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• Kickstarter "last minute cold feet"

  - by mm24

  today I scheduled the publication of a video on kickstarter requesting approximately 5.000 $ in order to complete the iPhone shooter game I started 1 year ago after quitting my job. I invested more than 20.000$ in the game so far (for artwork, music, legal and accountant expenses) and I am now getting cold feet about my decision of publishing the video. The game is "nearly finished", in other words: the game mechanics are working but I still have some bugs to fix. Once I will have finished this (I hope will take me 1 or 2 weeks) I plan to start working on the actual level balancing (e.g. deciding the order of appearence of enemies for each level and balancing the number of hitpoints and strenght of bullets that the enemies have). Reasons for not publishing the video are: fear that the concept can be copied easily: the game is a shooter game set in a different environment (its a pretty cool one, believe me :)) and I am worried that someone might copy* the idea (I know, its the usual "I am worried story.."). A shooter game is one of the easiest game to implement and hence there will be hundreds game developer able to copy it by just adapting their existing code and changing graphics (not as straightforward). It took me one year to develop this because I was inexperienced plus there are approximately 6/7 months of work from the illustrator and there are 8 unique music tracks composed. The soundtrack of the video is the soundtrack of the game wich is not yet published and has not been deposited to a music society. I did create legally valid timestamps for the tracks and I am considering uploading the album on iTunes before publishing the video so I can have a certain publication date. But overall I am a bit scared and worried because I have never done this before and even the simple act of publishing an album requires me to read a long contract from the "aggregator company") which, even if I do have contracts with the musicians do worry me as I am not a U.S. resident and I am not familiar with the U.S. law system Reasons for publishing the video are: I almost run out of money (but this is not a real reason as I should have enough for one more month of development time) ...I kind of need extra money as, even if I do have money for 1 month of development I do not have money for marketing and for other expenses (e.g. accountant) It will create a fan base I could get some useful feedback from a wider range of beta testers It might create some pre-release buzz in case some blogger or game magazine likes the concept Anyone has had similar experiences? Is there a real risk that someone will copy the concept and implement it in a couple of months? Will the Kickstarter campaing be a good pre-release exposure for the gmae? Any refrences of similar projects/situations? Is it realistic that someone like ROVIO will copy the idea straight away?

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• handling various frame layouts in android

  - by vaibhav

  i'm new to game development and am trying create a Contra or the old tmnt game (but a simple one) like game for android. for the game i decided to divide my main screen in three parts - upper for stats,mid for the game and lower for controls. my main.xml is <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:orientation="vertical" > <FrameLayout android:id="@+id/upper_bar" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:layout_weight="1" > </FrameLayout> <FrameLayout android:id="@+id/fl" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:layout_weight="0.5" > </FrameLayout> <FrameLayout android:id="@+id/low_bar" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:layout_weight="0.85" > </FrameLayout> </LinearLayout> so i have created the gameview and gameloopthread classes for the mid surface(which is pretty standard). my problem is that how do i draw in the upper and lower frame layouts? should i make new classes for view and thread for each layout , should i do all this in the gameview class itself or is there any better way to implement this?

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• What are benefit/drawbacks of classifying defects during a peer code review

  - by DXM

  About 3 months ago, our engineering group rolled out Review Board to be used for all peer code reviews. Today, I had a discussion with one of the people involved in that process and found out that we are already looking for a replacement (possibly something commercial) because of several missing features. One of the features that is apparently asked by many people is the ability to classify/categorize each code review comment (i.e. is it a style issue, coding convention, resource leak, logic error, crash... whatever). For those teams that regularly practice code review, is this categorization a common practice? Do you do it? have you done it in the past? Is it good/bad? On one hand, it gives the team some more metrics and possibly will indicate more specific areas where developers may potentially need to be trained in (at least that seems to be the argument). Are there other benefits? And on the other hand, and this is my concern, is that it will slow down code review process that much more. As a team lead, I've done a fairly large share of reviews, and I've always liked the ability, to highlight a chunk of code, hammer off a comment and move on as fast as possible. Although I haven't tried it personally, I have a feeling that expanding that combo box every time and scrolling/searching for the right category would feel like something is tripping you. Also if we start keeping metrics on this stuff, my other concern is that valuable code review meeting time will be spent on arguing whether something is a logic error or if it should be classified as a crash.

