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• HLSL - Creating Shadows in 2D

  - by richard

  The way that I create shadows is by the following technique: http://www.catalinzima.com/2010/07/my-technique-for-the-shader-based-dynamic-2d-shadows/ But I have questions to HLSL. The way that I currently do it is, I have a black and white image, where Black means 'object', and white means 'nothing'. I then distort the image like in the tutorial. I do this with a pixel shader, but instead of rendering to the screen, I render to a texture, back to my application. I then take this, and create the shadows, and then send it back to the graphics card to undo the distortion, after the shadow has been added - this comes back and I have a stencil of shadow. I can put this ontop of the original image and send them back to the graphics card, which then puts them on the screen. To me this is alot of back and forth. Is there a way i can avoid this? The problem that I am having is that I need to basically go through all positions in the texture 3 times, and use the new new texture every time instead of the orginal one. I tried to read up on Passes, but i don't think that i am heading in the right direction there. Help?

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• Android threads trouble wrapping my head around design

  - by semajhan

  I am having trouble wrapping my head around game design. On the android platform, I have an activity and set its content view with a custom surface view. The custom surface view acts as my panel and I create instances of all classes and do all the drawing and calculation in there. Question: Should I instead create the instances of other classes in my activity? Now I create a custom thread class that handles the game loop. Question: How do I use this one class in all my activities? Or do I have to create a separate thread each time? In my previous game, I had multiple levels that had to create an instance of the thread class and in the thread class I had to set constructor methods for each separate level and in the loop use a switch statement to check which level it needs to render and update. Sorry if that sounds confusing. I just want to know if the method I am using is inefficient (which it probably is) and how to go about designing it the correct way. I have read many tutorials out there and I am still having lots of trouble with this particular topic. Maybe a link to a some tutorials that explain this? Thanks.

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• Customer Service Experience, Oracle e Cels insieme per innovare le strategie.

  - by Claudia Caramelli-Oracle

  Si è svolto oggi il workshop Oracle "Customer Service Experience. Strategie per progettare un Servizio eccellente e profittevole." che ha visto il contributo del gruppo di ricerca CELS (Research Group on Industrial Engineering, Logistics and Service Operations) e della sezione ASAP SMF dell’Università degli Studi di Bergamo. Giuditta Pezzotta (PhD - Cels) e Roberto Pinto (PhD - Cels) ci hanno presentato la Service Engineering Methodology (SEEM), innovativa piattaforma metodologica che permette di ottimizzare la creazione di valore sia per il cliente finale sia per l’azienda, partendo dalla progettazione del prodotto e arrivando alla progettazione della soluzione prodotto-servizio, e valutando la bontà del prodotto-servizio ipotizzato attraverso strumenti concettuali e di simulazione dei processi. Armando Janigro, CX Strategy Director EMEA - Oracle ha invece parlato di Modern Customer Service, ovvero di come adattarsi in modo agile e veloce alle mutevoli necessità dei clienti, ipotizzando l’adozione in chiave strategica di nuovi strumenti di differenziazione e di leadership come la Customer Experience (CX) e sfruttando le nuove dinamiche di relazione azienda-singolo consumatore per ottimizzare l’esperienza multicanale e per render più efficiente il Customer Service, creando ulteriore valore. A seguire è stata mostrata da PierLuigi Coli, Principal Sales Consultant - Oracle, una demo sui prodotti Service Cloud offerti da Oracle, a supporto di tutti i concetti raccontati nelle sessioni precedenti. Il workshop è stato un’occasione unica per definire i percorsi da intraprendere per sviluppare efficaci strategie di Customer Experience grazie ad approcci e metodologie innovative alla base di uno sviluppo sostenibile del business. Le slide proiettate sono disponibili su richiesta: scrivi a Claudia Caramelli per ogni informazione o chiarimento.

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• Using unordered_multimap as entity and component storage

  - by natebot13

  The Setup I've made a few games (more like animations) using the Object Oriented method with base classes for objects that extend them, and objects that extend those, and found I couldn't wrap my head around expanding that system to larger game ideas. So I did some research and discovered the Entity-Component system of designing games. I really like the idea, and thoroughly understood the usefulness of it after reading Byte54's perfect answer here: Role of systems in entity systems architecture. With that said, I have decided to create my current game idea using the described Entity-Component system. Having basic knowledge of C++, and SFML, I would like to implement the backbone of this entity component system using an unordered_multimap without classes for the entities themselves. Here's the idea: An unordered_mulitmap stores entity IDs as the lookup term, while the value is an inherited Component object. Examlpe: ____________________________ |ID |Component | ---------------------------- |0 |Movable | |0 |Accelable | |0 |Renderable | |1 |Movable | |1 |Renderable | |2 |Renderable | ---------------------------- So, according to this map of objects, the entity with ID 0 has three components: Movable, Accelable, and Renderable. These component objects store the entity specific data, such as the location, the acceleration, and render flags. The entity is simply and ID, with the components attached to that ID describing its attributes. Problem I want to store the component objects within the map, allowing the map have full ownership of the components. The problem I'm having, is I don't quite understand enough about pointers, shared pointers, and references in order to get that set up. How can I go about initializing these components, with their various member variables, within the unordered_multimap? Can the base component class take on the member variables of its child classes, when defining the map as unordered_multimap<int, component>? Requirements I need a system to be able to grab an entity, with all of its' attached components, and access members from the components in order to do the necessary calculations and reassignments for position, velocity, etc. Need a clarification? Post a comment with your concerns and I will gladly edit or comment back! Thanks in advance! natebot13

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• How do I use depth testing and texture transparency together in my 2.5D world?

