Search Results

Search found 21436 results on 858 pages for 'draw order'.

Page 288/858 | < Previous Page | 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295  | Next Page >

• A developer&rsquo;s WBS &ndash; 3 factors of 5

  - by johndoucette

  As a development manager, I have requested work breakdown structures (WBS) many times from the dev leads. Everyone has their own approach and why it takes sometimes days to get this simple list is often frustrating. Here is a simple way to get that elusive WBS done in 30 minutes and have 125 items in your list – well, 126. The WBS is made up of parent-child entities representing the overall outcome of the project. At the bottom of the hierarchical list should be the task item that a developer would perform in support of the branch in the list or WBS. Because I work with different dev leads on every project, I always ask the “what time value would you like to see at the lowest task in order to assign it to a developer and ensure it gets done within the timeframe”. I am particular to a task being 8 hours. Some like 8 to 24 hours. Stay away from tasks defaulting to 1 week. The task becomes way to vague and hard to manage completeness, especially on short budgets. As a developer, your focus is identifying the tasks you to accomplish in order to deliver the product. As a project manager, you will take the developer's WBS and add all the “other stuff” like quality testing, meetings, documentation, transition to maintenance, etc… Start your exercise with the name of the product you are delivering as a result of the project. You should be able to represent what you are building and deploying with one to three words. Example; XYZ Public Website Middleware BizTalk Application The reason you start with that single identifier is to always see the list as the product. It helps during each of the next three passes. Now, choose 5 tasks which in their entirety represent the product you will be delivering and add them to list under the product name you created earlier; Public Website     Security     Sites     Infrastructure     Publishing     Creative Continue this concept of seeing the list as the complete picture and decompose it one more level. You should have 25 items. Public Website     Security         Authentication         Login Control         Administration         DRM         Workflow     Sites         Masterpages         Page Layouts         Web Parts (RIA, Multimedia)         Content Types         Structures     Infrastructure         ...     Publishing         ...     Creative         ... And one more time for a total of 125 items. The top item makes the list 126. Public Website     Security         Authentication             Install (AD/ADAM/LDAP/SQL)             Configuration             Management             Web App Configuration             Implement Provider         Login Control             Login Form             Login/Logoff             pw change             pw recover/forgot             email verification         Administration             ...         DRM             ...         Workflow             ...     Sites         Masterpages         Page Layouts         Web Parts (RIA, Multimedia)         Content Types         Structures     Infrastructure         ...     Publishing         ...     Creative         ... The next step is to make sure the task at the bottom of every branch represents the “time value” you planned for the project. You can add more to the WBS and of course if you can’t find 5 items, 4 is fine. If a task can be done in a fraction of the time value you determined for the project, try to roll it up into a larger task. In the task actions (later when the iteration is being planned), decompose the details back to the simple tasks. Now, go estimate!

  Read the article

• How can I pass an external instance to the constructor of an object that's being created using the default XNA XML content loader?

  - by Michael

  I'm trying to understand how to use the XNA XML content importer to instantiate non-trivial objects that are more than a collection of basic properties (e.g., a class that inherits from DrawableGameObject or GameObject and requires other things to be passed into its constructor). Is it possible to pass existing external instances (e.g., an instance of the current Game) to the constructor of an object that's being created using the default XNA XML content loader? For example, imagine that I have the following class, inheriting from DrawableGameComponent: public class Character : DrawableGameComponent { public string Name { get; set; } public Character(Game game) : base(game) { } public override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { } public override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { } } If I had a simple class that did not need other parameters in its constructor (i.e., the Game instance), then I could simply use this XML: <XnaContent> <Asset Type="MyNamespace.Character"> <Name>John Doe</Name> </Asset> </XnaContent> ...and then create an instance of Character using this code: var character = Content.Load<Character>("MyXmlAssetName"); But that won't work because I need to pass the need to pass the Game into the constructor. What's the best way to handle this situation? Is there a way to pass in things like the current Game using the default XNA XML content loader? Do I need to write my own XML loader? (If so, how?) Is there a better object-oriented design that I should be using for my classes? Note: Although I used Game in this example, I'm really just asking how to pass any type of existing instance to my constructors. (For example, I'm using the Farseer Physics Engine, and some of my classes also need a reference to the Farseer World object too.) Thanks in advance.

