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• How do I make a more or less realistic water surface?

  - by Johnny

  I want to make a similar water surface like in this picture: http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/pictures/20000/velka/water-surface-detail-11291208064MpI.jpg I need the water surface in the same view than in the picture. Is it possible to work without shaders? I want to develop a little game for Xbox Live Indie Marketplace, Windows Phone and maybe later iPhone/iPad. How should I make the water surface, so that it works on multiple platforms?

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• Animating DOM elements vs refreshing a single Canvas

  - by mgibsonbr

  A few years ago, when the HTML Canvas element was still kinda fresh, I wrote a small game in a rather "unusual" way: each game element had its own canvas, and frequently animated elements even had multiple canvases, one for each animation sprite. This way, the translation would be done by manipulating the DOM position of the canvases, while the sprite animation would consist of altering the visibility of the already drawn canvases. (z-indexes, of course, were the tricky part) It worked like a charm: even in IE6 with excanvas it showed a decent performance, and everything was rather consistent between browsers, including some smartphones. Now I'm thinking in writing a larger game engine in the same fashion, so I'm wondering whether it would be a good idea to do so in the current context (with all the advances in browsers and so on). I know I'm trading memory for time, so this needs to be customizable (even at runtime) for each machine the game will be running. But I believe using separate canvases would also help to avoid the game "freezing" on CPU spikes, since the translation would still happen even if the redraws lag for a while. Besides, the browsers' rendering engines are already optimized in may ways, so I'm guessing this scheme would also reduce the load on the CPU (in contrast to doing everything in JavaScript - specially the less optimized ones). It looks good in my head, but I'd like to hear the opinion of more experienced people before proceeding further. Is there any known drawback of doing this? I'm particulartly unexperienced in dealing with the GPU, so I wonder whether this "trick" would nullify any benefit of using a single, big canvas. Or maybe on modern devices it's overkill (though I'm skeptic about the claims that canvas+js - especially WebGL - will ever be a good alternative to native code). Any thoughts?

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• Algorithm allowing a good waypoint path following?

  - by Thierry Savard Saucier

  I'm more looking into how should I implement this, either a tutorial or even the name of the concept I'm missing. I'm pretty sure some basic pathfinding algorithm could help me here, but I dont know which one ... I have a worldmap, with different cities on it. The player can choose a city from a menu, or click on an available cities on the world map, and the toon should walk over there. But I want him to follow a predefine path. Lets say our hero is on the city 1. He clicks on city 4. I want him to follow the path to city 2 and from there to city 4. I was handling this easily with arrow movement (left right top bottom) since its a single check. Now I'm not sure how I should do this. Should I loop threw each possible path and check which one leads me to D the fastest ... and if I do how do I avoid running in circle forever with cities 1-5-2 ?

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• Why can we recognize game engines?

  - by Bart van Heukelom

  About many games you can say "oh that's the Unreal engine for sure", "this was made by upgrading GTA 4", etc. We can often recognize the engine used for a game just by looking at its graphics (disregarding menus and such). I'm wondering, why is this? All game engines use the same 3D rendering technology that we all use, and the different games usually have a distinct art style, so what's left to recognize?

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• What is the benefit of triple buffering?

  - by user782220

  I read everything written in a previous question. From what I understand in double buffering the program must wait until the finished drawing is copied or swapped before starting the next drawing. In triple buffering the program has two back buffers and can immediately start drawing in the one that is not involved in such copying. But with triple buffering if you're in a situation where you can take advantage of the third buffer doesn't that suggest that you are drawing frames faster than the monitor can refresh. So then you don't actually get a higher frame rate. So what is the benefit of triple buffering then?