  - by nbolton

  Note: I've already found an answer (which I will post after this question) - I was just wondering if I was doing it right, or if there is a better way. I'm making a "2.5D" isometric game using OpenGL ES (JOGL). By "2.5D", I mean that the world is 3D, but it is rendered using 2D isometric tiles. The original problem I had to solve was that my textures had to be rendered in order (from back to front), so that the tiles overlapped properly to create the proper effect. After some reading, I quickly realised that this is the "old hat" 2D approach. This became difficult to do efficiently, since the 3D world can be modified by the player (so stuff can appear anywhere in 3D space) - so it seemed logical that I take advantage of the depth buffer. This meant that I didn't have to worry about rendering stuff in the correct order. However, I faced a problem. If you use GL_DEPTH_TEST and GL_BLEND together, it creates an effect where objects are blended with the background before they are "sorted" by z order (meaning that you get a weird kind of overlap where the transparency should be). Here's some pseudo code that should illustrate the problem (incidentally, I'm using libgdx for Android). create() { // ... // some other code here // ... Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_DEPTH_TEST); Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_BLEND); } render() { Gdx.gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL10.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); Gdx.gl.glBlendFunc(GL10.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL10.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); // ... // bind texture and create vertices // ... } So the question is: How do I solve the transparency overlap problem?

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• Why is testing MVC Views frowned upon?

  - by Peter Bernier

  I'm currently setting the groundwork for an ASP.Net MVC application and I'm looking into what sort of unit-tests I should be prepared to write. I've seen in multiple places people essentially saying 'don't bother testing your views, there's no logic and it's trivial and will be covered by an integration test'. I don't understand how this has become the accepted wisdom. Integration tests serve an entirely different purpose than unit tests. If I break something, I don't want to know a half-hour later when my integration tests break, I want to know immediately. Sample Scenario : Lets say we're dealing with a standard CRUD app with a Customer entity. The customer has a name and an address. At each level of testing, I want to verify that the Customer retrieval logic gets both the name and the address properly. To unit-test the repository, I write an integration test to hit the database. To unit-test the business rules, I mock out the repository, feed the business rules appropriate data, and verify my expected results are returned. What I'd like to do : To unit-test the UI, I mock out the business rules, setup my expected customer instance, render the view, and verify that the view contains the appropriate values for the instance I specified. What I'm stuck doing : To unit-test the repository, I write an integration test, setup an appropriate login, create the required data in the database, open a browser, navigate to the customer, and verify the resulting page contains the appropriate values for the instance I specified. I realize that there is overlap between the two scenarios discussed above, but the key difference it time and effort required to setup and execute the tests. If I (or another dev) removes the address field from the view, I don't want to wait for the integration test to discover this. I want is discovered and flagged in a unit-test that gets multiple times daily. I get the feeling that I'm just not grasping some key concept. Can someone explain why wanting immediate test feedback on the validity of an MVC view is a bad thing? (or if not bad, then not the expected way to get said feedback)

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• How can I unit test rendering output?

  - by stephelton

  I've been embracing Test-Driven Development (TDD) recently and it's had wonderful impacts on my development output and the resiliency of my codebase. I would like to extend this approach to some of the rendering work that I do in OpenGL, but I've been unable to find any good approaches to this. I'll start with a concrete example so we know what kinds of things I want to test; lets say I want to create a unit cube that rotates about some axis, and that I want to ensure that, for some number of frames, each frame is rendered correctly. How can I create an automated test case for this? Preferably, I'd even be able to write a test case before writing any code to render the cube (per usual TDD practices.) Among many other things, I'd want to make sure that the cube's size, location, and orientation are correct in each rendered frame. I may even want to make sure that the lighting equations in my shaders are correct in each frame. The only remotely useful approach to this that I've come across involves comparing rendered output to a reference output, which generally precludes TDD practice, and is very cumbersome. I could go on about other desired requirements, but I'm afraid the ones I've listed already are out of reach.

