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  • How to shift development culture from tech fetish to focusing on simplicity and getting things done?

    - by Serge
    Looking for ways to switch team/individual culture from chasing latest fads, patterns, and all kinds of best practices to focusing on finding quickest and simplest solutions and shipping features. My definition of "tech fetish": Chasing latest fads, applying new technologies and best practices without considering product/project impact, focusing on micro optimization, creating platforms and frameworks instead of finding simple and quick ways to ship product features. Few examples of culture differences: From "Spent a day on trying to map database query with five complex joins in NHibernate" to "Wrote a SQL query and used DataReader to pull data in" From "Wrote super-fast JSON parser in C++" to "Used Python to parse JSON response and call C++ code" From "Let's use WCF because it supports all possible communication standards" to "REST is simple text-based format, let's stick with it and use simple HTTP handlers"

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  • Passing data between engine layers

    - by spaceOwl
    I am building a software system (game engine with networking support ) that is made up of (roughly) these layers: Game Layer Messaging Layer Networking Layer Game related data is passed to the messaging layer (this could be anything that is game specific), where they are to be converted to network specific messages (which are then serialized to byte arrays). I'm looking for a way to be able to convert "game" data into "network" data, such that no strong coupling between these layers will exist. As it looks now, the Messaging layer sits between both layers (game and network) and "knows" both of them (it contains Converter objects that know how to translate between data objects of both layers back and forth). I am not sure this is the best solution. Is there a good design for passing objects between layers? I'd like to learn more about the different options.

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  • Where can I find game postmortems with a programmer perspective [on hold]

    - by Ken
    There are a number of interesting game post-mortems in places like GDC vault or gamastura.com. The post-mortems are generally give with a CEO/manager perspective or a designer perspective, or, more often a combination of both e.g DOOM postmortem But I have not been able to find many post-mortems which are primarily from the programmers perspective. I'm looking for discussions and rational for technical choices and tradeoffs and how technical problems were overcome. The motivation here is to learn what kind of problems real game programmers encounter and how they go about solving them. A perfect example of what I'm looking for is Renaud Bédard's excellent GDC talk on the development of Fez, "Cubes all the way down". Where can I find more like that?

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  • Techniques for separating game model from presentation

    - by liortal
    I am creating a simple 2D game using XNA. The elements that make up the game world are what i refer to as the "model". For instance, in a board game, i would have a GameBoard class that stores information about the board. This information could be things such as: Location Size Details about cells on the board (occupied/not occupied) etc This object should either know how to draw itself, or describe how to draw itself to some other entity (renderer) in order to be displayed. I believe that since the board only contains the data+logic for things regarding it or cells on it, it should not provide the logic of how to draw things (separation of concerns). How can i achieve a good partitioning and easily allow some other entity to draw it properly? My motivations for doing so are: Allow multiple "implementations" of presentation for a single game entity Easier porting to other environments where the presentation code is not available (for example - porting my code to Unity or other game technology that does not rely on XNA).

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  • I am afraid that my University is not going to teach me enough information [closed]

    - by Muhklayne
    I attend a University and am a Computer Science major. I have barely entered into the major, as I am a sophomore. However, the coursework I am doing is extremely easy already and I feel as though this degree is going to lead me to a path of knowledge without knowing how to bring it all together. Therefore, I am coming to you to ask where I should begin learning on my own! I am willing to dedicate hours upon hours of learning to code outside of class, as it is truly my passion. I will begin by completing all work on http://www.codecademy.com, however I feel this will not be enough either. I would love to learn to integrate visual languages for video games such as NXA and C# combining it with C++ (as I understand video games can be created in this manner). I would also like to look into LUA and Python scripting. I am asking for advice as to where I should begin my personal studies of learning to program, as with my research it has become quite apparent that simply attaining a degree in Computer Science is quite frankly not enough. Thank you for your time!

