Search Results

Search found 14455 results on 579 pages for 'black background'.

Page 360/579 | < Previous Page | 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367  | Next Page >

• Wirelessly Sync Photos From iPhone To Computer Using CameraSync

  - by Gopinath

  How do you upload photos captured on your iOS device to your computer? By connecting the device using a cable and then syncing up with an app?? Ah..is’nt it a boring way. Here comes CameraSync – an app that lets you wirelessly send your iOS device photos to DropBox, so that you can access on your computer irrespective of the platform (Windows, Mac, Linux). By the way, this app works in the background and syncs the  files without disturbing  you. You don’t like DropBox? CameraSync works with a variety  of cloud services : Flickr, Amazon S3, iDisk, FTP and Box.net. If you looking for a step by step guide on how to setup CameraSync for DropBox then check this post. CameraSync cost $1.99 and runs on iOS4.0+ devices. CameraSync [iTunes App via Lifehacker] This article titled,Wirelessly Sync Photos From iPhone To Computer Using CameraSync, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

  Read the article

• FP for simulation and modelling

  - by heaptobesquare

  I'm about to start a simulation/modelling project. I already know that OOP is used for this kind of projects. However, studying Haskell made me consider using the FP paradigm for modelling a system of components. Let me elaborate: Let's say I have a component of type A, characterised by a set of data (a parameter like temperature or pressure,a PDE and some boundary conditions,etc.) and a component of type B, characterised by a different set of data(different or same parameter, different PDE and boundary conditions). Let's also assume that the functions/methods that are going to be applied on each component are the same (a Galerkin method for example). If I were to use an OOP approach, I would create two objects that would encapsulate each type's data, the methods for solving the PDE(inheritance would be used here for code reuse) and the solution to the PDE. On the other hand, if I were to use an FP approach, each component would be broken down to data parts and the functions that would act upon the data in order to get the solution for the PDE. This approach seems simpler to me assuming that linear operations on data would be trivial and that the parameters are constant. What if the parameters are not constant(for example, temperature increases suddenly and therefore cannot be immutable)? In OOP, the object's (mutable) state can be used. I know that Haskell has Monads for that. To conclude, would implementing the FP approach be actually simpler,less time consuming and easier to manage (add a different type of component or new method to solve the pde) compared to the OOP one? I come from a C++/Fortran background, plus I'm not a professional programmer, so correct me on anything that I've got wrong.

  Read the article

• How do I drag my widgets without dragging other widgets?

  - by Cypher

  I have a bunch of drag-able widgets on screen. When I am dragging one of the widgets around, if I drag the mouse over another widget, that widget then gets "snagged" and is also dragged around. While this is kind of a neat thing and I can think of a few game ideas based on that alone, that was not intended. :-P Background Info I have a Widget class that is the basis for my user interface controls. It has a bunch of properties that define it's size, position, image information, etc. It also defines some events, OnMouseOver, OnMouseOut, OnMouseClick, etc. All of the event handler functions are virtual, so that child objects can override them and make use of their implementation without duplicating code. Widgets are not aware of each other. They cannot tell each other, "Hey, I'm dragging so bugger off!" Source Code Here's where the widget gets updated (every frame): public virtual void Update( MouseComponent mouse, KeyboardComponent keyboard ) { // update position if the widget is being dragged if ( this.IsDragging ) { this.Left -= (int)( mouse.LastPosition.X - mouse.Position.X ); this.Top -= (int)( mouse.LastPosition.Y - mouse.Position.Y ); } ... // define and throw other events if ( !this.WasMouseOver && this.IsMouseOver && mouse.IsButtonDown( MouseButton.Left ) ) { this.IsMouseDown = true; this.MouseDown( mouse, new EventArgs() ); } ... // define and throw other events } And here's the OnMouseDown event where the IsDraggable property gets set: public virtual void OnMouseDown( object sender, EventArgs args ) { if ( this.IsDraggable ) { this.IsDragging = true; } } Problem Looking at the source code, it's obvious why this is happening. The OnMouseDown event gets fired whenever the mouse is hovered over the Widget and when the left mouse button is "down" (but not necessarily in that order!). That means that even if I hold the mouse down somewhere else on screen, and simply move it over anything that IsDraggable, it will "hook" onto the mouse and go for a ride. So, now that it's obvious that I'm Doing It Wrong™, how do I do this correctly?