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• Grid pathfinding with a lot of entities

  - by Vee

  I'd like to explain this problem with a screenshot from a released game, DROD: Gunthro's Epic Blunder, by Caravel Games. The game is turn-based and tile-based. I'm trying to create something very similar (a clone of the game), and I've got most of the fundamentals done, but I'm having trouble implementing pathfinding. Look at the screenshot. The guys in yellow are friendly, and want to kill the roaches. Every turn, every guy in yellow pathfinds to the closest roach, and every roach pathfinds to the closest guy in yellow. By closest I mean the target with the shortest path, not a simple distance calculation. All of this without any kind of slowdown when loading the level or when passing turns. And all of the entities change position every turn. Also (not shown in screenshot), there can be doors that open and close and change the level's layout. Impressive. I've tried implementing pathfinding in my clone. First attempt was making every roach find a path to a yellow guy every turn, using a breadth-first search algorithm. Obviously incredibly slow with more than a single roach, and would get exponentially slower with more than a single yellow guy. Second attempt was mas making every yellow guy generate a pathmap (still breadth-first search) every time he moved. Worked perfectly with multiple roaches and a single yellow guy, but adding more yellow guys made the game slow and unplayable. Last attempt was implementing JPS (jump point search). Every entity would individually calculate a path to its target. Fast, but with a limited number of entities. Having less than half the entities in the screenshot would make the game slow. And also, I had to get the "closest" enemy by calculating distance, not shortest path. I've asked on the DROD forums how they did it, and a user replied that it was breadth-first search. The game is open source, and I took a look at the source code, but it's C++ (I'm using C#) and I found it confusing. I don't know how to do it. Every approach I tried isn't good enough. And I believe that DROD generates global pathmaps, somehow, but I can't understand how every entity find the best individual path to other entities that move every turn. What's the trick? This is a reply I just got on the DROD forums: Without having looked at the code I'd wager it's two (or so) pathmaps for the whole room: One to the nearest enemy, and one to the nearest friendly for every tile. There's no need to make a separate pathmap for every entity when the overall goal is "move towards nearest enemy/friendly"... just mark every tile with the number of moves it takes to the nearest target and have the entity chose the move that takes it to the tile with the lowest number. To be honest, I don't understand it that well.

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• Stop map from scrolling but let player still move?

  - by ChocoMan

  I have a basic method of scrolling around on a map (moving the map instead of the player), but at when the player gets to a certain proximity to the edge, how do you stop the map from scrolling, but still allow the player to move around until it is away from that proximity? I'm not looking for any code. Just a suggestion so that I can implement it myself. I can see it visually (creating 4 boxed intersecting boundaries for the player to enter), but not sure how to come about stopping and resuming the scrolling of the map.

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• How to handle wildly varying rendering hardware / getting baseline

  - by edA-qa mort-ora-y

  I've recently started with mobile programming (cross-platform, also with desktop) and am encountering wildly differing hardware performance, in particular with OpenGL and the GPU. I know I'll basically have to adjust my rendering code but I'm uncertain of how to detect performance and what reasonable default settings are. I notice that certain shader functions are basically free in a desktop implemenation but can be unusable in a mobile device. The problem is I have no way of knowing what features will cause what performance issues on all the devices. So my first issue is that even if I allow configuring options I'm uncertain of which options I have to make configurable. I'm wondering also wheher one just writes one very configurable pipeline, or whether I should have 2 distinct options (high/low). I'm also unsure of where to set the default. If I set to the poorest performer the graphics will be so minimal that any user with a modern device would dismiss the game. If I set them even at some moderate point, the low end devices will basically become a slide-show. I was thinking perhaps that I just run some benchmarks when the user first installs and randomly guess what works, but I've not see a game do this before.

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• Lighting-Reflectance Models & Licensing Issues

  - by codey

  Generally, or specifically, is there any licensing issue with using any of the well known lighting/reflectance models (i.e. the BRDFs or other distribution or approximation functions): Phong, Blinn–Phong, Cook–Torrance, Blinn-Torrance-Sparrow, Lambert, Minnaert, Oren–Nayar, Ward, Strauss, Ashikhmin-Shirley and common modifications where applicable, such as: Beckmann distribution, Blinn distribution, Schlick's approximation, etc. in your shader code utilised in a commercial product? Or is it a non-issue?

