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• How is game development different from other software development?

  - by Davy8

  For a solid general purpose software developer, what specifically is different about game development, either fundamentally or just differences in degree? I've done toy games like Tic-tac-toe, Tetris, and a brute-force sudoku solver (with UI) and I'm now embarking on a mid-sized project (mid-sized for being a single developer and not having done many games) and one thing I've found with this particular project is that separation of concerns is a lot harder since everything affects state, and every object can interact with every other object in a myriad of ways. So far I've managed to keep the code reasonably clean for my satisfaction but I find that keeping clean code in non-trivial games is a lot harder than it is for my day job. The game I'm working on is turn-based and the graphics are going to be fairly simple (web-based, mostly through DOM manipulation) so real time and 3d work aren't really applicable to me, but I'd still be interested in answers regarding those if they're interesting. Mostly interested in general game logic though. P.S. Feel free to retag this, I'm not really sure what tags are applicable.

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• String patterns that can be used to filter and group files

  - by Louis Rhys

  One of our application filters files in certain directory, extract some data from it and export a document from the extracted data. The algorithm for extracting the data depends on the file, and so far we use regex to select the algorithm to be used, for example .*\.txt will be processed by algorithm A, foo[0-5]\.xml will be processed by algo B, etc. However now we need some files to be processed together. For example, in one case we need two files, foo.*\.xml and bar.*\.xml. Part of the information to be extracted exist in the foo file, and the other part in the bar file. Moreover, we need to make sure the wild card is compatible. For example, if there are 6 files foo1.xml foo23.xml bar1.xml bar9.xml bar23.xml foo4.xml I would expect foo1 and bar1 to be identified as a group, and foo23 and bar23 as another group. bar9 and foo4 has no pair, so they will not be treated. Now, since the filter is configured by user, we need to have a pattern that can express the above requirement. I don't think you can express meaning like above in standard regex. (foo|bar).*\.xml will match all 6 file above and we can't identify which file is paired for a particular file. Is there any standard pattern that can express it? Or any idea how to modify regex to support this, that can be implemented easily?

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• Questioning the motivation for dependency injection: Why is creating an object graph hard?

  - by oberlies

  Dependency injection frameworks like Google Guice give the following motivation for their usage (source): To construct an object, you first build its dependencies. But to build each dependency, you need its dependencies, and so on. So when you build an object, you really need to build an object graph. Building object graphs by hand is labour intensive (...) and makes testing difficult. But I don't buy this argument: Even without dependency injection, I can write classes which are both easy to instantiate and convenient to test. E.g. the example from the Guice motivation page could be rewritten in the following way: class BillingService { private final CreditCardProcessor processor; private final TransactionLog transactionLog; // constructor for tests, taking all collaborators as parameters BillingService(CreditCardProcessor processor, TransactionLog transactionLog) { this.processor = processor; this.transactionLog = transactionLog; } // constructor for production, calling the (productive) constructors of the collaborators public BillingService() { this(new PaypalCreditCardProcessor(), new DatabaseTransactionLog()); } public Receipt chargeOrder(PizzaOrder order, CreditCard creditCard) { ... } } So dependency injection may really be an advantage in advanced use cases, but I don't need it for easy construction and testability, do I?

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• Publish/Subscribe/Request for exchange of big, complex, and confidential data?

  - by Morten

  I am working on a project where a website needs to exchange complex and confidential (and thus encrypted) data with other systems. The data includes personal information, technical drawings, public documents etc. We would prefer to avoid the Request-Reply pattern to the dependent systems (and there are a LOT of them), as that would create an awful lot of empty traffic. On the other hand, I am not sure that a pure Publisher/Subscriber pattern would be apropriate -- mainly because of the complex and bulky nature of the data to be exchanged. For that reason we have discussed the possibility of a "publish/subscribe/request" solution. The Publish/Subscribe part would be to publish a message to the dependent systems, that something is ready for pickup. The actual content is then picked up by old-school Request-Reply action. How does this sound to you?? Regards, Morten

