|
I'm late to the party but the following is an excellent article covering all of the problems with the various timing methods. http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/FAQS/timing.html xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Jul 11, 2008 |
# ¿ Jul 11, 2008 10:35 |
|
|
# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 13:22 |
|
I used XAudio in XNA when it first came out and it was a horrible horrible experience. Unless XAudio2 is completely different or the C++ API is vastly superior to the XNA one then I will not touch it with a ten foot poll. I deal with FMOD mostly these days. Can't really beat its cross platform capabilities. xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Jul 24, 2009 |
# ¿ Jul 24, 2009 02:34 |
|
UberJumper posted:For any windows based games, that use encryption. What is the defacto standard for C++ encryption? Please tell me nobody used CryptoAPI. libtomcrypt
|
# ¿ Oct 9, 2009 08:00 |
|
PnP Bios posted:The only problem I can see is that it's creating a lot of objects so the garbage collector is going to be working overtime. Garbage collection issues and cache misses are completely different set of performance issues. Just because someone is using C# doesn't mean they aren't concerned with performance. Especially where the garbage collector is concerned. I would not use a library, especially one designed to be used in a tight drawing loop, that is willy nilly creating tons of garbage. I would find a way to either not create the garbage in the first place, or find a way to recycle it so the gc doesn't kick in.
|
# ¿ May 25, 2011 01:48 |
|
poemdexter posted:Money. It's GPL code, but may give you some ideas. https://github.com/nardo/tnl2 This is basically a rewrite of the first open source version which was called OpenTNL, which has a long standing history in the Starsiege/Tribes series of games. And is to this day, in my opinion, one of the most capable game networking systems in existence. I think the only company competing in this area is Valve with all of the stuff they've done for Counterstrike, etc. Every one else seems to have gone rather lazy in the networking area, with id games and Unreal games being the worst offenders of poor networking. Old Paper about TNL before it was TNL: http://www.pingz.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/tribes_networking_model.pdf Valve has some information about their stuff: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Category:Networking http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_Networking http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensating_Methods_in_Client/Server_In-game_Protocol_Design_and_Optimization xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 20:34 on May 27, 2011 |
# ¿ May 27, 2011 20:26 |
|
PDP-1 posted:Doubleposting with a question of my own - http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Games-Second-Millington/dp/0123747317/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1307128154&sr=8-9
|
# ¿ Jun 3, 2011 20:09 |
|
RoboCicero posted:What's the best way to develop for an iPhone on a windows machine? I know that eventually I need a Mac to publish it to the device, but I'd like to put that step off until I actually have to deal with it. You can setup VMware with OSX and run simulator on that. Kind of slow though unless you have a decent computer. I did this for awhile before I caved and got a macmini. Now I just wish synergy wasn't a piece of poo poo.
|
# ¿ Apr 2, 2012 17:37 |
|
Hughlander posted:Just to derail some more, problems I've had with synergy: #1 - Yea this isn't fixed. I think it requires a signed executable. #2 - Not fixed. #3 - Not fixed. On top of your complaints I also have this issue where modifier keys get stuck, eg it will act like ctrl is held down when it isn't. Very aggravating. That sharemouse program prolecat suggested earlier looks promising. But it's $50/computer. So really its $100+ because you wouldn't be using the software in the first place if you had just one computer. xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Apr 4, 2012 |
# ¿ Apr 4, 2012 02:35 |
|
SupSuper posted:Ok, I'll clarify some things. Software development isn't new to me. I'm a Comp Sci masters student, I've been through all the theory and OO and pattern stuff, and if you ask me about Singletons I'll punch you in the face. It's making the leap from that to game development that gets to me. Because while most things apply to both, there's still gaps that I hit and I'm left stumped with nothing but Google to help me out. Because in games you often want to do most things yourself, so you gotta worry about rendering, event handling, state management, resource loading, etc. Your typical application will just let Windows Forms or whatever do most of the work and only worry about the specific business logic. I don't get the CPU thing. A game, by it's very nature, is a tight loop. It's supposed to use 100% CPU.
