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• How can I easily create cloud texture maps?

  - by EdwardTeach

  I am making 3d planets in my game; these will be viewed as "globes". Some of them will need cloud layers. I looked at various Blender tutorials for creating "earth", and for their cloud layers they use earth cloud maps from NASA. However I will be creating a fictional universe with many procedurally-generated planets. So I would like to use many variations. I'm hoping there's a way to procedurally generate cloud maps such as the NASA link. I will also need to create gas giants, so I will also need other kinds of cloud texture maps. If that is too difficult, I could fall back to creating several variations of cloud maps. For example, 3 for earth-like, 3 for gas giants, etc. So how do I statically create or programmatically generate such cloud maps?

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• Can you shade a specific section of a sprite? If so, how?

  - by l5p4ngl312

  I have been working on an isometric minecraft-esque game engine for a strategy game I plan on making. As you can see, it really needs some sort of shading. It is difficult to distinguish between separate elevations when the camera is facing away from the slope because everything is the same shade. So my question is: can I shade just a specific section of a sprite? All of those blocks are just sprites, so if I shaded the entire image, it would shade the whole block. I am using LWJGL. Heres a link to a screenshot from the engine: http://i44.tinypic.com/qxqlix.jpg

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• C: What is a good source to teach standard/basic code conventions to someone newly learning the language ?

  - by shan23

  I'm tutoring someone who can be described as a rank newcomer in C. Understandably, she does not know much about coding conventions generally practiced, and hence all her programs tend to use single letter vars, mismatched spacing/indentation and the like, making it very difficult to read/debug her endeavors. My question is, is there a link/set of guidelines and examples which she can use for adopting basic code conventions ? It should not be too arcane as to scare her off, yet inclusive enough to have the basics covered (so that no one woulc wince looking at the code). Any suggestions ?

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• What is the simplest human readable configuration file format?

  - by Juha

  Current configuration file is as follows: mainwindow.title = 'test' mainwindow.position.x = 100 mainwindow.position.y = 200 mainwindow.button.label = 'apply' mainwindow.button.size.x = 100 mainwindow.button.size.y = 30 logger.datarate = 100 logger.enable = True logger.filename = './test.log' This is read with python to a nested dictionary: { 'mainwindow':{ 'button':{ 'label': {'value':'apply'}, ... }, 'logger':{ datarate: {'value': 100}, enable: {'value': True}, filename: {'value': './test.log'} }, ... } Is there a better way of doing this? The idea is to get XML type of behavior and avoid XML as long as possible. The end user is assumed almost totally computer illiterate and basically uses notepad and copy-paste. Thus the python standard "header + variables" type is considered too difficult. The dummy user edits the config file, able programmers handle the dictionaries. Nested dictionary is chosen for easy splitting (logger does not need or even cannot have/edit mainwindow parameters).

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• Level and Player objects - which should contain which?

  - by Thane Brimhall

  I've been working on a several simple games, and I've always come to a decision point where I have to choose whether to have the Level object as an attribute of the Player class or the Player as an attribute of the Level class. I can see arguments for both: The Level should contain the player because it also contains every other entity. In fact it just makes sense this way: "John is in the room." It makes it a bit more difficult to move the player to a new level, however, because then each level has to pass its player object to an upcoming level. On the other hand, it makes programming sense to me to leave the player as the top-level object that is persistent between levels, and the environment changes because the player decides to change his level and location. It becomes very easy to change levels, because all I have to do is replace the level variable on the player. What's the most common practice here? Or better yet, is there a "right" way to architecture this relationship?

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• Moving from XNA/C# to DirectX/C++ quite confused

  - by misiMe

  I made some game with XNA/C# for Windows Phone and Windows 8, since XNA is dead and Visual studio doesn't support it (I have to target Windows Phone 7.1 to build with XNA), I want to start learning something more "consistent in time" and improve my skills. I'm a little confused about the possibilities, because C++/DirectX alone seems difficult, so I found some high-level classes to help: DirectX Toolkit Cocos2D My questions are: What will happen when they will "die" like XNA? Is C++'s approces more "professional" than C#/XNA and why? Is C++'s approces more "portable"? Is C++'s approces more resistant in terms of time? Is there any consideration about DirectX TK and Cocos2D in terms of performance? I ask that because I found that every Game software house in my country looks for skilled C++ programmers.