  Read the article

• How to debug a fatal system crash - [graphical loop DOTA2]?

  - by Huw

  Whilst playing DOTA2, I occasionally and apparently randomly seem to be experiencing a fatal crash where the display freezes fixed and the audio loops over approx the last .5 of a second. Now, I'm interested in resolving this - but my trouble is I don't know where to start. The error appears non-reproducible (I've tried returning to games and deploying the same combination of events in hopes of pinning to to a certain shader etc), and I don't know which part of 'the stack' it might be coming from. Variables that occur to me: I custom build this system, did I do something wrong - is my PSU not providing enough power to the graphics card? I am running Steam and DOTA under Linux, could this new software have a bug Might it be something to do with my ATI Catalyst graphics drivers Is some other background process interfering I'm usually mid game when this occurs, so i quickly kill the power and reboot (when i'm lucky i can get back in with only 1-2 mins lost!). So my question here relates to logs. Where should I start to look or how might I set up logs to help me pin down a fatal crash of this kind by recording moments up to / before a crash and is this likely to be something I should push Steam to do, or is there something at a system level? Then perhaps I can return with a more specific question and perhaps even a bug report :) Many thanks in advance.

  Read the article

• Does LINQ require significantly more processing cycles and memory than lower-level data iteration techniques?

  - by Matthew Patrick Cashatt

  Background I am recently in the process of enduring grueling tech interviews for positions that use the .NET stack, some of which include silly questions like this one, and some questions that are more valid. I recently came across an issue that may be valid but I want to check with the community here to be sure. When asked by an interviewer how I would count the frequency of words in a text document and rank the results, I answered that I would Use a stream object put the text file in memory as a string. Split the string into an array on spaces while ignoring punctuation. Use LINQ against the array to .GroupBy() and .Count(), then OrderBy() said count. I got this answer wrong for two reasons: Streaming an entire text file into memory could be disasterous. What if it was an entire encyclopedia? Instead I should stream one block at a time and begin building a hash table. LINQ is too expensive and requires too many processing cycles. I should have built a hash table instead and, for each iteration, only added a word to the hash table if it didn't otherwise exist and then increment it's count. The first reason seems, well, reasonable. But the second gives me more pause. I thought that one of the selling points of LINQ is that it simply abstracts away lower-level operations like hash tables but that, under the veil, it is still the same implementation. Question Aside from a few additional processing cycles to call any abstracted methods, does LINQ require significantly more processing cycles to accomplish a given data iteration task than a lower-level task (such as building a hash table) would?

  Read the article

• What is the recommended MongoDB schema for this quiz-engine scenario?

  - by hughesdan

  I'm working on a quiz engine for learning a foreign language. The engine shows users four images simultaneously and then plays an audio file. The user has to match the audio to the correct image. Below is my MongoDB document structure. Each document consists of an image file reference and an array of references to audio files that match that image. To generate a quiz instance I select four documents at random, show the images and then play one audio file from the four documents at random. The next step in my application development is to decide on the best document schema for storing user guesses. There are several requirements to consider: I need to be able to report statistics at a user level. For example, total correct answers, total guesses, mean accuracy, etc) I need to be able to query images based on the user's learning progress. For example, select 4 documents where guess count is 10 and accuracy is <=0.50. The schema needs to be optimized for fast quiz generation. The schema must not cause future scaling issues vis a vis document size. Assume 1mm users who make an average of 1000 guesses. Given all of this as background information, what would be the recommended schema? For example, would you store each guess in the Image document or perhaps in a User document (not shown) or a new document collection created for logging guesses? Would you recommend logging the raw guess data or would you pre-compute statistics by incrementing counters within the relevant document? Schema for Image Collection: _id "505bcc7a45c978be24000005" date 2012-09-21 02:10:02 UTC imageFileName "BD3E134A-C7B3-4405-9004-ED573DF477FE-29879-0000395CF1091601" random 0.26997075392864645 user "2A8761E4-C13A-470E-A759-91432D61B6AF-25982-0000352D853511AF" audioFiles [ 0 { audioFileName "C3669719-9F0A-4EB5-A791-2C00486665ED-30305-000039A3FDA7DCD2" user "2A8761E4-C13A-470E-A759-91432D61B6AF-25982-0000352D853511AF" audioLanguage "English" date 2012-09-22 01:15:04 UTC } 1 { audioFileName "C3669719-9F0A-4EB5-A791-2C00486665ED-30305-000039A3FDA7DCD2" user "2A8761E4-C13A-470E-A759-91432D61B6AF-25982-0000352D853511AF" audioLanguage "Spanish" date 2012-09-22 01:17:04 UTC } ]

  Read the article

• Is it worth moving from Microsoft tech to Linux, NodeJS & other open source frameworks to save money for a start-up?