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  • design a model for a system of dependent variables

    - by dbaseman
    I'm dealing with a modeling system (financial) that has dozens of variables. Some of the variables are independent, and function as inputs to the system; most of them are calculated from other variables (independent and calculated) in the system. What I'm looking for is a clean, elegant way to: define the function of each dependent variable in the system trigger a re-calculation, whenever a variable changes, of the variables that depend on it A naive way to do this would be to write a single class that implements INotifyPropertyChanged, and uses a massive case statement that lists out all the variable names x1, x2, ... xn on which others depend, and, whenever a variable xi changes, triggers a recalculation of each of that variable's dependencies. I feel that this naive approach is flawed, and that there must be a cleaner way. I started down the path of defining a CalculationManager<TModel> class, which would be used (in a simple example) something like as follows: public class Model : INotifyPropertyChanged { private CalculationManager<Model> _calculationManager = new CalculationManager<Model>(); // each setter triggers a "PropertyChanged" event public double? Height { get; set; } public double? Weight { get; set; } public double? BMI { get; set; } public Model() { _calculationManager.DefineDependency<double?>( forProperty: model => model.BMI, usingCalculation: (height, weight) => weight / Math.Pow(height, 2), withInputs: model => model.Height, model.Weight); } // INotifyPropertyChanged implementation here } I won't reproduce CalculationManager<TModel> here, but the basic idea is that it sets up a dependency map, listens for PropertyChanged events, and updates dependent properties as needed. I still feel that I'm missing something major here, and that this isn't the right approach: the (mis)use of INotifyPropertyChanged seems to me like a code smell the withInputs parameter is defined as params Expression<Func<TModel, T>>[] args, which means that the argument list of usingCalculation is not checked at compile time the argument list (weight, height) is redundantly defined in both usingCalculation and withInputs I am sure that this kind of system of dependent variables must be common in computational mathematics, physics, finance, and other fields. Does someone know of an established set of ideas that deal with what I'm grasping at here? Would this be a suitable application for a functional language like F#? Edit More context: The model currently exists in an Excel spreadsheet, and is being migrated to a C# application. It is run on-demand, and the variables can be modified by the user from the application's UI. Its purpose is to retrieve variables that the business is interested in, given current inputs from the markets, and model parameters set by the business.

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  • Why Nodes.js being that "unique"?

    - by Adrian Shum
    Recently years there are lots of praise to Nodes.js. I am not a developer that have much exposure on network application. From my bare understanding of Nodes.js, its strength is: We are having only on thread handling multiple connections, providing a event-based architecture. However, for example in Java, what if I am having only one thread, using NIO/AIO (which is non-blocking APIs from my bare understanding), and handle multiple connections using that thread, and I provide an event-based architecture to implement the data handling logic (shouldn't be that difficult by providing some callback etc) ? Given JVM being a even more mature VM than V8 (I expect it run faster too), and event-based handling architecture seems not something difficult to create. I am not sure why Nodes.js is attracting so much attention. Did I miss some important points?

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  • What is So Unique About Node.js?

    - by Adrian Shum
    Recently there has been a lot of praise for Node.js. I am not a developer that has had much exposure to network application. From my bare understanding of Nodes.js, its strength is: we have only one thread handling multiple connections, providing an event-based architecture. However, for example in Java, I can create only one thread using NIO/AIO (which is non-blocking APIs from my bare understanding), and handle multiple connections using that thread, and I provide an event-based architecture to implement the data handling logic (shouldn't be that difficult by providing some callback etc) ? Given JVM being a even more mature VM than V8 (I expect it to run faster too), and event-based handling architecture seems to be something not difficult to create, I am not sure why Node.js is attracting so much attention. Did I miss some important points?

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  • How do you navigate and refactor code written in a dynamic language?

