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• best way to compute vertex normals from a Triangle's list

  - by nkint

  hi i'm a complete newbie in computergraphics so sorry if it's a stupid answer. i'm trying to make a simple 3d engine from scratch, more for educational purpose than for real use. i have a Surface object with inside a Triangle's list. For now i compute normals inside Triangle class, in this way: triangle.computeFaceNormals() { Vec3D u = v1.sub(v3) Vec3D v = v1.sub(v2) Vec3D normal = Vec3D.cross(u,v) normal.normalized() this.n1 = this.n2 = this.n3 = normal } and when building surface: t = new Triangle(v1,v2,v3).computeFaceNormals() surface.addTriangle(t) and i think this is the best way to do that.. isn't it? now.. what about for vertex normals? i've found this simple algorithm: flipcode vertex normal but.. hei this algorithm has.. exponential complexity? (if my memory doesn't fail my computer science background..) (bytheway.. it has 3 nested loops.. i don't think it's the best way to do it..) any suggestion?

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• Best practice settings Effect parameters in XNA

  - by hichaeretaqua

  I want to ask if there is a best practice settings effect parameters in XNA. Or in other words, what exactly happens when I call pass.Apply(). I can imagine multiple scenarios: Each time Apply() is called, all effect parameters are transferred to the GPU and therefor it has no real influence how often I set a parameter. Each time Apply() is called, only the parameters that got reset are transferred. So caching Set-operations that don't actually set a new value should be avoided. Each time Apply() is called, only the parameters that got changed are transferred. So caching Set-operations is useless. This whole questions is bootless because no one of the mentions ways has any noteworthy impact on game performance. So the final question: Is it useful to implement some caching of Set-operation like: private Matrix _world; public Matrix World { get{ return _world;} set { if(value == world)return; _effect.Parameters["xWorld"].SetValue(value); _world = value; } Thanking you in anticipation

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• Checking if an object is inside bounds of an isometric chunk

  - by gopgop

  How would I check if an object is inside the bounds of an isometric chunk? for example I have a player and I want to check if its inside the bounds of this isometric chunk. I draw the isometric chunk's tiles using OpenGL Quads. My first try was checking in a square pattern kind of thing: e = object; this = isometric chunk; if (e.getLocation().getX() < this.getLocation().getX()+World.CHUNK_WIDTH*World.TILE_WIDTH && e.getLocation().getX() > this.getLocation().getX()) { if (e.getLocation().getY() > this.getLocation().getY() && e.getLocation().getY() < this.getLocation().getY()+World.CHUNK_HEIGHT*World.TILE_HEIGHT) { return true; } } return false; What happens here is that it checks in a SQUARE around the chunk so not the real isometric bounds. Image example: (THE RED IS WHERE THE PROGRAM CHECKS THE BOUNDS) What I have now: Desired check: Ultimately I want to do the same for each tile in the chunk. EXTRA INFO: Till now what I had in my game is you could only move tile by tile but now I want them to move freely but I still need them to have a tile location so no matter where they are on the tile their tile location will be that certain tile. then when they are inside a different tile's bounding box then their tile location becomes the new tile. Same thing goes with chunks. the player does have an area but the area does not matter in this case. and as long as the X and Y are inside the bounding box then it should return true. they don't have to be completely on the tile.

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• Blending animations for more character movements

  - by Noob Saibot

  I am making a hack n slash 3rd person game. And I want the character movements to be more dynamic not like fighting games where you have a moves list. I want to animate tons of different animations and have them "Tween" between each other? Because I want the controls to not be keyboard mouse. I want it to be all keyboard. that way you have up to 10 inputs (All your fingers) to blend and morph animations to create more fluid movements. In the end this will almost be similar to characters typing a phrase or string of keys rather than move forward mouse look click to melee. My question is. Has anyone done this before and would someone go about trying to tween lets say one for key on the keyboard excluding Tab, Caps, R+Shift, L+Shift, Enter, R+Ctrl, L+Ctrl, L+Alt, R+Alt, Windows Key, and Menu. So thats all the numbers, letters and punctuation keys. Thats 46 keys gives me a combination of 46P1 = 5502622159812088949850305428800254892961651752960000000000L (used Python) and with a minimum entry value of 2 keypresses shortening to half. This is not humanly possible to create so many inique animations in one lifetime. But I'm guessing there is a reason this hasn't been done already. Or if I just used 10 basic keys. Maybe ASDF SPACE (RIGHT HAND) 456+0 (LEFT HAND KEYPAD) it would give me 3,628,800 posible unique animations.