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• Strange 3D game engine camera with X,Y,Zoom instead of X,Y,Z

  - by Jenko

  I'm using a 3D game engine, that uses a 4x4 matrix to modify the camera projection, in this format: r r r x r r r y r r r z - - - zoom Strangely though, the camera does not respond to the Z translation parameter, and so you're forced to use X, Y, Zoom to move the camera around. Technically this is plausible for isometric-style games such as Age Of Empires III. But this is a 3D engine, and so why would they have designed the camera to ignore Z and respond only to zoom? Am I missing something here? I've tried every method of setting the camera and it really seems to ignore Z. So currently I have to resort to moving the main object in the scene graph instead of moving the camera in relation to the objects. My question: Do you have any idea why the engine would use such a scheme? Is it common? Why? Or does it seem like I'm missing something and the SetProjection(Matrix) function is broken and somehow ignores the Z translation in the matrix? (unlikely, but possible) Anyhow, what are the workarounds? Is moving objects around the only way? Edit: I'm sorry I cannot reveal much about the engine because we're in a binding contract. It's a locally developed engine (Australia) written in managed C# used for data visualizations. Edit: The default mode of the engine is orthographic, although I've switched it into perspective mode. Its probably more effective to use X, Y, Zoom in orthographic mode, but I need to use perspective mode to render everyday objects as well.

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• Determinism in multiplayer simulation with Box2D, and single computer

  - by Jake

  I wrote a small test car driving multiplayer game with Box2D using TCP server-client communcations. I ran 1 instance of server.exe and 2 instance of client.exe on the same machine that I code and compile the executables. I type inputs (WASD for a simple car movement) into one of the 2 clients and I can get both clients to update the simulation. There are 2 cars in the simulation. As long as the cars do not collide, I get the same identical output on both client.exe. I can run the car(s) around for as long as I could they still update the same. However, if I start to collide the cars, very quickly they go out of sync. My tools: Windows 7, C++, MSVS 2010, Box2D, freeGlut. My Psuedocode: // client.exe void timer(int value) { tcpServer.send(my_inputs); foreach(i = player including myself) inputs[i] = tcpServer.receive(); foreach(i = player including myself) players[i].process(inputs[i]); myb2World.step(33, 8, 6); // Box2D world step simulation foreach(i = player including myself) renderer.render(player[i]); glutTimerFunc(33, timer, 0); } // server.exe void serviceloop { while(all clients alive) { foreach(c = clients) tcpClients[c].receive(&inputs[c]); // send input of each client to all clients foreach(source = clients) { foreach(dest = clients) { tcpClients[dest].send(inputs[source]); } } } } I have read all over the internet and SE the following claims (paraphrased): Box2D is deterministic as long as floating point architecture/implementation is the same. (For any deterministic engine) Determinism is gauranteed if playback of recorded inputs is on the same machine with exe compiled using same compiler and machine. Additionally my server.exe and client.exe gameloop is single thread with blocking socket calls and fixed time step. Question: Can anyone explain what I did wrong to get different Box2D output?

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• Static "LoD" hack opinions

  - by David Lively

  I've been playing with implementing dynamic level of detail for rendering a very large mesh in XNA. It occurred to me that (duh) the whole point of this is to generate small triangles close to the camera, and larger ones far away. Given that, rather than constantly modifying or swapping index buffers based on a feature's rendered size or distance from the camera, it would be a lot easier (and potentially quite a bit faster), to render a single "fan" or flat wedge/frustum-shaped planar mesh that is tessellated into small triangles close to the near or small end of the frustum and larger ones at the far end, sort of like this (overhead view) (Pardon the gap in the middle - I drew one side and mirrored it) The triangle sizes are chosen so that all are approximately the same size when projected. Then, that mesh would be transformed to track the camera so that the Z axis (center vertical in this image) is always aligned with the view direction projected into the XZ plane. The vertex shader would then read terrain heights from a height texture and adjust the Y coordinate of the mesh to match a height field that defines the terrain. This eliminates the need for culling (since the mesh is generated to match the viewport dimensions) and the need to modify the index and/or vertex buffers when drawing the terrain. Obviously this doesn't address terrain with overhangs, etc, but that could be handled to a certain extent by including a second mesh that defines a sort of "ceiling" via a different texture. The other LoD schemes I've seen aren't particularly difficult to implement and, in some cases, are a lot more flexible, but this seemed like a decent quick-and-dirty way to handle height map-based terrain without getting into geometry manipulation. Has anyone tried this? Opinions?