  - by dormisher

  I am currently getting involved in a startup, I am the only developer involved at the moment, and the other guys are leaving all the tech decisions up to me at the moment. For my day job I work at a software house that uses Microsoft tech on a day to day basis, we utilise .NET, SqlServer, Windows Server etc. However, I realise that as a startup we need to keep costs down, and after having a brief look at the cost of hosting for Windows I was shocked to see some of the prices for a dedicated server. The cheapest I found was £100 a month. Also if the business needs to scale in the future and we end up needing multiple servers, we could end up shelling out £10's of £000's a year in SQL Server / Windows Server licenses etc. I then had a quick look at the price of Linux hosting for a dedicated server and saw the price was waaaaaay lower than windows hosting. One place was offering a machine with 2 cores for less than £20 a month. This got me thinking maybe the way to go is open source on Linux. As I write a lot of Javascript at work (I'm working on a single page backbone app at the moment), I thought maybe NodeJS and a web framework like Express would be cool to use. I then thought that instead of using SQL why not use an open source NoSQL database like MongoDB, which has great support on NodeJS? My only concern is that some of the work the application is going to do is going to be dynamically building images and various other image related stuff, i.e. stuff that is quite CPU heavy - so I'm thinking of maybe writing anything CPU heavy in C++ and consuming it as a module in Node. That's the background - but basically is Linux a good match for: Hosting a NodeJS/Express site? Compiling C++ node modules? Using a NoSQL DB like MongoDB? And is it a good idea to move to these unfamiliar technologies to save money?

  Read the article

• How do I uninstall GRUB?

  - by ændrük

  A hard drive that I use only for data storage still has GRUB from past Ubuntu installations. How can I remove GRUB from it without harming the rest of the drive's data? Background I occasionally move the data drive between computers with various boot order configurations, so I would like it to be non-bootable in order to avoid having to accommodate it in each computer's BIOS settings. When I power on a computer while only the data drive is attached, the following appears: error: no such device: fdf38dd4-9e9d-479d-b830-2a6989958503. grub rescue> I can confirm from old backups of /etc/fstab that this was the UUID of a root partition that I recently reformatted and which no longer exists. Here's the the data drive's partition table and raw master boot record. Please note that I'm not interested in workarounds that don't answer my primary question. I can think of several ways to work around this issue, but it bothers me on principle that I don't know how to directly resolve it. Every installation procedure should have a counterpart uninstallation procedure.

  Read the article

• Transitioning from Internal to Public Speaking

  - by TJB

  For whatever reason, I've always enjoyed giving presentations. As a developer, I've grown from giving the rare presentation when asked to frequently doing 'brown bag' talks and other presentations on new technology, projects etc. I'd like to expand as a presenter and start giving talks in public, outside of just my workplace, and I'm looking for tips on how to get there. At a high level, I'd love to know a good path to take & useful tips to help me grow from just giving internal talks to my group (10-20 people) to eventually be a presenter at medium-large sized conferences. Here are some specific questions, but I will take any advice you can offer: 1. How much experience do I need to speak at user groups etc? I've been in industry for around 5 years, which pales in comparison to most speakers that I normally see. 2. What is a good venue for my 1st public talk? 3. What surprises can I expect when transistioning from speaking to a small group of friends to presenting in public to strangers? I live in southern California and my background is mostly .net / web, so if you have any specific user group / venues those are also greatly appreciated.