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• On Reflector Pricing

  - by Nick Harrison

  I have heard a lot of outrage over Red Gate's decision to charge for Reflector. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a fan of Red Gate. I have worked with them on several usability tests. They also sponsor Simple Talk where I publish articles. They are a good company. I am also a BIG fan of Reflector. I have used it since Lutz originally released it. I have written my own add-ins. I have written code to host reflector and use its object model in my own code. Reflector is a beautiful tool. The care that Lutz took to incorporate extensibility is amazing. I have never had difficulty convincing my fellow developers that it is a wonderful tool. Almost always, once anyone sees it in action, it becomes their favorite tool. This wide spread adoption and usability has made it an icon and pivotal pillar in the DotNet community. Even folks with the attitude that if it did not come out of Redmond then it must not be any good, still love it. It is ironic to hear everyone clamoring for it to be released as open source. Reflector was never open source, it was free, but you never were able to peruse the source code and contribute your own changes. You could not even use Reflector to view the source code. From the very beginning, it was never anyone's intention for just anyone to examine the source code and make their own contributions aside from the add-in model. Lutz chose to hand over the reins to Red Gate because he believed that they would be able to build on his original vision and keep the product viable and effective. He did not choose to make it open source, hoping that the community would be up to the challenge. The simplicity and elegance may well have been lost with the "design by committee" nature of open source. Despite being a wonderful and beloved tool, Reflector cannot be an easy tool to maintain. Maybe because it is so wonderful and beloved, it is even more difficult to maintain. At any rate, we have high expectations. Reflector must continue to be able to reasonably disassemble every language construct that the framework and core languages dream up. We want it to be fast, and we also want it to continue to be simple to use. No small order. Red Gate tried to keep the core product free. Sadly there was not enough interest in the Pro version to subsidize the rest of the expenses. $35 is a reasonable cost, more than reasonable. I have read the blog posts and forum posts complaining about the time associated with getting the expense approved. I have heard people complain about the cost being unreasonable if you are a developer from certain countries. Let's do the math. How much of a productivity boost is Reflector? How many hours do you think it saves you in a typical project? The next question is a little easier if you are a contractor or a consultant, but what is your hourly rate? If you are not a contractor, you can probably figure out an hourly rate. How long does it take to get a return on your investment? The value added proposition is not a difficult one to make. I have read people clamoring that Red Gate sucks and is evil. They complain about broken promises and conflicts of interest. Relax! Red Gate is not evil. The world is not coming to an end. The sun will come up tomorrow. I am sure that Red Gate will come up with options for volume licensing or site licensing for companies that want to get a licensed copy for their entire team. Don't panic, and I am sure that many great improvements are on the horizon. Switching the UI to WPF and including a tabbed interface opens up lots of possibilities.

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• How to write a network game? [closed]

  - by Tom Wijsman

  Based on Why is so hard to develop a MMO?: Networked game development is not trivial; there are large obstacles to overcome in not only latency, but cheat prevention, state management and load balancing. If you're not experienced with writing a networked game, this is going to be a difficult learning exercise. I know the theory about sockets, servers, clients, protocols, connections and such things. Now I wonder how one can learn to write a network game: How to balance load problems? How to manage the game state? How to keep things synchronized? How to protect the communication and client from reverse engineering? How to work around latency problems? Which things should be computed local and which things on the server? ... Are there any good books, tutorials, sites, interesting articles or other questions regarding this? I'm looking for broad answers, but specific ones are fine too to learn the difference.

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• Why is the Touchpad tab missing?

  - by U47

  So my Dell Vostro 3360 came out of the box with an Alps touchpad which was detected as PS/2. Through these steps, I was able to get as far as it appearing to be recognized as a touchpad. Howevver, I do not get the Touchpad tab in the Mouse/Touchpad settings. Two-finger scrolling appears to work, and the Fn-F3 does disable the touchpad, but the settings are so brutal that it is almost impossible to work with. Very difficult to scroll at all accurately. I'm hoping there's some settings which can be tweaked which will help with this. Any ideas? My xinput listing is as follows: ? Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)] ? ? Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)] ? ? GlidePoint Virtual Touchpad id=12 [slave pointer (2)] Thanks,

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• Is loose coupling w/o use cases an anti-pattern?

  - by dsimcha

  Loose coupling is, to some developers, the holy grail of well-engineered software. It's certainly a good thing when it makes code more flexible in the face of changes that are likely to occur in the foreseeable future, or avoids code duplication. On the other hand, efforts to loosely couple components increase the amount of indirection in a program, thus increasing its complexity, often making it more difficult to understand and often making it less efficient. Do you consider a focus on loose coupling without any use cases for the loose coupling (such as avoiding code duplication or planning for changes that are likely to occur in the foreseeable future) to be an anti-pattern? Can loose coupling fall under the umbrella of YAGNI?

