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• Does it make the game more fun when the user is forced to progress thru the levels sequentially rather than letting them pick and play?

  - by BeachRunnerJoe

  Hello. For the first time in my game, I'm stuck with a real design dilemma. I guess that's a good thing ;) I'm building a word puzzle game that has five levels, each with 30 puzzles. Currently, the user has to solve one puzzle at a time before moving to the next. However, I'm finding the user occasionally gets stuck on a puzzle, at which point they can no longer play until they solve it. This is obviously bad because many people will just quit playing the game and delete the app since they get frustrated and can't play any other puzzles until the current puzzle is solved. The only elegant solution I can find to helping the player get unstuck is changing the design of the game to allow the users to pick any puzzle to play at any time. This way, if they get stuck, they can come back to it later and at least they have other puzzles to play in the meantime. It's my opinion, however, that this new flow design doesn't make the game as fun as the original flow design where the player has to complete a puzzle before moving to the next. To me, it's like anything else, when you only have one of something, it's more enjoyable, but when you have 30 of something, it's far less enjoyable. In fact, when I present the user with 30 puzzles to choose from that they need to solve before unlocking the next level, it almost seems as tho I'm making them feel like it's work they have to do. I even had a tester voluntarily tell me that being forced to complete a puzzle before moving to the next is more motivating. My questions are... Do you agree/disagree? Do you have any suggestions for how I can help the player get unstuck? Thanks so much in advance for your thoughts! EDIT: I should mention that I've already considered a few other solutions to helping the user get unstuck, but none of them seem like good ideas. They are... Add more hints: Currently, the user gets two hints per puzzle. If I increase the hint count, it only makes the game more easy and still leaves the possibility of the user getting stuck. Add a "Show Solution" button: This seems like a bad idea because it's my opinion this takes the fun out of the game for many people who would probably otherwise solve the puzzle if they didn't have the quick option to see the solution.

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• Evolution laggy due to IMAP -profile or due to some odd Sync -issue?

  - by Izzy

  I'm fighting with Evolution. Basically it's working fine -- but it is very slow to react in certain situations. Helper questions Could it be that changing away from Bonobo has to do with slowing-down? There might be some trouble with the new engine and "asynchronous actions". What to do about it? Are there e.g. any configuration files? I want to get the previous "working mood" back. How can I speed this thing up? Different scenarios when sending a mail, the composer window hangs there inactive for a couple of seconds, everything grayed out. Though there is a green check mark saying it's sent, I'm not sure a) why it's still blocking everything and b) whether I could simply close it without "breaking"/"losing" anything. In earlier versions, the composer window was closing pretty fast, and one could see the message being stored into the local "outbox" until it was sent, and one could immediately continue with the next task. I prefer that behaviour over the current, where I cannot do anything in the application until the window closes. switching between modules. Coming from mail and switching to the address book takes a couple of seconds. Same for switching to the calendar. I read about different "possible causes" and tried a few things: I only have 3 local address books, so no networking should be involved here. To make sure, I switched to offline mode and then tried to access the address book. No noticeable difference. I use 3 Google Calendars. Switching to offline mode made a minor difference, but so minor that it also could be "imagination" since one might have expected this in this case according to some reports, disabling the tasks should help. Well, it didn't in my case, as I don't use them regularly (just two local items stored here) Maybe I should also mention that I'm using the KDE4 desktop (so no Unity or Gnome, though both is installed on the computer). And I did not have this issue before I updated to 12.04.

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• A little gem from MPN&ndash;FREE online course on Architectural Guidance for Migrating Applications to Windows Azure Platform

  - by Eric Nelson

  I know a lot of technical people who work in partners (ISVs, System Integrators etc). I know that virtually none of them would think of going to the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) learning portal to find some deep and high quality technical content. Instead they would head to MSDN, Channel 9, msdev.com etc. I am one of those people :-) Hence imagine my surprise when i stumbled upon this little gem Architectural Guidance for Migrating Applications to Windows Azure Platform (your company and hence your live id need to be a member of MPN – which is free to join). This is first class stuff – and represents about 4 hours which is really 8 if you stop and ponder :) Course Structure The course is divided into eight modules.  Each module explores a different factor that needs to be considered as part of the migration process. Module 1:  Introduction:  This section provides an introduction to the training course, highlighting the values of the Windows Azure Platform for developers. Module 2:  Dynamic Environment: This section goes into detail about the dynamic environment of the Windows Azure Platform. This session will explain the difference between current development states and the Windows Azure Platform environment, detail the functions of roles, and highlight development considerations to be aware of when working with the Windows Azure Platform. Module 3:  Local State: This session details the local state of the Windows Azure Platform. This section details the different types of storage within the Windows Azure Platform (Blobs, Tables, Queues, and SQL Azure). The training will provide technical guidance on local storage usage, how to write to blobs, how to effectively use table storage, and other authorization methods. Module 4:  Latency and Timeouts: This session goes into detail explaining the considerations surrounding latency, timeouts and how to assess an IT portfolio. Module 5:  Transactions and Bandwidth: This session details the performance metrics surrounding transactions and bandwidth in the Windows Azure Platform environment. This session will detail the transactions and bandwidth costs involved with the Windows Azure Platform and mitigation techniques that can be used to properly manage those costs. Module 6:  Authentication and Authorization: This session details authentication and authorization protocols within the Windows Azure Platform. This session will detail information around web methods of authorization, web identification, Access Control Benefits, and a walkthrough of the Windows Identify Foundation. Module 7:  Data Sensitivity: This session details data considerations that users and developers will experience when placing data into the cloud. This section of the training highlights these concerns, and details the strategies that developers can take to increase the security of their data in the cloud. Module 8:  Summary Provides an overall review of the course.