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• Light mask map and camera for static lights in XNA Platformer

  - by JiminyCricket

  Using the example for some basic light maps found here : http://blog.josack.com/2011/07/xna-2d-dynamic-lighting.html, I've managed to create a lightmap texture using individual lightmaps and display it over a 2D tiled world as in the Platformer example. I'm using the very basic 2D camera example as found here : http://www.david-amador.com/2009/10/xna-camera-2d-with-zoom-and-rotation/, and the problem is that the lightmap texture scrolls with the player sprite. This looks pretty good and would be excellent for lighting the player sprite as it moves. But, I also want to be able to place static lights (or some initial position for the lights) that do not move with the player or camera. When I turn off the camera or give it a static position, it works as a series of static lights so I believe it's probably caused by the camera transformation matrix following the player around. I'm using RenderTarget2Ds, one for the main game screen after all the backgrounds and tiles are rendered, and one for the "lightmap" which consists of a black background and a bunch of lighting textures which are merged with it using additive blending. For now, I'm doing all of this in PlatformerGame.cs where the camera transformation and position is set and the level.Draw() call is made. I can't figure out how to separate the drawing of the lightmap and the camera following the player. I was thinking it would be better to render the shadows and lighting directly in the drawing of the level itself, but I'm not sure how to do that either because this technique requires RenderTarget2Ds and calling SpriteBatch.Begin()/End().

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• Retexturing a model via API on the web

  - by AndyMcKenna

  I'm looking at creating a site where a user could see our product and configure the options or look of it and see an image that represents that. The way I'm doing it now is if you have Piece A selected and then you choose Texture X, I have an image on the filesystem that is A with X applied to it. I just swap out my default image with that specific one. One product has 8 areas, with 10-70 pieces per area, and about 200 textures for each piece. Programming the site was pretty simple but we are getting bogged down in rendering all these pieces/textures and entering them into the system. What I would love to do is build a model and have some way to apply the textures via API and render it to the browser. I would even settle for exporting a flat image and pulling that into the browser. Is that possible with something like SolidWorks, 3DSMax, or something else? If the rendering is too time intensive it would still help to batch create all my images and use them the way I am currently.

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• What am I doing wrong in my config for MySql?

  - by Knight Hawk3

  When I load my my.conf with the config at the bottom Mysql fails to start and prints no errors. I am running Arch Linux (Updated) with the latest MySQL (5.5) and the latest nginx (Well latest in the repository, Not sure how to check. Only installed it today) I will give you any info you ask for. Thanks for helping! # The following options will be passed to all MySQL clients [client] #password = your_password port = 3306 socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock # Here follows entries for some specific programs # The MySQL server [mysqld] port = 3306 socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock skip-locking key_buffer = 16K max_allowed_packet = 1M table_cache = 4 sort_buffer_size = 64K read_buffer_size = 256K read_rnd_buffer_size = 256K net_buffer_length = 2K thread_stack = 64K # Don’t listen on a TCP/IP port at all. This can be a security enhancement, # if all processes that need to connect to mysqld run on the same host. # All interaction with mysqld must be made via Unix sockets or named pipes. # Note that using this option without enabling named pipes on Windows # (using the “enable-named-pipe” option) will render mysqld useless! # #skip-networking server-id = 1 # Uncomment the following if you want to log updates #log-bin=mysql-bin # Uncomment the following if you are NOT using BDB tables skip-bdb # Uncomment the following if you are using InnoDB tables #innodb_data_home_dir = /var/lib/mysql/ #innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend #innodb_log_group_home_dir = /var/lib/mysql/ #innodb_log_arch_dir = /var/lib/mysql/ # You can set .._buffer_pool_size up to 50 – 80 % # of RAM but beware of setting memory usage too high #innodb_buffer_pool_size = 16M #innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 2M # Set .._log_file_size to 25 % of buffer pool size #innodb_log_file_size = 5M #innodb_log_buffer_size = 8M #innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 #innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 50 skip-innodb [mysqldump] quick max_allowed_packet = 16M [mysql] no-auto-rehash # Remove the next comment character if you are not familiar with SQL #safe-updates [isamchk] key_buffer = 1M sort_buffer_size = 1M [myisamchk] key_buffer = 1M sort_buffer_size = 1M [mysqlhotcopy] interactive-timeout So what is my silly error?

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• Should a model binder populate all of the model?

  - by Richard

  Should a model binder populate all of the model, or only the bits that are being posted? For example, I am adding a product in my system and on the form i want the user to select which sites the new product will appear on. Therefore, in my model I want to populate a collection called "AllAvailableSites" to render the checkboxes for the user to choose from. I also need to populate the model with any chosen sites on a post in case the form does not validate, and I need to represent the form showing the initial selections. It would seem that I should let the model binder set the chosen sites on the model, and (once in the controller method) I set the "AllAvailableSites" on the model. Does that sound right? It seems more efficient to set everything in the model binder but someone is suggesting it is not quite right. I am grateful for any advice; I have to say that all the MVC model binding help online seems to cite really simple examples, nothing complicated. Do I really need a GET and a POST version of a method? Can't they just take the same view model? Then I check in my model binder if it is a GET/POST, and populate all the model accordingly.