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• Books or guides regarding secure key storage and database encryption

  - by Matty

  I have an idea for a SaaS product I want to create, however, this product will store extremely sensitive data that needs to be encrypted at rest. The trouble is not so much the encryption, but the problem of securely storing the keys so that in the event the server was somehow compromised, the keys couldn't just be recovered and used to decrypt the database. Are there any decent books to guides regarding database encryption, and in particular secure key storage? This seems to be a less than straightforward topic and something that is difficult to get right. I'm seeing multiple ways to attack such a system, but unable to come up with one that is secure enough to store highly confidential information.

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• Business person turned into coder? How and why? Inspire the non-technical.

  - by huisjames

  I graduated with a Business degree. Two years later, I finally realized the power of programming - the power to "invent." I wish I realized this in high school. Nevertheless, I tried to self-teach C# but found it difficult. Then I pivoted to learn PHP two months ago and I have been able to build things I thought was beyond my abilities. Has anyone had the same experience? Or self-taught programming? What lessons did you learn?

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• Ogre3D : seeking advices about game files management

  - by Tibor

  I'm working on a new game, and its related level editor, based on Ogre3D. I was thinking about how i could manage the game files, knowing that Ogre use .mesh files for models, .material for materials/texture information etc... . At first i thought about a common .zip folder decompressed at runtime (the same way Torchlight and Ogre samples do). But this way the game assets become a monolithic archive, loading takes time, and could be difficult to eventually patch them. So, let's say i have a game object named "Cube" i want to load in my program. Going for modularity, what if i create a compressed file (using zlib compression routines) named Cube.extname, containing its sub-files Cube.mesh, Cube.material and so on ? Are there any alternatives or should i stick with compressed objects? PS: Just to clear things, the answer is unrelated to my program code, at the moment i'm using "resources.cfg" pointing to the OgreSDK media directory.

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• Creating a SOLID Visual Studio Solution

  The SOLID acronym describes five object-oriented design principles that, when followed, produce code that is cleaner and more maintainable. The last principle, the Dependency Inversion Principle, suggests that details depend upon abstractions. Unfortunately, typical project relationships in .NET applications can make this principle difficult to follow. In this article, I'll describe how one can structure a set of projects in a Visual Studio solution such that DIP can be followed, allowing for the creation of a SOLID solution. You can download the sample solution and use it as a starting point for your new solutions if you like.

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• Are there existing FOSS component-based frameworks?

  - by Tesserex

  The component based game programming paradigm is becoming much more popular. I was wondering, are there any projects out there that offer a reusable component framework? In any language, I guess I don't care about that. It's not for my own project, I'm just curious. Specifically I mean are there projects that include a base Entity class, a base Component class, and maybe some standard components? It would then be much easier starting a game if you didn't want to reinvent the wheel, or maybe you want a GraphicsComponent that does sprites with Direct3D, but you figure it's already been done a dozen times. A quick Googling turns up Rusher. Has anyone heard of this / does anyone use it? If there are no popular ones, then why not? Is it too difficult to make something like this reusable, and they need heavy customization? In my own implementation I found a lot of boilerplate that could be shoved into a framework.

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• Simple 3D Physics engine as a part of graduation project [on hold]

  - by Eugene Kolesnikov

  I am working on my graduation project and one part of it is to simulate the motion of a rigid body in 3D space. I can use either already written physics engine or to write it myself. It's quite an interesting challenge for me, so I would like to do it myself. I am able to use either C++ or Java for programming (prefer C++). I am using Mac OS X and Debian 7. Could you suggest any guides or tutorials how to do it, can't find it anywhere... More precisely, I need a very simple engine, without collision detection, and many other things that I do not know, I just need to calculate the forces and move my body, depending on the resultant force. If you think that this task is still very difficult or there is no such tutorial, please suggest me some good and simple engine.

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• How to find siblings of a tree?

  - by smallB

  On my interview for an internship, I was asked following question: On a whiteboard write the simplest algorithm with use of recursion which would take a root of a so called binary tree (so called because it is not strictly speaking binary tree) and make every child in this tree connected with its sibling. So if I have: 1 / \ 2 3 / \ \ 4 5 6 / \ 7 8 then the sibling to 2 would be 3, to four five, to five six and to seven eight. I didn't do this, although I was heading in the right direction. Later (next day) at home I did it, but with the use of a debugger. It took me better part of two hours and 50 lines of code. I personally think that this was very difficult question, almost impossible to do correctly on a whiteboard. How would you solve it on a whiteboard? How to apprehend this question without using a debugger?

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• How do I install the Intel 82845 graphics driver -- videos are really slow?