  Read the article

• Limiting the speed of the mouse cursor

  - by idlewire

  I am working on a simple game where you can drag objects around with the mouse cursor. As I drag the object around quickly, I notice there is some juddering, which seems to be due to the fact that I can move the mouse cursor faster than the game's update/draw. So, although I maintain the offset from where the player initially clicked on the object, the mouse's relative position to the object shifts around slightly before settling as I move the object very quickly. The only way I have found to get smooth, exact 1:1 movement is if I turn both IsFixedTimeStep and SynchronizeWithVerticalRetrace to false. However, I'd rather not have to do that. I have also tried making a custom mouse cursor, hiding the real mouse, taking the real mouse delta and clamping it to a maximum speed. Here is the problem: In windowed mode, the "real" mouse cursor moves off the window while the custom mouse cursor (since it's movement is being scaled) is still somewhere inside the game window. This becomes bizarre and is obviously not desired, as clicking at this point means clicking on things outside the game window. Is there any way to accomplish this in windowed mode? In fullscreen mode, the "real" mouse cursor is bounded to the edges of the screen. So I get to a point where there is no more mouse delta, yet my custom cursor is still somewhere in the middle of the screen and hence can't move further in that direction. If I wanted to clamp it to the edge of the screen when the real cursor is at the edge, then I would get an abrupt jump to the edge of the screen, which isn't desired either Any help would be appreciated. I'd like to be able to limit the speed of the mouse, but also would appreciate help with the first issue (the non-smooth relative offset between mouse cursor movement and object movement).

  Read the article

• RemoveHandler Issues with Custom Events

  - by Jeff Certain

  This is a case of things being more complicated that I thought they should be. Since it took a while to figure this one out, I thought it was worth explaining and putting all of the pieces to the answer in one spot. Let me set the stage. Architecturally, I have the notion of generic producers and consumers. These put items onto, and remove items from, a queue. This provides a generic, thread-safe mechanism to load balance the creation and processing of work items in our application. Part of the IProducer(Of T) interface is: 1: Public Interface IProducer(Of T) 2: Event ItemProduced(ByVal sender As IProducer(Of T), ByVal item As T) 3: Event ProductionComplete(ByVal sender As IProducer(Of T)) 4: End Interface Nothing sinister there, is there? In order to simplify our developers’ lives, I wrapped the queue with some functionality to manage the produces and consumers. Since the developer can specify the number of producers and consumers that are spun up, the queue code manages adding event handlers as the producers and consumers are instantiated. Now, we’ve been having some memory leaks and, in order to eliminate the possibility that this was caused by weak references to event handles, I wanted to remove them. This is where it got dicey. My first attempt looked like this: 1: For Each producer As P In Producers 2: RemoveHandler producer.ItemProduced, AddressOf ItemProducedHandler 3: RemoveHandler producer.ProductionComplete, AddressOf ProductionCompleteHandler 4: producer.Dispose() 5: Next What you can’t see in my posted code are the warnings this caused. The 'AddressOf' expression has no effect in this context because the method argument to 'AddressOf' requires a relaxed conversion to the delegate type of the event. Assign the 'AddressOf' expression to a variable, and use the variable to add or remove the method as the handler.  Now, what on earth does that mean? Well, a quick Bing search uncovered a whole bunch of talk about delegates. The first solution I found just changed all parameters in the event handler to Object. Sorry, but no. I used generics precisely because I wanted type safety, not because I wanted to use Object. More searching. Eventually, I found this forum post, where Jeff Shan revealed a missing piece of the puzzle. The other revelation came from Lian_ZA in this post. However, these two only hinted at the solution. Trying some of what they suggested led to finally getting an invalid cast exception that revealed the existence of ItemProducedEventHandler. Hold on a minute! I didn’t create that delegate. There’s nothing even close to that name in my code… except the ItemProduced event in the interface. Could it be? Naaaaah. Hmmm…. Well, as it turns out, there is a delegate created by the compiler for each event. By explicitly creating a delegate that refers to the method in question, implicitly cast to the generated delegate type, I was able to remove the handlers: 1: For Each producer As P In Producers 2: Dim _itemProducedHandler As IProducer(Of T).ItemProducedEventHandler = AddressOf ItemProducedHandler 3: RemoveHandler producer.ItemProduced, _itemProducedHandler 4:  5: Dim _productionCompleteHandler As IProducer(Of T).ProductionCompleteEventHandler = AddressOf ProductionCompleteHandler 6: RemoveHandler producer.ProductionComplete, _productionCompleteHandler 7: producer.Dispose() 8: Next That’s “all” it took to finally be able to remove the event handlers and maintain type-safe code. Hopefully, this will save you the same challenges I had in trying to figure out how to fix this issue!

  Read the article

• Creating a voxel world with 3D arrays using threads

  - by Sean M.