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• The Minimalist's Approach to Content Governance

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  This week on the blog, we want to focus on the content lifecylce and how important it is to have the tools in place to be able to properly manage all te phases of the content lifecylce. John Brunswick has some great advice when it comes to this topic, so expect to hear a lot from him this week! Originally posted by John Brunswick. Let's be honest - content governance is far from an exciting topic. BUT the potential of a very small intranet team creating and maintaining a platform that provides an organization with relevant, high value information, helping workers to get their jobs done with greater accuracy and in less time is exciting. It is easy to quickly start producing content, but the challenge is ensuring that the environment is easy to navigate and use on the third week and during the third year.   What can be done to bridge this gap? Over the next few blog entries let's take a pragmatic, minimalistic view of a process that can help any team manage a wealth of unstructured information. Based on an earlier article that I wrote around Portal Governance, I am going to focus on using technology as much as possible to support the governance of content with minimal involvement from users. The only certainty about content production is that business users are not fans of maintaining content. Maintenance is overhead and is a long-term investment thats value will possibly not be realized under the current content creator's watch. To add context to how we will use technical tools in this process, each post will highlight one section of the content lifecycle process as outlined below Content Lifecycle Stages 1. Request - Understand the education, purpose, resource and success criteria for content 2. Create - Determine access and workflow for content 3. Manage - Understand ownership and review cycles 4. Retire - Act on thresholds established during the request stage Within each state we will also elaborate as to 1. Why - why would we entertain doing this? 2. How - the steps that are needed to make it happen 3. Impact - what is the net benefit or loss based on the process Over the course of this week, we will dive deep into the stages and the minimal amount of time, effort and process within each to make some meaningful gains in the improvement of user experience and productivity in their search for information. It might be a stretch to say that we can make content governance exciting, but hopefully it can end up being painless and paying dividends. And if you'd like to hear first hand from a customer that is managing their content lifecycle with Oracle WebCenter, be sure to join us on Wednesday for this webcast "ResCare Solves Content Lifecycle Challenges with Oracle WebCenter"!

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• Are these non-standard applications of rendering practical in games?

  - by maul

  I've recently got into 3D and I came up with a few different "tricky" rendering techniques. Unfortunately I don't have the time to work on this myself, but I'd like to know if these are known methods and if they can be used in practice. Hybrid rendering Now I know that ray-tracing is still not fast enough for real-time rendering, at least on home computers. I also know that hybrid rendering (a combination of rasterization and ray-tracing) is a well known theory. However I had the following idea: one could separate a scene into "important" and "not important" objects. First you render the "not important" objects using traditional rasterization. In this pass you also render the "important" objects using a special shader that simply marks these parts on the image using a special color, or some stencil/depth buffer trickery. Then in the second pass you read back the results of the first pass and start ray tracing, but only from the pixels that were marked by the "important" object's shader. This would allow you to only ray-trace exactly what you need to. Could this be fast enough for real-time effects? Rendered physics I'm specifically talking about bullet physics - intersection of a very small object (point/bullet) that travels across a straight line with other, relatively slow-moving, fairly constant objects. More specifically: hit detection. My idea is that you could render the scene from the point of view of the gun (or the bullet). Every object in the scene would draw a different color. You only need to render a 1x1 pixel window - the center of the screen (again, from the gun's point of view). Then you simply check that central pixel and the color tells you what you hit. This is pixel-perfect hit detection based on the graphical representation of objects, which is not common in games. Afaik traditional OpenGL "picking" is a similar method. This could be extended in a few ways: For larger (non-bullet) objects you render a larger portion of the screen. If you put a special-colored plane in the middle of the scene (exactly where the bullet will be after the current frame) you get a method that works as the traditional slow-moving iterative physics test as well. You could simulate objects that the bullet can pass through (with decreased velocity) using alpha blending or some similar trick. So are these techniques in use anywhere, and/or are they practical at all?

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• Adding Facebook Open Graph Tags to an MVC Application

  - by amaniar

  If you have any kind of share functionality within your application it’s a good practice to add the basic Facebook open graph tags to the header of all pages. For an MVC application this can be as simple as adding these tags to the Head section of the Layouts file.<head> <title>@ViewBag.Title</title> <meta property="og:title" content="@ViewBag.FacebookTitle" /> <meta property="og:type" content="website"/> <meta property="og:url" content="@ViewBag.FacebookUrl"/> <meta property="og:image" content="@ViewBag.FacebookImage"/> <meta property="og:site_name" content="Site Name"/> <meta property="og:description" content="@ViewBag.FacebookDescription"/></head>  These ViewBag properties can then be populated from any action: private ActionResult MyAction() { ViewBag.FacebookDescription = "My Actions Description"; ViewBag.FacebookUrl = "My Full Url"; ViewBag.FacebookTitle = "My Actions Title"; ViewBag.FacebookImage = "My Actions Social Image"; .... } You might want to populate these ViewBag properties with default values when the actions don’t populate them. This can be done in 2 places. 1. In the Layout itself. (check the ViewBag properties and set them if they are empty) @{ ViewBag.FacebookTitle = ViewBag.FacebookTitle ?? "My Default Title"; ViewBag.FacebookUrl = ViewBag.FacebookUrl ?? HttpContext.Current.Request.RawUrl; ViewBag.FacebookImage = ViewBag.FacebookImage ?? "http://www.mysite.com/images/logo_main.png"; ViewBag.FacebookDescription = ViewBag.FacebookDescription ?? "My Default Description"; }  2. Create an action filter and add it to all Controllers or your base controller. public class FacebookActionFilterAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute { public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { var viewBag = filterContext.Controller.ViewBag; viewBag.FacebookDescription = "My Actions Description"; viewBag.FacebookUrl = "My Full Url"; viewBag.FacebookTitle = "My Actions Title"; viewBag.FacebookImage = "My Actions Social Image"; base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext); } } Add attribute to your BaseController. [FacebookActionFilter] public class HomeController : Controller { .... }

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• Quickly Copy Movie Files to Individually Named Folders

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Some HTPC media manager applications require movie files to be in stored in separate folders to properly store information such as cover art images and other metadata. Here we look at copying movie files to individual folders. If you already have a large movie collection stored in a single folder, we’ll show you how to quickly move those files into their own individually named folders. File2Folder FIle2folder is a handy portable app that automatically creates and moves movie files into a folder of the same filename. There is no installation needed. Simply download and run the .exe file (link below). Enter the current movie directory, or browse for the folder. File2folder now supports both local and network shares. When you are ready to create the folders and move the files, click Move! You’ll see the move progress displayed in the window. When the process is finished, you’ll have all your movie file in individual folders.   Change your mind? Just click the Undo! button…   …and the move and folder creation process will be undone. If you would like to have the folder monitored for new files, click the Start button. File2folder will process any new files it discovers every 180 seconds. To turn it off, click Stop. This simple little program is a huge timesaver for those looking to organize movie collections for their HTPC. We should also note that this will work with any files, not just videos. Download file2folder Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Hack: Turn Off Debug Mode in VMWare Workstation 6 BetaAdd Images and Metadata to Windows 7 Media Center Movie LibraryAdd Folders to the Movie Library in Windows 7 Media CenterAutomatically Mount and View ISO files in Windows 7 Media CenterMove the Public Folder in Windows Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Identify Fonts using WhatFontis.com Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good Greate Image Viewing and Management with Zoner Photo Studio Free Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician