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• How or why would this mechanic (not) work to bring game balance to a singleplayer RPG? [closed]

  - by 0xFFF1

  Mechanic details The player, the monsters, and the merchants act as three separate parties. The player needs to beat up monsters for exp points and resources to sell and to buy potions from merchants to continue to fight. The monsters need healing and reviving to survive (also bought from merchants) and the merchants need potion ingredients from the player and the monsters to make potions to sell. These potions are only able to be processed in such bulk by merchants thus their potions would be cheaper than making them yourself. Only the monsters can farm ingredients in bulk. Only the player is or has to be overly aggressive (in bulk). Monsters can farm and produce "Level up candies" that do the work of exp. they are eaten right away after they are made and are never stockpiled or held for fear of the player and merchants who want to sell to the player. The monsters will defend themselves. Reviving is very expensive. The merchants can be found either with a concerned expression or a grinning expression based on how much profit they are making compared to their morale standing. The economies of each monster town and merchant city are distinct but interconnected. Magic Swords are worth a lot. So what I need to know is what concerns would there be to design a game around this mechanic and/or design this mechanic around a developing game. which would fare better? Is game balance an issue here? (how strong the monsters get or how quickly they die off based on the player's input into the system), Or is game balance solely in the hands of the player? (he decides if he overkills monsters or get underleveled.) What do I need to think about to make sure it isn't too easy or too hard to swing the amount/strength of monsters compared to the player and the amount of profit the merchants get vs the player. Would indicating how out of whack things are getting in game help with this?

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• XNA - Finding boundaries in isometric tilemap

  - by Yheeky

  I have an issue with my 2D isometric engine. I'm using my own 2D camera class which works with matrices and need to find the tilemaps boundaries so the user always sees the map. Currently my map size is 100x100 (with 128x128 tiles) so the calculation (e.g. for the right boundary) is: var maxX = (TileMap.MapWidth + 1) * (TileMap.TileWidth / 2) - ViewSize.X; var maxX = (100 + 1) * (128 / 2) - 1360; // = 5104 pixels. This works fine while having scale factor of 1.0f but not for any other zoom factor. When I zoom out to 0.9f the right border should be at approx. 4954. I´m using the following code for transformation but I always get a wrong value: var maxXVector = new Vector2(maxX, 0); var maxXTransformed = Vector2.Transform(maxXVector, tempTransform).X; The result is 4593. Does anyone of you have an idea what I´m during wrong? Thanks for your help! Yheeky

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• Better way to do AI Behavior in AS3/Flixel

  - by joon

  I'm making a game in Flixel and I need to program an NPC. It's rapidly turning more complex than I expected. I was wondering if there are any best practices, tutorials or examples that you can refer me to, to see how this is done. I can probably hack it together, which is what I always do, but it would be nice if I can make it maintanable and can add stuff later on. Here's screenshot to give you an idea: The butler will be an NPC that will follow you, or guide you, and talk to you the whole time. EDIT: More specifically: What I have now is a long list of IF statements in the update loop of the butler (about 8 different cases), and all I have covered is his walking behavior. I want him to comment on things and sometimes switch his main behavior to be more aggresive or distant,... Is there any way to keep track of this, or is complex code with many many nested if statements the way to go?