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• Collision Resolution

  - by ultifinitus

  Hey all, I'm making a simple side-scrolling game, and I would appreciate some input! My collision detection system is a simple bounding box detection, so it's really easy to implement. However my collision resolution is ridiculous! Currently I have a little formula like this: if (colliding(firstObject,secondObject)) firstObject.resolve_collision(yAxisOffset); if (colliding(firstObject,secondObject)) firstObject.resolve_collision(xAxisOffset); where yAxisOffset is only set if the first object's previous y position was outside the second object's collision frame, respectively xAxisOffset as well. Now this is working great, in general. However there is a single problem. When I have a stack of objects and I push the first object against that stack, the first object get's "stuck," on the stack. What's I think is happening is the object's collision system checks and resolves for collisions based on creation time, so If I check one axis, then the other, the object will "sink" object directly along the checking axis. This sinking action causes the collision detection routine to think there's a gap between our position and the other object's position, and when I finally check the object that I've already sunk into, my object's position is resolved to it's original position... All this is great, and I'm sure if I bang my head against a wall long enough i'll come up with a working algorithm, but I'd rather not =). So what in the heck do you think I should do? How could I change my collision resolution system to fix this? Here's the program (temporary link, not sure how long it'll last) (notes: arrow keys to navigate, click to drop block, x to jump) I'd appreciate any help you can offer!

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• Calculating the "power" of a player in a "Defend Your Castle" type game

  - by Jesse Emond

  I'm a making a "Defend Your Castle" type game, where each player has a castle and must send units to destroy the opponent's castle. It looks like this (and yeah, this is the actual game, not a quick paint drawing..): Now, I'm trying to implement the AI of the opponent, and I'd like to create 4 different AI levels: Easy, Normal, Hard and Hardcore. I've never made any "serious" AI before and I'd like to create a quite complete one this time. My idea is to calculate a player's "power" score, based on the current health of its castle and the individual "power" score of its units. Then, the AI would just try to keep a score close to the player's one(Easy would stay below it, Normal would stay near it and Hard would try to get above it). But I just don't know how to calculate a player's power score. There are just too many variables to take into account and I don't know how to properly use them to create one significant number(the power level). Could anyone help me out on this one? Here are the variables that should influence a player's power score: Current castle health, the unit's total health, damage, speed and attack range. Also, the player can have increased Income(the money bag), damage(the + Damage) and speed(the + speed)... How could I include them in the score? I'm really stuck here... Or is there an other way that I could implement AI for this type of game? Thanks for your precious time.

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• how to write high quality GUI software with qt?

  - by Opetmar

  I want to write a project using QT library, so after learning the library and mastering it how should I start, what other libraries or things that I should learn? are there any other tools that will help me during the development or tools well help the end user to install the software and using it? What are the things that I should be aware? what are the things that I should avoid so it can run efficiently?

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• Switch vs Polymorphism when dealing with model and view

  - by Raphael Oliveira

  I can't figure out a better solution to my problem. I have a view controller that presents a list of elements. Those elements are models that can be an instance of B, C, D, etc and inherit from A. So in that view controller, each item should go to a different screen of the application and pass some data when the user select one of them. The two alternatives that comes to my mind are (please ignore the syntax, it is not a specific language) 1) switch (I know that sucks) //inside the view controller void onClickItem(int index) { A a = items.get(index); switch(a.type) { case b: B b = (B)a; go to screen X; x.v1 = b.v1; // fill X with b data x.v2 = b.v2; case c: go to screen Y; etc... } } 2) polymorphism //inside the view controller void onClickItem(int index) { A a = items.get(index); Screen s = new (a.getDestinationScreen()); //ignore the syntax s.v1 = a.v1; // fill s with information about A s.v2 = a.v2; show(s); } //inside B Class getDestinationScreen(void) { return Class(X); } //inside C Class getDestinationScreen(void) { return Class(Y); } My problem with solution 2 is that since B, C, D, etc are models, they shouldn't know about view related stuff. Or should they in that case?