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• Help with calculation to steer ship in 3d space

  - by Aaron Anodide

  I'm a beginner using XNA to try and make a 3D Asteroids game. I'm really close to having my space ship drive around as if it had thrusters for pitch and yaw. The problem is I can't quite figure out how to translate the rotations, for instance, when I pitch forward 45 degrees and then start to turn - in this case there should be rotation being applied to all three directions to get the "diagonal yaw" - right? I thought I had it right with the calculations below, but they cause a partly pitched forward ship to wobble instead of turn.... :( Here's current (almost working) calculations for the Rotation acceleration: float accel = .75f; // Thrust +Y / Forward if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.I)) { this.ship.AccelerationY += (float)Math.Cos(this.ship.RotationZ) * accel; this.ship.AccelerationX += (float)Math.Sin(this.ship.RotationZ) * -accel; this.ship.AccelerationZ += (float)Math.Sin(this.ship.RotationX) * accel; } // Rotation +Z / Yaw if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.J)) { this.ship.RotationAccelerationZ += (float)Math.Cos(this.ship.RotationX) * accel; this.ship.RotationAccelerationY += (float)Math.Sin(this.ship.RotationX) * accel; this.ship.RotationAccelerationX += (float)Math.Sin(this.ship.RotationY) * accel; } // Rotation -Z / Yaw if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.K)) { this.ship.RotationAccelerationZ += (float)Math.Cos(this.ship.RotationX) * -accel; this.ship.RotationAccelerationY += (float)Math.Sin(this.ship.RotationX) * -accel; this.ship.RotationAccelerationX += (float)Math.Sin(this.ship.RotationY) * -accel; } // Rotation +X / Pitch if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.F)) { this.ship.RotationAccelerationX += accel; } // Rotation -X / Pitch if (currentKeyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.D)) { this.ship.RotationAccelerationX -= accel; } I'm combining that with drawing code that does a rotation to the model: public void Draw(Matrix world, Matrix view, Matrix projection, TimeSpan elsapsedTime) { float seconds = (float)elsapsedTime.TotalSeconds; // update velocity based on acceleration this.VelocityX += this.AccelerationX * seconds; this.VelocityY += this.AccelerationY * seconds; this.VelocityZ += this.AccelerationZ * seconds; // update position based on velocity this.PositionX += this.VelocityX * seconds; this.PositionY += this.VelocityY * seconds; this.PositionZ += this.VelocityZ * seconds; // update rotational velocity based on rotational acceleration this.RotationVelocityX += this.RotationAccelerationX * seconds; this.RotationVelocityY += this.RotationAccelerationY * seconds; this.RotationVelocityZ += this.RotationAccelerationZ * seconds; // update rotation based on rotational velocity this.RotationX += this.RotationVelocityX * seconds; this.RotationY += this.RotationVelocityY * seconds; this.RotationZ += this.RotationVelocityZ * seconds; Matrix translation = Matrix.CreateTranslation(PositionX, PositionY, PositionZ); Matrix rotation = Matrix.CreateRotationX(RotationX) * Matrix.CreateRotationY(RotationY) * Matrix.CreateRotationZ(RotationZ); model.Root.Transform = rotation * translation * world; model.CopyAbsoluteBoneTransformsTo(boneTransforms); foreach (ModelMesh mesh in model.Meshes) { foreach (BasicEffect effect in mesh.Effects) { effect.World = boneTransforms[mesh.ParentBone.Index]; effect.View = view; effect.Projection = projection; effect.EnableDefaultLighting(); } mesh.Draw(); } }

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• GLSL per pixel lighting with custom light type

  - by Justin

  Ok, I am having a big problem here. I just got into GLSL yesterday, so the code will be terrible, I'm sure. Basically, I am attempting to make a light that can be passed into the fragment shader (for learning purposes). I have four input values: one for the position of the light, one for the color, one for the distance it can travel, and one for the intensity. I want to find the distance between the light and the fragment, then calculate the color from there. The code I have gives me a simply gorgeous ring of light that get's twisted and widened as the matrix is modified. I love the results, but it is not even close to what I am after. I want the light to be moved with all of the vertices, so it is always in the same place in relation to the objects. I can easily take it from there, but getting that to work seems to be impossible with my current structure. Can somebody give me a few pointers (pun not intended)? Vertex shader: attribute vec4 position; attribute vec4 color; attribute vec2 textureCoordinates; varying vec4 colorVarying; varying vec2 texturePosition; varying vec4 fposition; varying vec4 lightPosition; varying float lightDistance; varying float lightIntensity; varying vec4 lightColor; void main() { vec4 ECposition = gl_ModelViewMatrix * gl_Vertex; vec3 tnorm = normalize(vec3 (gl_NormalMatrix * gl_Normal)); fposition = ftransform(); gl_Position = fposition; gl_TexCoord[0] = gl_MultiTexCoord0; fposition = ECposition; lightPosition = vec4(0.0, 0.0, 5.0, 0.0) * gl_ModelViewMatrix * gl_Vertex; lightDistance = 5.0; lightIntensity = 1.0; lightColor = vec4(0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 1.0); } Fragment shader: varying vec4 colorVarying; varying vec2 texturePosition; varying vec4 fposition; varying vec4 lightPosition; varying float lightDistance; varying float lightIntensity; varying vec4 lightColor; uniform sampler2D texture; void main() { float l_distance = sqrt((gl_FragCoord.x * lightPosition.x) + (gl_FragCoord.y * lightPosition.y) + (gl_FragCoord.z * lightPosition.z)); float l_value = lightIntensity / (l_distance / lightDistance); vec4 l_color = vec4(l_value * lightColor.r, l_value * lightColor.g, l_value * lightColor.b, l_value * lightColor.a); vec4 color; color = texture2D(texture, gl_TexCoord[0].st); gl_FragColor = l_color * color; //gl_FragColor = fposition; }