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• Doing powerups in a component-based system

  - by deft_code

  I'm just starting really getting my head around component based design. I don't know what the "right" way to do this is. Here's the scenario. The player can equip a shield. The the shield is drawn as bubble around the player, it has a separate collision shape, and reduces the damage the player receives from area effects. How is such a shield architected in a component based game? Where I get confused is that the shield obviously has three components associated with it. Damage reduction / filtering A sprite A collider. To make it worse different shield variations could have even more behaviors, all of which could be components: boost player maximum health health regen projectile deflection etc Am I overthinking this? Should the shield just be a super component? I really think this is wrong answer. So if you think this is the way to go please explain. Should the shield be its own entity that tracks the location of the player? That might make it hard to implement the damage filtering. It also kinda blurs the lines between attached components and entities. Should the shield be a component that houses other components? I've never seen or heard of anything like this, but maybe it's common and I'm just not deep enough yet. Should the shield just be a set of components that get added to the player? Possibly with an extra component to manage the others, e.g. so they can all be removed as a group. (accidentally leave behind the damage reduction component, now that would be fun). Something else that's obvious to someone with more component experience?

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• State / Screen management in Entity Component Systems

  - by David Lively

  My entity/component system is happily humming along and, despite some performance concerns I initially had, everything is working fine. However, I've realized that I missed a crucial point when starting this thing: how do you handle different screens? At the moment, I have a GameManager class which owns a component manager and entity manager. When I create an entity, the entity manager assigns it an ID and makes sure it's tracked. When I modify the components that are assigned to an entity. an UpdateEntity method is called, which alerts each of the systems that they may need to add or remove the entity from their respective entity lists. A problem with this is that the collection of entities operated on by each system is determined solely by the individual Systems, typically based on a "required component" filter. (An entity has to have a Renderable component to be rendered, for instance.) In this situation, I can't just keep collections of entities per screen and only Update/Draw those collections. They'd have to either be added and removed depending on their applicability to the current screen, which would cause their associated components to be removed, or enable/disable entities in a group per screen to hide what's not supposed to be visible. These approaches seem like really, really crappy kludges. What's a good way to handle this? A pretty straightforward way that comes to mind is to create a separate GameManager (which in my implementation owns all of the systems, entities, etc.) per screen, which means that everything outside of the device context would be duplicated. That's bothersome because some things are always visible, or I might want to continue to display the game under a translucent menu window. Another option would be to add a "layer" key to the GameManager class, which could be checked against a displayable layer stack held by the game manager. *System.Draw() would be called for each active layer, in the required order as determined by the stack. When the systems request an iterator for their respective entity collections, it would be pre-filtered to a (cached) set of those entities that participate in the active layer. Those collections could be updated from the same UpdateEntity event that's already used to maintain each system's entity collections. Still, kinda feels like a hack. If I've coded myself into a corner, feel free to throw tomatoes as long as they're labeled with a helpful suggestion. Hooray for learning curves.

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• Box2D physics editor for complex bodies

  - by Paul Manta

  Is there any editor out there that would allow me to define complex entities, with joins connecting their multiple bodies, instead of regular single body entities? For example, an editor that would allow me to 'define' a car as having a main body with two circles as wheels, connected through joints. Clarification: I realize I haven't been clear enough about what I need. I'd like to make my engine data-driven, so all entities (and therefore their Box2D bodies) should be defined externally, not in code. I'm looking for a program like Code 'N' Web's PhysicsEditor, except that one only handles single body entities, no joints or anything like that. Like PhysicsEditor, the program should be configurable so that I can save the data in whatever format I want to. Does anyone know of any such software?

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• The technology behind 22can's curiosity

  - by Cameron Scully

  I don't have alot of experience with mobile apps and I definitely don't know much about MMO's but I was wondering what the basic architecture of a game like that would be (understandably some don't consider it a game, but it must use some game theory and implementation). Mainly, how are they able to send/recieve real time feed back of the cube being chipped away by thousands of players on their mobile devices? How is data of the cube's millions of pieces stored and accessed so quickly? Thanks

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• Drawing isometric map in canvas / javascript