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• Merge two different API calls into One

  - by dhilipsiva

  I have two different apps in my django project. One is "comment" and an other one is "files". A comment might save some file attached to it. The current way of creating a comment with attachments is by making two API calls. First one creates an actual comment and replies with the comment ID which serves as foreign key for the Files. Then for each file, a new request is made with the comment ID. Please note that file is a generic app, that can be used with other apps too. What is the cleanest way of making this into one API call? I want to have this as a single API call because I am in a situation where I need to send user an email with all the files as attachment when a comment is made. I know Queueing is the ideal way to do it. But I don't have the liberty to add queing to our stack now. So this was the only way I could think of.

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• Server-side Architecture for Online Game

  - by Draiken

  Hi, basically I have a game client that has communicate with a server for almost every action it takes, the game is in Java (using LWJGL) and right now I will start making the server. The base of the game is normally one client communicating with the server alone, but I will require later on for several clients to work together for some functionalities. I've already read how authentication server should be sepparated and I intend on doing it. The problem is I am completely inexperienced in this kind of server-side programming, all I've ever programmed were JSF web applications. I imagine I'll do socket connections for pretty much every game communication since HTML is very slow, but I still don't really know where to start on my server. I would appreciate reading material or guidelines on where to start, what architecture should the game server have and maybe some suggestions on frameworks that could help me getting the client-server communication. I've looked into JNAG but I have no experience with this kind of thing, so I can't really tell if it is a solid and good messaging layer. Any help is appreciated... Thanks !

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• Preffered lambda syntax?

  - by Roger Alsing

  I'm playing around a bit with my own C like DSL grammar and would like some oppinions. I've reserved the use of "(...)" for invocations. eg: foo(1,2); My grammar supports "trailing closures" , pretty much like Ruby's blocks that can be passed as the last argument of an invocation. Currently my grammar support trailing closures like this: foo(1,2) { //parameterless closure passed as the last argument to foo } or foo(1,2) [x] { //closure with one argument (x) passed as the last argument to foo print (x); } The reason why I use [args] instead of (args) is that (args) is ambigious: foo(1,2) (x) { } There is no way in this case to tell if foo expects 3 arguments (int,int,closure(x)) or if foo expects 2 arguments and returns a closure with one argument(int,int) - closure(x) So thats pretty much the reason why I use [] as for now. I could change this to something like: foo(1,2) : (x) { } or foo(1,2) (x) -> { } So the actual question is, what do you think looks best? [...] is somewhat wrist unfriendly. let x = [a,b] { } Ideas?

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• Bachelor in Game Development [on hold]

  - by vandamon taigi

  At this moment, I'm in year 11 in Romania. I have started thinking about an university to go to and I am not really sure which should be my choice. I want it to be game development, but I also want it to be good and fun university.Thing is, I don't want to pay 30 grands a year or so for Cambridge or something like that. I am looking for a decent university at a decent price. I have in my hometown a University that is ranked 1613 world-wide which has a software development category. I need some advices and some possible options for decent universities ( Personal experience is greatly appreciated )

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• How to "translate" interdependent object states in code?

  - by Earl Grey

  I have the following problem. My UI interace contains several buttons, labels, and other visual information. I am able to describe every possible workflow scenario that should be be allowed on that UI. That means I can describe it like this - when button A is pressed, the following should follow - In the case of that A button, there are three independent factors that influence the possible result when pushing the A button. The state of the session (blank, single, multi, multi special), the actual work that is being done by the system at the moment of pressing the A button (nothing was happening, work was being done, work was paused) and a separate UI element that has two states (on , off)..This gives me a 3 dimensional cube with 24 possible outcomes. I could write code for this using if cycles, switch cycles etc....but the problem is, I have another 7 buttons on that ui, I can enter this UI from different states..some buttons change the state, some change parameters... To sum up, the combinations are mindbogling and I am not able come up with a methodology that scales and is systematically reliable. I am able to describe EVERY workflow with words, I am sure my description is complete and without logical errors. But I am not able to translate that into code. I was trying to draw flowcharts but it soon became visually too complicated due to too many if "emafors". Can you advice how to proceeed?