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• UTF-8 encoding problem with flash mysql and php

  - by alibhp

  Hi, As you may know, I am programming an on-line game using FLASH. I am connecting my FLASH 8 movie with MySQL database through PHP. I am doing very good in that, and I have everything working fine. The problems come when I am trying to insert (Using the INSERT SQL func) data to the database that are non-english. In other words, UTF-8 data. I red a lot of articls about that stuff and found and apply the fallowing: 1. In PHP4, you need to tell the PHP to use UTF-8 when using the xml_parser_crater() func, however, in PHP5 that is done automatically. Even though I told PHP5 to use the UTF-8 when calling the func. Adding the header to the XML sent to PHP from flash. Force the FLASH to use UTF-8 encoding in the preference options. Set the encoding in MySQL to UTF-8 (utf8_unicode_ci with InnoDB engine). I can read and insert the other language data correctly in the phpadmin as well. I did all that in my coding, and still I can't insert such data. one more strange thing is that, when I use the same link, that the FLASH using, with the XML, that the FLASH creating, on the browser (google chrome), I got the data inserted right in the database!!!!! I am about to get crazy about that stuff, What am I missing? what cause the problem? Thank you in advance.

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• How does flocking algorithm work?

  - by Chan

  I read and understand the basic of flocking algorithm. Basically, we need to have 3 behaviors: 1. Cohesion 2. Separation 3. Alignment From my understanding, it's like a state machine. Every time we do an update (then draw), we check all the constraints on both three behaviors. And each behavior returns a Vector3 which is the "correct" orientation that an object should transform to. So my initial idea was /// <summary> /// Objects stick together /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> private Vector3 Cohesion() { Vector3 result = new Vector3(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); return result; } /// <summary> /// Object align /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> private Vector3 Align() { Vector3 result = new Vector3(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); return result; } /// <summary> /// Object separates from each others /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> private Vector3 Separate() { Vector3 result = new Vector3(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); return result; } Then I search online for pseudocode but many of them involve velocity and acceleration plus other stuffs. This part confused me. In my game, all objects move at constant speed, and they have one leader. So can anyone share me an idea how to start on implement this flocking algorithm? Also, did I understand it correctly? (I'm using XNA 4.0)

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• XNA Required information to represent 2D Sprite graphically

  - by Fire-Dragon-DoL

  I was thinking about dividing my game engine into 2 threads: render thread and update thread (I can't come up on how to divide update thread from physic thread at the moment). That said, I have to duplicate all Sprite informations, what do I really need to represents a 2D Sprite graphically? Here are my ideas (I'll mark with ? things that I'm not sure): Vector2 Position float Rotation ? Vector2 Pivot ? Rectangle TextureRectangle Texture2D Texture Vector2 ImageOrigin ? (is it tracked somewhere else?) If you have any suggestion about using different types for datas, it's appreciated Last part of the question: isn't this a lot of data to copy in a buffer?what should I really copy in the buffer?I'm following this tutorial: http://www.sgtconker.com/2009/11/article-multi-threading-your-xna/3/ Thanks UPDATE 1: Newer values at the moment: Vector2 Position float Rotation Vector2 Pivot Rectangle TextureRectangle Texture2D Texture Color Color byte Facing (can be left or right, I'll do it with an enum) I re-read the tutorial, what I was doing wrong is not that I need to pass all those values, I need to pass only changed values as messages. UPDATE 2: Vector2 Position float Rotation Vector2 Pivot Rectangle TextureRectangle Texture2D Texture Color Color bool Flip uint DrawOrder Vector2 Scale bool Visible ? Mhhh, should Visibile be included?