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• I need help on methodologies for information system project [closed]

  - by Neenee Kale

  Basically I will be developing a student information system for parents and I am confused on what type of methodology I can use. Please recommend me a methodology which involves use cases the system development life cycle. I'm confused on what a methodology is as I've read loads of books and researched but I still don't seem to understand. I was going to use system development life cycle but I found out that this is not a methodology.

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• SQL Server Express and VS2010 Web Application .MDF file errors

  - by nannette

  I installed SQL Server 2008 as well as SQL Server Express 2008 on my new Windows 7 development environment, along with Visual Studio 2010. I could get SQL Server 2008 to work fine, but I could not use Express .MDF databases within sample web application projects without receiving the below error: Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to a failure in starting the process for the user instance. The connection will be closed. For instance, I was creating an ASP.NET Web Application. When...(read more)

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• Third-Grade Math Class

  - by andyleonard

  An Odd Thing Happened... ... when I was in third grade math class: I was handed a sheet of arithmetic problems to solve. There were maybe 20 problems on the page and we were given the remainder of the class to complete them. I don't remember how much time remained in the class, I remember I finished working on the problems before my classmates. That wasn't the odd part. The odd part was that I started working on the first problem, concentrating pretty hard. I worked the sum and moved to the next...(read more)

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• How to ...set up new Java environment - largely interfaces...

  - by Chris Kimpton

  Hi, Looks like I need to setup a new Java environment for some interfaces we need to build. Say our system is X and we need to interfaces to systems A, B and C. Then we will be writing interfaces X-A, X-B, X-C. Our system has a bus within it, so the publishing on our side will be to the bus and the interface processes will be taking from the bus and mapping to the destination system. Its for a vendor based system - so most of the core code we can't touch. Currently thinking we will have several processes, one per interface we need to do. The question is how to structure things. Several of the APIs we need to work with are Java based. We could go EJB, but prefer to keep it simple, one process per interface, so that we can restart them individually. Similarly SOA seems overkill, although I am probably mixing my thoughts about implementations of it compared to the concepts behind it... Currently thinking that something Spring based is the way to go. In true, "leverage a new tech if possible"-style, I am thinking maybe we can shoe horn some jruby into this, perhaps to make the APIs more readable, perhaps event-machine-like and to make the interface code more business-friendly, perhaps even storing the mapping code in the DB, as ruby snippets that get mixed in... but thats an aside... So, any comments/thoughts on the Spring approach - anything more up-to-date/relevant these days. EDIT: Looking a JRuby further, I am tempted to write it fully in JRuby... in which case do we need any frameworks at all, perhaps some gems to make things clearer... Thanks in advance, Chris

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• What should be contained in a game scene graph?

  - by Bunkai.Satori

  Would you help me to clarify, please, what what exactly should be contained within a game scene graph? See the following list, please: Game Actors? (obviously yes, all the objects changing state should be the major prart of the Scene Graph) Simple static game ojbects? (I mean ojects places in the background that do not get animated, neither do they collide) Game Triggers? Game Lights? Game Cameras? Weapon Bullets? Game Explosions and Special Effects? The above considered object types. Now to the coverage of the scene graph: Should a scene graph contain the whole game level map since the level start, or should it contain only the visible portion of the map? If the second is true, it would mean that scene graph would be continuously updated, by adding/removing game objects, as the player moves. However, containing only the visible are of the map obviously would be much faster to traverse and update.