  I am making a voxel game (a bit like Minecraft) in C++(11), and I've come across an issue with creating a world efficiently. In my program, I have a World class, which holds a 3D array of Region class pointers. When I initialize the world, I give it a width, height, and depth so it knows how large of a world to create. Each Region is split up into a 32x32x32 area of blocks, so as you may guess, it takes a while to initialize the world once the world gets to be above 8x4x8 Regions. In order to alleviate this issue, I thought that using threads to generate different levels of the world concurrently would make it go faster. Having not used threads much before this, and being still relatively new to C++, I'm not entirely sure how to go about implementing one thread per level (level being a xz plane with a height of 1), when there is a variable number of levels. I tried this: for(int i = 0; i < height; i++) { std::thread th(std::bind(&World::load, this, width, height, depth)); th.join(); } Where load() just loads all Regions at height "height". But that executes the threads one at a time (which makes sense, looking back), and that of course takes as long as generating all Regions in one loop. I then tried: std::thread t1(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h1, h2 - 1, d)); std::thread t2(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h2, h3 - 1, d)); std::thread t3(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h3, h4 - 1, d)); std::thread t4(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h4, h - 1, d)); t1.join(); t2.join(); t3.join(); t4.join(); This works in that the world loads about 3-3.5 times faster, but this forces the height to be a multiple of 4, and it also gives the same exact VAO object to every single Region, which need individual VAOs in order to render properly. The VAO of each Region is set in the constructor, so I'm assuming that somehow the VAO number is not thread safe or something (again, unfamiliar with threads). So basically, my question is two one-part: How to I implement a variable number of threads that all execute at the same time, and force the main thread to wait for them using join() without stopping the other threads? How do I make the VAO objects thread safe, so when a bunch of Regions are being created at the same time across multiple threads, they don't all get the exact same VAO? Turns out it has to do with GL contexts not working across multiple threads. I moved the VAO/VBO creation back to the main thread. Fixed! Here is the code for block.h/.cpp, region.h/.cpp, and CVBObject.h/.cpp which controls VBOs and VAOs, in case you need it. If you need to see anything else just ask. EDIT: Also, I'd prefer not to have answers that are like "you should have used boost". I'm trying to do this without boost to get used to threads before moving onto other libraries.

  Read the article

• Best approach to depth streaming via existing codec

  - by Kevin

  I'm working on a development system (and game) intended for games set mostly in static third-person views. We produce our scenery by CG and photographic techniques. Our background art is rendered off-line by a production-grade renderer. To allow the runtime imagery to properly interact with the background art, I wrote a program to convert from depth output by Mental Ray into a texture, and a pixel shader to draw a quad such that the Z data comes from the texture. This technique is working out very well, but now we've decided that some of the camera angle changes between scenes should be animated. The animation itself is straightforward to produce from our CG models. We intend to encode it to some HD video codec such as H.264. The problem is that in order to maintain our runtime imagery on the screen, the depth buffer will need to be loaded for each video frame. Due to the bandwidth, the video's depth data will need to be compressed efficiently. I've looked into methods for performing temporal compression of depth info and found an interesting research paper here: http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.kautz/publications/depth-streaming.pdf The method establishes a mapping between 16-bit depth values and YCbCr values. The mapping is tuned to the properties of existing video codecs in order to maximize precision of the decoded depths after the YCbCr has undergone video compression. It allows an existing, unmodified video codec to be used on the backend. I'm looking at how to pull this off with the least possible work. (This design change was unplanned.) Our game engine itself is native C++, presently for Win32 and DirectX, although we've worked hard to keep platform dependence segregated because we intend other ports. We don't have motion video facilities in the engine yet but will ultimately need that anyway for cinematics. I was planning on using some off-the-shelf motion video solution we can plug into our engine, and haven't chosen one yet. This new added requirement makes selecting one harder since, among other things, we'll now need to bypass colourspace conversion on one of the streams, and also will need to be playing two streams simultaneously in lockstep, on top of in some cases audio on one of them (for the cinematics). I'm also wondering if it's possible (or even useful) to do the conversion from YCbCr to depth in a pixel shader, or if it's better to just do it in CPU and separately load the resulting depth values into a locked tex. The conversion unfortunately does involve branching logic per-pixel. (There are more naive mappings that don't need branching, but they produce inferior results.) It could be reduced to a table lookup but the table would be 32MB. Programming is second-nature to me but I'm not that experienced with pix shaders and have zero knowledge of off-the-shelf video solutions. I'd therefore be interested in advice from others who may have dealt more with depth streaming, pixel shaders, and/or off-the-shelf codecs, regarding how feasible the proposed application is and what off-the-shelf video systems out there would best get along with this usage case.

  Read the article

• How exactly to implement multiple threads in a game

  - by xerwin

  So I recently started learning Java, and having a interest in playing games as well as developing them, naturally I want to create game in Java. I have experience with games in C# and C++ but all of them were single-threaded simple games. But now, I learned how easy it is to make threads in Java, I want to take things to the next level. I started thinking about how would I actually implement threading in a game. I read couple of articles that say the same thing "Usually you have thread for rendering, for updating game logic, for AI, ..." but I haven't (or didn't look hard enough) found example of implementation. My idea how to make implementation is something like this (example for AI) public class AIThread implements Runnable{ private List<AI> ai; private Player player; /*...*/ public void run() { for (int i = 0; i < ai.size(); i++){ ai.get(i).update(player); } Thread.sleep(/* sleep until the next game "tick" */); } } I think this could work. If I also had a rendering and updating thread list of AI in both those threads, since I need to draw the AI and I need to calculate the logic between player and AI(But that could be moved to AIThread, but as an example) . Coming from C++ I'm used to do thing elegantly and efficiently, and this seems like neither of those. So what would be the correct way to handle this? Should I just keep multiple copies of resources in each thread or should I have the resources on one spot, declared with synchronized keyword? I'm afraid that could cause deadlocks, but I'm not yet qualified enough to know when a code will produce deadlock.

