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• Is it a good idea to use a formula to balance a game's complexity, in order to keep players in constant flow?

  - by user1107412

  I read a lot about Flow theory and its applications to video games, and I got an idea sticking in my mind. If a number of weight values are applied to different parameters of a certain game level (i.e. the size of the level, the number of enemies, their overal strength, the variance in their behavior, etc), then it should be technically possible to find an overal score mechanism for each level in the game. If a constant ratio of complexity increase were empirically defined, for instance 1,3333, or say, the Golden Ratio, would it be a good idea to arrange the levels in such an order that the increase of overal complexity tends to increase that much? Has somebody tried it?

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• i am going to start learning to develop games, and have a very importent question

  - by levi s.

  so i am going to be starting to start learning to develop games soon, and i have already learned the basics of java. before i really go balls out. am i making a bad choice of language? should i stop now and move to c++ or c#? will that hinder me? is java going to hinder me worse? im kinda having regrets on saying "oh hey minecraft was made in java, it must be best!" im mainly asking, what should i do?

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• How to export Oracle statistics

  - by A_M

  Hi, I am writing some new SQL queries and want to check the query plans that the Oracle query optimiser would come up with in production. My development database doesn't have anything like the data volumes of the production database. How can I export database statistics from a production database and re-import them into a development database? I don't have access to the production database, so I can't simply generate explain plans on production without going through a third party hosting organisation. This is painful. So I want a local database which is in some way representative of production on which I can try out different things. Also, this is for a legacy application. I'd like to "improve" the schema, by adding appropriate indexes. constraints, etc. I need to do this in my development database first, before rolling out to test and production. If I add an index and re-generate statistics in development, then the statistics will be generated around the development data volumes, which makes it difficult to assess the impact my changes on production. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with this? Or is it just a case of fixing unexpected behaviour once we've discovered it on production? I do have a staging database with production volumes, but again I have to go through a third party to run queries against this, which is painful. So I'm looking for ways to cut out the middle man as much as possible. All this is using Oracle 9i. Thanks.

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• Calculate vector direction

  - by Starkers

  Is the direction angle always measured from the plus x axis? Does a vector in the +,+ quadrant always have a direction between 0 and 90, and in -,+ between 90 and 180 and in -,- between 180 and 270 and in -,+ between 270 and 360 ? Also, how should we calculate the direction using tan? Would that mean nested if statements to find out what quadrant we're in, and then applying the appropriate "work arounds"? E.g. If we were in the -,+ (like in the diagram) would we find the angle from the + axis would be 90 + tan^-1(y/x), the 90 + only used because we're in the -,+ quadrant. Also, that's just a quick solution, may be off, I just want to know if we use nested if statements to get the angle from the + x axis. Finally, should we find the distance in degrees or radians?

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• How do I apply 2 rotations about different points to a single primitive using OpenGL

  - by Fenoec

  I'm working on a 2D top-down shooter game that has a rotation feature like Realm Of The Mad God such that if you press e the camera rotates around the character in a clockwise direction and q rotates the camera around the character in a counterclockwise direction. I have this working with my floors and walls by translating to the character, doing the screen rotation, and drawing everything with the character as the origin. The problem arises when I shoot projectiles which need to both rotate around the character and rotate around themselves (shooting uses the mouse cursor so I can shoot at any angle). For example, if the screen is not rotated and I'm shooting rectangular projectiles, I want them to face in the direction I'm shooting (rotation around themselves). However if I only do this rotation, when I then rotate the screen the projectiles will always shoot at the same position because my cursor position does not change. Therefore I need to also either rotate the projectiles around the character or rotate the mouse cursor position to get the correct position (which would then totally screw up all of the collision detection). Likewise if I only do the screen rotation on projectiles, the rectangles will always be facing the same way and they would only look correct if I were shooting straight up or straight down. So my question is, how can I perform 2 rotations on a primitive around 2 different points? The only way I can think of is to translate to the character and do the screen rotation, then somehow calculate the translation required to move back to the middle of the projectile (seeing as how my axes are now rotated) and do its rotation. Or am I thinking about this in the wrong way and there is a different solution to accomplishing this effect?

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• Using "screenshots" in a game, is it allowed?

  - by DevilWithin

  Lets say I have a game that is some kind of a quiz, and its questions are themed around gaming. For it to be interesting, I would need to make references to well-known games and game-related stuff. In a copyright infrigement sense, could I have problems with this? Imagine a question such as, "What was the currency used in game X?", or "Which company made game Y?". Also, the same applied to screenshots of known games, and have a question near it, such as "What game is this image from?". Toughts? Thanks

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• How can a load and play an .x model using vertex animation in XNA?