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• C# with keyword equivalent

  - by oazabir

  There’s no with keyword in C#, like Visual Basic. So you end up writing code like this: this.StatusProgressBar.IsIndeterminate = false; this.StatusProgressBar.Visibility = Visibility.Visible; this.StatusProgressBar.Minimum = 0; this.StatusProgressBar.Maximum = 100; this.StatusProgressBar.Value = percentage; Here’s a work around to this: With.A<ProgressBar>(this.StatusProgressBar, (p) => { p.IsIndeterminate = false; p.Visibility = Visibility.Visible; p.Minimum = 0; p.Maximum = 100; p.Value = percentage; }); Saves you repeatedly typing the same class instance or control name over and over again. It also makes code more readable since it clearly says that you are working with a progress bar control within the block. It you are setting properties of several controls one after another, it’s easier to read such code this way since you will have dedicated block for each control. It’s a very simple one line function that does it: public static class With { public static void A<T>(T item, Action<T> work) { work(item); } } You could argue that you can just do this: var p = this.StatusProgressBar; p.IsIndeterminate = false; p.Visibility = Visibility.Visible; p.Minimum = 0; p.Maximum = 100; p.Value = percentage; But it’s not elegant. You are introducing a variable “p” in the local scope of the whole function. This goes against naming conventions. Morever, you can’t limit the scope of “p” within a certain place in the function.

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• Why is TDD not working here?

  - by TobiMcNamobi

  I want to write a class A that has a method calculate(<params>). That method should calculate a value using database data. So I wrote a class Test_A for unit testing (TDD). The database access is done using another class which I have mocked with a class, let's call it Accessor_Mockup. Now, the TDD cycle requires me to add a test that fails and make the simplest changes to A so that the test passes. So I add data to Accessor_Mockup and call A.calculate with appropriate parameters. But why should A use the accessor class at all? It would be simpler (!) if the class just "knows" the values it could retrieve from the database. For every test I write I could introduce such a new value (or an if-branch or whatever). But wait ... TDD is more. There is the refactoring part. But that sounds to me like "OK, I can do this all with a big if-elseif construct. I could refactor it using a new class ... but instead I make use of the DB accessor and do this in a totally different way. The code will not necessarily look better afterwards but I know I WANT to use the database".

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• Graphics module: Am I going the right way?

  - by Paul

  I'm trying to write the graphics module of my engine. That is, this part of the code only provides an interface through which to load images, fonts, etc and draw them on the screen. It is also a wrapper for the library I'm using (SDL in this case). Here are the interfaces for my Image, Font and GraphicsRenderer classes. Please tell me if I'm going the right way. Image class Image { public: Image(); Image(const Image& other); Image(const char* file); ~Image(); bool load(const char* file); void free(); bool isLoaded() const; Image& operator=(const Image& other); private: friend class GraphicsRenderer; void* data_; }; Font class Font { public: Font(); Font(const Font& other); Font(const char* file, int ptsize); ~Font(); void load(const char* file, int ptsize); void free(); bool isLoaded() const; Font& operator=(const Font& other); private: friend class GraphicsRenderer; void* data_; }; GrapphicsRenderer class GraphicsRenderer { public: static GraphicsRenderer* Instance(); void blitImage(const Image& img, int x, int y); void blitText(const char* string, const Font& font, int x, int y); void render(); protected: GraphicsRenderer(); GraphicsRenderer(const GraphicsRenderer& other); GraphicsRenderer& operator=(const GraphicsRenderer& other); ~GraphicsRenderer(); private: void* screen_; bool initialize(); void finalize(); };

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• Scrubbing a DotNetNuke Database for user info and passwords

  - by Chris Hammond

  If you’ve ever needed to send a backup of your DotNetNuke database to a developer for testing, you likely trust the developer enough to do so without scrubbing your data, but just to be safe it is probably best that you do take the time to scrub. Before you do anything with the SQL below, make sure you have a backup of your website! I would recommend you do the following. Backup your existing production database Restore a backup of your production database as a NEW database Run the scripts below...(read more)

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• Are Get-Set methods a violation of Encapsulation?