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• Redirecting to a dynamic page

  - by binarydev

  I have a page displaying blog posts (latest_posts.php) and another page that display single blog posts (blog.php) . I intend to link the image title in latest_posts.php so that it redirects to blog.php where it would display the particular post that was clicked. latest_posts.php: <!-- Header --> <h2 class="underline"> <span>What&#039;s new</span> <span></span> </h2> <!-- /Header --> <!-- Posts list --> <ul class="post-list post-list-1"> <?php /* Fetches Date/Time, Post Content and title */ include 'dbconnect.php'; $sql = "SELECT * FROM wp_posts"; $res = mysql_query($sql); while ( $row = mysql_fetch_array($res) ) { ?> <!-- Post #1 --> <li class="clear-fix"> <!-- Date --> <div class="post-list-date"> <div class="post-date-box"> <?php //Timestamp broken down to show accordingly $timestamp = $row['post_date']; $datetime = new DateTime($timestamp); $date = $datetime->format("d"); $month = $datetime->format("M"); ?> <h3> <?php echo $date; ?> </h3> <span> <?php echo $month; ?> </span> </div> </div> <!-- /Date --> <!-- Image + comments count --> <div class="post-list-image"> <!-- Image --> <div class="image image-overlay-url image-fancybox-url"> <a href="post.php" class="preloader-image"> <?php echo '<img src="', $row['image'], '" alt="' , $row['post_title'] , '\'s Blog Image" />'; ?> </a> </div> <!-- /Image --> </div> <!-- /Image + comments count --> <!-- Content --> <div class="post-list-content"> <div> <!-- Header --> <h4> <a href="post.php? . $row['ID'] . "> <?php echo $row['post_title']; ?> </a> </h4> <!-- /Header --> <!-- Excerpt --> <p> <?php echo $row ['post_content']; }?> </p> <!-- /Excerpt --> </div> </div> <!-- /Content --> </li> <!-- /Post #1 --> </ul> <!-- /Posts list --> <a href="blog.php" class="button-browse">Browse All Posts</a> </div> <?php require_once('include/twitter_user_timeline.php'); ?> blog.php: <?php require_once('include/header.php'); ?> <body class="blog"> <?php require_once('include/navigation_bar_blog.php'); ?> <div class="blog"> <div class="main"> <!-- Header --> <h2 class="underline"> <span>What&#039;s new</span> <span></span> </h2> <!-- /Header --> <!-- Layout 66x33 --> <div class="layout-p-66x33 clear-fix"> <!-- Left column --> <!-- <div class="column-left"> --> <!-- Posts list --> <ul class="post-list post-list-2"> <?php /* Fetches Date/Time, Post Content and title with Pagination */ include 'dbconnect.php'; //sets to default page if(empty($_GET['pn'])){ $page=1; } else { $page = $_GET['pn']; } // Index of the page $index = ($page-1)*3; $sql = "SELECT * FROM `wp_posts` ORDER BY `post_date` DESC LIMIT " . $index . " ,3"; $res = mysql_query($sql); //Loops through the values while ( $row = mysql_fetch_array($res) ) { ?> <!-- Post #1 --> <li class="clear-fix"> <!-- Date --> <div class="post-list-date"> <div class="post-date-box"> <?php //Timestamp broken down to show accordingly $timestamp = $row['post_date']; $datetime = new DateTime($timestamp); $date = $datetime->format("d"); $month = $datetime->format("M"); ?> <h3> <?php echo $date; ?> </h3> <span> <?php echo $month; ?> </span> </div> </div> <!-- /Date --> <!-- Image + comments count --> <div class="post-list-image"> <!-- Image --> <div class="image image-overlay-url image-fancybox-url"> <a href="post.php" class="preloader-image"> <?php echo '<img src="', $row['image'], '" alt="' , $row['post_title'] , '\'s Blog Image" />'; ?> </a> </div> <!-- /Image --> </div> <!-- /Image + comments count --> <!-- Content --> <div class="post-list-content"> <div> <?php $id = $_GET['ID']; $post = lookup_post_somehow($id); if($post) { // render post } else { echo 'blog post not found..'; } ?> <!-- Header --> <h4> <a href="post.php"> <?php echo $row['post_title']; ?> </a> </h4> <!-- /Header --> <!-- Excerpt --> <p> <?php echo $row ['post_content']; ?> </p> <!-- /Excerpt --> </div> </div> <!-- /Content --> </li> <!-- /Post #1 --> <?php } // close while loop ?> </ul> <!-- /Posts list --> <div><!-- Pagination --> <ul class="blog-pagination clear-fix"> <?php //Count the number of rows $numberofrows = mysql_query("SELECT COUNT(ID) FROM `wp_posts`"); //Do ciel() to round the result according to number of posts $postsperpage = 4; $numOfPages = ceil($numberofrows / $postsperpage); for($i=1; $i < $numOfPages; $i++) { //echos links for each page $paginationDisplay = '<li><a href="blog.php?pn=' . $i . '">' . $i . '</a></li>'; echo $paginationDisplay; } ?> <!-- <li><a href="#" class="selected">1</a></li> <li><a href="#">2</a></li> <li><a href="#">3</a></li> <li><a href="#">4</a></li> --> </ul> </div><!-- /Pagination --> <!-- /div> --> <!-- Left column --> </div> <!-- /Layout 66x33 --> </div> </div> <?php require_once('include/twitter_user_timeline.php'); ?> <?php require_once('include/footer_blog.php'); ?> How do I render?