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• Starting point for a simple game written in action script [closed]

  - by Hossein

  Possible Duplicate: AS3/Flash Game Dev: Looking for good & current step by step. Hi, I want to develop a simple game like: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/games/falldown2 And then making it a bit more fancy. But I don't know where to start. I have already started AS3 so I know about the syntax and stuff, but I am kinda lost. Does anyone knows of a nice starting point or a tutorial that can help me with this? Thanks

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• Avoiding the Anaemic Domain - How to decide what single responsibility a class has

  - by thecapsaicinkid

  Even after reading a bunch I'm still falling into the same trap. I have a class, usually an enity. I need to implement more than one, similar operations on this type. It feels wrong to (seemingly arbitrarily) choose one of these operations to belong inside the entity and push the others out to a separate class; I end up pushing all operations to service classes and am left with an anaemic domain. As a crude example, imagine the typical Employee class with numeric properties to hold how many paid days the employee is entitled to for both sickness and holiday and a collection of days taken for each. public class Employee { public int PaidHolidayAllowance { get; set; } public int PaidSicknessAllowance { get; set; } public IEnumerable<Holiday> Holidays { get; set; } public IEnumerable<SickDays> SickDays { get; set; } } I want two operations, one to calculate remaining holiday, another for remaining paid sick days. It seems strange to include say, CalculateRemaingHoliday() in the Employee class and bump CalculateRemainingPaidSick() to some PaidSicknessCalculator class. I would end up with a PaidSicknessCalculator and a RemainingHolidayCalculator and the anaemic Employee entity as seen above. The other alternative would be to put both operations in the Employee class and kick Single Responsibility to the curb. That doesn't make for particularly maintainable code. I suppose the Employee class should have some initialisation/validation logic (not accepting negative alowances etc.) So maybe I just stick to basic initialisation and validation in the entities themselves and be happy with my separate calculator classes. Or maybe I should be asking myself if Anaemic Domain is actually causing me some tangible problems with my code.

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• Good free CSS Sprite for icons

  - by Saif Bechan

  I am working on a small project where I need some of the basic icons: edit, favorite, delete. You know them. Now i can download them all seperate, and put them together in a sprite, but I was wondering if there are ready to download sprites which I can use. Now I am working on an accounting app, so it would be nice if the icons were not too childish. A little but of fancy business type icons. Thanks

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• Use adapter pattern for coupled classes

  - by kaiseroskilo

  I need (for unit testing purposes) to create adapters for external library classes.ExchangeService and ContactsFolder are Microsoft's implementations in its' EWS library. So I created my adapters that implement my interfaces, but it seems that contactsFolder has a dependency for ExchangeService in its' constructor. The problem is that I cannot instantiate ContactsFolderAdapter without somehow accessing the actual ExchangeService instance (I see only ExchangeServiceAdapter in scope). Is there a better pattern for this that retains the adapter classes? Or should I "infect" ExchangeServiceAdapter with some kind of GetActualObject method?

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• Is extensive documentation a code smell?

  - by Griffin

  Every library, open-source project, and SDK/API I've ever come across has come packaged with a (usually large) documentation file, and this seems contradictory to the wide-spread belief that good code needs little to no comments. What separates documentation from this programming methodology? a one to two page overview of a package seems reasonable, but elegant code combined with standard intelisense should have theoretically deprecated the practice of documentation by now IMO. I feel like companies only create detailed documentation and tutorials because its what they've always done. Why should developers have to constantly be searching through online documentation in order to learn how to do things when such information should be intrinsic to the classes, methods and namespaces?

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• Are there specific legal issues for web developers working on sex dating sites?

  - by YumYumYum

  Say I have created many ordinary websites which are not related to any dating/sexual content. Are the rules and regulations for a developer the same when making a sex-related dating site? I'm talking about a site where people meet together and get to know each other, with the intent of having a sexual relationship (you know what I mean), also featuring webcam sex, but not explicitly a porno site. Do such sites have any special legal issues for developers compared with non-sexual/dating sites?