    - by Philippe Beaudoin
    I love that writing Python, Ruby or Javascript requires so little boilerplate. I love simple functional constructs. I love the clean and simple syntax. However, there are three things I'm really bad at when developing a large software in a dynamic language: Navigating the code Identifying the interfaces of the objects I'm using Refactoring efficiently I have been trying simple editors (i.e. Vim) as well as IDE (Eclipse + PyDev) but in both cases I feel like I have to commit a lot more to memory and/or to constantly "grep" and read through the code to identify the interfaces. As for refactoring, for example changing method names, it becomes hugely dependent on the quality of my unit tests. And if I try to isolate my unit tests by "cutting them off" the rest of the application, then there is no guarantee that my stub's interface stays up to date with the object I'm stubbing. I'm sure there are workarounds for these problems. How do you work efficiently in Python, Ruby or Javascript?

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  • How necessary is it to learn JavaScript before jQuery?

    - by benhowdle89
    In my opinion, when I looked at JavaScript, it looked like not my cup of tea. When I came across jQuery, I loved it. I sat and watched Nettuts+ 15 days of jQuery screencasts, 1 year later and now I'm fairly confident I wouldn't develop a website without including jQuery's library. I have never felt this has held me back but my question is, will this come back and bite me in the ass one day, the fact that I didn't have a solid JavaScript foundation before jumping feet first into one of its best (if not the best) frameworks? Did anyone else take this approach?

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  • Hard Copies VS Soft Copies

    - by Garet Claborn
    Where do you draw the line and say, "OK, I'm actually going to print out this piece of code, spec, formula, or other info and carry it around but these pieces can stay on disk." Well, more importantly why do you draw the line there? I've encountered this a number of times and have some sort of vague conceptions beyond "oh now I'm REALLY stuck, better print this out." I've also found some quicksheets of basic specs to be handy. Really though, I have no particular logic behind what is useful to physically have available in the design and development process. I have a great pile of 'stuff' papers that seemed at least partially relevant at the time, but I only really use about a third of them ever and often end up wishing I had different info on hand. Edit: So this is what I'm hearing in a nutshell: Major parts of the design pattern Common, fairly static and prominently useful code (reference or specs) Some representation of data useful in collaborating or sharing with team Extreme cases of tough problem solving Overwhelmingly,almost never print anything.

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  • Learning good OOP design & unlearning some bad habits

    - by Nick
    I have been mostly a C programmer so far in my career with knowledge of C++. I rely on C++ mostly for the convenience STL provides and I hardly ever focus on good design practices. As I have started to look for a new job position, this bad habit of mine has come back to haunt me. During the interviews, I have been asked to design a problem (like chess, or some other scenario) using OOP and I doing really badly at that (I came to know this through feedback from one interview). I tried to google stuff and came up with so many opinions and related books that I don't know where to begin. I need a good through introduction to OOP design with which I can learn practical design, not just theory. Can you point me to any book which meets my requirements ? I prefer C++, but any other language is fine as long as I can pick-up good practices. Also, I know that books can only go so far. I would also appreciate any good practice project ideas that helped you learn and improve your OOP concepts. Thanks.

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  • how difficult to add vibration/feedback to a open source driving game

    - by Jonathan Day
    Hi, I'm looking to use SuperTuxKart as a basis for a PhD research project. A key requirement for the game is to provide vibration feedback through the controller (obviously dependant on the controller itself). I don't believe that the game currently includes this feature and I'm trying to get a feel for how big a challenge it would be to add. My background is as a J2EE and PHP developer/architect, so I don't know C++ as such, but am prepared to give it a crack if there are resources and guides to assist, and it's not a herculean task. Alternatively, if you know of any open source games that do include vibration feedback, please feel free to let me know! Preferably the game would be of the style that the player had to navigate a character (or character's vehicle) over a repeatable course/map. TIA, JD

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  • How do I print values of an array in Three Rows?

    - by Ramkumar
    I need this output.. 1 3 5 2 4 6 I want to use array function like array(1,2,3,4,5,6). If I edit this array like array(1,2,3), it means the output need to show like 1 2 3 The concept is maximum 3 column only. If we give array(1,2,3,4,5), it means the output should be 1 3 5 2 4 Suppose we will give array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9), then it means output is 1 4 7 2 5 8 3 6 9 that is, maximum 3 column only. Depends upon the the given input, the rows will be created with 3 columns. Is this possible with PHP? I am doing small Research & Development in array functions. I think this is possible. Will you help me? For more info: * input: array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15) * output: 1 6 11 2 7 12 3 8 13 4 9 14 5 10 15

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  • Why would Java app make RPC call to itself?