  Read the article

• Storing data offline with javascript

  - by Walker

  My question is about storing data offline and potentially whether I will need to bring in an outside programmer or could this be learned within a few weeks? The website I am working on will have an interface where users will login and go through a series of quizzes in the form of checkbox, drop down menus, and others. Each page/quiz area could have 20-100 total checkboxes in a series of 3-5 rows because of the comprehensive nature of course. This I can do - I know how to code the quiz and return a correct or incorrect answer based on each individual checkbox and present a cumulative score (ie: you got 57% correct). The issue lies in the fact that I would like to save the users results and keep them informed of their progress. When they complete all of the quizzes, I would like to have a visual output of their performance in each area. Storing the output from their results offline is where I think I may run into a problem with my lack of coding experience. I would also like to have a sidebar with their progress of each section (10-15) with a green percentage completion bar or a % correct which would draw from this. I have never had to code something that stores information like this offline - so back to my question - would it be better to learn the language needed or bring in a coder/developer for the back end stuff.

  Read the article

• Advantage of Software Development [on hold]

  - by user93319

  The worth of a brand that a corporation carries is way too high than its physical presence. If you are venturing into an online business, you need to take special care about the corporate image of your business. Nowadays, it is very important for every organization to have its own website. To enhance the online presence of a company it is important to have a good website design as well as the blueprint of the design. A quality site can enhance organizational growth and it can lend a hand an in achieving company’s goals promptly. When websites have gained so much meaning, it is advisable for an organization to seek professional support for the construction of its own exclusive portals. Expert help may again is essential when one needs for a complete renovation on the Web. Any group is necessary to do a bit of introspection before it make a decision to look for the services of a professional web software development company. It is good to be completely clear-headed regarding one’s requirements. To start with, a business should be familiar with who its potential clientele are. Once this main factor has been give consideration, an association can go ahead and get its website designed accordingly. On approaching a corporation that offers software development services India to its customers, a client can make sure that their site is ready with all the most up-to-date features. Professional Assistance Matters Professional service supplier is identified to furnish a site with easy to use features that prompt visitors to come back again and again. Yet one more benefit of receiving aid from professionals is that they can let you know of the type of content that you should place on display over your site. For example, a business that wants to draw the interest of experts belong to the corporate world must make sure that the language used on its website is crisp and official.

  Read the article

• Particle trajectory smoothing: where to do the simulation?

  - by nkint

  I have a particle system in which I have particles that are moving to a target and the new targets are received via network. The list of new target are some noisy coordinates of a moving target stored in the server that I want to smooth in the client. For doing the smoothing and the particle I wrote a simple particle engine with standard euler integration model. So, my pseudo code is something like that: # pseudo code class Particle: def update(): # do euler motion model integration: # if the distance to the target is more than a limit # add a new force to the accelleration # seeking the target, # and add the accelleration to velocity # and velocity to the position positionHistory.push_back(position); if history.length > historySize : history.pop_front() class ParticleEngine: particleById = dict() # an associative array # where the keys are the id # and particle istances are sotred as values # this method is called each time a new tcp packet is received and parsed def setNetTarget(int id, Vec2D new_target): particleById[id].setNewTarget(new_target) # this method is called each new frame def draw(): for p in particleById.values: p.update() beginVertex(LINE_STRIP) for v in p.positionHistory: vertex(v.x, v.y) endVertex() The new target that are arriving are noisy but setting some accelleration/velocity parameters let the particle to have a smoothed trajectories. But if a particle trajectory is a circle after a while the particle position converge to the center (a normal behaviour of euler integration model). So I decided to change the simulation and use some other interpolation (spline?) or smooth method (kalman filter?) between the targets. Something like: switch( INTERPOLATION_MODEL ): case EULER_MOTION: ... case HERMITE_INTERPOLATION: ... case SPLINE_INTERPOLATION: ... case KALMAN_FILTER_SMOOTHING: ... Now my question: where to write the motion simulation / trajectory interpolation? In the Particle? So I will have some Particle subclass like ParticleEuler, ParticleSpline, ParticleKalman, etc..? Or in the particle engine?

  Read the article

• Will people respect a Masters of Science in IT w/software engineering concentration from RPI?

  - by twneale

  Here's my thing: I got my undergraduate degree in political science, then a law degree. Then I figured out that I love programming and I'm pretty good at it too. It's fun and rewarding enough for me that I'd prefer to do it for a living over almost any form of pure law practice. So I'm looking at getting a masters degree to put some weight behind a possible career switch. If I actually want to develop software (web, in particular), would people in programming circles respect a master's of science in IT? Specifically, consider as an example the MS in IT from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (with a concentration in software engineering). Here's the home page: http://www.rpi.edu/IT/graduate/masters_program.html In particular, I mean to draw a contrast between IT as specifically contemplated by the RPI masters program (an interdisciplinary tech/business program) and other MS degrees in computer science or software engineering that focus more on the science and technical aspects. I guess I want to make sure that other programmers would respect my credentials and not consider me as different or underqualified based on the connotations of the phrase "IT". I believe RPI has an unimpeachable reputation for hard science, and the program seems excellent, but it still matters to me how people in industry would perceive it.