  - by Dipan Mehta

  In an Object oriented framework, one believes there must be strict encapsulation. Hence, internal variables are not to be exposed to outside applications. But in many codebases, we see tons of get/set methods which essentially open a formal window to modify internal variables that were originally intended to be strictly prohibited. Isn't it a clear violation of encapsulation? How broadly such a practice is seen and what to do about it? EDIT: I have seen some discussions where there are two opinions in extreme: on one hand people believe that because get/set interface is used to modify any parameter, it does qualifies not be violating encapsulation. On the other hand, there are people who believe it is does violate. Here is my point. Take a case of UDP server, with methods - get_URL(), set_URL(). The URL (to listen to) property is quite a parameter that application needs to be supplied and modified. However, in the same case, if the property like get_byte_buffer_length() and set_byte_buffer_length(), clearly points to values which are quite internal. Won't it imply that it does violate the encapsulation? In fact, even get_byte_buffer_length() which otherwise doesn't modify the object, still misses the point of encapsulation, because, certainly there is an App which knows i have an internal buffer! Tomorrow, if the internal buffer is replaced by something like a *packet_list* the method goes dysfunctional. Is there a universal yes/no towards get set method? Is there any strong guideline that tell programmers (specially the junior ones) as to when does it violate encapsulation and when does it not?

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• Is gstreamer the best encoder for vorbis or is there a better encoding engine I should use?

  - by sayth

  I have sound juicer installed and I want to rip to vorbis.ogg. Is gstreamer the best encoder for vorbis or is there a better encoding engine I should use. The default gstreamer profile is audio/x-raw-float,rate=44100,channels=2 ! vorbisenc name=enc quality=0.5 ! oggmux I am going to raise the quality to 0.7 but thats all nothing if gstreamer isn't the best encoder. Any suggestions for high quality ripping? Edit: a good answer to this will also be the top search result in google for "best vorbis encoding engine". Double Edit: It appears oggenc itself is the best encoder which rules out using sound juicer to rip cd's as it uses gstreamer. I have installed oggenc and am testing the command ripper abcde. Found a good configuration for it here oggenc config for abcde

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• Why is Python slower than Java but faster than PHP

  - by good_computer

  I have many times seen various benchmarks that show how a bunch of languages perform on a given task. Always these benchmarks reveal that Python is slower then Java and faster than PHP. And I wonder why is that the case. Java, Python, and PHP run inside a virtual machine All three languages convert their programs into their custom byte codes that run on top of OS -- so none is running natively Both Java and Python can be "complied" (.pyc for Python) but the __main__ module for Python is not compiled Python and PHP are dynamically typed and Java statically -- is this the reason Java is faster, and if so, please explain how that affects speed. And, even if the dynamic-vs-static argument is correct, this does not explain why PHP is slower than Python -- because both are dynamic languages. You can see some benchmarks here and here, and here

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• Issue with distinguishing levels in isometric game

  - by Konrad

  I'm working on an isometric game however I am having trouble visually distinguishing between levels in the game. Take the example below, the first image shows concrete blocks at ground level and the following images show an attempt to build a few blocks a level above. As you can see the level above is visually swallowed the one below. I've tried shading to make lower levels darker with respect to camera, but this doesn't work that well.. any ideas?

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• Alternative to Game State System?

  - by Ricket

  As far as I can tell, most games have some sort of "game state system" which switches between the different game states; these might be things like "Intro", "MainMenu", "CharacterSelect", "Loading", and "Game". On the one hand, it totally makes sense to separate these into a state system. After all, they are disparate and would otherwise need to be in a large switch statement, which is obviously messy; and they certainly are well represented by a state system. But at the same time, I look at the "Game" state and wonder if there's something wrong about this state system approach. Because it's like the elephant in the room; it's HUGE and obvious but nobody questions the game state system approach. It seems silly to me that "Game" is put on the same level as "Main Menu". Yet there isn't a way to break up the "Game" state. Is a game state system the best way to go? Is there some different, better technique to managing, well, the "game state"? Is it okay to have an intro state which draws a movie and listens for enter, and then a loading state which loops on the resource manager, and then the game state which does practically everything? Doesn't this seem sort of unbalanced to you, too? Am I missing something?

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• Android in-game pause screen

  - by Max

  Right now Im calling a new activity with an xml-view when I pause my game, but Since I do this I need to use context in my real-time code, and this is causing a memory leak. Is there any preffered way to pause the game? By pause I mean if game is over, if I die, or if I press pause-button. Would a custom dialog work just aswell? this would mean I wont have to leave my main-activity while im in-game.