  Read the article

• Learning curve webdevelopment

  - by refro

  At the moment our team has a huge challenge, we're being asked to deliver a new GUI for an embedded controller. De deadline is very tight and is set on april 2013. Our team is very diverse some people are on the level of functional programming (mostly C), others (including myself) also master object oriented programming (C++, C#). We build a prototype with android, although it has its quirks it is mostly just OO. For the future there is a wish to support multiple platforms (Windows, Android, iOS). In my opinion a HTML5 app with a native app shell is the way to go. When gathering more information on the frameworks to use etc it becomes obvious to me a paradigm shift is needed. None of us have a web background so we need to learn from the ground up. The shift from functional to oo took us about 6 months to become productive (and some of the early subsystems were rewritten because they were a total mess) . Can we expect the learning curve to be similar? Can this be pulled off with a webapp? (My feeling says it will already be hard to pull off as a native app which is at the edge of our comfort zone)

  Read the article

• How can I get SLI working with 295.40?

  - by Steve

  I've been doing a lot of googling these last few hours and I'm not having much luck. Perhaps I don't know exactly what I am looking for. I just recently installed Ubuntu 12.04LTS x86_64. Looks beautiful! I have two GTX470's in SLI, and I am finally migrating my desktop over given the hopeful gaming support as of late. My laptop has been enjoying multiple distros of Ubuntu for a couple years now. However, new problems come with unexplored territory, here. At first, I only had one working monitor of my two. Over on nvidia-xconfig I fixed that, but the only solution that actually worked was twinview. Just recently I read here that twinview is not compatible with SLI. Sweet. When I try to tell it, oh hey, use a separate XScreen, configure it the way I want it, click save to configuration file, enter my password, then a sudo restart lightdm, it's broken. One screen blacks or whites out (Couldn't tell you the specific conditions for each, I'm dubious at this point,) and I get this huge error dialogue box upon login. Something about incompatible resolutions if I remember right. Though I am sure I set the resolutions for each screen correctly. Anyway, when I try to enable SLI (sudo nvidia-xconfig --sli=On) despite the fact it hates twinview, unity breaks. The sidebar is there, but only one screen works, the mouse is trapped running along the left edge of it, and the background of the sidebar is a solid blue. Anyway, this ended up being entirely too verbose, I'm sorry, but could anyone part some wisdom please? It would be appreciated!

  Read the article

• What do I need to learn to decide on rename/recompile source package names because of company rebranding?

  - by Roberto Linares

  My company is currently at a rebranding process and the brand names have been used in the sources' package names but these names are only visible to developers who maintain this code so nobody from project management is really interested in changing them considering also that it would imply the recompiling of several old components. What factors do I need to consider when deciding on a change like that? I don't know if I should worry about legal issues or not and if so, how to address this with project management. More background details. I have all the sources and dependencies but since the company rebranding, other development areas have adopted some of the code that needs package name-changing so I cannot take the decision only by myself so I don't make everyone else's code to crash with my core components and I cannot change other areas' code without the permission of those areas' users so yes, my concern is more political than technical. I am going try to coordinate the involved it areas to make the change anyway, since it seems to be the best approach.   Unfortunatelly in my company there's no continuous integration build server so we build our code manually on demand and to get something to production I have to justify the change (even just the package name changing) to QA with an user requirement and some other bureaucratic documentation so that's why I was hesitating the change in first place.

  Read the article

• In what fields do programming and Business Sciences intersect? [on hold]

  - by Alainus

  One note of clarification: I'm getting a lot of comments saying that this question is too personal, too relative, subjective, and that career-path questions get quickly deleted. This is not a question about me or my career. This question is just what the title says: What fields exist that converge programming and business. Now the question: I read this answer regarding off-topic questions, and I was afraid this might be, so I'll try to keep it general and helpful for others. Also, this one has a similar background but formulates a different question from it. I have a Business Administration degree, but I've programmed since I can remember, and it's been my only job for years. However, my problem is the same that the majority of "amateuressional" programmers have: - Incomplete knowledge of the fundamentals. - Anxiety to keep up. - Feeling of not making anything useful of "the other degree". - Afraid of finally becoming a jack of all trades (master of none). Which further studies (specific degrees or fields) exist that allow a person with a BS degree converge into a programming career, without having to sacrifice coding, allowing to further expand the knowledge of C.S. fundamentals, and also without completely sacrificing the first?

