Search Results

Search found 40870 results on 1635 pages for 'database design'.

Page 241/1635 | < Previous Page | 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248  | Next Page >

  • How do they keep track of the NPCs in Left 4 Dead?

    - by f20k
    How do they keep track of the NPC zombies in Left 4 Dead? I am talking about the NPCs that just walk into walls or wander around aimlessly. Even though the players cannot see them, they are there (say inside rooms or behind doors). Let's say there's about 10 or so zombies in a hallway and inside rooms. Does the game keep all of those zombies in a list and iterate through giving them commands? Do they just spawn when the user is within a certain radius or reached a special location? Say you placed the 4 units (controlled by players) on completely different places throughout the map. Let's assume you aren't being swarmed and then you have not killed any of these aimless NPCs. Would the game be keeping track of 10 x 4 = 40 zombies in total? Or is my understanding completely off? The reason I ask is if I were to implement something similar on a mobile device, keeping track of 40 or more NPCs might not be such a great idea.

    Read the article

  • Disqus integration in website.. what is wrong??

    - by Thieme Hennis
    hi, I try to embed a disqus forum in a website I created. I used the exact code and instructions they give on the installation instructions. I just don't get it. Not much on Google either. Is something wrong in the code? Should I change anything? <!DOCTYPE HTML> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="../favicon.ico"> <title>Little Louie | Hennis &amp; Blaisse Lovers Productions</title> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="some,tags"> <link href="../style2.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> </head> <body> <p><b>Some text</p> <p> <div id="disqus_thread"></div> <script type="text/javascript"> (function() { var dsq = document.createElement('script'); dsq.type = 'text/javascript'; dsq.async = true; dsq.src = 'http://littelouie.disqus.com/embed.js'; (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(dsq); })(); </script> <noscript>Please enable JavaScript to view the <a href="http://disqus.com/?ref_noscript=littelouie">comments powered by Disqus.</a></noscript> <a href="http://disqus.com" class="dsq-brlink">blog comments powered by <span class="logo-disqus">Disqus</span></a> </p> <p> <script type="text/javascript"> var disqus_shortname = 'littelouie'; (function () { var s = document.createElement('script'); s.async = true; s.src = 'http://disqus.com/forums/littelouie/count.js'; (document.getElementsByTagName('HEAD')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('BODY')[0]).appendChild(s); }()); </script> </p> </body> </html>

    Read the article

  • 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?

    Read the article

  • How can I gather client's data on Google App Engine without using Datastore/Backend Instances too much?

    - by ruslan
    One of the projects I'm working on is online survey engine. It's my first big commercial project on Google App Engine. I need your advice on how to collect stats and efficiently record them in DataStore without bankrupting me. Initial requirements are: After user finishes survey client sends list of pairs [ID (int) + PercentHit (double)]. This list shows how close answers of this user match predefined answers of reference answerers (which identified by IDs). I call them "target IDs". Creator of the survey wants to see aggregated % for given IDs for last hour, particular timeframe or from the beginning of the survey. Some surveys may have thousands of target/reference answerers. So I created entity public class HitsStatsDO implements Serializable { @Id transient private Long id; transient private Long version = (long) 0; transient private Long startDate; @Parent transient private Key parent; // fake parent which contains target id @Transient int targetId; private double avgPercent; private long hitCount; } But writing HitsStatsDO for each target from each user would give a lot of data. For instance I had a survey with 3000 targets which was answered by ~4 million people within one week with 300K people taking survey in first day. Even if we assume they were answering it evenly for 24 hours it would give us ~1040 writes/second. Obviously it hits concurrent writes limit of Datastore. I decided I'll collect data for one hour and save that, that's why there are avgPercent and hitCount in HitsStatsDO. GAE instances are stateless so I had to use dynamic backend instance. There I have something like this: // Contains stats for one hour private class Shard { ReadWriteLock lock = new ReentrantReadWriteLock(); Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> map = new HashMap<Integer, HitsStatsDO>(); // Key is target ID public void saveToDatastore(); public void updateStats(Long startDate, Map<Integer, Double> hits); } and map with shard for current hour and previous hour (which doesn't stay here for long) private HashMap<Long, Shard> shards = new HashMap<Long, Shard>(); // Key is HitsStatsDO.startDate So once per hour I dump Shard for previous hour to Datastore. Plus I have class LifetimeStats which keeps Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> in memcached where map-key is target ID. Also in my backend shutdown hook method I dump stats for unfinished hour to Datastore. There is only one major issue here - I have only ONE backend instance :) It raises following questions on which I'd like to hear your opinion: Can I do this without using backend instance ? What if one instance is not enough ? How can I split data between multiple dynamic backend instances? It hard because I don't know how many I have because Google creates new one as load increases. I know I can launch exact number of resident backend instances. But how many ? 2, 5, 10 ? What if I have no load at all for a week. Constantly running 10 backend instances is too expensive. What do I do with data from clients while backend instance is dead/restarting?