  - by Dave

  I have a problem with my map design for my tiles. I set player position which is meant to be the middle tile that the canvas is looking at. How ever the calculation to put them in x:y pixel location is completely messed up for me and i don't know how to fix it. This is what i tried: var offset_x = 0; //used for scrolling on x var offset_y = 0; //used for scrolling on y var prev_mousex = 0; //for movePos function var prev_mousey = 0; //for movePos function function movePos(e){ if (prev_mousex === 0 && prev_mousey === 0) { prev_mousex = e.pageX; prev_mousey = e.pageY; } offset_x = offset_x + (e.pageX - prev_mousex); offset_y = offset_y + (e.pageY - prev_mousey); prev_mousex = e.pageX; prev_mousey = e.pageY; run = true; } player_posx = 5; player_posy = 55; ct = 19; for (i = (player_posx-ct); i < (player_posx+ct); i++){ //horizontal for (j=(player_posy-ct); j < (player_posy+ct); j++){ // vertical //img[0] is 64by64 but the graphic is 64by32 the rest is alpha space var x = (i-j)*(img[0].height/2) + (canvas.width/2)-(img[0].width/2); var y = (i+j)*(img[0].height/4); var abposx = x - offset_x; var abposy = y - offset_y; ctx.drawImage(img[0],abposx,abposy); } } Now based on these numbers the first render-able tile is I = 0 & J = 36. As numbers in the negative are not in the array. But for I=0 and J= 36 the position it calculates is : -1120 : 592 Does any one know how to center it to canvas view properly?

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• Updating scene graph in multithreaded game

  - by user782220

  In a game with a render thread and a game logic thread the game logic thread needs to update the scene graph used by the render thread. I've read about ideas such as a queue of updates. Can someone describe to a newbie at scene graphs what kind of interface the scene graph exports. Presumably it would be rather complicated. So then how does a queue of updates get implemented in C++ in a way that can handle the complexity of the interface of the scene graph while also being type safe and efficient. Again I'm a newbie at scene graphs and C++.

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• What's wrong with this turn to face algorithm?

  - by Chan

  I implement a torpedo object that chases a rotating planet. Specifically, it will turn toward the planet each update. Initially my implement was: void move() { vector3<float> to_target = target - get_position(); to_target.normalize(); position += (to_target * speed); } which works perfectly for torpedo that is a solid sphere. Now my torpedo is actually a model, which has a forward vector, so using this method looks odd because it doesn't actually turn toward but jump toward. So I revised it a bit to get, double get_rotation_angle(vector3<float> u, vector3<float> v) const { u.normalize(); v.normalize(); double cosine_theta = u.dot(v); // domain of arccosine is [-1, 1] if (cosine_theta > 1) { cosine_theta = 1; } if (cosine_theta < -1) { cosine_theta = -1; } return math3d::to_degree(acos(cosine_theta)); } vector3<float> get_rotation_axis(vector3<float> u, vector3<float> v) const { u.normalize(); v.normalize(); // fix linear case if (u == v || u == -v) { v[0] += 0.05; v[1] += 0.0; v[2] += 0.05; v.normalize(); } vector3<float> axis = u.cross(v); return axis.normal(); } void turn_to_face() { vector3<float> to_target = (target - position); vector3<float> axis = get_rotation_axis(get_forward(), to_target); double angle = get_rotation_angle(get_forward(), to_target); double distance = math3d::distance(position, target); gl_matrix_mode(GL_MODELVIEW); gl_push_matrix(); { gl_load_identity(); gl_translate_f(position.get_x(), position.get_y(), position.get_z()); gl_rotate_f(angle, axis.get_x(), axis.get_y(), axis.get_z()); gl_get_float_v(GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, OM); } gl_pop_matrix(); move(); } void move() { vector3<float> to_target = target - get_position(); to_target.normalize(); position += (get_forward() * speed); } The logic is simple, I find the rotation axis by cross product, the angle to rotate by dot product, then turn toward the target position each update. Unfortunately, it looks extremely odds since the rotation happens too fast that it always turns back and forth. The forward vector for torpedo is from the ModelView matrix, the third column A: MODELVIEW MATRIX -------------------------------------------------- R U A T -------------------------------------------------- 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 -------------------------------------------------- Any suggestion or idea would be greatly appreciated.