  Read the article

• How to achieve selection of a tile from a tile sheet based on an ID?

  - by Bugster

  Let's say I have a tile sheet that contains 8 sprites per sheet. Each sprite is a tile of 30x30. I wrote my own custom map parser/map loader however I'm having trouble extracting a certain tile sprite from the file. I'll describe my problem better in order for everyone to understand. I wrote an enum of materials, each material has a value according to it's location relative to the tile sheet. For example void is 1, grass is 2, rock is 3, etc. So in my tile sheet they are represented as such: +---+---+---+---+---+ | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | +---+---+---+---+---+ Which is equivalent to: +------+-------+-------+ | void | grass | stone | +------+-------+-------+ Basically when rendering, I created a tile class, each tile has 2 coordinates: X and Y (They are calculated automatically) and a material which can be represented either as a number, either as a value (ID). When rendering, I have a vector of sprites which are all taken from 1 file called tilesheet.png, however each of them must only draw a certain portion of the tile sheet, for example say I have something like this: tile coordinateBounds(topLeftX, topLeftY, tileWidth, tileHeight); During the initialization of the map I calculate an array of tiles, and I give each of them their position, their materials based on the values in a map file and a few other variables such as collision. I need to apply the coordinateBounds to each of them according to their material value. For example if the material is grass it should only take the grass sprite from the tilesheet. I must also mention I'm using SFML, and there are no borders or spacing between the tiles.

  Read the article

• Android 2D terrain scrolling

  - by Nikola Ninkovic

  I want to make infinite 2D terrain based on my algorithm.Then I want to move it along Y axis (to the left) This is how I did it : public class Terrain { Queue<Integer> _bottom; Paint _paint; Bitmap _texture; Point _screen; int _numberOfColumns = 100; int _columnWidth = 20; public Terrain(int screenWidth, int screenHeight, Bitmap texture) { _bottom = new LinkedList<Integer>(); _screen = new Point(screenWidth, screenHeight); _numberOfColumns = screenWidth / 6; _columnWidth = screenWidth / _numberOfColumns; for(int i=0;i<=_numberOfColumns;i++) { // Generate terrain point and put it into _bottom queue } _paint = new Paint(); _paint.setStyle(Paint.Style.FILL); _paint.setShader(new BitmapShader(texture, Shader.TileMode.REPEAT, Shader.TileMode.REPEAT)); } public void update() { _bottom.remove(); // Algorithm calculates next point _bottom.add(nextPoint); } public void draw(Canvas canvas) { Iterator<Integer> i = _bottom.iterator(); int counter = 0; Path path = new Path(); path.moveTo(0, _screen.y); while (i.hasNext()) { path.lineTo(counter, _screen.y-i.next()); counter += _columnWidth; } path.lineTo(_screen.x, _screen.y); path.lineTo(0, _screen.y); canvas.drawPath(path2, _paint); } } The problem is that the game is too 'fast', so I tried with pausing thread with Thread.sleep(50); in run() method of my game thread but then it looks too torn. Well, is there any way to slow down drawing of my terrain ?

  Read the article

• Is using a dedicated thread just for sending gpu commands a good idea?

  - by tigrou

  The most basic game loop is like this : while(1) { update(); draw(); swapbuffers(); } This is very simple but have a problem : some drawing commands can be blocking and cpu will wait while he could do other things (like processing next update() call). Another possible solution i have in mind would be to use two threads : one for updating and preparing commands to be sent to gpu, and one for sending these commands to the gpu : //first thread while(1) { update(); render(); // use gamestate to generate all needed triangles and commands for gpu // put them in a buffer, no command is send to gpu // two buffers will be used, see below pulse(); //signal the other thread data is ready } //second thread while(1) { wait(); // wait for second thread for data to come send_data_togpu(); // send prepared commands from buffer to graphic card swapbuffers(); } also : two buffers would be used, so one buffer could be filled with gpu commands while the other would be processed by gpu. Do you thing such a solution would be effective ? What would be advantages and disadvantages of such a solution (especially against a simpler solution (eg : single threaded with triple buffering enabled) ?

  Read the article

• What is a good design pattern / lib for iOS 5 to synchronize with a web service?