    Read the article

  • Which numeral systems are useful in computer science?

    - by authchir
    I am wondering which numeral system different programmers are using, or would use if their language has support for them. As an example, in C++ we can use: Octal by prefixing with 0 (e.g. 0377) Decimal by default (e.g. 255) Hexadecimal by prefixing with 0x (e.g. 0xff) When working with bitmask, I am using hexadecimal but would sometimes want to be able to express binary numbers directly. I know some programming language support it with 0b syntax (e.g. 0b11111111). Is there any other numeric system useful in some computer science domain (e.g. cryptography, codecs, 3D graphics, etc)?

    Read the article

  • Access functions from user control without events?

    - by BornToCode
    I have an application made with usercontrols and a function on main form that removes the previous user controls and shows the desired usercontrol centered and tweaked: public void DisplayControl(UserControl uControl) I find it much easier to make this function static or access this function by reference from the user control, like this: MainForm mainform_functions = (MainForm)Parent; mainform_functions.DisplayControl(uc_a); You probably think it's a sin to access a function in mainform, from the usercontrol, however, raising an event seems much more complex in such case - I'll give a simple example - let's say I raise an event from usercontrol_A to show usercontrol_B on mainform, so I write this: uc_a.show_uc_b+= (s,e) => { usercontrol_B uc_b = new usercontrol_B(); DisplayControl(uc_b); }; Now what if I want usercontrol_B to also have an event to show usercontrol_C? now it would look like this: uc_a.show_uc_b+= (s,e) => { usercontrol_B uc_b = new usercontrol_B(); DisplayControl(uc_b); uc_b.show_uc_c += (s2,e2) => {usercontrol_C uc_c = new usercontrol_C(); DisplayControl(uc_c);} }; THIS LOOKS AWFUL! The code is much simpler and readable when you actually access the function from the usercontrol itself, therefore I came to the conclusion that in such case it's not so terrible if I break the rules and not use events for such general function, I also think that a readable usercontrol that you need to make small adjustments for another app is preferable than a 100% 'generic' one which makes my code look like a pile of mud. What is your opinion? Am I mistaken?

    Read the article

  • Comparison of languages by usage type? [closed]

    - by Tom
    Does anyone know of a good place to go find comparisons of programming languages by the intended platform/usage? Basically, what I want to know, is of the more popular languages, which ones are meant for high level application development, low level system development, mobile development, web, etc. If there's a good listing out there already, I'm not finding it so far. Does anyone know of a place that would have this? Thanks.

    Read the article

  • When should one use the Abstract, Implements, or extends keywords?

    - by kdavis8
    I'm just now moving from a beginner to intermediate level android programmer in the java language. i can successfully write a game framework of classes that work together to accomplish a task beyond basic things, like hello world. but i'm having issues with some pretty basic OOP concepts; When should i derive from an abstract class? When is it more efficient to use an Interface instead of simply sub classing a parent? Basically, between extends, implements, and the abstract keywords, which keywords should be used instead of the others? i'm not looking for a basic definition, as i know them. i need to no when and why i should apply them to my code? what advantages does one have over the other? which is best for game development?

    Read the article

  • 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 ?

    Read the article

  • What can make peaceful game successful?

    - by Miro
    Today, the most successful games are action games like FPS, RPG, MMORPG... I'd like to make peaceful game, but i don't know how to attract people. I can make good graphics, but that's not the main thing that makes people like game more that couple of minutes. The content is important. In game styles mentioned in beginning are main content fight, kill others, make from yourself predator/the most powerful creature/player in the game. But what content can attract people in peaceful game?

    Read the article

  • What is the best website width? [on hold]

    - by Salvis Dišlers
    What is the best website width? I can't decide between 1200px max-width and 1236px....with 300px sidebar as enough or 320px? I personally like wide website, my current website is 1236px; but I hear it's considered very wide for eyesight and all those gadgets keeping in mind... The website is for reading - I mean, mostly articles with around 3000 words on average per page, so no matter - whether they look wide, whether they love to scroll down :) Also - what to decide about Banner size / sidebar? Probably the 300px I can put a 300px banner, but on 320px sidebar I could put 336px banner, if necessary...