  - by Mahesh Bhat

  I installed lubuntu on my machine and seems Intel 82845 graphics wasn't installed. Videos are showing frame by frame. Many says ubuntu kernel has built in support for it. but seems it is not. There is a website www.intellinuxgraphics.org has drivers for many kinds of linux distributions. But I find it difficult how to install them on my lubuntu. Can anyone elabroate on how that can be installed ? Output of the command dmesg http://paste.ubuntu.com/1058720/ Output of the command lsmod http://paste.ubuntu.com/1058724/

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• Display launcher over a GNOME panel (instead of under)

  - by Greg Treleaven

  I've set up my desktop so that I have a classic style gnome-panel at the bottom to show my active applications with a main menu button on the side. The problem is that the panel stretches across the whole width of the screen and over the launcher, making it difficult to access the icons at the bottom. I could untick the expand option in the panel's properties, but there's no way to resize it so it takes up the rest of the right part of the screen, which is what I want. And if enough applications are open it stretches all the way anyway. I don't want to auto-hide it either. What I'd like to do is make the launcher go over the top of the panel so I can fully access both the launcher and the panel at the same time. If it's possible, how do I do this?

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• Techniques and methods to improve and speedup development

  - by Jlouro

  I just got a new project. It’s a WinForm app. And it’s interesting because I will have the possibility to learn how fish farms work and are managed. I will have to develop touch interfaces, and use datasnap to communicate and sync data between farm and office. The development will be done in DELPHI win32, still not sure about the database, but maybe SQLlite. So now comes the difficult part of the project, building it. I am just finishing one. It took me a lot of time to do it and I am a bit “burned out”. I will have time to relax, not much, but a few days. What I am looking is some tips and tricks and possibly tools to be able to speed up the development. It must be up and running in 2 months. So what tricks do you use to speed up things?

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• Balancing Player vs. Monsters: Level-Up Curves

  - by ashes999

  I've written a fair number of games that have RPG-like "levelling up," where the player gains experience for killing monsters/enemies, and eventually, reaches a new level, where their stats increase. How do you find a balance between player growth, monster strength, and difficulty? The extreme ends of this spectrum are: Player levels up really fast and blows away monsters without much effort Monsters are incredibly strong and even at low levels, are very difficult to beat I've also tried a strange situation of making enemies relative to players, i.e. an enemy will always be at 50% or 100% or 150% of player stats (thus requiring the player to use other techniques instead of brute strength to succeeed). But where's the balance, and how do you find it? Edit: For example, I am expecting to hear things like: Balance high instead of balance low (200 HP and 20 str is easier to balance than 20 HP and 2 str) Look at easiest vs. hardest monsters, and see what you have in terms of a range

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• How do you forcibly unmount a disk when you press the eject button on an optical drive?

  - by Michael Curran

  When upgrading my hardware, I also upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10. On my previous system (with 10.04 and earlier) when I ejected a disk from the optical drive, the subfolder in the /media directory was automatically removed. In my new 10.10 system, if I don't eject the disk using the "eject" command within the system, the disk remains mounted, even after a new disk is installed. The new drive is a Blu Ray drive, but I haven't noticed any other problems from it. Normally, this isn't a problem, but it makes installing applications that are spread over multiple CDs more difficult in many cases (i.e. Wine). Any advice?

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• Serious Forum Design Issue

  - by John

  I want to launch a school forum for a country. I'm in dilemma as to how to design this forum. Country will have many states, each state will have cities, each city will have many schools. Each school will have many classes( 1st - 12th). It looks like this: States - Cities - Schools - Classes I want to make each class as forum. Now the biggest problems are two fold: If I were to list even 1000 schools it will create huge number of forums and I don't think forum softwares(PHPBB, MyBB) are designed to support these many Secondly creating and maintaining huge forums is also very difficult. Ideally I'd like to duplicate existing forum hierarchy to new one. I've done lot of search and I've found that such type of forums are infeasible and such designs don't work. Leave alone the fact the nobody uses such a forum. Keeping in mind this, how should I go about designing this forum?

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• React to a modified directory

  - by Ghanshyam Rathod

  In linux everything is considered as file, Now if I want to find only folders/directories not the files then how can i do that? I am getting all the modified files with the following command. find /Users/ghanshyam -type f -mmin -5 -print My goal is to generate the log file with all the modified/access folders. Here two options are available. create a module and call every time when a folder is modified (this one is bit difficult because I need to check particular event) create a cron task that will run after every 5 minutes. cron task will execute shell script and generate the log entries with the modified folders. Do you have any other option to do this task ?

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• Top 10 Transact-SQL Statements a SQL Server DBA Should Know

  Microsoft SQL Server is a feature rich database management system product, with an enormous number of T-SQL commands. With each feature supporting its own list of commands, it can be difficult to remember them all. MAK shares his top 10 T-SQL statements that a DBA should know. Join SQL Backup’s 35,000+ customers to compress and strengthen your backups "SQL Backup will be a REAL boost to any DBA lucky enough to use it." Jonathan Allen. Download a free trial now.

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