  - by Christian

  From a game I developed years ago, I still have character models that my former 3D engine designer created and that I'd like to reuse in a Windows Phone project now. However, the files are in DirectX format (.x) containing keyframe animation only. No bones. No skeleton. There are a lot of animation keys defined on several frames to animate the characters. I don't quite understand how that works, to be frankly. However, I did a lot of research regarding a possible way of getting the characters animated via XNA on Windows Phone and all I found are hints that it is generally possible but not supported. Possibly by implementing own Content Importers and Processors. I didn't find anyone who successfully did something like that yet. How should I go about loading and displaying these models in XNA?

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• How do I position a 2D camera in OpenGL?

  - by Elfayer

  I can't understand how the camera is working. It's a 2D game, so I'm displaying a game map from (0, 0, 0) to (mapSizeX, 0, mapSizeY). I'm initializing the camera as follow : Camera::Camera(void) : position_(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f), rotation_(0.0f, 0.0f, -1.0f) {} void Camera::initialize(void) { glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); glTranslatef(position_.x, position_.y, position_.z); gluPerspective(70.0f, 800.0f/600.0f, 1.0f, 10000.0f); gluLookAt(0.0f, 6000.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glDepthFunc(GL_LEQUAL); } So the camera is looking down. I currently see the up right border of the map in the center of my window and the map expand to the down left border of my window. I would like to center the map. The logical thing to do should be to move the camera to eyeX = mapSizeX / 2 and the same for z. My map has 10 x 10 cases with CASE = 400, so I should have : gluLookAt((10 / 2) * CASE /* = 2000 */, 6000.0f, (10 / 2) * CASE /* = 2000 */, 0.0f, 0.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); But that doesn't move the camera, but seems to rotate it. Am I doing something wrong? EDIT : I tried that: gluLookAt(2000.0f, 6000.0f, 0.0f, 2000.0f, 0.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); Which correctly moves the map in the middle of the window in width. But I can't move if correctly in height. It always returns the axis Z. When I go up, It goes down and the same for right and left. I don't see the map anymore when I do : gluLookAt(2000.0f, 6000.0f, 2000.0f, 2000.0f, 0.0f, 2000.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f);

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• Design leaderboard ratings for quiz games

  - by PeterK

  Back in March 2011 i started the following post: How to design a leaderboard? Now my quiz game have been out for approximately a year and sold pretty decently. I am working on to update the game design and is again looking into the leaderboard design to make it better as i am not happy with it. Currently i rate players on number of correct answers, which is not good as it does not consider things like number of games, difficulty levels etc. I also have "extended" stats behind the UITableView (Leaderboard). A player can play based on three levels of difficulty: hard, medium or easy Difficulty levels can be mixed between players in a game Each game can be one to six players, so there can be single games or duels Between 2 and 30 questions per game As i am considering integrating Game Center Leaderboard i need to design a better rating system so i would like to ask for some ideas how to do the rating based on the above. I am thinking about how much a point would be worth and what it includes.

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• Adjusting the rate of movement of different objects on the same timer

  - by theUg

  I have a series of objects moving along the straight lines. I want to implement slight changes of velocity of each of the object. Constraint is existing model of animation. I am new to this, and not sure if it is the best way to accommodate varying speeds, but what do I know? It is a Java application that repaints the panel every time the timer expires. Timer is set via swing.Timer object that is set by timer delay constant. Every time the game is stepped objects’ coordinates advanced by an increment constant. Most of the objects are of the same class. Is there fairly easy way to refactor existing system to allow changing velocity for an individual object? Is there some obvious common solution I am not aware about? Idea I am having right now is to set timer delay fairly small, and only move objects every so many cycles of animation so that the apparent speed can be adjusted by varying how often they get moved. But that seems fairly involved, and I do not think it is the most elegant solution in terms of performance what with repainting the whole frame every 3-5 milliseconds. Can it be done by advancing the objects so many (varying) times during the certain interval (let’s say 35ms for something like 28fps), and use repaint() method to redraw just individual object? Do I need to mess with pausing animation for smoothness at higher redraw rates? Is it common practise to check for collision at larger step interval, but draw animation a lot more frequently?