    - by amphibient
    I am working with a multithreaded homegrown multi-module app in my new job. We use the the Thrift protocol to communicate RPC calls between different stand-alone applications in a distributed system. One of them listens on multiple ports and I just noticed that it actually makes an RPC call to itself from one thread invoked from one socket it listens to (web service call) to another port within the same app. I verified that it could accomplish the same thing if it just went and directly called the method that the remote procedure ultimately invokes as it is all within the same application, same JVM. To make it even more mysterious, the call is completely synchronous, i.e. no callbacks involved. The first thread totally sits and waits until it makes a call across the wire to itself and comes back. Now, I am perplexed why anybody would do it this way. It seems like calling somebody on the phone that sits in the same room as you do. Can anybody provide an explanation why the developer before me would come up with the above mentioned model? Maybe there is a reason and I am missing something.

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  • Everything has an Interface [closed]

    - by Shane
    Possible Duplicate: Do I need to use an interface when only one class will ever implement it? I am taking over a project where every single real class is implementing an Interface. The vast majority of these interfaces are implemented by a single class that share a similar name and the exact same methods (ex: MyCar and MyCarImpl). Almost no 2 classes in the project implement more than the interface that shares its name. I know the general recommendation is to code to an interface rather than an implementation, but isn't this taking it a bit too far? The system might be more flexible in that it is easier to add a new class that behaves very much like an existing class. However, it is significantly harder to parse through the code and method changes now require 2 edits instead of 1. Personally, I normally only create interfaces when there is a need for multiple classes to have the same behavior. I subscribe to YAGNI, so I don't create something unless I see a real need for it. Am I doing it all wrong or is this project going way overboard?

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  • At $20/month Windows Azure host my website with 99.97% uptime

    - by Gopinath
    Couple of years ago a reliable and decent performing Windows hosting was not affordable to many enthusiastic developers who want to try a startup idea or build a hobby site. I tried to start an ASP.NET website few years ago to provide services like – Mobile Tracing, Vehicle Tracing. But due to high cost of Windows hosting I developed those services using PHP (not an easy task for .NET developer) and hosted on them Linux servers.  But with recent evolution of Windows Azure, hosting ASP.NET websites on highly reliable servers is affordable. Today anyone can host a high responsive and available ASP.NET website for just $20/month using Windows Azure. My website coziie.com is running on Windows Azure and serves close to quarter millions visitors a month with 99.97% of uptime and most of the page load times are less than 3 seconds. All I spend to run this website is just around $20, if you translate it to India rupees its roughly Rs.1000. The web sever of coziie.com is powered by a single Extra Small Web role instance and the backend is powered by a SQL Azure instance. Azure is quite impressive to provide 99.97% of uptime. Response times during peak are around 3 seconds and on nomarl loads it is around 1.5 seconds. Here is the report of uptime provided by Royal Pingdom over last one year For just $20/month Windows Azure takes care of the following apart from hosting Patches up Windows OS to the latest version Upgrades ASP.NET to the latest version – coziie.com is running on ASP.NET MVC 3 and soon I’ll upgrade it to ASP.NET MVC 4 Hosts data on latest and best version Sql Server database SQL Azure maintains 3 copies of database and automatically recovers in case of server failures and disasters. I never worry about database backups/restore. Provides staging environment for deploying applications for testing purpose and move them to production – I upgrade  twice a month on average With Windows Azure I no longer focus on server maintenance or data backups. They are taken up by Microsoft team and I just focus on building my website. Wish there is a low cost Linux version of Windows Azure so that I can stop worrying about server maintenance of this blog!! If you are looking for a Windows hosting, look no further than Windows Azure. If you find $20/month is a bit expensive to start with you may explore Azure Website (sort of shared hosted environment) which is free to start with and as your traffic grows you can move to paid hosting.