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• UIView vs CCLayer and Making gestures work in Cocos2d

  - by Lewis

  now I've been been searching for an answer to this question for at least 3 days now. I've tried on many cocos2d forums, including the official one and have heard nothing back. I've found a project which uses custom gestures: https://github.com/melle/OneFingerRotationGestureDemo Explanation here: http://blog.mellenthin.de/archives/2012/02/13/an-one-finger-rotation-gesture-recognizer/ Now I want to implement that behaviour onto a sprite in a cocos2d application. I've tried to do this but it fails to work. It uses a view controller which inherits like this: @interface OneFingerRotationGestureViewController : UIViewController <OneFingerRotationGestureRecognizerDelegate> Now my question is how would I implement the OneFingerRotationGesture behaviour onto a CCSprite in cocos2d 2.0? As interfaces in cocos2d look like this: @interface HelloWorldLayer : CCLayer Now I have asked a similar question to this on stack overflow and a user directed me to this link: https://github.com/krzysztofzablocki/CCNode-SFGestureRecognizers Which I believe makes use of gestures (like the first github linked project) but not custom gestures. I lack the obj-c skills to work out and implement the functionality into my game, so I would appreciate it if someone could explain the differences between CCLayer and UIViewController, and help me implement the OneFingerRotation gesture into a cocos2d 2.0 project. Regards, Lewis.

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• Implementing a multilanguage AI contest platform

  - by Alejandro Piad

  This is a followup to this question. To sum: I'm implementing an AI contest site, where each user may submit several AI implementations for different games. Think about Google AI Challenge but instead of just having a big event once a year, I would like it more on a league fashion, with all virtual players playing with each other every some close period of time. I want to support as many programming languages as possible. I've seen that contest sites (like codeforces) ask you to submit a source code and interact through stdin and stdout. The first question is: what is the best way of supporting multiple languages? As I see it, I can either ask people to upload some binary/script, and interact either through stdin/*stdout*, or sockets, or the file system; or ask people to submit source code, and wrap it with whatever is necessary for the interaction. I would like to skip the need to compile the code by myself (in the server, I mean), but I am willing to do it if its the "best" choice. I need to comunicate virtual players with each other, or even better, with some intermediary arbiter. The second question is regarding security. If I'm going to be running user code in my server, I want to ensure strict security conditions, like no file system access, no networking, etc. Otherwise it would be a safe heaven for hackers. I will be implementing the engine/arbiter in .NET. I would like to support at least C#, C++, Java and Python for the user's implementations. I'm willing to write interfaces for each of these languages to simplify the user interaction with the system. Thanks in advance.

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• WoW lua: Getting quest attributes before the QUEST_DETAIL event

  - by Matt DiTrolio

  I'd like to determine the attributes of a quest (i.e., information provided by functions such as QuestIsDaily and IsQuestCompletable) before the player clicks on the quest detail. I'm trying to write an add-on that handles accepting and completing of daily quests with a single click on the NPC, but I'm running into a problem whereby I can't find out anything about a given quest unless the quest text is currently being displayed, defeating the purpose of the add-on. Other add-ons of this nature seem to be getting around this limitation by hard-coding information about quests, an approach I don't much like as it requires constant maintenance. It seems to me that this information must be available somehow, as the game itself can properly figure out which icon to display over the head of the NPC without player interaction. The only question is, are add-on authors allowed access to this information? If so, how? EDIT: What I originally left out was that the situations I'm trying to address are when: An NPC has multiple quests The quest detail is not the first thing that shows up upon right-click Otherwise, the situation is much simpler, as I have the information I need provided immediately.

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• Flash AS3 sidescrolling tiles optimization

  - by Galvanize

  I'm trying to make a sidescrolling game in Flash that will run on a low performance laptop. While studying the subject from Tonypa I saw that he builds a Bitmap by making copys of the BitmapData of each tile from the Tile Sheet and placing it on the bigger Bitmat with the size of the screen. But when I came to think on how to scroll my map I ran into some optimization doubts. I came up with two choices: Create a MovieClip, place a Bitmap instance for each tile that is shown on the screen + 1 row in it, then move them all. Then when the tile ran off the screen I would move it to end of the MovieClip and replace their BitmapData for the next row in my map. Use a Bitmap with copys of each tile in it (as shown in Tonypa's tutorial) but 1 extra row, move the whole Bitmap, and when it comes the time to replace rows, redraw the whole Bitmap and move it back to the origin position. The first idea is how a co-worker of mine suggested, the second one is my own, but none of us has enough technical knowledge to be sure on a technique that would be optimal in performance, can anyone help?

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• How to optimise Andengine's PathModifer (with singleton or pool)?