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• Starting an HTML canvas game with no graphics skills

  - by Jacob

  I want to do some hobby game development, but I have some unfortunate handicaps that have me stuck in indecision; I have no artistic talent, and I also have no experience with 3D graphics. But this is just a hobby project that might not go anywhere, so I want to develop the stuff I care about; if the game shows good potential, my graphic "stubs" can be replaced with something more sophisticated. I do, however, want my graphics engine to render something approximate to the end goal. The game is tile-based, with each tile being a square. Each tile also has an elevation. My target platform (subject to modification) is JavaScript rendering to the HTML 5 canvas, either with a 2D or WebGL context. My question to those of you with game development experience is whether it's easier to develop an isometric game using a 2D graphics engine and sprites or a 3D game using rudimentary 3D primitives and basic textures? I realize that there are limitations to isometric projection, but if it makes developing my throwaway graphics engine easier, I'm OK with the visual warts that would be introduced. Or is representing a 3D world with an actual 3D engine easier?

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• Java Applet or Unity3D for Cross-Platform 3D Surveying App

  - by Jake M

  Do you think a Java Applet or Unity3D Application is the best option to make a cross-browser 3d web-app? I intend to make a web application that displays 3d environments that can be navigated by dragging(with a finger or mouse depending on the platform). The web app will render 3d environments of development sites including contours, water pipeline locations, buildings etc. The application must work on Windows Desktop, Android, iOS and Windows Phone. So this is why I am tending towards a web-app as opposed to cross-platform smart phone library(like Mosync or Marmalade). The 3d environments will be navigable(by dragging around) and contain simple(not detailed) 3d objects like buildings, mountains, pipelines, etc. One thing I know is that WebGL is out because it doesn't work on IE and has limited support on Smart Phones(am I correct to completely disregard WebGL?). Will future Smart Phone browsers continue to support Java Applets? Also is it really true I can write ONE Application/Game in Unity3D and simply compile it to run on Windows Windows, Mac, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, iPad, iPhone and Android? Would you suggest the Unity3D application path or the Unity3D Web Player path? Concerning Unity3D, there's one thing I am unsure about: do all Unity3D features work on iOS and Android?

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• How to update entity states and animations in a component-based game

  - by mivic

  I'm trying to design a component-based entity system for learning purposes (and later use on some games) and I'm having some troubles when it comes to updating entity states. I don't want to have an update() method inside the Component to prevent dependencies between Components. What I currently have in mind is that components hold data and systems update components. So, if I have a simple 2D game with some entities (e.g. player, enemy1, enemy 2) that have Transform, Movement, State, Animation and Rendering components I think I should have: A MovementSystem that moves all the Movement components and updates the State components And a RenderSystem that updates the Animation components (the animation component should have one animation (i.e. a set of frames/textures) for each state and updating it means selecting the animation corresponding to the current state (e.g. jumping, moving_left, etc), and updating the frame index). Then, the RenderSystem updates the Render components with the texture corresponding to the current frame of each entity's Animation and renders everything on screen. I've seen some implementations like Artemis framework, but I don't know how to solve this situation: Let's say that my game has the following entities. Each entity have a set of states and one animation for each state: player: "idle", "moving_right", "jumping" enemy1: "moving_up", "moving_down" enemy2: "moving_left", "moving_right" What are the most accepted approaches in order to update the current state of each entity? The only thing that I can think of is having separate systems for each group of entities and separate State and Animation components so I would have PlayerState, PlayerAnimation, Enemy1State, Enemy1Animation... PlayerMovementSystem, PlayerRenderingSystem... but I think this is a bad solution and breaks the purpose of having a component-based system. As you can see, I'm quite lost here, so I'd very much appreciate any help.

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• Can anyone recommend an AI sandbox?

  - by user19433

  I'm passionate person, who has been around AI from a long time [1] but never going in deep enough. Now it's time! I've been really looking for some way to concentrate on AI coding but couldn't succeeded to find an AI environment I can focus on. I just want to use an AI sandbox environment which would let me have tools like: visibility information character controller able to easily define a level, with obstacles of course physics collider management triggers management don't need to be a shiny, eye candy graphical render : this is about pathfinding, tactical reasoning, etc.. I have tried : Unreal Dev Kit : while the new release announce is about C++ coding, this is about external tools and will be released in 2013 Cry Engine : really interesting as AI is presents here but coding with it appears to be an hell: did I got it wrong ? Half Life source, C4, Torque, Dx Studio : either quite old, not very useful or costly these imply to dig in documentation (when provided) to code everything, graphics included. Unity 3D : the most promising platform. While you also need to create your own environment, there are lot of examples. The disadvantage is, in addition to spend time to have this env. working, is the languages choice : C#, Javascript or Boo. C# is not that hard, but this implies you'll allways have to convert papers (I love those from Lars Linden) books codes, or anything you can have in Aigamedev are most often in C++. This is extra work. I've look at "Simple Path", the very good Arong Greenberg work but no source provided and AngryAnt work. AI Sandbox : this seems to be exactly what as AI coder I want to use. I saw some preview but from 2009 we still don't know what it will be about precisely, will it be opensource or free (I strongly doubt), will I be able to buy it? will it really provide me tools I need to focus on AI ? That being said, what is the best environment to be able to focus on AI coding only, is it even possible?