    Read the article

  • How is intermediate data organized in MapReduce?

    - by Pedro Cattori
    From what I understand, each mapper outputs an intermediate file. The intermediate data (data contained in each intermediate file) is then sorted by key. Then, a reducer is assigned a key by the master. The reducer reads from the intermediate file containing the key and then calls reduce using the data it has read. But in detail, how is the intermediate data organized? Can a data corresponding to a key be held in multiple intermediate files? What happens when there is too much data corresponding to one key to be held by a single file? In short, how do intermediate partitions differ from intermediate files and how are these differences dealt with in the implementation?

    Read the article

  • Client-Server connection response timeout issues

    - by Srikar
    User creates a folder in client and in the client-side code I hit an API to the server to make this persistent for that user. But in some cases, my server is so busy that the request timesout. The server has executed my request but timedout before sending a response back to client. The timeout set is 10 seconds in client. At this point the client thinks that server has not executed its request (of creating a folder) and ends up sending it again. Now I have 2 folders on the server but the user has created only 1 folder in the client. How to prevent this? One of the ways to solve this is to use a unique ID with each new request. So the ID acts as a distinguisher between old and new requests from client. But this leads to storing these IDs on my server and do a lookup for each API call which I want to avoid. Other way is to increase the timeout duration. But I dont want to change this from 10 seconds. Something tells me that there are better solutions. I have posted this question in stackoverflow but I think its better suited here. UPDATE: I will make my problem even more explicit. The client is a webbrowser and the server is running nginx+django+mysql (standard stack). The user creates a folder in webbrowser. As a result I need to hit a server API. The API call responds back, thereby client knows API call was success. This is normal scenario. Sometimes though, server successfully completes the API request but the client-side (webbrowser) connection timesout before server can respond back. The client has no clue at this point. The user thinks the request was a fail & clicks again. This time it was a success but when the UI refreshes he sees 2 folders. I want to remedy this situation.

    Read the article

  • 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.

    Read the article

  • 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?

    Read the article

  • How does a game developer get feedback from gamers (not developers) or start a forum community without paying for advertising or hiring Q&A teams?

    - by Carter81
    I am familiar with a lot of game developer forums, but I'd assume this is much less likely to attract more casual commentators. I also fear that feedback from a gamer's perspective would often be tainted by their game dev perspective. For example, if I were making a RTS game and wanted to get feedback from "The RTS gamers" where would I go? Is there a general idea of what type of website or forum to go to? Do you go to specific game websites, to try to "steal" attention? Would this not equate to spam or inappropriate posting? What is considered appropriate and inappropriate? I am not asking for specifics. I am asking how one "starts a community", or how one "gets feedback from gamers" without resorting to spamming forums or 'advertising' just to see what sticks. What TYPE OF PLACE does one go? Are there already sites designed for this purpose? I tried going to what was once a very popular forum for feedback from what I believed was a niche hardcore group of gamers in the genre, but its popularity seemed to have died significantly; Leaving only trolls and very young teenagers. The resulting feedback was quite disappointing, mainly for how little feedback it resulted. Many years ago, feedback would flood in by the hundreds so quickly. Without this website, I am at a loss as to where to go to see what people think of ideas, gather feedback from a gamer's perspective (not a developer's perspective), or where to pull from to start my own site's forum. I am out of ideas of what to do, short of going to various game forums to post in the off-topic sections there.

    Read the article

  • What features would you like to have in PHP? [closed]

    - by StasM
    Since it's the holiday season now and everybody's making wishes, I wonder - which language features you would wish PHP would have added? I am interested in some practical suggestions/wishes for the language. By practical I mean: Something that can be practically done (not: "I wish PHP would guess what my code means and fix bugs for me" or "I wish any code would execute under 5ms") Something that doesn't require changing PHP into another language (not: "I wish they'd drop $ signs and use space instead of braces" or "I wish PHP were compiled, statically typed and had # in it's name") Something that would not require breaking all the existing code (not: "Let's rename 500 functions and change parameter order for them") Something that does change the language or some interesting aspect of it (not: "I wish there was extension to support for XYZ protocol" or "I wish bug #12345 were finally fixed") Something that is more than a rant (not: "I wish PHP wouldn't suck so badly") Anybody has any good wishes? Mod edit: Stanislav Malyshev is a core PHP developer.