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• Coordinate spaces and transformation matrices

  - by Belgin

  I'm trying to get an object from object space, into projected space using these intermediate matrices: The first matrix (I) is the one that transforms from object space into inertial space, but since my object is not rotated or translated in any way inside the object space, this matrix is the 4x4 identity matrix. The second matrix (W) is the one that transforms from inertial space into world space, which is just a scale transform matrix of factor a = 14.1 on all coordinates, since the inertial space origin coincides with the world space origin. /a 0 0 0\ W = |0 a 0 0| |0 0 a 0| \0 0 0 1/ The third matrix (C) is the one that transforms from world space, into camera space. This matrix is a translation matrix with a translation of (0, 0, 10), because I want the camera to be located behind the object, so the object must be positioned 10 units into the z axis. /1 0 0 0\ C = |0 1 0 0| |0 0 1 10| \0 0 0 1/ And finally, the fourth matrix is the projection matrix (P). Bearing in mind that the eye is at the origin of the world space and the projection plane is defined by z = 1, the projection matrix is: /1 0 0 0\ P = |0 1 0 0| |0 0 1 0| \0 0 1/d 0/ where d is the distance from the eye to the projection plane, so d = 1. I'm multiplying them like this: (((P x C) x W) x I) x V, where V is the vertex' coordinates in column vector form: /x\ V = |y| |z| \1/ After I get the result, I divide x and y coordinates by w to get the actual screen coordinates. Apparenly, I'm doing something wrong or missing something completely here, because it's not rendering properly. Here's a picture of what is supposed to be the bottom side of the Stanford Dragon: Also, I should add that this is a software renderer so no DirectX or OpenGL stuff here.

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• How to alter image pixels of a wild life bird?

  - by NoobScratcher

  Hello so I was hoping someone knew how to move or change color and position actual image pixels and could explain and show the code to do so. I know how to write pixels on a surface or screen-surface usigned int *ptr = static_cast <unsigned int *> (screen-pixels); int offset = y * (screen->pitch / sizeof(unsigned int)); ptr[offset + x] = color; But I don't know how to alter or manipulate a image pixel of a png image my thoughts on this was How do I get the values and locations of pixels and what do I have to write to make it happen? Then how do I actually change the values or locations of those gotten pixels and how do I make that happen? any ideas tip suggestions are also welcome! int main(int argc , char *argv[]) { SDL_Surface *Screen = SDL_SetVideoMode(640,480,32,SDL_SWSURFACE); SDL_Surface *Image; Image = IMG_Load("image.png"); bool done = false; SDL_Event event; while(!done) { SDL_FillRect(Screen,NULL,(0,0,0)); SDL_BlitSurface(Image,NULL,Screen,NULL); while(SDL_PollEvent(&event)) { switch(event.type) { case SDL_QUIT: return 0; break; } } SDL_Flip(Screen); } return 0; }

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• Problem with a* implementation in pygame

  - by piyush3dxyz

  Yesterday i decide to make RTS game in pygame(pygame is best).I figured out many components of RTS game like unit selecting,health,resources but only 1 thing i still not understand.. which is a* pathfinding in pygame... I also done little bit of research on wiki,articles and papers...but still cant figure out problem.... function A*(start,goal) closedset := the empty set // The set of nodes already evaluated. openset := {start} // The set of tentative nodes to be evaluated, initially containing the start node came_from := the empty map // The map of navigated nodes. g_score[start] := 0 // Cost from start along best known path. // Estimated total cost from start to goal through y. f_score[start] := g_score[start] + heuristic_cost_estimate(start, goal) while openset is not empty current := the node in openset having the lowest f_score[] value if current = goal return reconstruct_path(came_from, goal) remove current from openset add current to closedset for each neighbor in neighbor_nodes(current) if neighbor in closedset continue tentative_g_score := g_score[current] + dist_between(current,neighbor) if neighbor not in openset or tentative_g_score <= g_score[neighbor] came_from[neighbor] := current g_score[neighbor] := tentative_g_score f_score[neighbor] := g_score[neighbor] + heuristic_cost_estimate(neighbor, goal) if neighbor not in openset add neighbor to openset return failure here is the pseudocode for wiki a* implementation......

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• One-way platforms in UDK

  - by Jordaan Mylonas

  I'm looking to make a multi-player platforming game using UDK. I'm currently doing feasibility research, to make sure I will reasonably be able to do all of the technical things I want to do. The first major hurdle I've come across without being able to find as answer, are one-way platforms. That is to say, platforms through which a player can jump up, but not fall through (unless they choose to). These are commonly seen in games like Mario, Kirby and Smash Bros. Does anyone know how such a system would work within UDK? I can think of solutions that might work for single-player, but not multi.

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• Am I missing something about these considerations about Leaderboard's database's schema?