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• Strategy for avoiding duplicate object ids for data shared across devices using iCloud

  - by rmaddy

  I have a data intensive iOS app that is not using CoreData nor does it support iCloud synching (yet). All of my objects are created with unique keys. I use a simple long long initialized with the current time. Then as I need a new key I increment the value by 1. This has all worked well for a few years with the app running isolated on a single device. Now I want to add support for automatic data sync across devices using iCloud. As my app is written, there is the possibility that two objects created on two different devices could end up with the same key. I need to avoid this possibility. I'm looking for ideas for solving this issue. I have a few requirements that the solution must meet: 1) The key needs to remain a single integral data type. Converting all existing keys to a compound key or to a string or other type would affect the entire code base and likely result in more bugs than it's worth. 2) The solution can't depend on an Internet connection. A user must be able to run the app and add data even with no Internet connection. The data should still resolve properly later when the data syncs through iCloud once a connection is available. I'll accept one exception to this rule. If no other option is available, I may be open to requiring an Internet connection the first time the app's data is initialized. One idea I have been toying around with in my head is logically splitting the integer key into two parts. The high 4 or 5 bits could be used as some sort of device id while the rest represents the actual key. The fuzzy part is figuring out how to come up with non-conflicting device ids that fit in a few bits. This should be viable since I don't need to deal will millions of devices. I just need to deal with the few devices that would be shared by a given iCloud account. I'm open to suggestions. Thanks.

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• Homepage issue on Google [closed]

  - by nico

  We have recently updated our website www.blinds4uk.co.uk with a new homepage containing additional features and more on page content but since then we have lost primary keyword positions and the home page has disappeared completely. The only time it appears is for an exact search ‘blinds4uk’. Today I took snippets of 'unique content' from the homepage and put this into the 'google search' but our homepage was nowhere to be found. When I did the same in ‘Yahoo’ the homepage came up. Are we missing something? We ranked in the top 4 for primary kw terms 'blinds uk' & 'uk blinds' but now we don’t show anywhere for these terms. Our homepage has never ranked well for the primary kw 'blinds' yet our internal pages rank very well with many pages on page 1 of google uk. We employed an SEO firm for 9 months to help us establish issues with the homepage but they never could, so we got rid. We have been trying to get to the root cause of why the homepage ranks so poorly for a number of years and only yesterday we established that we had the meta tag directly below the tag and our title & meta description were further down the page; we have today corrected. Not sure what effect this would have on the way Google reads the homepage but we are trying everything to try and get the homepage ranking fro those primary kw's. Our current developers & ex SEO guys are all part of the same company and cannot pin-point anything other than saying carryon with their SEO team because it will take time but just comes across as a milking exercise. Another thing which I have found very strange is the data from our 'traffic audience'. We are a UK based website yet our traffic stats were showing as;- UK 36.6%, Denmark 35.8% and India 27.6%. – don’t make sense to me! Is there anybody out there that could simply point us in the right direction to the problem(s), so we can fix once and for all? Could there be anything within the code that is causing the home page not to display within google for our primary kw's terms such as blinds, window blinds etc. I would appreciate any advice at all that may help us in our quest to sort this homepage issue once and for all

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• Draw images with warped triangles on a web server [migrated]

  - by epologee

  The scenario The Flash front end of my current project produces images that a web server needs to combine into a video. Both frame-rate and frame-resolution are sizeable enough that sending an image sequence to the back end is not feasible (in both time and client bandwidth). Instead, we're trying to recreate the image drawing on the back end as well. Correct and slow, or incorrect and fast The problem is that this involves quite a bit of drawing textured triangles, and two solutions we found in Python (here and there) are so inefficient, that the drawing takes about 60 seconds per frame, resulting in a whopping 7,5 hours of processing time for a 30 second clip. Unacceptable. When using a PHP-module to send commands to ImageMagick for image manipulation, the whole process is super fast (tenths of a second per frame), but ImageMagick seems to be unable to draw triangles the way we do it in the front end, so the final results do not match. Unacceptable. What I'm asking here, is if there's someone who would know a way to solve this issue, by any means necessary that would run on a web server. Warping an image Let me explain the process of the front end: Perform a Delaunay calculation on points in an image to get an evenly distributed mesh of triangles. Offset the points/vertices in the mesh, distorting or warping the image. Draw the warped triangles on a new bitmap. We can send the results (coordinates) of steps 1 and 2 to the back end, to then draw the warped triangles and save it to an image on disk (or append as a frame to the video). But that last step is what I need help with. The Question Is there an alternative to ImageMagick that can draw triangles in a bitmap? Is there some other library, like a C library, that would allow us to do this? Or could we achieve this effect more easily by switching back end technologies, like Ruby? (.Net and Java are, unfortunately, not really options right now) Many thanks. EP. P.S. I'd appreciate re-tagging efforts, I don't quite know what labels to put on this question. Thanks!

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• New RUP Patch for iSupplier Portal, Sourcing and Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM)

  - by LuciaC

  Just released - the 12.1.3 Rollup (RUP) Patch 17525552:R12.PRC_PF.B for iSupplier Portal, Sourcing and Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM). Who should apply this patch? Anyone that is on Release 12.1.3 and is using  iSupplier Portal, Sourcing or Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) functionality. The following areas have had major fixes: Prospective Supplier Guided Navigation: The train-navigation is introduced for prospective supplier registration so that prospective suppliers can see all steps needed to successfully register themselves. Supplier Registration Workflow Enhancement: With this release, provided the Approval Management Engine (AME) action required notifications for supplier approval, so that all workflow related features can be enabled. Vacation rules can be set, approvals can be forwarded and more information can be requested through the notification itself.  Additionally AME parallel Approval support for Supplier Registration approvals has been added. Reinstate Supplier Request: Allow buyer to reopen/reinstate the rejected supplier. Supplier is able to access their previously rejected registration again and make changes and resubmit request. Contact Address Association: The prospective supplier is allowed to associate addresses with contacts (including Primary) during the prospective supplier registration process. Primary Contact Enhancement: The prospective supplier can be registered without creating a user account for the primary contact. Mandatory Attributes: In the negotiation requirement creation page, the lookup meaning of 'Internal' has been changed to 'Internal Optional', and a new lookup value with meaning as 'Internal Required' has been added. The values available in the 'Type' dropdown now are Display Only, Internal Optional, Internal Required, Supplier Optional and Supplier Required.  So now during supplier evaluations, internal user response can be set as mandatory by using Internal Required type during requirement creation. Notifications to Supplier:  When the supplier saves and submits their supplier registration request, then a notification with a registration status page link will be sent for further access.  When the buyer approves, rejects or returns the request, the supplier will be notified in an email with the current status. There are also 10 major enhancements included in this RUP. For information about this RUP; including, the fixes and enhancements included, how to access and apply the patch, performing an impact analysis on your system, and testing recommendations, see Doc ID 1591198.1.  Don’t delay apply the patch today!