  Read the article

• SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 2

  As stated already yesterday, today I continued with the available course material on Pluralsight. For sure interesting topics in the second part of the series but not the field of operation I'm going to work in later. During the course you get a lot of information about how to create and deploy SharePoint Solutions and hosted SharePoint Apps. Today's resource(s) Apart from some blog articles I watched in the following course today: SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 2 - Developing SharePoint Solutions and Apps Not thrilling but still two solid hours to go. Takeaway One of the coolest aspects I figured out today is that SharePoint development can be done easily in JavaScript and C# - just as you like or prefer. It's actually pretty cool to see that you could integrate external JS libraries like datajs, knockout,js and so forth in order to implement your solution. And that you should be very familiar with Microsoft PowerShell. Not only to simplify some repetitive work but also to do be able to get things going in SharePoint. Having a decent background knowledge in Linux, I find this pretty amusing and remember the initial baby steps when PowerShell was introduced some years back (Note: German language). The outcry as well as the hype was too funny. Honestly, I have kind of mixed feelings about today's progress. Surely, there was interesting information about developing extensions directly for and in SharePoint... Hm, I'll leave that one for now and probably it might be helpful someday.

  Read the article

• Joining a company to get experience vs. going alone [closed]

  - by daniels

  My goal is to build a successful web startup, say the next Digg or Twitter, and I am in doubt regarding what is the best route to follow as a programmer. I see basically two options: Get an internship/job with an established online company, so that I could get a mentor and learn from more experienced programmers, learn their processes, methodology and so on. I could do this for 1-2 years, and then quit to start working on my own stuff. Start working on my own projects right away, starting with small ones and moving up gradually. This would give me more control on the things I would be working with, but I would lack contact with more experienced people, so I would need to figure basic things on my own. Doing both is not an option in my opinion, cause I would need to put a lot of effort/time into each if I was to learn/improve as a programmer. So is one route definitely better than the other? Is there a third one I am not considering? Background: I already work by myself developing content-based websites and doing SEO, and I am decent at it so money is not a problem. Last year I started learning to program, first by myself and now I enrolled in a CS degree on a good university.

  Read the article

• Information about rendering, batches, the graphical card, performance etc. + XNA?

  - by Aidiakapi

  I know the title is a bit vague but it's hard to describe what I'm really looking for, but here goes. When it comes to CPU rendering, performance is mostly easy to estimate and straightforward, but when it comes to the GPU due to my lack of technical background information, I'm clueless. I'm using XNA so it'd be nice if theory could be related to that. So what I actually wanna know is, what happens when and where (CPU/GPU) when you do specific draw actions? What is a batch? What influence do effects, projections etc have? Is data persisted on the graphics card or is it transferred over every step? When there's talk about bandwidth, are you talking about a graphics card internal bandwidth, or the pipeline from CPU to GPU? Note: I'm not actually looking for information on how the drawing process happens, that's the GPU's business, I'm interested on all the overhead that precedes that. I'd like to understand what's going on when I do action X, to adapt my architectures and practices to that. Any articles (possibly with code examples), information, links, tutorials that give more insight in how to write better games are very much appreciated. Thanks :)

  Read the article

• Vector-based fonts vs. bitmap fonts in (2d) games?

  - by jmp97

  I know that many games are using bitmap fonts. Which are the advantages for vector-based font rendering / manipulation when compared to bitmap fonts and in which scenarios would they matter the most? Prefer a focus on 2d games when answering this question. If relevant, please include examples for games using either approach. Some factors you might consider: amount of text used in the game scaling of text overlaying glyphs and anti-aliasing general rendering quality font colors and styling user interface requirements localisation / unicode text wrapping and formatting cross-platform deployment 2d vs 3d Background: I am developing a simple falling blocks game in 2d, targeted for pc. I would like to add text labels for level, score, and menu buttons. I am using SFML which uses FreeType internally, so vector-based features are easily available for my project. In my view, font sizes in simple games often don't vary, and bitmap fonts should be easier for cross-platform concerns (font-formats and font rendering quality). But I am unsure if I am missing some important points here, especially since I want to polish the looks of the final game.