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• How to approach big developer companies if I have a killer game idea? (for mobile devices)

  - by Balázs Dávid

  I have an idea for a game that has a potential, but I'm not a programmer. How to tell this to development companies without being my idea stolen? All I want from the company is first to watch a 3-minute long video presentation about my idea and if they see fantasy in it then we can talk about the details. I have already sent an e-mail to several big companies that have the expertise needed to code the game, they haven't answer me. Actually the idea is nothing fancy, no 3D, but fun and unique.

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• The next next C++ [closed]

  - by Roger Pate

  It's entirely too early for speculation on what C++ will be like after C++0x, but idle hands make for wild predictions. What features would you find useful and why? Is there anything in another language that would fit nicely into the state of C++ after 0x? What should be considered for the next TC and TR? (Mostly TR, as the TC would depend more on what actually becomes the next standard.) Export was removed, rather than merely deprecated, in 0x. (It remains a keyword.) What other features carry so much baggage to also be more harmful than helpful? ISO Standards' process I'm not involved in the C++ committee, but it's also a mystery, unfortunately, to most programmers using C++. A few things worth keeping in mind: There will be 10 years between standards, barring extremely exceptional circumstances. The standard can get "bug fixes" in the form of a Technical Corrigendum. This happened to C++98 with TC1, named C++03. It fixed "simple" issues such as making the explicit guarantee that std::vector stores items contiguously, which was always intended. The committee can issue reports which can add to the language. This happened to C++98/03 with TR1 in 2005, which introduced the std::tr1 namespace.

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• What to include in metadata?

  - by shyam

  I'm wondering if there are any general guidelines or best practices regarding when to split data into a metadata format, as oppose to directly embedding it within the data. (Specific example below). My understanding of metadata is that it describes data (without the need to actually look at the data), allowing for data to be quickly search/filtered for easy access. Let's take for example a simple 3D model format. The actual data file itself is a binary file containing vertices and colors. Things like creation date, modified data and author name would be things that describe the binary data, so I would say these belong as metadata (outside of the binary file). But what if the application had no need to search or filter by these fields? Would it be acceptable to embed these fields directly into the binary data itself? Could they be duplicated in both the binary data and the meta data, or would this be considered bad practice? What about more ambiguous fields such as the model name, which could be considered part of the data itself, but also as data describing the binary data?... How do you decide which data to embed in the actual binary file, as opposed to separating into a more flexible metadata format? Thanks!

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• Moving camera, or camera with discrete "screens"?

  - by Jacob Millward

  I'm making a game with a friend, but having trouble deciding on a camera style. The basic idea for the game, is having a randomly generated 2-dimensional world, with settlements in it. These settlements would have access to different resources, and it would be the job of the player to create bridges and ladders and links between these villages so they can trade. The player would advance personally by getting better gear, fighting monsters and looking for materials in the world, in order to craft and trade them at the settlements. My friend wants to use an old-style camera, where the world is split into a discrete number of screens that the player moves between. Similar to early Zelda dungeons, or Knytt Stories. This is opposite to me, as I want a standard camera that follows the player around as I feel the split-screen style camera limits the game. Can anyone argue the case either way? We've hit a massive roadblock here and can't seem to get past it.

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• Why not expose a primary key

  - by Angelo Neuschitzer

  In my education I have been told that it is a flawed idea to expose actual primary keys (not only DB keys, but all primary accessors) to the user. I always thought it to be a security problem (because an attacker could attempt to read stuff not their own). Now I have to check if the user is allowed to access anyway, so is there a different reason behind it? Also, as my users have to access the data anyway I will need to have a public key for the outside world somewhere in between. Now that public key has the same problems as the primary key, doesn't it?

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• Game development: Pre-production stage

  - by piers

  I´m starting up a new project. It´s going to be a web browser game, developed using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3. I have some general questions regarding the process of game developing. Should you know everything about your game by the time you start writing the first lines of code? I mean should you know all the details, all the things the player can and can not do? Basically: should you be done writing down new ideas before you begin coding? I understand the pre-production process is about documenting, doing research etc. What does that mean? Does it mean I should open up Word and write down everything about the game? For example what should happen when you click on different things etc. Thanks for your help!

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