  - by Casla

  I am trying to build a game where the character find and follows a new path when a new destination is issued by the player, kinda like how units in RTS games work. This is done on a TMX map and I am using the A Star path finder utilities in Andengine to do this.David helped me on that: How can I change the path a sprite is following in real time? At the moment, every-time a new path is issued, I have to abandon the existing PathModifer and Path instances, and create new ones, and from what I read so far, creating new objects when you could re-use existing ones are a big waste for mobile applications. This is how I coded it at the moment: private void loadPathFound() { if (mAStarPath != null) { modifierPath = new org.andengine.entity.modifier.PathModifier.Path(mAStarPath.getLength()); /* replace the first node in the path as the player's current position */ modifierPath.to(player.convertLocalToSceneCoordinates(12, 31)[Constants.VERTEX_INDEX_X]-12, player.convertLocalToSceneCoordinates(12, 31)[Constants.VERTEX_INDEX_Y]-31); for (int i=1; i<mAStarPath.getLength(); i++) { modifierPath.to(mAStarPath.getX(i)*TILE_WIDTH, mAStarPath.getY(i)*TILE_HEIGHT); /* passing in the duration depended on the length of the path, so that the animation has a constant duration for every step */ player.registerEntityModifier(new PathModifier(modifierPath.getLength()/100, modifierPath, null, mIPathModifierListener)); } } The ideal implementation will be to always have just one object of PathModifer and just reset the destination of the path. But I don't know how you can apply the singleton patther on Andengine's PathModifer, there is no method to reset attribute of the path nor the pathModifer. So without re-write the PathModifer and the Path class, or use reflection, is there any other way to implement singleton PathModifer? Thanks for your help.

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• Stage3D: Camera pans the whole screen

  - by Thomas Versteeg

  I am trying to create a 2D Stage3D game where you can move the camera around the level in an RTS style. I thought about using Orthographic Matrix3D functions for this but when I try to scroll the whole "stage" also scrolls. This is the Camera code: public function Camera2D(width:int, height:int, zoom:Number = 1) { resize(width, height); _zoom = zoom; } public function resize(width:Number, height:Number):void { _width = width; _height = height; _projectionMatrix = makeMatrix(0, width, 0, height); _recalculate = true; } protected function makeMatrix(left:Number, right:Number, top:Number, bottom:Number, zNear:Number = 0, zFar:Number = 1):Matrix3D { return new Matrix3D(Vector.<Number>([ 2 / (right - left), 0, 0, 0, 0, 2 / (top - bottom), 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 / (zFar - zNear), 0, 0, 0, zNear / (zNear - zFar), 1 ])); } public function get viewMatrix():Matrix3D { if (_recalculate) { _recalculate = false; _viewMatrix.identity(); _viewMatrix.appendTranslation( -_width / 2 - _x, -_height / 2 - y, 0); _viewMatrix.appendScale(_zoom, _zoom, 1); _renderMatrix.identity(); _renderMatrix.append(_viewMatrix); _renderMatrix.append(_projectionMatrix); } return _renderMatrix; } And the camera is send directly to the GPU with: c3d.setProgramConstantsFromMatrix(Context3DProgramType.VERTEX, 0, cameraMatrix, true); And these are the shaders: ------Vertex Shader------ m44 op, va0, vc0 mov v0, va1.xy mov v0.z, va0.z ------Fragment Shader------ tex ft0, v0, fs0 <2d,linear,nomip> mov oc, ft1 Here is a example and here are two screenshots to show what I mean: How do I only let the inside of the stage3D scroll and not the whole stage?

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• Creating a retro-style palette swapping effect in OpenGL

  - by Zack The Human

  I'm working on a Megaman-like game where I need to change the color of certain pixels at runtime. For reference: in Megaman when you change your selected weapon then main character's palette changes to reflect the selected weapon. Not all of the sprite's colors change, only certain ones do. This kind of effect was common and quite easy to do on the NES since the programmer had access to the palette and the logical mapping between pixels and palette indices. On modern hardware, though, this is a bit more challenging because the concept of palettes is not the same. All of my textures are 32-bit and do not use palettes. There are two ways I know of to achieve the effect I want, but I'm curious if there are better ways to achieve this effect easily. The two options I know of are: Use a shader and write some GLSL to perform the "palette swapping" behavior. If shaders are not available (say, because the graphics card doesn't support them) then it is possible to clone the "original" textures and generate different versions with the color changes pre-applied. Ideally I would like to use a shader since it seems straightforward and requires little additional work opposed to the duplicated-texture method. I worry that duplicating textures just to change a color in them is wasting VRAM -- should I not worry about that?