  Read the article

• Shutting down Ubuntu 11.10 with power button without x11-session

  - by RJdaMoD

  when pressing the power-button inside a (gnome-)session, ubuntu asks me what to do and shuts down after 60 seconds anyway. No problem so far. But if i'm not logged in in a gnome-session (for example in the login screen), or just change to a tty, then the power-button won't work. But i remember that i worked in 11.04. So what's changed and how to restore? Background: I use my machine as a print server. If im not home and my wife wants to print sth., she used to switch on my machine, print via her laptop, and then just shut it down by power-button. Beginning of march i was on a business tour, and she called me that she could not shutdown my machine anymore. I shut it down by ssh, but this seems not the favorable way to me. I already had a look in /etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh and think that the line if pidof x $PMS > /dev/null; then exit is the cause for this since it aborts the script when no gui-power-manager is found. Is that right? But that does not explain with the power-button does not work when switching from the x11-session to a tty, although this would not be critical to me. Thanks in advance Greetings RJ

  Read the article

• Silverlight 4 &ndash; Coded UI Framework Video Tutorial

  - by mbcrump

  With the release of Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2, Microsoft included the Coded UI Test framework. With this release it is possible to create automated test with just a few mouse clicks. This is a very powerful feature that all Silverlight developers need to learn. Instead of my normal blog post, I have created a video tutorial that walks you through it starting from “File” –> New Project. I hope you enjoy and please leave feedback. Video Tutorial (short 9 minute video): Slides from the demo (only 3): Silverlight 4 – Coded UI Testing Code for the MainPage.xaml that was used in the Demo. For the sake of time, I did not go into the AutomationProperties.Name that I used for the TextBox or Button. I added that for each element . <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White" Height="100" Width="350"> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition/> <ColumnDefinition/> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition/> <RowDefinition/> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <TextBlock Padding="15" Grid.Column="0" TextAlignment="Right">Name</TextBlock> <TextBox AutomationProperties.Name="txtAP" Grid.Column="1" Height="25" TextAlignment="Right" Name="txtName" /> <Button AutomationProperties.Name="btnAP" Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1" Content="Click for Name" x:Name="btnMessage" Click="btnMessage_Click" /> </Grid>  Subscribe to my feed

  Read the article

• Can't login to Unity 3d after enabling Xinerama for a short moment

  - by Amir Adar

  Today I connected a second monitor to my computer. I set it up using nVidia's control panel, and all was working quite well, so I figured it won't be a problem to try Xinerama, just to see the difference between that and twinview. After enabling Xinerama and restarting the X session, I saw that I was logged into a Unity 2d session. I thought it was a problem with Xinerama, so I switched back to twinview, but it still logged me into Unity 2d. I tried disconnecting the second monitor, no luck: still Unity 2d. I tried changing GPU drivers and installing drivers from a separate ppa, and still I was logged into Unity 2d. Up until this point, I didn't have any problem logging into Unity 3d. It only happened after I tried using Xinerama. I should note that I was doing all this while updates were going on in the background, so it could be something related to that, though I can't imagine what (I tried booting with another kernel, but no luck). So what exactly happened? Did changing the mode to Xinerama triggered some other changes that I'm not aware of? Did these updates cause a certain malfunction in the driver? Is it something else?

  Read the article

• Centring an HTML element relative to its parent when its width is greater than its parent. [closed]

  - by casr

  I mocked up my intended outcome. So the blue element is the main content of the website and the yellow element represents something like a diagram or an image that has a greater width than the blue element. Ideally, I would like a purely CSS solution that is able to deal with various sizes of images. I have tried various things but have failed so far. I hope you can help! Here’s some example markup to set you on your way. <!DOCTYPE HTML> <html> <head> <title>Example</title> <style> #el1 { display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 30em; background-color: #8cabde } #el2 { /* works when the width is less than the parent */ display: block; margin: 0 auto; } </style> </head> <body> <article id=el1> <p>Some content above.</p> <img id=el2 src=http://i.imgur.com/JFfGG.gif title=spaceball width=600 height=400> <p>Some content below.</p> </article> </body> </html>

  Read the article

• What are some ways to separate game logic from animations and the draw loop?

  - by TMV

  I have only previously made flash games, using MovieClips and such to separate out my animations from my game logic. Now I am getting into trying my hand at making a game for Android, but the game programming theory around separating these things still confuses me. I come from a background of developing non game web applications so I am versed in more MVC like patterns and am stuck in that mindset as I approach game programming. I want to do things like abstract my game by having, for example, a game board class that contains the data for a grid of tiles with instances of a tile class that each contain properties. I can give my draw loop access to this and have it draw the game board based on the properties of each tile on the game board, but I don't understand where exactly animation should go. As far as I can tell, animation sort of sits between the abstracted game logic (model) and the draw loop (view). With my MVC mindset, it's frustrating trying to decide where animation is actually supposed to go. It would have quite a bit of data associated with it like a model, but seemingly needs to be very closely coupled with the draw loop in order to have things like frame independent animation. How can I break out of this mindset and start thinking about patterns that make more sense for games?