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• How can I make an infinite cave using stage3d?

  - by ifree

  I want to make an infinite cave in my 3d game using flash stage3d. But I got no idea about how to build that cave. Can anyone can give me some solution or hint? update: I've tried agal fragment shader like squeae tunnel in shader toy code: var fragmentProgramCode:String = AGALUtils.build() .mov("ft0","v0") .div("ft1","ft0.xy","fc3.xy") .mul("ft2","fc6.x","ft1") .sub("ft3","ft2","fc5.x")//vec2 p = -1.0 + 2.0 * gl_FragCoord.xy / resolution.xy; .mul("ft1","ft3.x","ft3.x") .mul("ft2","ft3.y","ft3.y") .pow("ft4","ft1","fc6.z")//float r = pow( pow(p.x*p.x,16.0) + pow(p.y*p.y,16.0), 1.0/32.0 ); .pow("ft5","ft2","fc6.z") .add("ft1","ft4","ft5") .pow("ft4","ft1","fc6.w") .mov("ft5","fc5")//uv .sub("ft1","fc7.x","ft4") .add("ft5.x","fc7.x","ft1")//uv.x = .5*time + 0.5/r; .mov("ft6","fc0")//for atan .atan2("ft5.y","ft3.y","ft3.x",new <String>["fc7.y","fc5.x","fc7.z","fc7.w","fc8.x","fc8.y","fc8.z","fc8.w","fc9.x","fc9.y"],"ft6") .tex("ft0","ft5","fs0","repeat","linear","nomip")//tex .mul("ft1","ft4","ft4") .mul("ft2","ft1","ft4")//r*r*r .mul("ft1","ft0.xyz","ft2") .mov("ft0.w","fc5.x") .mov("oc","ft1").toString() it can only apply one material,but my project requires different types of material (like floor,ceilling). so ,I create a 3d model Is there anyway to make that 3d model render like "infinity cave"? use agal to make each side of cave's texture move? thanks for your help

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• Seeking solution for printing-reporting .NET

  - by Parhs

  I am developing an application that prints in separate threads in extreme cases about 20-25 pages per minute to various thermal printers. Currently templates for these are XAML xps documents. All printers have graphics drivers that support EMF/GDI printing. So GDI-EMF is done by operating system resulting in slower performance. Sending raw text for printing is another good solution but doesnt work always , because some clients have old chinese thermal printer that nobody support thus impossible to change codepage / emulation. So it doesnt work always. Also most computers running my software are low end ATOM CPU. So I am thinking to return to GDI, EMF printing and have both Text-Only reports and EMF reports. Another reason i want EMF is because here receipts are signed by Electronic Fiscal Memory device.Most of these dont do good job extracting text from XPS as they dont follow the standard but how windows convert GDI to XPS.Even with text-only mode some of them dont support all character encodings and are impossible to send paper cut command after the sign. I know that using a reporting engine would solve rendering problem but I dont want to buy one. All I want is to be able to show tabular data and insert an image and replaced text.I know there is StringTemplate that could do the generation of template but the problem is i should parse somehow the template and render it using GDI commands. Is there any other solution/approach for this ? Or is there anything ready ?

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• Simple monitoring of a Raspberry Pi powered screen - Part 2

  - by Chris Houston

  If you have read my previous blog post Raspberry Pi entrance signed backed by Umbraco - Part 1 which describes how we used a Raspberry Pi to drive an Entrance sign for QV Offices you will have seen I mentioned a follow up post about monitoring the sign.As the sign is mounted in the entrance of the building on the ground floor and the reception is on the 1st floor, this meant that if there was a fault of any kind showing on the screen, the first person to see this was inevitably one of QV Offices' clients as they walked into the building.Although the QV Offices' team were able to check the Umbraco website address that the sign uses, this did not always mean that everything was working as expected. We noticed a couple of times that the sign had Wifi issues (it is now hard wired) and this caused the Chromium browser to render a 404 error when it tried to refresh the screen.The simple monitoring solutionWe added the following line to our refresh script, so that after the sign had been refreshed a screen shot of the Raspberry Pi would be taken:import -display :0 -window root ~/screenshot.jpgFinally we wrote a small Crontab task that ran on a QV Offices Mac that grabs this screen shot and saved it on the desktop, admittedly we have used a package that it not mega secure, but in reality this is an internal system that only runs an office sign, so we are not to concerned about it being hacked.*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/sshpass -p 'password' /usr/bin/scp [email protected]:screenshot.jpg Desktop/QVScreenShot.jpgAs the file icon updates, if the image changes, this gives a quick visual indication of the status of the sign, if for some reason the icon does not look correct the QV Offices administrator can just click on the file to see the exact image currently displayed on the sign.Sometimes a quick and easy solution is better than a more complex and expensive one.