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• Adding Facebook Comments using Razor in DotNetNuke

  - by Chris Hammond

  The other day I posted on how to add the new Facebook Comments to your DotNetNuke website. This worked okay for basic modules that only had one content display, but for a module like DNNSimpleArticle this didn’t work well as the URLs for each article didn’t come across as individual URLs because of the way the Facebook code is formatted. When displaying the Comments I also only wanted to show them on individual articles, not on the main article listing. There is actually a pretty easy fix though...(read more)

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• Edge Detection on Screen

  - by user2056745

  I have a edge collision problem with a simple game that i am developing. Its about throwing a coin across the screen. I am using the code below to detect edge collisions so i can make the coin bounce from the edges of the screen. Everything works as i want except one case. When the coin hits left edge and goes to right edge the system doesnt detect the collision. The rest cases are working perfectly, like hitting the right edge first and then the left edge. Can someone suggest a solution for it? public void onMove(float dx, float dy) { coinX += dx; coinY += dy; if (coinX > rightBorder) { coinX = ((rightBorder - coinX) / 3) + rightBorder; } if (coinX < leftBorder) { coinX = -(coinX) / 3; } if (coinY > bottomBorder) { coinY = ((bottomBorder - coinY) / 3) + bottomBorder; } invalidate(); }

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• Count a row VS Save the Row count after each update

  - by SAFAD

  I want to know whether saving row count in a table is better than counting it each time of the proccess. Quick Example : A visitor goes to Group Clan, the page displays clan information and Members who have joined the group,Should the page look for all the users who joined the clan and count them, or just display the number of members already saved in table ? I think the first one is not possible to get manipulated with but IT MIGHT cost performance Your Ideas ?

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• How to name an subclass that add a minor, detailed thing?

  - by Louis Rhys

  What is the most concise (yet descriptive) way of naming a subclass that only add a specific minor thing to the parent? I encountered this case a lot in WPF, where sometime I have to add a small functionality to an out-of-the-box control for specific cases. Example: TreeView doesn't change the SelectedItem on right-click, but I have to make one that does in my application. Some possible names are TreeViewThatChangesSelectedItemOnRightClick (way too wordy and maybe difficult to read because there is so many words concantenated together) TreeView_SelectedItemChangesOnRightClick (slightly more readable, but still too wordy and the underscore also breaks the normal convention for class names) TreeViewThatChangesSIOnRC (non-obvious acronym), ExtendedTreeView (more concise, but doesn't describe what it is doing. Besides, I already found a class called this in the library, that I don't want to use/modify in my application). LouisTreeView, MyTreeView, etc. (doesn't describe what it is doing). It seems that I can't find a name which sounds right. What do you do in situation like this?

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• What is the best practice to move sprites using mouse order in Tile games?

  - by Robin-Hood

  I am trying to make my first Tile-game using XNA. I have no problem drawing the map layers using TiledLib from codeplex, but, now I want to give sprite an (order) to move to a specific position on map, by selecting the sprite (left mouse click) and then right mouse click somewhere on the map to specify the target position. I don’t know what is the best practice to move sprite this way, considering that there may be collision objects in the direct path. what is the best practice to do this? Is there any demo covering this issue? thanks. BTW: I couldn’t upload snapshot because of my low score :(

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• Best approach for a database of long strings

  - by gsingh2011

  I need to store questions and answers in a database. The questions will be one to two sentences, but the answers will be long, at least a paragraph, likely more. The only way I know about to do this right now is an SQL database. However, I don't feel like this is a good solution because as far as I've seen, these databases aren't used for data of this type or size. Is this the correct way to go or is there a better way to store this data? Is there a better way than storing raw strings?

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• Part 4, Getting the conversion tables ready for CS to DNN

  - by Chris Hammond

  This is the fourth post in a series of blog posts about converting from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke. A brief background: I had a number of websites running on CommunityServer 2.1, I decided it was finally time to ditch CommunityServer due to the change in their licensing model and pricing that made it not good for the small guy. This series of blog posts is about how to convert your CommunityServer based sites to DotNetNuke . Previous Posts: Part 1: An Introduction Part 2: DotNetNuke Installation...(read more)

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