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• File format for animated scene

  - by stephelton

  I've got a custom OpenGL based rendering engine and I'd like to add support for cinema-type scene animation. The artist that is helping me uses primarily 3DSMax. I'd like a file format for exporting and importing this data. I'm also in need of a file format for skeletal animation data, which may have an impact here. I've been looking at MAXScript to manually export this stuff, which would buy me the most flexibility, but I have virtually no experience with 3DSMax itself, so I get a little lost when it comes to terminology. So I'd like to know what file formats exist for animated scene data, and whether they are appropriate for my use (my fear is that they will be way too broad for my fairly simple needs.) The way I view animated scene data is basically a bunch of references to [animated] models with keyframe-based matrices describing their orientation over time. And probably some special camera stuff to handle perspective. I might also want some event type stuff for adding/removing objects. Is this a sane concept?

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• Using orientation to calculate position on Windows Phone 7

  - by Lavinski

  I'm using the motion API and I'm trying to figure out a control scheme for the game I'm currently developing. What I'm trying to achive is for a orienation of the device to correlate directly to a position. Such that tilting the phone forward and to the left represents the top left position and back to the right would be the bottom right position. Photos to make it clearer (the red dot would be the calculated position). Forward and Left Back and Right Now for the tricky bit. I also have to make sure that the values take into account left landscape and right landscape device orientations (portrait is the default so no calculations would be needed for it). Has anyone done anything like this? Notes: I've tried using the yaw, pitch, roll and Quaternion readings. Sample: // Get device facing vector public static Vector3 GetState() { lock (lockable) { var down = Vector3.Forward; var direction = Vector3.Transform(down, state); switch (Orientation) { case Orientation.LandscapeLeft: return Vector3.TransformNormal(direction, Matrix.CreateRotationZ(-rightAngle)); case Orientation.LandscapeRight: return Vector3.TransformNormal(direction, Matrix.CreateRotationZ(rightAngle)); } return direction; } }

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• Box2D: How to get the Exact Collision Point and ignore the collision (from 2 "ghost bodies")

  - by Moritz

  I have a very basic problem with Box2D. For a arenatype game where you can throw scriptable "missiles" at other players I decided to use Box2D for the collision detection between the players and the missiles. Players and missiles have their own circular shape with a specific size (varying). But I don´t want to use dynamic bodies because the missiles need to move themselve in any way they want to (defined in the script) and shouldnt be resolved unless the script wants it. The behavior I look for is as following (for each time step): velocity of missiles is set by the specific missile script each missile is moved according to that velocity if a collision accurs now, I want to get the exact position of impact, and now I need a mechanism to decide if the missile should just ignore the collision (for example collision between two fireballs which shouldnt interact) or take it (so they are resolved and dont overlap anymore) So is there a way in Box2D to create Ghost bodies and listen to collisions from them, then deciding if they should ignore the collision or should take them and resolve their position? I hope I was clear enough and would be happy about any help!

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• Pathfinding and BSP with Box2D

  - by Amplify91

  I'm looking into implementing AI in my 2D side-scrolling platformer, and I'm looking into using algorithms such as A*. For many kinds of pathfinding, we need some sort of grid or systems of nodes or polygon areas. My problem is that I am using Box2d for physics and I am not sure how best to create a structure that my AI can use besides placing individual nodes manually (something I really want to avoid) and using some sort of steering behavior. My level design is tile-based with each tile being about half of the height/width of my main character. The tiles are not all square (some are sloped). I'd like to have a system that can see what the terrain looks like for pathfinding and also keep track of the positions of other actors such as enemies. I'd like to avoid directly placing any nodes into my level design except for possible endpoints or goals. This question is related: How do you do AI path following within a 2d physics engine like farseer/box2d?, but it doesn't specify what kind of structure I could use instead of a list of nodes. I'm looking for some kind of grid or type of BSP that I can query for algorithms like A*.

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• What is a technique for 2D ray-box intersection that is suitable for old console hardware?