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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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• cross resolution level design advice [on hold]

  - by Mike

  I was looking for some beginner advice regarding level design across multiple resolutions. I believe the answer is likely "it depends", but any input from anyone with real experience is very appreciated. Basically, I am building a 2D Super Metroid type game. If rooms/levels are to be a tiled grid, what are some general best practices for designing rooms when taking into account different resolutions? Since more or less tiles could fit vertically on a single screen depending on the resolution, is it better to design towards possibly having more of the room visible depending on the screen (with a bare minimum needed for gameplay), or should I fix the design at a certain tile height and scale the graphics?

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• Better data structure for a game like Bubble Witch

  - by CrociDB

  I'm implementing a bubble-witch-like game (http://www.king.com/games/puzzle-games/bubble-witch/), and I was thinking on what's the better way to store the "bubbles" and to work with. I thought of using graphs, but that might be too complex for a trivial thing. Thought of a matrix, just like a tile map, but that might get too 'workaroundy'. I don't know. I'll be doing in Flash/AS3, though. Thanks. :)

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• How can I create and animate 2D skeletons for HTML5 Javascript games? [on hold]

  - by user414209

  I'm trying to make a 2D fighting game in HTML5(somewhat like street fighter). So basically there are two players, one AI and one Human. The players need to have animations for the body movements. Also, there needs to be some collision detection system. I'm using createjs for coding but to design models/objects/animations, I need some other software. So I'm looking for a software that can: easily make custom animation of 2d objects. The objects structure(skeleton etc.) will be same once defined but need to be defined once. Can export the animations and models in a js readable format(preferably json) Collision detection can be done easily after the exported format is loaded in a game engine. For point 1, I'm looking for some generic skeleton based animation. Sprite-sheet based animations will be difficult for collision detection.

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• How to move Objects smoothly like swimming arround

  - by philipp

  I have a Box2D project that is about to create a view where the user looks from the Sky onto Water. Or perhaps on a bathtub filled with water or something like this. The Object which holds the fluid actually does not matter, what matters is the movement of the bodies, because they should move like drops of grease on a soup, or wood on water, I can even imagine the the fluid is mercurial, extreme heavy and "lazy". How can I manipulate the bodies (every frame or time by time) to make them move like this? I started with randomly manipulation their linear velocity, but I turned out that this not very smooth and looks quite hard. Is it a better idea to check their velocity and apply impulses? Is there any example? Greetings philipp

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• OpenGL flickerinng near the edges

  - by Daniel

  I am trying to simulate particles moving around the scene with OpenCL for computation and OpenGL for rendering with GLUT. There is no OpenCL-OpenGL interop yet, so the drawing is done in the older fixed pipeline way. Whenever circles get close to the edges, they start to flicker. The drawing should draw a part of the circle on the top of the scene and a part on the bottom. The effect is the following: The balls you see on the bottom should be one part on the bottom and one part on the top. Wrapping around the scene, so to say, but they constantly flicker. The code for drawing them is: void Scene::drawCircle(GLuint index){ glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); glTranslatef(pos.at(2*index),pos.at(2*index+1), 0.0f); glBegin(GL_TRIANGLE_FAN); GLfloat incr = (2.0 * M_PI) / (GLfloat) slices; glColor3f(0.8f, 0.255f, 0.26f); glVertex2f(0.0f, 0.0f); glColor3f(1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); for(GLint i = 0; i <=slices; ++i){ GLfloat x = radius * sin((GLfloat) i * incr); GLfloat y = radius * cos((GLfloat) i * incr); glVertex2f(x, y); } glEnd(); } If it helps, this is the reshape method: void Scene::reshape(GLint width, GLint height){ if(0 == height) height = 1; //Prevent division by zero glViewport(0, 0, width, height); glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); gluOrtho2D(xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax); std::cout << xmin << " " << xmax << " " << ymin << " " << ymax << std::endl; }

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