  - by Junto

  We are developing an iOS application that needs to synchronize with a remote server using web services. The existing web services have an "operations" style rather than REST (implemented in WCF but exposing JSON HTTP endpoints). We are unsure of how to structure the web services to best fit with iOS and would love some advice. We are also interested in how to manage the synchronization process within iOS. Without going into detailed specifics, the application allows the user to estimate repair costs at a remote site. These costs are broken down by room and item. If the user has an internet connection this data can be sent back to the server. Multiple photographs can be taken of each item, but they will be held in a separate queue, which sends when the connection is optimal (ideally wifi). Our backend application controls the unique ids for each room and item. Thus, each time we send these costs to the server, the server echoes the central database ids back, thus, that they can be synchronized in the mobile app. I have simplified this a little, since the operations contract is actually much larger, but I just want to illustrate the basic requirements without complicating matters. Firstly, the web service architecture: We currently have two operations: GetCosts and UpdateCosts. My assumption is that if we used a strict REST architecture we would need to break our single web service operations into multiple smaller services. This would make the services much more chatty and we would also have to guarantee a delivery order from the app. For example, we need to make sure that containing rooms are added before the item. Although this seems much more RESTful, our perception is that these extra calls are expensive connections (security checks, database calls, etc). Does the type of web api (operation over service focus) determine chunky vs chatty? Since this is mobile (3G), are we better handling lots of smaller messages, or a few large ones? Secondly, the iOS side. What is the current advice on how to manage data synchronization within the iOS (5) app itself. We need multiple queues and we need to guarantee delivery order in each queue (and technically, ordering between queues). The server needs to control unique ids and other properties and echo them back to the application. The application then needs to update an internal database and when re-updating, make sure the correct ids are available in the update message (essentially multiple inserts and updates in one call). Our backend has a ton of business logic operating on these cost estimates. We don't want any of this in the app itself. Currently the iOS app sends the cost data, and then the server echoes that data back with populated ids (and other data). The existing cost data is deleted and the echoed response data is added to the client database on the device. This is causing us problems, because any photos might not have been sent, but the original entity tree has been removed and replaced. Obviously updating the costs tree rather than replacing it would remove this problem, but I'm not sure if there are any nice xcode libraries out there to do such things. I welcome any advice you might have.

  Read the article

• How do you deal with poor management [closed]

  - by Sybiam

  I come from a company where during a project, we saw the client 3 time during the whole project. We were never informed when did the client came in office in order to discuss with him about his requirements. I did setup redmine and told them that if they have any request they can post an issue there. But they never really used redmine to publish anything. They would instead: harass a team member on the phone at any time of the day or night hand us over sheets of paper with new requests or changes hand us over new design (graphical) They requested how much time it would take us to finish the project, I gave them a date and a week to test everything and deployment. I calculated that time taking into account the current features we had to do. And then blamed us that our deadline was wrong and that we lied. But the truth is that one week before that deadline they added a couple of monster feature from nowhere and that week were we were supposed to test and deploy, my friends spent all day in the office changing all little things. After that project, my friend got some kind of depression and got scared everytime his phone rang. They kind of used him as a communication proxy. After that project of hell, (every body got pissed off on that project) as far as I know the designer who was working with us left work after that project and she had some kind of issue too with managers. My team also started looking for work somewhere else. At first I tried to get things straight with management, I tried to make a meeting to discuss about the communication issues and so on.. What really pissed me off and made me leave that job for good is the following. Me: "We have to discuss about what went wrong on the last project. It's quite important" Him: "Lets talk about it in a week or two. Just make a list of all the things you did wrong" Me: "We already have a new project and we want to prevent what happened on the last project to happen again" Him: "Just do it and well have our meeting in a week, make a list of all the thing you did wrong." It kind of ended there then he organized a meeting at a moment I wasn't unable to come. My friend discussed with him and tried to explained him that we really had to discuss about organization issue on how to manage a project. And his answer was pretty much: "During the meeting I don't want to ear how you want to us to manage a project but I want to know what you guys did wrong" After that I felt it wasn't even worth it discussing anything since they weren't even ready listening to us. Found a new job and I'm pretty happy with my choice. I'd like to know how you'd handle such situation. Is there anything to do to solve communication problem? After that project my friend got a depression and some other employee had their down too as far as I know. I wonder what else we can do other than leave these place as soon as possible. Feel sad for the people that are still there and get screamed at just because they need money in order to eat and finding an other job like that isn't that easy. note I died a little when our boss asked us to make a list of things we (programmers) did wrong. This is probably the stupidest request I ever got. If everybody thinks they did everything right, it doesn't mean that there is no problems. Individual problem are rarely the big issue. Colleagues help each others and solve theses issues to prevent problems.

  Read the article

• Correct architecture for running and stopping complex tasks in the background

  - by Phonon

  I'm having trouble working out the correct architecture for the following task. I have a GUI in Windows Forms that contains a ListBox, listing certain architectural layouts. One an item in this list is selected, a custom Control displays an interactive visualization of the selected layout. Drawing of this interactive diagram is a CPU-intensive task, and can take up to a second on my machine. The kind of functionality I'm trying to achieve is that if a user wants to quickly scroll through the layouts in the ListBox (say, holding down the down arrow key), I don't want my computer to sit there thinking about how to draw the layout before it allows the user to do anything else. The obvious answer is, of course, to run the layout calculations in a separate thread. But how do I make that thread return a whole control? How do I make sure I'm not running two layout calculations at once? I'm fairly new to this complex GUI business. So the real question is what is the right architecture to implement something like this? This seems like something people do all the time, but finding any suggestions on how to do it properly is really difficult.