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• OpenGL ES 2.0 texture distortion on large geometry

  - by Spruce

  OpenGL ES 2.0 has serious precision issues with texture sampling - I've seen topics with a similar problem, but I haven't seen a real solution to this "distorted OpenGL ES 2.0 texture" problem yet. This is not related to the texture's image format or OpenGL color buffers, it seems like it's a precision error. I don't know what specifically causes the precision to fail - it doesn't seem like it's just the size of geometry that causes this distortion, because simply scaling vertex position passed to the the vertex shader does not solve the issue. Here are some examples of the texture distortion: Distorted Texture (on OpenGL ES 2.0): http://i47.tinypic.com/3322h6d.png What the texture normally looks like (also on OpenGL ES 2.0): http://i49.tinypic.com/b4jc6c.png The texture issue is limited to small scale geometry on OpenGL ES 2.0, otherwise the texture sampling appears normal, but the grainy effect gradually worsens the further the vertex data is from the origin of XYZ(0,0,0) These texture issues do not occur on desktop OpenGL (works fine under Windows XP, Windows 7, and Mac OS X) I've only seen the problem occur on Android, iPhone, or WebGL(which is similar to OpenGL ES 2.0) All textures are power of 2 but the problem still occurs Scaling the vertex data - The values of a vertex's X Y Z location are in the range of: -65536 to +65536 floating point I realized this was large, so I tried dividing the vertex positions by 1024 to shrink the geometry and hopefully get more accurate floating point precision, but this didn't fix or lessen the texture distortion issue Scaling the modelview or scaling the projection matrix does not help Changing texture filtering options does not help Disabling mipmapping, or using GL_NEAREST/GL_LINEAR does nothing Enabling/disabling anisotropic does nothing The banding effect still occurs even when using GL_CLAMP Dividing the texture coords passed to the vertex shader and then multiplying them back to the correct values in the fragment shader, also does not work precision highp sampler2D, highp float, highp int - in the fragment or the vertex shader didn't change anything (lowp/mediump did not work either) I'm thinking this problem has to have been solved at one point - Seeing that OpenGL ES 2.0 -based games have been able to render large-scale, highly detailed geometry

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• 14.04 LTS Unity no longer boots after last 94 MB update

  - by Harryg123

  I am running 14.04 LTS, Unity, on an HP Pavillion 15, 4GBRAM, 750 GB hdd, I-5 machine, with AMD 8600M graphics card built in. I have disabled the dash and all Ubuntu spyware. I have been faithfully loading all updates as they appear. This morning it asked for a 94 MB update (bringing kernel to .27, I think. Now, I can boot, get to login screen, but it freezes after that. Keyboard doesn't work at that point, but mouse does. I booted into recovery mode, tried to run in generic graphics mode, -- system again froze. I also pressed [esc] during boot, but saw nothing strange; then text disappeared and was replaced by login screen. I am not a hobbyist; this is a production machine and I have a lot of work to do today. Having a standard software update render my machine completely useless... sigh. Perhaps the simplest thing to do would be to revert to the previous configuration. How do I do that? I can boot into recovery mode. But I have no idea how to proceed. TIA for all help. -Harry

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• MonoGame not all letters being drawn with DrawString

  - by Lex Webb

  I'm currently making a dynamic user interface for my game and are setting up having text on my buttons. I'm having an odd issue where, when i use a specific piece of code to determine the text position, it will not render all of the text passed to DrawString. Even weirder, is if i insert another DrawString after this, drawing more text at a different place, different parts of the text will be drawn. The code for drawing my button with the text attached is: public override void Draw(SpriteBatch sb, GameTime gt) { sb.Draw(currentImage, GetRelativeRectangle(), Color.White); sb.DrawString(font, text, new Vector2(this.GetRelativeDrawOffset().X + this.Width / 2 - font.MeasureString(text).X / 2, this.GetRelativeDrawOffset().Y + this.Height / 2 - font.MeasureString(text).Y / 2), textColor); } The methods in the creation of the Vector2 simply get the draw position of the button. I'm then doing some calculation to center the text. This produces this when the text is set to 'Test': And when i enter this piece of code below the first DrawString: sb.DrawString(font, "test", new Vector2(500, 50), Color.Pink); I should mention that that grey square is being drawn in the same spritebatch, before the button and the text. Any ideas as to what could be causing this? I have a feeling it may be due to draw order, but i have no idea how to control that.

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