  - by misiMe

  I just finished to develop a mobile game, now I want to implement an online leaerboard using mysql. I'm wondering about the database's schema, I thought about some possibilities: (I didn't got in detail with syntax because my question is just about the logic of it) Name: string; Score: integer I thought to ask the name just the first time. If, in the future, you will modify that, it will call just an update to the name associated with your id. Leaderboard(ID, Name, Score) ID: integer autoincrement, PrimaryKey With this kind of idea maybe the db will grow fast because if you choose everytime a different name for the score, it will add a new entry. Leaderboard(PhoneId, Name, Score) Here PhoneId will be the unique identifier of the phone, PrimaryKey. A con of this choice is that if you want to play with your friends' phone, you can't put a different name for the score. Leaderboard(Name, Score) Here Name is PrimaryKey. With that, if you enter a name that already exists, you will be prompted to choose another one. Do you agree with this considerations? What will you do? Am I missing something?

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• Rendering output to arbitary quadrilateral

  - by Trainee4Life

  I want to render output on a device to an arbitary quadirlateral, i.e. project texture on to a quad. What are the possible ways I could implement it? Till now, I have investigated: Drawing textured quadrilateral - Quads look odd as they are composed of triangles, and the distortion looks odd. The issue I'm facing has been discussed here and here as well. Setting transformation on device - Need help in getting this implemented. Pixel shaders - Not able to implement the desired effect. Any help would be much appreciated.

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• Estimate angle to launch missile, maths question

  - by Jonathan

  I've been working on this for an hour or two now and my maths really isn't my strong suit which is definitely not a good thing for a game programmer but that shouldn't stop me enjoying a hobby surely? After a few failed attempts I was hoping someone else out there could help so here's the situation. I'm trying to implement a bit of faked intelligence when the A.I fires it's missiles at a target in a 2D game world. By predicting the likely position the target will be in given it's current velocity and the time it will take the missile to reach it's target. I created an image to demonstrate my thinking: http://i.imgur.com/SFmU3.png which also contains the logic I use for accelerating the missile after launch. The ship that fires the missile can fire within a total of 40 degree angle, 20 either side of itself, but this could likely become variable. My current attempt was to break the space between the two lines into segments which match the targets width. Then calculate the time it would take the missile to get to that location using the formula. So for each iteration of this we total up the values and that tells us the distance travelled, ad it would then just need compared to distance to the segment. startVelocity * ((startVelocity * acceleration)^(currentframe-1) So for example. If we start at a velocity of 1f/frame with an acceleration of 0.1f the formula, at frame 4, would be 1 * (1.1^3) = 1.331 But I quickly realized I was getting lost when trying to put this into practice. Does this seem like a correct starting point or am I going completely the wrong way about it? Any pointers would help me greatly. Maths really isn't my strong suit so I get easily lost in these matters and don't even really know a good phrase to search for with this. So I guess in summary my question is more about the correct way to approach this problem and any additional code samples on top of that would be great but I'm not averse to working out the complete code from helpful pointers.

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• Understanding IDAT chunk of PNG file format

  - by DRapp

  From the sample image below, I have a border in yellow just for display purposes only. The actual .png file is a simple black/white image 3 pixels by 3 pixels. I was originally thinking to try as a 2x2, but that would not help trying to interpret low/hi vs hi/low drawing stream. At least this way, I would have two black, one white from the top, or one white, two black from the bottom.. So I read the chunks of data, get to the IDAT chunk, decode that (zlib) and come up with 12 bytes as follows 00 20 00 40 00 80 So, my question, how does the above get broken down into the 3x3 black and white sample... Also, it is saved in palette format and properly recognizes the bit depth of 1 and color palette of 2... color pallet[0] is RGBA all zeros. Palette1 has RGBA of 255, 255, 255, 0 I'll eventually get into the multiple other depth formats later, just wanted to start with what would expect to be the easiest. Part II. Any guidance on handling the other depth formats would help if anything special to be considered especially regarding alpha channel (which I am already looking for in the palette) that might trip me up.

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• Dynamic navigation mesh changes

  - by Nairou

  I'm currently trying to convert from grids to navigation meshes for pathfinding, since grids are either too coarse for accurate navigation, or too fine to be useful for object tracking. While my map is fairly static, and the navigation mesh could be created in advance, this is somewhat of a tower defense game, where objects can be placed to block paths, so I need a way to recalculate portions of the navigation mesh to allow pathing around them. Is there any existing documentation on good ways to do this? I'm still very new to navigation meshes, so the prospect of modifying them to cut or fill holes sounds daunting.