  Read the article

• Horse Drawn Fiber Optics Bring Broadband to Remote Areas

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  When you think of fiber optics and high speed internet the last thing you likely think of is… horses. Yet horses have been put to use rolling out fiber optics to remote rural locations. In Vermont a Belgium draft horse named Fred, seen in the photo above being tended by his handler Claude, is a distinctly 19th century solution to a 21st century problem; how to run fiber optic cable through remote areas where trucks cannot easily pass. The man and animal are indispensable to cable and phone-service provider FairPoint Communications because they easily can access hard-to-reach job sites along country roads, which bulky utility trucks often cannot. “It just saves so much work – it would take probably 15 guys to do what Fred and Claude can do,” said Paul Clancy, foreman of a line crew from FairPoint. “They can pull 5,000 feet of cable with no sweat.” You can read more about the use of draft horses to draw lines and the roll out of broadband to rural Vermont at the link below. Vermont Uses Draft Horse to Lay Cables for Internet Access [Reuters] How To Encrypt Your Cloud-Based Drive with BoxcryptorHTG Explains: Photography with Film-Based CamerasHow to Clean Your Dirty Smartphone (Without Breaking Something)

  Read the article

• The clock problem - to if or not to if?

  - by trejder

  Let's say, we have a simple digital clock. To "power" it, we use a routine executed every second. We update seconds part in it. But, what about minutes and hours part? What is better / more professional / offers better performance: Ignore all checking and update hour, minute and seconds part each time, every second. Use if + a variable for checking, if 60 (or 3600) seconds passed and update minute / hour part only at that precise moments. This leads us to a question, what is better -- unnecessary drawings (first approach) or extra ifs? I've just spotted a Javascript digital clock, one of millions similar on one of billions pages. And I noticed that all three parts (hours, minutes and seconds) are updated every second, though first changes its value only once per 3600 seconds and second once per 60 seconds. I'm not to experienced developer, so I might me wrong. But everything, what I've learnt up until now, tells me, that if are far better then executing drawing / refreshing sequences only to draw the same content.

  Read the article

• Problem with alleg42.dll / program crashes / Allegro & Codeblocks

  - by user24152

  I'm having a serious problem with allegro. The program should display random pixels on the screen and when I build and run it I get the following error message: Below is the full code of my program: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <time.h> #include "allegro.h" #define Text_Color_Red makecol(255,0,0) int main() { int ret; int color_depth = 32; int x; int y; int red; int green; int blue; int color; //init allegro allegro_init(); //install keyboard install_keyboard(); //set color depth to 32 bits set_color_depth(color_depth); //init random seed srand(time(NULL)); //init video mode to 640 x 480 ret = set_gfx_mode(GFX_AUTODETECT_WINDOWED,640,480,0,0); if(ret !=0) { allegro_message(allegro_error); return 1; } //Display string textprintf(screen,font,0,0,10,0,Text_Color_Red,"Screen Resolution is: %dx%d -- Press ESC to quit !",SCREEN_W,SCREEN_H); //display pixels until ESC key is pressed //wait for keypress while(!key[KEY_ESC]) { //set a random location x = 10 + rand() % (SCREEN_W-20); y = 10 + rand() % (SCREEN_H-20); //set a random color red = rand() % 255; green = rand() % 255; blue = rand() % 255; color = makecol(red,green,blue); //draw the pixel putpixel(screen, x, y, color); } //quit allegro allegro_exit(); } END_OF_MAIN() Error message: AllegroPixels1.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Error signature: AppName: allegropixels1.exe AppVer: 0.0.0.0 ModName: alleg42.dll ModVer: 4.2.3.0 Offset: 0006c05c I am using Windows XP inside a virtual machine under Parallels 7.0

  Read the article

• Octrees and Vertex Buffer Objects

  - by sharethis

  As many others I want to code a game with a voxel based terrain. The data is represented by voxels which are rendered using triangles. I head of two different approaches and want to combine them. First, I could once divide the space in chunks of a fixed size like many games do. What I could do now is to generate a polygon shape for each chunk and store that in a vertex buffer object (vbo). Each time a voxel changes, the polygon and vbo of its chunk is recreated. Additionally it is easy to dynamically load and reload parts of the terrain. Another approach would be to use octrees and divide the space in eight cubes which are divided again and again. So I could efficiently render the terrain because I don't have to go deeper in a solid cube and can draw that as a single one (with a repeated texture). What I like to use for my game is an octree datastructure. But I can't imagine how to use vbos with that. How is that done, or is this impossible?