  - by DJCouchyCouch

  I'm working on a Sega Genesis homebrew game (it has a 7mhz 68000 CPU). I'm looking for a way to find the intersection between a particle sprite and a background tile. Particles are represented as a point with a movement vector. Background tiles are 8 x 8 pixels, with an (X,Y) position that is always located at a multiple of 8. So, really, I need to find the intersection point for a ray-box collision; I need to find out where along the edge of the tile the ray/particle hits. I have these two hard constraints: I'm working with pixel locations (integers). Floating point is too expensive. It doesn't have to be super exact, just close enough. Multiplications, divisions, dot products, et cetera, are incredibly expensive and are to be avoided. So I'm looking for an efficient algorithm that would fit those constraints. Any ideas? I'm writing it in C, so that would work, but assembly should be good as well.

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• Best algorithm for recursive adjacent tiles?

  - by OhMrBigshot

  In my game I have a set of tiles placed in a 2D array marked by their Xs and Zs ([1,1],[1,2], etc). Now, I want a sort of "Paint Bucket" mechanism: Selecting a tile will destroy all adjacent tiles until a condition stops it, let's say, if it hits an object with hasFlag. Here's what I have so far, I'm sure it's pretty bad, it also freezes everything sometimes: void destroyAdjacentTiles(int x, int z) { int GridSize = Cubes.GetLength(0); int minX = x == 0 ? x : x-1; int maxX = x == GridSize - 1 ? x : x+1; int minZ = z == 0 ? z : z-1; int maxZ = z == GridSize - 1 ? z : z+1; Debug.Log(string.Format("Cube: {0}, {1}; X {2}-{3}; Z {4}-{5}", x, z, minX, maxX, minZ, maxZ)); for (int curX = minX; curX <= maxX; curX++) { for (int curZ = minZ; curZ <= maxZ; curZ++) { if (Cubes[curX, curZ] != Cubes[x, z]) { Debug.Log(string.Format(" Checking: {0}, {1}", curX, curZ)); if (Cubes[curX,curZ] && Cubes[curX,curZ].GetComponent<CubeBehavior>().hasFlag) { Destroy(Cubes[curX,curZ]); destroyAdjacentTiles(curX, curZ); } } } } }

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• Dynamic/Adaptive RLE

  - by Lucius

  So, I'm developing a 2D, tile based game and a map maker thingy - all in Java. The problem is that recently I've been having some memory issues when about 4 maps are loaded. Each one of these maps are composed of 128x128 tiles and have 4 layers (for details and stuff). I already spent a good amount of time searching for solutions and the best thing I found was run-length enconding (RLE). It seems easy enough to use with static data, but is there a way to use it with data that is constantly changing, without a big drop in performance? In my maps, supposing I'm compressing the columns, I would have 128 rows, each with some amount of data (hopefully less than it would be without RLE). Whenever I change a tile, that whole row would have to be checked and I'm affraid that would slow down too much the production (and I'm in a somewhat tight schedule). Well, worst case scenario I work on each map individually, and save them using RLE, but it would be really nice if I could avoind that. EDIT: What I'm currently using to store the data for the tiles is a 2D array of HashMaps that use the layer as key and store the id of the tile in that position - like this: private HashMap< Integer, Integer [][]

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• How to use shared_ptr for COM interface pointers

  - by Seefer

  I've been reading about various usage advice relating to the new c++ standard smart pointers unique_ptr, shared_ptr and weak_ptr and generally 'grok' what they are about when I'm writing my own code that declares and consumes them. However, all the discussions I've read seem restricted to this simple usage situation where the programmer is using smart in his/her own code, with no real discussion on techniques when having to work with libraries that expect raw pointers or other types of 'smart pointers' such as COM interface pointers. Specifically I'm learning my way through C++ by attempting to get a standard Win32 real-time game loop up and running that uses Direct2D & DirectWrite to render text to the display showing frames per second. My first task with Direct2D is in creating a Direct2D Factory object with the following code from the Direct2D examples on MSDN: ID2D1Factory* pD2DFactory = nullptr; HRESULT hr = D2D1CreateFactory(D2D1_FACTORY_TYPE_SINGLE_THREADED, &pD2DFactory); pD2DFactory is obviously an 'out' parameter and it's here where I become uncertain how to make use of smart pointers in this context, if indeed it's possible. My inexperienced C++ mind tells me I have two problems: With pD2DFactory being a COM interface pointer type, how would smart_ptr work with the Add() / Release() member functions for a COM object instance? Are smart pointers able to be passed to functions in situations where the function is using an 'out' pointer parameter technique? I did experiment with the alternative of using _com_ptr_t in the comip.h header file to help with pointer lifetime management and declared the pD2DFactory pointer with the following code: _com_ptr_t<_com_IIID<pD2DFactory, &__uuidof(pD2DFactory)>> pD2DFactory = nullptr; and it appears to work so far but, as you can see, the syntax is cumbersome :) So, I was wondering if any C++ gurus here could confirm whether smart pointers are able to help in cases like this and provide examples of usage, or point me to more in-depth discussions of smart pointer usage when needing to work with other code libraries that know nothing of them. Or is it simply a case of my trying to use the wrong tool for the job? :)