  Read the article

• For an ORM supporting data validation, should constraints be enforced in the database as well?

  - by Ramnique Singh

  I have always applied constraints at the database level in addition to my (ActiveRecord) models. But I've been wondering if this is really required? A little background I recently had to unit test a basic automated timestamp generation method for a model. Normally, the test would create an instance of the model and save it without validation. But there are other required fields that aren't nullable at the in the table definition, meaning I cant save the instance even if I skip the ActiveRecord validation. So I'm thinking if I should remove such constraints from the db itself, and let the ORM handle them? Possible advantages if I skip constraints in db, imo - Can modify a validation rule in the model, without having to migrate the database. Can skip validation in testing. Possible disadvantage? If its possible that ORM validation fails or is bypassed, howsoever, the database does not check for constraints. What do you think? EDIT In this case, I'm using the Yii Framework, which generates the model from the database, hence database rules are generated also (though I could always write them post-generation myself too).

  Read the article

• How do you apply to a company way out of your league?

  - by emcb

  First, my background: I'm in the market for a new job I have ~2 years experience under my belt Nothing on my resume would JUMP out at you Thus far in my career I've been able to become productive quickly and have been continually praised by managers and coworkers for my abilities to learn and produce. I don't mean to be bragging here, but I want to get across that (at least in my mind) I could be categorized as "very promising young developer" I've been job hunting for a little while now and like most job seekers I've found a handful of companies that are basically "dream" jobs (think Fog Creek or 37Signals). If I were to apply to a company like that in the normal recruitment channels, my resume would probably not make it past the first set of filters. Now, I accept that I'm a longshot for a job at the hottest companies out there, but in my job search I've had a little success in applying for positions I'm not qualified for simply by doing something a little different: sending an email outlining how I don't meet the qualifications but stating why I would do well in the job anyways. In other cases, I've outright asked for a small project/problem that would be representative of the work to prove I can do the job, since I didn't have the specific skills on my resume yet. What I'm wondering is: If I'm not qualified on paper for a particular job, what creative/unique/impressive methods have you thought of or seen work to at least get an interview? For the sake of argument, assume I really am a "very promising young developer". I would love to hear from people who are responsible for hiring - I'd like to hear examples of techniques that got someone noticed when they otherwise wouldn't have. Clarification: I know that I need to continue building my resume to continue advancing. But I'm in the job search NOW, so I'm looking for other approaches

  Read the article

• What is the breakdown of jobs in game development?

  - by Destry Ullrich

  There's a project I'm trying to start for Indie Game Development; specifically, it's going to be a social networking website that lets developers meet through (It's a secret). One of the key components is showing what skills members have. Question: I need to know what MAJOR game development roles are not represented in the following list, keeping in mind that many specialist roles are being condensed into more broad, generalist roles: Art Animator (Characters, creatures, props, etc.) Concept Artist (2D scenes, environments, props, silhouettes, etc.) Technical Artist (UI artists, typefaces, graphic designers, etc.) 3D Artist (Modeling, rigging, texture, lighting, etc.) Audio Composer (Scores, music, etc.) Sound Engineer (SFX, mood setting, audio implementation, etc.) Voice (Dialog, acting, etc.) Design Creative Director (Initial direction, team management, communications, etc.) Gameplay Designer (Systems, mechanics, control mapping, etc.) World Designer (Level design, aesthetics, game progression, events, etc.) Writer (Story, mythos, dialog, flavor text, etc.) Programming Engine Programming (Engine creation, scripting, physics, etc.) Graphics Engineer (Sprites, lighting, GUI, etc.) Network Engineer (LAN, multiplayer, server support, etc.) Technical Director (I don't know what a technical director would even do.) Post Script: I have an art background, so i'm not familiar with what the others behind game creation actually do. What's missing from this list, and if you feel some things should be changed around how so?

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367  | Next Page >