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• Application toolkits like QT versus traditional game/multimedia libraries like SFML

  - by Aaron

  I currently intend to use SFML for my next game project. I'll need a substantial GUI though (RPG/strategy-type) so I'll either have to implement my own or try to find an appropriate third party library, which seem to boil down to CEGUI, libRocket, and GWEN. At the same time, I do not anticipate doing that many advanced graphical effects. My game will be 2D and primarily sprite-based with some sprite animations. I've recently discovered that QT applications can have their appearance styled so that they don't have to look like plain OS apps. Given that, I am beginning to consider QT a valid alternative to SFML. I wouldn't have to implement the GUI functionality I'd need, and I may not be taking advantage of SFML's lower-level access anyway. The only drawbacks I can think of immediately are the learning curve for QT and figuring out how to fit game logic inside such a framework after getting used to the input/update/render loop of traditional game libraries. When would an application toolkit like QT be more appropriate for a game than a traditional game or multimedia library like SFML?

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• 3ds Max CAT to XNA

  - by user12214

  Has anyone successfully used the CAT bone system in 3ds Max and exported the file into XNA? If so, what was your method of doing so? There are a number of methods of doing this apparently, but the ones I've tried have not worked. I used the Panda Exporter which creates a .X file. This seems to be the latest way of going about this, but when it's loaded in XNA, there is an error saying something about the bone weights. This happens when I export with and without CAT bones.

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• OpenGL + Allegro. Moving from software drawing X Y to openGL is confusing

  - by Aaron

  Having a fair bit of trouble. I'm used to Allegro and drawing sprites on a bitmap buffer at X Y coords. Now I've started a test project with OpenGL and its weird. Basically, as far as I know, theirs many ways to draw stuff in OpenGL. At the moment, I think I'm creating a Quad? Whatever that is, and I think Ive given it a texture of a bitmap and them im drawing that: GLuint gl_image; bitmap = load_bitmap("cat.bmp", NULL); gl_image = allegro_gl_make_texture_ex(AGL_TEXTURE_MASKED, bitmap, GL_RGBA); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, gl_image); glBegin(GL_QUADS); glColor4ub(255, 255, 255, 255); glTexCoord2f(0, 0); glVertex3f(-0.5, 0.5, 0); glTexCoord2f(1, 0); glVertex3f(0.5, 0.5, 0); glTexCoord2f(1, 1); glVertex3f(0.5, -0.5, 0); glTexCoord2f(0, 1); glVertex3f(-0.5, -0.5, 0); glEnd(); So yeah. So I got a few questions: Is this the best way of drawing a sprite? Is it suitable? The big question: Can anyone help / Does anyone know any tutorials on this weird coordinate thing? If it even is that. It's vastly different from XY, but I want to learn it. I was thinking maybe I could learn how this weird positioning stuff works, and then write a function to try and translate it to X and Y coords. Thats about it. I'm still trying to figure it all out on my own but any contributions you guys can make would be greatly appreciated =D Thanks!

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• Complete Math Library for use in OpenGL ES 2.0 Game?

  - by Bunkai.Satori

  Are you aware of a complete (or almost complete) cross platform math library for use in OpenGL ES 2.0 games? The library should contain: Matrix2x2, Matrix 3x3, Matrix4x4 classes Quaternions Vector2, Vector3, Vector4 Classes Euler Angle Class Operations amongh the above mentioned classes, conversions, etc.. Standardly used math operations in 3D graphics (Dot Product, Cross Product, SLERP, etc...) Is there such Math API available either standalone or as a part of any package? Programming Language: Visual C++ but planned to be ported to OS X and Android OS.

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• Detecting a ledge in Box2D

  - by DormoTheNord

  I'm making a 2D platformer with Box2D. The player needs to be able to grab onto a ledge and pull him/herself up. Right now I have a sensor that extends in every direction from the upper half of the player's body. The logic seems simple enough: if there are tiles inside the sensor and empty space above them, then it's a ledge and the game should act accordingly. The problem is that I can't figure out how to implement that logic with Box2D. Anyone have any ideas?

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• How can I log key presses in Game Maker?

  - by skeletalmonkey

  I'm trying to create a log of a players actions as they play a game of Spelunky. The easiest I've found to do this is to log what keys are pressed at each frame. What I don't know how to do is how to integrate this with the Game Maker source code of Spelunky. Is there a specific way to create a script that is checked every frame/tick (don't know the right term) and a command to find what buttons are pressed?

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