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• Is there a factory pattern to prevent multiple instances for same object (instance that is Equal) good design?

  - by dsollen

  I have a number of objects storing state. There are essentially two types of fields. The ones that uniquely define what the object is (what node, what edge etc), and the others that store state describing how these things are connected (this node is connected to these edges, this edge is part of these paths) etc. My model is updating the state variables using package methods, so all these objects act as immutable to anyone not in Model scope. All Objects extend one base type. I've toyed with the idea of a Factory approach which accepts a Builder object and constructs the applicable object. However, if an instance of the object already exists (ie would return true if I created the object defined by the builder and passed it to the equal method for the existing instance) the factory returns the current object instead of creating a new instance. Because the Equal method would only compare what uniquely defines the type of object (this is node A to node B) but won't check the dynamic state stuff (node A is currently connected to nodes C and E) this would be a way of ensuring anyone that wants my Node A automatically knows its state connections. More importantly it would prevent aliasing nightmares of someone trying to pass an instance of node A with different state then the node A in my model has. I've never heard of this pattern before, and it's a bit odd. I would have to do some overriding of serialization methods to make it work (ensure that when I read in a serilized object I add it to my facotry list of known instances, and/or return an existing factory in its place), as well as using a weakHashMap as if it was a weakHashSet to know whether an instance exists without worrying about a quasi-memory leak occuring. I don't know if this is too confusing or prone to its own obscure bugs. One thing I know is that plugins interface with lowest level hardware. The plugins have to be able to return state that is different than my memory; to tell my memory when its own state is inconsistent. I believe this is possible despite their fetching objects that exist in my memory; we allow building of objects without checking their consistency with the model until the addToModel is called anyways; and the existing plugins design was written before all this extra state existed and worked fine without ever being aware of it. Should I just be using some other design to avoid this crazyness? (I have another question to that affect that I'm posting).

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• What is the most appropriate testing method in this scenario?

  - by Daniel Bruce

  I'm writing some Objective-C apps (for OS X/iOS) and I'm currently implementing a service to be shared across them. The service is intended to be fairly self-contained. For the current functionality I'm envisioning there will be only one method that clients will call to do a fairly complicated series of steps both using private methods on the class, and passing data through a bunch of "data mangling classes" to arrive at an end result. The gist of the code is to fetch a log of changes, stored in a service-internal data store, that has occurred since a particular time, simplify the log to only include the last applicable change for each object, attach the serialized values for the affected objects and return this all to the client. My question then is, how do I unit-test this entry point method? Obviously, each class would have thorough unit tests to ensure that their functionality works as expected, but the entry point seems harder to "disconnect" from the rest of the world. I would rather not send in each of these internal classes IoC-style, because they're small and are only made classes to satisfy the single-responsibility principle. I see a couple possibilities: Create a "private" interface header for the tests with methods that call the internal classes and test each of these methods separately. Then, to test the entry point, make a partial mock of the service class with these private methods mocked out and just test that the methods are called with the right arguments. Write a series of fatter tests for the entry point without mocking out anything, testing the entire functionality in one go. This looks, to me, more like "integration testing" and seems brittle, but it does satisfy the "only test via the public interface" principle. Write a factory that returns these internal services and take that in the initializer, then write a factory that returns mocked versions of them to use in tests. This has the downside of making the construction of the service annoying, and leaks internal details to the client. Write a "private" initializer that take these services as extra parameters, use that to provide mocked services, and have the public initializer back-end to this one. This would ensure that the client code still sees the easy/pretty initializer and no internals are leaked. I'm sure there's more ways to solve this problem that I haven't thought of yet, but my question is: what's the most appropriate approach according to unit testing best practices? Especially considering I would prefer to write this test-first, meaning I should preferably only create these services as the code indicates a need for them.

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• JavaOne 2013: (Key) Notes of a conference – State of the Java platform and all the roadmaps by Amis

  - by JuergenKress

  Last week’s JavaOne conference provided insights in the roadmap of the Java platform as well as in the current state of things in the Java community. The close relationship between Oracle and IBM concerning Java, the (continuing) lack of such a relationship with Google, the support from Microsoft for Java applications on its Azure cloud and the vibrant developer community – with over 200 different Java User Groups in many countries of the world. There were no major surprises or stunning announcements. Java EE 7 (release in June) was celebrated, the progress of Java 8 SE explained as well as the progress on Java Embedded and ME. The availability of NetBeans 7.4 RC1 and JDK 8 Early Adopters release as well as the open sourcing of project Avatar probably were the only real news stories. The convergence of JavaFX and Java SE is almost complete; the upcoming alignment of Java SE Embedded and Java ME is the next big consolidation step that will lead to a unified platform where developers can use the same skills, development tools and APIs on EE, SE, SE Embedded and ME development. This means that anything that runs on ME will run on SE (Embedded) and EE – not necessarily the reverse because not all SE APIs are part of the compact profile or the ME environment. However, the trimming down of the SE libraries and the increased capabilities of devices mean that a pretty rich JVM runs on many devices – such as JavaFX 8 on the Raspberry PI. The major theme of the conference was Internet of Things. A world of things that are smart and connected, devices like sensors, cameras and equipment from cars, fridges and television sets to printers, security gates and kiosks that all run Java and are all capable of sending data over local network connections or directly over the internet. The number of devices that has these capabilities is rapidly growing. This means that the number of places where Java programs can help program the behavior of devices is growing too. It also means that the volume of data generated is expanding and that we have to find ways to harvest that data, possibly do a local pre-processing (filter, aggregate) and channel the data to back end systems. Terms typically used are edge devices (small, simple, publishing data), gateways (receiving data from many devices, collecting and consolidating, pre-processing, sending onwards to back end – typically using real time event processing) and enterprise services – receiving the data-turned-information from the gateways to further consolidate, distribute and act upon. A cheap device like the Raspberry PI is a perfect way to get started as a Java developer with what embedded (device) programming means and how interaction with physical input and output takes place. Roadmaps The over all progress on Java is visualized in this overview: Read the full article here. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Amis,OOW,Oracle OpenWorld,JavaOne,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Good, simple reasons for having multiple environments