    Read the article

  • What is wrong with Unix/linux

    - by John Smith
    This is a genuine question motivated by Ideal Operating System When I moved from DOS to Linux in the late 90s it was an eye opener for me. Long file names, arbitrarily many extensions etc... Now I look at Linux and Unix and see all sorts of issues. Here are things I see which could be fixed. Too much depends on root, and rootly powers cannot be voluntarily delegated over several users. (I would love to give up my power to manager printers and delegate the job to another account) File permissions are very limited, and there is not much metadata to go with files. The "everything is a file" metaphor is not true, Plan 9 gets it right(er).

    Read the article

  • Writing selenium tests, should I just get it done or get it right?

    - by Peter Smith
    I'm attempting to drive my user interface (heavy on javascript) through selenium. I've already tested the rest of my ajax interaction with selenium successfully. However, this one particular method seems to be eluding me because I can't seem to fake the correct click event. I could solve this problem by simply waiting in the test for the user to click a point and then continuing with the test but this seems like a cop out. But I'm really running out of time on my deadline to have this done and working. Should I just get this done and move on or should I spend the extra (unknown) amount of time to fix this problem and be able to have my selenium tests 100% automated?

    Read the article

  • What makes games responsive to user input?

    - by zaftcoAgeiha
    Many games have been praised for its responsive gameplay, where each user action input correspond to a quick and precise character movement (eg: super meat boy, shank...) What makes those games responsive? and what prevents other games from achieving the same? How much of it is due to the game framework used to queue mouse/keyboard events and render/update the game and how much is attributed to better coding?

    Read the article

  • Changelog Management

    - by Gnial0id
    I'm currently developing a WinForm application. In order to inform the client about the improvements and corrections made during the last version, I would like to manage and display a changelog. I mostly found existing changelog on website (the term changelog is pretty used) or explanation on how to manage the release numbers, which I don't care. So, these are my questions: How do I manage a changelog (using XML, pure text in the app, etc.) in a desktop application? How do I present it to the user (external website, inside the winform application)?

    Read the article

  • Explicitly pass context object versus injecting with IoC

    - by SonOfPirate
    I have a layered service application where the service layer delegates operations into the domain layer for execution. Many of these operations need to know the context under which they are operation. (The context included the identity of the current user, culture information, etc. received from the caller.) For example, I have an API method that returns a list of announcements. The list is based on the current user's role and each announcement is localized to their culture. The API is a thin-facade that delegates to an Application Service in my domain layer. The Application Service method obviously needs to know the context of the current request/operation as another call to the same API from another user should result in a different list. Within this method, we also have logging that uses some of the context information so we a clear understanding of the context when the operation was performed (this is especially useful if something goes wrong.) While this is a contrived example, in the real world, my Application Services will coordinate operations with many collaborative components, any number of them also needing the context information. My choice is to pass the context to the Application Service which would then pass it with any calls to collaborators or have the IoC container satisfy the dependency the Application Service and any collaborators have on the context. I am wondering if it is considered good/bad, best practices/code smell, etc. if I pass the context object as a parameter to the domain methods or if injecting the context via an IoC container is preferred. (EDIT: I should mention that the context object is instantiated per-request.)

    Read the article

  • 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.

    Read the article

  • Finding most Important Node(s) in a Directed Graph

    - by Srikar Appal
    I have a large (˜ 20 million nodes) directed Graph with in-edges & out-edges. I want to figure out which parts of of the graph deserve the most attention. Often most of the graph is boring, or at least it is already well understood. The way I am defining "attention" is by the concept of "connectedness" i.e. How can i find the most connected node(s) in the graph? In what follows, One can assume that nodes by themselves have no score, the edges have no weight & they are either connected or not. This website suggest some pretty complicated procedures like n-dimensional space, Eigen Vectors, graph centrality concepts, pageRank etc. Is this problem that complex? Can I not do a simple Breadth-First Traversal of the entire graph where at each node I figure out a way to find the number of in-edges. The node with most in-edges is the most important node in the graph. Am I missing something here?

    Read the article

  • Game ideas for a platformer

    - by user5925
    I have created a platformer which currently has the features listed below. I would greatly appreciate any further ideas which I could implement! (I don't play a lot of games which is why I require help) -- Walking/jumping/movement -- player can shoot lasers -- enemies also walk, fly, and shoot lasers -- water (you can swim in this) -- mud (slows you down on contact, and stops you from jumping) -- ladders -- damage when falling from a large height, unless falling into water -- moving platforms -- springboards (jumping on them shoot you into the air) -- growing platforms (allow you to reach new places) -- key and door system -- gem and coin collection system

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248  | Next Page >