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  • Should I use AND or should I use OR

    - by BDotA
    An order can be in the "status" of Completed, Corrected or some other stratus. I saw some code that is checking it like this, the purpose is to disable some stuff when the status is in Completed or Corrected status. if (model.CurrentStatus != DSRHelper.OrderStatusEnum.Complete && model.CurrentStatus != DSRHelper.OrderStatusEnum.Corrected) I can't get it why the engineer has used "AND" for this, shouldn't it be an "OR"?

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  • "Imprinting" as a language feature?

    - by MKO
    Idea I had this idea for a language feature that I think would be useful, does anyone know of a language that implements something like this? The idea is that besides inheritance a class can also use something called "imprinting" (for lack of better term). A class can imprint one or several (non-abstract) classes. When a class imprints another class it gets all it's properties and all it's methods. It's like the class storing an instance of the imprinted class and redirecting it's methods/properties to it. A class that imprints another class therefore by definition also implements all it's interfaces and it's abstract class. So what's the point? Well, inheritance and polymorphism is hard to get right. Often composition gives far more flexibility. Multiple inheritance offers a slew of different problems without much benefits (IMO). I often write adapter classes (in C#) by implementing some interface and passing along the actual methods/properties to an encapsulated object. The downside to that approach is that if the interface changes the class breaks. You also you have to put in a lot of code that does nothing but pass things along to the encapsulated object. A classic example is that you have some class that implements IEnumerable or IList and contains an internal class it uses. With this technique things would be much easier Example (c#) [imprint List<Person> as peopleList] public class People : PersonBase { public void SomeMethod() { DoSomething(this.Count); //Count is from List } } //Now People can be treated as an List<Person> People people = new People(); foreach(Person person in people) { ... } peopleList is an alias/variablename (of your choice)used internally to alias the instance but can be skipped if not needed. One thing that's useful is to override an imprinted method, that could be achieved with the ordinary override syntax public override void Add(Person person) { DoSomething(); personList.Add(person); } note that the above is functional equivalent (and could be rewritten by the compiler) to: public class People : PersonBase , IList<Person> { private List<Person> personList = new List<Person>(); public override void Add(object obj) { this.personList.Add(obj) } public override int IndexOf(object obj) { return personList.IndexOf(obj) } //etc etc for each signature in the interface } only if IList changes your class will break. IList won't change but an interface that you, someone in your team, or a thirdparty has designed might just change. Also this saves you writing a whole lot of code for some interfaces/abstract classes. Caveats There's a couple of gotchas. First we, syntax must be added to call the imprinted classes's constructors from the imprinting class constructor. Also, what happends if a class imprints two classes which have the same method? In that case the compiler would detect it and force the class to define an override of that method (where you could chose if you wanted to call either imprinted class or both) So what do you think, would it be useful, any caveats? It seems it would be pretty straightforward to implement something like that in the C# language but I might be missing something :) Sidenote - Why is this different from multiple inheritance Ok, so some people have asked about this. Why is this different from multiple inheritance and why not multiple inheritance. In C# methods are either virtual or not. Say that we have ClassB who inherits from ClassA. ClassA has the methods MethodA and MethodB. ClassB overrides MethodA but not MethodB. Now say that MethodB has a call to MethodA. if MethodA is virtual it will call the implementation that ClassB has, if not it will use the base class, ClassA's MethodA and you'll end up wondering why your class doesn't work as it should. By the terminology sofar you might already confused. So what happens if ClassB inherits both from ClassA and another ClassC. I bet both programmers and compilers will be scratching their heads. The benefit of this approach IMO is that the imprinting classes are totally encapsulated and need not be designed with multiple inheritance in mind. You can basically imprint anything.

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  • What are your worst experiences with whitespace?