  - by smp7d

  Throughout my career I had worked at companies that had a collection of different environments for different purposes. We always had more or less our desktop environment, a test environment, a QA environment, a staging environment and a production environment. This went for both servers/applications and any data sources we were using. When I started at my current company I found that 90% of the apps were either developed on a desktop environment against production data sources or developed directly on the production server depending on the platform. I wasn't fazed because I was hired in part to make changes to improve the way the development team functioned, which was clear from my interview process. We slowly started to turn the philosophy and pretty soon, most of the apps could be run in either a desktop, test or production environment. Not too long after that staging came around as well. Now most of our developers see the benefit of this methodology and defend it vigilantly. However, we have a number of legacy apps that never got migrated. We also have a number of legacy programmers who think of this as a waste of time. Unfortunately, we got lip service but never full buy-in from management. We got what we thought was a commitment to invest substantially in this about a year ago, but nothing materialized despite the considerable planning that we put into it. Now we are finding that we need more and more environments. We need help from the server/network administration teams for setup and we need participation from the business stakeholders to support the release cycle. We are at a place now where a project can function what I consider "normally" only if you have the right people on the project and the time to set up the proper environments. I'd love to present a complete argument, but management really has no time and interest in hearing me out until there is a critical issue. I can't really articulate the benefits simply as it always just seemed second nature to me. I was wondering if there are any good, simple, irrefutable reasons for the separation of environments that would get managers with no development experience to get behind this idea. Are there any good resources/literature on the topic?

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• Advice on how to build html5 basic tile game (multi player, cross device)

  - by Eric

  I just read http://buildnewgames.com/real-time-multiplayer/ which explains the fundamentals and bets practices to build a massive real time multiplayer html5 game. My question is however given the “simplicity” of the game I need to build (simple kind of scratch game where you find or not something behind a tile), do I really need complex tools (canvas or node.js for example) ? The game The gamestakes place with a picture of our office as a background (tilemap). For HR purpose, we wish to create the following game fore employees: each day they can come to the website and click on a certain number of tiles (3 max per day) and find behind it motivation advice and interesting facts about the company. The constraints and rules the screen is divided into isometric 2D square tiles. There are basically an image (photograph of our office) number of tiles on the screen game: about 10,000 to much more (with scroll , see below) the players can scroll in 4 directions there are only 2 types of tiles: already open and closed player can open tiles that have not been yet open by other players there is no path for players : any player can click on any tile on the screen at any moment (if it’s not already done by another player) 2 players can’t be on the same tile at the same moment (or if they can, I’ll have to manage to see which one clicked on it first) only one type of player (all with similar roles), no weapon, no internal score… very simple game. no complex physics (collision only occurs if 2 players are on the same tile) The target I need to achieve: cross device, cross browsers high performance reaction (subsecond reactions) average nb of players per hour: up to 10K players per hour (quite high indeed but it’s because we aim at proving our case for the game to our business unit) So what I would like to know: 2D Tiled map: Do I need tiledmapeditor or can I enable me split the screen like here ? should I use canvas or plain html/css could be sufficient for my need? do I need a game engine/framework such as melon.js or crafty./js ? (even if the game play is extremely basic, I do need mouse and touché device support, mouse emulations on touch devices…) or ca I easily/quickly do it without? for my constraints and targets, should I use CPU acceleration ? for my constraints and targets, should I use web workers ? for the database, for a massively real time game should I avoid to put the current locations of player in MySQL as i feel it might slow me down. What kind of DB should I implement ? Thanks for your help !

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• Weird Ubuntu Desktop Boot Partition On External Hard Drive

  - by Magnitus

  I have a Thinkpad with Windows 7. Last time I installed an Ubuntu/Windows dual boot, Windows was never same after and regularly got corrupted so this time, I installed Ubuntu on a separate external hard drive. I took a 500 GB external hard drive and used Windows to shrink the partition on it to 400 GB, freeing 100 GB to install Ubuntu. Then I modified the booting priority of my computer to boot from the external hard drive if present. Then, I installed Ubuntu desktop on the external hard drive using a DVD, picked the most simplistic partitioning scheme I could get away with (didn't go auto as it didn't include the external hard drive as a choice) and voilà. Fast forward some time and I'm trying to refresh my understanding of Linux partitions to install a bunch of servers, so I'm looking at the current partitioning scheme on my external hard drive and find the boot partition puzzling... sda is my integrated hard drive with Windows 7. sdb is my Ubuntu desktop external hard drive. Running parted on sdb, I get this: (parted) print Model: WD My Passport 0740 (scsi) Disk /dev/sdb: 500GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 393GB 393GB primary ntfs boot 2 393GB 500GB 107GB extended 5 393GB 425GB 32.8GB logical linux-swap(v1) 6 425GB 500GB 74.6GB logical ext4 At this point, I'm wondering why the ntfs partition is flagged as "boot" and not my ext4 partition which is the partition that contains / (and by extension, /boot since it's not on its own separate partition). Looking at mtab only confirms what I already know: eric@eric-ThinkPad-W530:~$ sudo cat /etc/mtab /dev/sdb6 / ext4 rw,errors=remount-ro 0 0 proc /proc proc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0 none /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs rw 0 0 none /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw 0 0 none /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw 0 0 none /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw 0 0 udev /dev devtmpfs rw,mode=0755 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620 0 0 tmpfs /run tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755 0 0 none /run/lock tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880 0 0 none /run/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0 none /run/user tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=104857600,mode=0755 0 0 none /sys/fs/pstore pstore rw 0 0 systemd /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd cgroup rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,none,name=systemd 0 0 gvfsd-fuse /run/user/1000/gvfs fuse.gvfsd-fuse rw,nosuid,nodev,user=eric 0 0 /dev/sdb1 /media/eric/My\040Passport fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,default_permissions,blksize=4096 0 0 My lack of understanding concerning this is not vital to anything (this is only my development desktop partition), but somehow annoys me. Any insight that could shed some light on this would be welcome.