  Read the article

• How to sync client and server at the first frame

  - by wheelinlight

  I'm making a game where an authoritative server sends information to all clients about states and positions for objects in a 3d world. The player can control his character by clicking on the screen to set a destination for the character, much like in the Diablo series. I've read most information I can find online about interpolation, reconciliation, and general networking architecture (Valve's for instance). I think I understand everything but one thing seems to be missing in every article I read. Let say we have an interpolation delay of 100ms, server tickrate=50ms, latency=200ms; How do I know when 100ms has past on the client? If the server sends the first update on t=0, can I assume it arrives at t=200, therefore assuming that all packets takes the same amount of time to reach the client? What if the first packet arrives a little quick, for instance at t=150. I would then be starting the client with t=150 and at t=250 it will think it has past 100ms since its connect to the server when it in fact only 50ms has past. Hopefully the above paragraph is understandable. The summarized question would be: How do I know at what tick to start simulating the client? EDIT: This is how I ended up doing it: The client keeps a clock (approximately) in sync with the server. The client then simulates the world at simulationTime = syncedTime - avg(RTT)/2 - interpolationTime The round-trip time can fluctuate so therefore I average it out over time. By only keeping the most recent values when calculating the average I hope to adapt to more permanent changes in latency. It's still to early to draw any conclusion. I'm currently simulating bad network connections, but it's looking good so far. Anyone see any possible problems?

  Read the article

• What is the standard technique for shifting the frames of a sprite according to user input?

  - by virtual__

  From my own experience, I developed two techniques for changing the sprites of a character that's reacting to user input -- this in the context of a classic 2D platformer. The first one is to store all character's pixmaps in a list, putting the index of the currently used pixmap in an ordinary variable. This way, every time the player presses a key -- say the right arrow for moving the character forward -- the graphics engine sees what's the next pixmap to draw, draws it, and increments the index counter. That's a pretty common approach I believe, the problem is that in this case the animation's quality depends not only on the number of sprites available but also on how often your engine listens to user input. The second technique is to actually play an animation every key press event. For this you can use any sort of animation framework you want. It's only necessary to set the timer, the animation steps and to call the animation's play() method on your key press event handler. The problem with that approach is that is lacks responsiveness, since the character won't react to any input while the current animation is still being played. What I want to know is whether you are using one of these techniques -- or something similar -- in your games, or whether there's a standard method for animating sprites out there that's widely known by everybody but me.

  Read the article

• How can I create an orthographic display that handles different screen dimensions?

  - by Piku

  I'm trying to create an iPad/iPhone game using GLES2.0 that contains a 3D scene with a heads-up-display/GUI overlaid on the top. However, this problem would also apply if I were to port my game to a computer and run the game in a resizable window, or allow the user to change screen resolutions... When trying to make the 2D GUI/HUD work I've made the assumption that all I'm really doing is drawing a load of 2D textured 'quads' on the screen and am trying to treat the orthographic projection as an old-style 2D display with 0,0 in the upper left and screenWidth,ScreenHeight in the lower right. This causes me all sorts of confusion when I rotate my ipad into Landscape mode since I can't work out what to put into my projection and modelview matrices to turn everything around the right way. It also gets messy if I want to support the iPad's large screen, an iPhone or a Retina display since I have to then draw three sets of textures for everything and work out which ones to use. Should I be trying to map the 2D OpenGL co-ords 1:1 with the screen? While typing out this question it occurs to me that I could keep my origin in the centre, still running -1/+1 along the axes. This would let me scale my 2D content appropriately on the different screen sizes, but wouldn't I end up with the textures being scaled and possibly losing quality? I'm using OpenGLES 2.0 and have a matrix library that has equivalents to the GLES1.1 glOrthof() and glFrustrum() calls.

  Read the article

• Loading images in XNA 4.0; "Cannot Open File" Problems

  - by user32623

  Okay, I'm writing a game in C#/XNA 4.0 and am utterly stumped at my current juncture: Sprite animation. I understand how it works and have all the code in place, but my ContentLoader won't open my file... Basically, my directory looks like this: //WindowsGame1 - "Game1.cs" - //Classes - "NPC.cs" - Content Reference - //Images - "Monster.png" Inside my NPC class, I have all the essential drawing functions, i.e. LoadContent, Draw, Update. And I can get the game to find the correct file and attempt to open it, but when it tries, it throws an exception and tells me it can't open the file. This is how my code in my NPC class looks: Texture2D NPCImage; Vector2 NPCPosition; Animation NPCAnimation = new Animation(); public void Initialize() { NPCAnimation.Initialize(NPCPosition, new Vector2(4, 4)); } public void LoadContent(ContentManager Content) { NPCImage = Content.Load<Texture2D>("_InsertImageFilePathHere_"); NPCAnimation.AnimationImage = NPCImage; } The rest of the code is irrelevant at this point because I can't even get the image to load. I think it might have to do with a directory problem, but I also know little to nothing about spriting or working with images or animations in my code. Any help is appreciated. Not sure if I provided enough information here, so let me know if more is needed! Also, what would be the correct way to direct that Content.Load to Monster.png given the current directory situation? Right now I just have it using the full path from the C:// drive. Thanks in advance!

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295  | Next Page >