzeled, because I cannot imagine Borland's developers didn't add events for several Objects properties out of ease. Sure, when a user changes a FileNames.Object in my component, he knows he does and could implement appropriate interaction himself. But wouldn't it be convenient when the component does automatically? What would you expect from this component in this regard?

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• Why are most websites optimized for viewing in portrait mode?

  - by NVM

  I simply cannot figure this out. Almost all monitors have an aspect ratio where width is much bigger than the height and yet almost all websites are designed exactly for the other way round? I am not really a web developer and am just experimenting stuff at the moment but this madness baffles me!!! Edit: The point is not that I would like to limit the height of a website. The point is that I'd wat it to somehow fill all available space when I have my 1920x1080 in landscape mode. Edit 2: See this to understand what I am saying

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• two-part dice pool mechanic

  - by bythenumbers

  I'm working on a dice mechanic/resolution system based off of the Ghost/Echo (hereafter shortened to G/E) tabletop RPG. Specifically, since G/E can be a little harsh with dealing out consequences and failure, I was hoping to soften the system and add a little more player control, as well as offer the chance for players to evolve their characters into something unique, right from creation. So, here's the mechanic: Players roll 2d12 against the two statistics for their character (each is a number from 2-11, and may be rolled above or below depending on the nature of the action attempted, rolling your stat exactly always fails). Depending on the success for that roll, they add dice to the pool rolled for a modified G/E style action. The acting player gets two dice anyhow, and I am debating offering a bonus die for each success, or a single bonus die for succeeding on both of the statistic-compared rolls. One the size of the dice pool is set, the entire pool is rolled, and the players are allowed to assign rolled dice to a goal and a danger. Assigned results are judged as follows: 1-4 means the attempted goal fails, or the danger comes true. 5-8 is a partial success at the goal, or partially avoiding the danger. 9-12 means the goal is achieved, or the danger avoided. My concerns are twofold: Firstly, that the two-stage action is too complicated, with two rolls to judge separately before anything can happen. Secondly, that the statistics involved go too far in softening the game. I've run some basic simulations, and the approximate statistics follow: 2 dice (up to) 3 dice (up to) 4 dice failure ~33% ~25% ~20% partial ~33% ~35% ~35% success ~33% ~40% ~45% I'd appreciate any advice that addresses my concerns or offers to refine my simulation (right now the first roll is statistically modeled as sign(1d12-1d12), where 0 is a success).

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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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• Managing accounts on a private website for a real-life community

  - by Smudge

  I'm looking at setting-up a walled-in website for a real-life community of people, and I was wondering if anyone has any experience with managing member accounts for this kind of thing. Some conditions that must be met: This community has a set list of real-life members, each of whom would be eligible for one account on the website. We don't expect or require that they all sign-up. It is purely opt-in, but we anticipate that many of them would be interested in the services we are setting up. Some of the community members emails are known, but some of them have fallen off the grid over the years, so ideally there would be a way for them to get back in touch with us through the public-facing side of the site. (And we'd want to manually verify the identity of anyone who does so). Their names are known, and for similar projects in the past we have assigned usernames derived from their real-life names. This time, however, we are open to other approaches, such as letting them specify their own username or getting rid of usernames entirely. The specific web technology we will use (e.g. Drupal, Joomla, etc) is not really our concern right now -- I am more interested in how this can be approached in the abstract. Our database already includes the full member roster, so we can email many of them generated links to a page where they can create an account. (And internally we can require that these accounts be paired with a known member). Should we have them specify their own usernames, or are we fine letting them use their registered email address to log-in? Are there any paradigms for walled-in community portals that help address security issues if, for example, one of their email accounts is compromised? We don't anticipate attempted break-ins being much of a threat, because nothing about this community is high-profile, but we do want to address security concerns. In addition, we want to make the sign-up process as painless for the members as possible, especially given the fact that we can't just make sign-ups open to anyone. I'm interested to hear your thoughts and suggestions! Thanks!

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