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• Validation and Error Generation when using the Data Mapper Pattern

  - by AndyPerlitch

  I am working on saving state of an object to a database using the data mapper pattern, but I am looking for suggestions/guidance on the validation and error message generation step (step 4 below). Here are the general steps as I see them for doing this: (1) The data mapper is used to get current info (assoc array) about the object in db: +=====================================================+ | person_id | name | favorite_color | age | +=====================================================+ | 1 | Andy | Green | 24 | +-----------------------------------------------------+ mapper returns associative array, eg. Person_Mapper::getPersonById($id) : $person_row = array( 'person_id' => 1, 'name' => 'Andy', 'favorite_color' => 'Green', 'age' => '24', ); (2) the Person object constructor takes this array as an argument, populating its fields. class Person { protected $person_id; protected $name; protected $favorite_color; protected $age; function __construct(array $person_row) { $this->person_id = $person_row['person_id']; $this->name = $person_row['name']; $this->favorite_color = $person_row['favorite_color']; $this->age = $person_row['age']; } // getters and setters... public function toArray() { return array( 'person_id' => $this->person_id, 'name' => $this->name, 'favorite_color' => $this->favorite_color, 'age' => $this->age, ); } } (3a) (GET request) Inputs of an HTML form that is used to change info about the person is populated using Person::getters <form> <input type="text" name="name" value="<?=$person->getName()?>" /> <input type="text" name="favorite_color" value="<?=$person->getFavColor()?>" /> <input type="text" name="age" value="<?=$person->getAge()?>" /> </form> (3b) (POST request) Person object is altered with the POST data using Person::setters $person->setName($_POST['name']); $person->setFavColor($_POST['favorite_color']); $person->setAge($_POST['age']); *(4) Validation and error message generation on a per-field basis - Should this take place in the person object or the person mapper object? - Should data be validated BEFORE being placed into fields of the person object? (5) Data mapper saves the person object (updates row in the database): $person_mapper->savePerson($person); // the savePerson method uses $person->toArray() // to get data in a more digestible format for the // db gateway used by person_mapper Any guidance, suggestions, criticism, or name-calling would be greatly appreciated.

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• How can I cleanly and elegantly handle data and dependancies between classes

  - by Neophyte

  I'm working on 2d topdown game in SFML 2, and need to find an elegant way in which everything will work and fit together. Allow me to explain. I have a number of classes that inherit from an abstract base that provides a draw method and an update method to all the classes. In the game loop, I call update and then draw on each class, I imagine this is a pretty common approach. I have classes for tiles, collisions, the player and a resource manager that contains all the tiles/images/textures. Due to the way input works in SFML I decided to have each class handle input (if required) in its update call. Up until now I have been passing in dependencies as needed, for example, in the player class when a movement key is pressed, I call a method on the collision class to check if the position the player wants to move to will be a collision, and only move the player if there is no collision. This works fine for the most part, but I believe it can be done better, I'm just not sure how. I now have more complex things I need to implement, eg: a player is able to walk up to an object on the ground, press a key to pick it up/loot it and it will then show up in inventory. This means that a few things need to happen: Check if the player is in range of a lootable item on keypress, else do not proceed. Find the item. Update the sprite texture on the item from its default texture to a "looted" texture. Update the collision for the item: it might have changed shape or been removed completely. Inventory needs to be updated with the added item. How do I make everything communicate? With my current system I will end up with my classes going out of scope, and method calls to each other all over the place. I could tie up all the classes in one big manager and give each one a reference to the parent manager class, but this seems only slightly better. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated! If anything is unclear, I'm happy to expand on things.

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• Toshiba wireless is blocked

  - by zorrillo

  I have the same problem, a 32 bits toshiba nb255, it first had the windows 7 bu next I installed the ubuntu 11.04. The wifi does not turn on. I used the following issues the commands rfkill unblock wlan0, sudo ifconfig wlan0 down; they were not able. by setting up the bios in advanced menu, the wireless communication sw in ON, but it did not work also. neither the utilities toshiba nor utilities of ubuntu (wicd, wifi radar). by using gedit to file group, nothing. by installing madwifi packet, nothing. by exporting the wifi driver from windows to ubuntu, by means of the NDISwrapper packet, neither. I put the current scripts of the ouput of the cli root@zorrillo:~# rfkill list 0: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: yes root@zorrillo:~# sudo lspci | grep Atheros 07:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01) root@zorrillo:~# root@zorrillo:~# ifconfig -a eth0 Link encap:Ethernet direcciónHW 88:ae:1d:47:df:e1 ACTIVO DIFUSIÓN MULTICAST MTU:1500 Métrica:1 Paquetes RX:0 errores:0 perdidos:0 overruns:0 frame:0 Paquetes TX:0 errores:0 perdidos:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 colisiones:0 long.colaTX:1000 Bytes RX:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) Interrupción:43 Dirección base: 0xe000 lo Link encap:Bucle local Direc. inet:127.0.0.1 Másc:255.0.0.0 Dirección inet6: ::1/128 Alcance:Anfitrión ACTIVO BUCLE FUNCIONANDO MTU:16436 Métrica:1 Paquetes RX:8 errores:0 perdidos:0 overruns:0 frame:0 Paquetes TX:8 errores:0 perdidos:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 colisiones:0 long.colaTX:0 Bytes RX:480 (480.0 B) TX bytes:480 (480.0 B) ppp0 Link encap:Protocolo punto a punto Direc. inet:189.203.115.236 P-t-P:192.168.226.1 Másc:255.255.255.255 ACTIVO PUNTO A PUNTO FUNCIONANDO NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1500 Métrica:1 Paquetes RX:6384 errores:30 perdidos:0 overruns:0 frame:0 Paquetes TX:6893 errores:0 perdidos:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 colisiones:0 long.colaTX:3 Bytes RX:5473081 (5.4 MB) TX bytes:974316 (974.3 KB) wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet direcciónHW 00:26:4d:c3:d0:44 DIFUSIÓN MULTICAST MTU:1500 Métrica:1 Paquetes RX:0 errores:0 perdidos:0 overruns:0 frame:0 Paquetes TX:0 errores:0 perdidos:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 colisiones:0 long.colaTX:1000 Bytes RX:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) note.-it is logical all the counters are cero if the wireless device is down root@zorrillo:/home/zorrillo/Descargas/802BGA# ifconfig wlan0 up SIOCSIFFLAGS: Operation not possible due to RF-kill root@zorrillo:/home/zorrillo/Descargas/802BGA# It would seem the wireless switching does not react with whichever ubuntu 11.04 command (I hope to be wrong). The target remains the same, in order of the scripts above. I am worried, I have tried to find any answer for days and nights. Toshiba does not supply drivers or soft support for linux, marketing of course. I only see the device is up by protocols and down phisically, My question is, is it possible to enable or not shutdown physically the device?, because in the toshiba model nb255 the wifi is not set up/down bye means of a physical switch, but by means a combination of Fn + F8 (only for windows 7, no one more), Is there one possibility to configure the hot keys in ubuntu?