    - by CheeseConQueso
    What are some good examples of whitespace being the cause of any type of error and/or total disruption of scripts and/or markups? I am more interested in any accounts related to languages that are used commonly today, but I would like to hear about any cases in general. PS - This should be a wiki, but I don't know what happened to the "make this a wiki" check box. If someone comes across this with the rights to set it as a "wiki", please do so. If SO decided they wanted to keep away from wiki's altogether, please comment me about that. Thanks

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  • How Does The Maybe Monad Relate To The Option Type?

    - by Onorio Catenacci
    I was doing a presentation on F# and was discussing the Option type when someone in the audience asked me if the Option type is F#'s implementation of the maybe monad. I know that's not the case but I did want to ask how the two concepts are related. I mean it seems to me that an option type might be the result of the operation of a maybe monad but I'm not even sure of that. Would someone elucidate the relationship between the maybe monad and the option type in those functional languages which support it?

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  • Make an object slide around an obstacle

    - by Isaiah
    I have path areas set up in a game I'm making for canvas/html5 and have got it working to keep the player within these areas. I have a function isOut(boundary, x, y) that returns true if the point is outside the boundary. What I do is check only the new position x/y separately with the corresponding old position x/y. Then if each one is out I assign them the past value from the frame before. The old positions are kept in a variable from a closure I made. like this: opos = [x,y];//old position npos = [x,y];//new position if(isOut(bound, npos[0], opos[1])){ npos[0] = opos[0]; //assign it the old x position } if(isOut(bound, opos[0], npos[1])){ npos[1] = opos[1]; //assign it the old y position } It looks nice and works good at certain angles, but if your boundary has diagonal regions it results in jittery motion. What's happening is the y pos exits the area while x doesn't and continues pushing the player to the side, once it has moved the player to the side a bit the player can move forward and then the y exits again and the whole process repeats. Anyone know how I may be able to achieve a smoother slide? I have access to the player's velocity vector, the angle, and the speed(when used with the angle). I can move the play with either angle/speed or x/yvelocities as I've built in backups to translate one to the other if either have been altered manually.

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  • Make a flowchart to demonstrate closure behavior

    - by thomas
    I saw below test question the other day in which the author's used a flow chart to represent the logic of loops. And I got to thinking it would be interesting to do this with some more complex logic. For example, the closure in this IIFE sort of boggles me. while (i <= qty_of_gets) { // needs an IIFE (function(i) promise = promise.then(function(){ return $.get("queries/html/" + product_id + i + ".php"); }); }(i++)); } I wonder if seeing a flowchart representation of what happens in it could be more elucidating. Could such a thing be done? Would it be helpful? Or just messy? I haven't the foggiest clue where to start, but thought maybe someone would like to take a stab. Probably all the ajax could go and it could just be a simple return within the IIFE.

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  • LOD in modern games

    - by Firas Assaad
    I'm currently working on my master's thesis about LOD and mesh simplification, and I've been reading many academic papers and articles about the subject. However, I can't find enough information about how LOD is being used in modern games. I know many games use some sort of dynamic LOD for terrain, but what about elsewhere? Level of Detail for 3D Graphics for example points out that discrete LOD (where artists prepare several models in advance) is widely used because of the performance overhead of continuous LOD. That book was published in 2002 however, and I'm wondering if things are different now. There has been some research in performing dynamic LOD using the geometry shader (this paper for example, with its implementation in ShaderX6), would that be used in a modern game? To summarize, my question is about the state of LOD in modern video games, what algorithms are used and why? In particular, is view dependent continuous simplification used or does the runtime overhead make using discrete models with proper blending and impostors a more attractive solution? If discrete models are used, is an algorithm used (e.g. vertex clustering) to generate them offline, do artists manually create the models, or perhaps a combination of both methods is used?

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  • How should bots be recognised in a game?

    - by Bane
    I'm interested in how bots are usually written. Here's my situation: I plan to make an online 2D mecha game in HTML5, and the server-side will be done with node. It is intended to be multiplayer, but I also want to make bots in case there aren't enough players. How does my game logic see them, as players or as bots? Is there a standard by which I should make them? Also, any general tips and hints will be OK.

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