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• How to account for speed of the vehicle when shooting shells from it?

  - by John Murdoch

  I'm developing a simple 3D ship game using libgdx and bullet. When a user taps the mouse I create a new shell object and send it in the direction of the mouse click. However, if the user has tapped the mouse in the direction where the ship is currently moving, the ship catches up to the shells very quickly and can sometimes even get hit by them - simply because the speed of shells and the ship are quite comparable. I think I need to account for ship speed when generating the initial impulse for the shells, and I tried doing that (see "new line added"), but I cannot figure out if what I'm doing is the proper way and if yes, how to calculate the correct coefficient. public void createShell(Vector3 origin, Vector3 direction, Vector3 platformVelocity, float velocity) { long shellId = System.currentTimeMillis(); // hack ShellState state = getState().createShellState(shellId, origin.x, origin.y, origin.z); ShellEntity entity = EntityFactory.getInstance().createShellEntity(shellId, state); add(entity); entity.getBody().applyCentralImpulse(platformVelocity.mul(velocity * 0.02f)); // new line added, to compensate for the moving platform, no idea how to calculate proper coefficient entity.getBody().applyCentralImpulse(direction.nor().mul(velocity)); } private final Vector3 v3 = new Vector3(); public void shootGun(Vector3 direction) { Vector3 shipVelocity = world.getShipEntities().get(id).getBody().getLinearVelocity(); world.getState().getShipStates().get(id).transform.getTranslation(v3); // current location of our ship v3.add(direction.nor().mul(10.0f)); // hack; this is to avoid shell immediately impacting the ship that it got shot out from world.createShell(v3, direction, shipVelocity, 500); }

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• Modern techniques for spriting

  - by DevilWithin

  Hello, I would like to know the flow for making modern 2D game artwork. How are the assets made nowadays? Bitmap? Vector-based? Hand-drawn and painted? Drawn digitally? Modeled in 3D and exported to bitmaps? I would like some information on programs as well, for fine looking art. Why does Flash's vector art style look good in most games? How do I make equivalent graphics with external tools? Or equaly good and not vector-based, anyway. Any special hints for animating? An answer oriented towards a one-man-army indie developer with little experience but some artistic sense would be appreciated! Not a complete dummy with paint programs, but also not a master at all, just need efficient ways to achieve results. Thanks. NOTE: Pixel art is not the goal of this question, nothing related to direct pixel manipulation should be brought up here, but you're free to do exactly that :)

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• Turn-based games [closed]

  - by Blue

  I've been looking for tutorials on turn-based games. I found an incomplete tutorial series by InsugentX about turn-based games. I haven't looked through it, but since it's incomplete, I worry that I won't be able to finish the scripts. I'm looking for tutorials or some good tips or advice to create turn-based games(similar to Worms). Recently I finished watching the WalkerBoys' tutorials so I am familiar with code. Where can I find some info and/or tutorials on creating Turn-based games? I'd prefer it to be video format. How can I create turn-based games (not the entire thing, only the set-up) or a turn-based event like in Worms? To explain more, How do I create 2 parties(1st player, 2nd player) exchanging turns(turn-based games and/or hotseat). While parties have characters similar to Worms(having more than 1 character within each party)? Do I use an array, an enum? I don't have any experience in turn-based games, so I would like to know how to actually make turn-based games. I can't find any reference to help me with construction of a turn-based game code similar to Worms in a programming language I can understand.

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