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• After startup, display reverts to one desktop duplicated on both screens

  - by Skilldrick

  I have a Samsung R530 laptop. I'm actually running Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu (which is why I thought it would be OK to post this here). I'm now getting exactly the same problem on Ubuntu 10.10. I've got it setup with a secondary LCD monitor, and I've changed the display settings so the laptop screen and monitor are at optimal resolution, with the desktop shared between them. After startup though (typically around 10-30 seconds) the display reverts to 1024 x 768 on both screens, and the display is duplicated (i.e. both screens show the same thing). I think this is something to do with my video card, as I had the same problem when I was running Arch Linux. Any ideas? Edit: 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev 09) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) 00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03) 00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03) 00:1a.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 03) 00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03) 00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03) 00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03) 00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03) 00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 93) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation ICH9M LPC Interface Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation ICH9M/M-E SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03) 02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01) 04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8040 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller It seems it's Intel, not Nvidia. I have a current work around, which is to have a launcher to a script containing xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1366x768 --output HDMI1 --mode 1280x1024 --left-of LVDS1 on my desktop, and to run it after the displays revert, but it's not ideal.

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• Variable number of GUI Buttons

  - by Wakaka

  I have a generic HTML5 Canvas GUI Button class and a Scene class. The Scene class has a method called createButton(), which will create a new Button with onclick parameter and store it in a list of buttons. I call createButton() for all UI buttons when initializing the Scene. Because buttons can appear and disappear very often during rendering, Scene would first deactivate all buttons (temporarily remove their onclick, onmouseover etc property) before each render frame. During rendering, the renderer would then activate the required buttons for that frame. The problem is that part of the UI requires a variable number of buttons, and their onclick, onmouseover etc properties change frequently. An example is a buffs system. The UI will list all buffs as square sprites for the current unit selected, and mousing over each square will bring up a tooltip with some information on the buff. But the number of buffs is variable thus I won't know how many buttons to create at the start. What's the best way to solve this problem? P.S. My game is in Javascript, and I know I can use HTML buttons, but would like to make my game purely Canvas-based. Create buttons on-the-fly during rendering. Thus I will only have buttons when I require them. After the render frame these buttons would be useless and removed. Create a fixed set of buttons that I'm going to assume the number of buffs per unit won't exceed. During each render frame activate the buttons accordingly and set their onmouseover property. Assign a button to each Buff instance. This sounds wrong as the buff button is a part of the GUI which can only have one unit selected. Assigning a button to every single Buff in the game seems to be overkill. Also, I would need to change the button's position every render frame since its order in the unit's list of buffs matter. Any other solutions? I'm actually quite for idea (1) but am worried about the memory/time issues of creating a new Button() object every render frame. But this is in Javascript where object creation is oh-so-common ({} mainly) due to automatic garbage collection. What is your take on this? Thanks!

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• Best way to determine surface normal for a group of pixels?

  - by Paul Renton

  One of my current endeavors is creating a 2D destructible terrain engine for iOS Cocos2D (See https://github.com/crebstar/PWNDestructibleTerrain ). It is in an infant stages no doubt, but I have made significant progress since starting a couple weeks ago. However, I have run into a bit of a performance road block with calculating surface normals. Note: For my destructible terrain engine, an alpha of 0 is considered to not be solid ground. The method posted below works just great given small rectangles, such as n < 30. Anything above 30 causes a dip in the frame rate. If you approach 100x100 then you might as well read a book while the sprite attempts to traverse the terrain. At the moment this is the best I can come up with for altering the angle on a sprite as it roams across terrain (to get the angle for a sprite's orientation just take dot product of 100 * normal * (1,0) vector). -(CGPoint)getAverageSurfaceNormalAt:(CGPoint)pt withRect:(CGRect)area { float avgX = 0; float avgY = 0; ccColor4B color = ccc4(0, 0, 0, 0); CGPoint normal; float len; for (int w = area.size.width; w >= -area.size.width; w--) { for (int h = area.size.height; h >= -area.size.height; h--) { CGPoint pixPt = ccp(w + pt.x, h + pt.y); if ([self pixelAt:pixPt colorCache:&color]) { if (color.a != 0) { avgX -= w; avgY -= h; } // end inner if } // end outer if } // end inner for } // end outer for len = sqrtf(avgX * avgX + avgY * avgY); if (len == 0) { normal = ccp(avgX, avgY); } else { normal = ccp(avgX/len, avgY/len); } // end if return normal; } // end get My problem is I have sprites that require larger rectangles in order for their movement to look realistic. I considered doing a cache of all surface normals, but this lead to issues of knowing when to recalculate the surface normals and these calculations also being quite expensive (also how large should the blocks be?). Another smaller issue is I don't know how to properly treat the case when length is = 0. So I am stuck... Any advice from the community would be greatly appreciated! Is my method the best possible one? Or should I rethink the algorithm? I am new to game development and always looking to learn new tips and tricks.

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