|
# ¿ Apr 5, 2012 03:50 |
|
Every professional game engine I've worked with has utilized 100% CPU. There were only very rare cases where you were intentionally sleeping the main thread. xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Apr 5, 2012 |
# ¿ Apr 5, 2012 04:29 |
|
For clarification. If the game isn't threaded or whatever, then obviously you would only be utilizing that one core. So on a dual core, for example this would show up as 50% CPU usage. And then, if you are using multiple cores, then how effectively you are distributing work load across them will determine whatever spikes and slumps in CPU percent utilized. I guess I just don't see a compelling reason to purposely sleep the main thread, especially when sleep, on windows in particular, is notoriously inaccurate and is not guaranteed to sleep for the length requested -- usually it takes longer. So when you have very specific Hz budgets for rendering, physics, etc, relying on sleep is a very bad idea.
|
# ¿ Apr 5, 2012 04:42 |
|
Quake, doom, etc. cap simulation at 60hz. Theyre still running the main loop. Just because you're capping at whatever Hz doesn't mean you stop looping, ever. And drat straight they're trying to render as fast as possible.
|
# ¿ Apr 5, 2012 04:54 |
|
Unormal posted:It is pretty typical, even for games that are balls-out when running, to watch window state and yield a bunch of CPU when minimized. Yes, exactly. Nothing wrong with that, and pretty common.
|
# ¿ Apr 5, 2012 05:59 |
|
Hughlander posted:Are there any papers or GDC talks on security in a Freemium game? I'm starting to think about ways of authenticating/validating unlocks/purchases but would like to read/watch anything that's already public... Its highly platform specific question too =) For iOS as an example, a common mistake is to store unlocks/puchases/etc in UserDefaults. This is bad, because its essentially a plain text file. Store that stuff in the keychain!
|
# ¿ Apr 6, 2012 00:15 |
|
crazylakerfan posted:Special sidenote: Why doesn't UDK have the built feature to make a look at matrix? Their matrix implementation is lovely as hell, and once I got past that part the ordering of the various columns didn't match anything I had ever used. Eventually got it, but that should have been a 15 minute thing, not a 2 hour ordeal. I'm not familiar with udk, so I don't know exactly. But don't they do all of their rotations via quaternions. Which would explain why their matrix functionality lacks in that area.
|
# ¿ Apr 22, 2012 16:24 |
|
If you are interested in procedural stuff you guys really need to follow this blog: http://procworld.blogspot.com This guy does some amazing poo poo. He uses l-systems a lot and wrote an editor around it. Anyway, he had a blog entry about creating procedural countries and provinces and cities, etc: http://procworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/political-landscape.html http://procworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/city-lots.html
|
# ¿ Apr 27, 2012 00:20 |
|
You could try squirrel, lua, or if you don't care about licensing issues on embedded systems, you could embed Mono C#. Mono is actually very simple to embed and get going. Last time I looked at embedding Javascript I wanted to vomit.
|
# ¿ May 27, 2012 00:33 |
|
OneEightHundred posted:If you want to go balls-out and ignore feedback and trust that your vision will find success, then great, but I think the skill that people need to learn more is the opposite: To absorb criticism, recognize the faults in what they've made, and use that to make it better. You have to be careful with this though. You don't want to just blindly accept criticism at face value. Often times what people complain about and what is actually the problem are two different things. You have to recognize what is the true core of an issue and what is just a symptom.
|
# ¿ May 30, 2012 19:09 |
|
TJChap2840 posted:Along that topic, what are some good game development blogs and/or websites? http://gafferongames.com/ http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/ http://msinilo.pl/blog/ http://flohofwoe.blogspot.com/ http://procworld.blogspot.com/ <- favorite to watch Those are some of the ones I know of. Most are not really kept up to date or anything. Seems most people have taken to twitter. So I follow a bunch of people on there.
|
# ¿ Jun 6, 2012 00:27 |
|
How are they doing the C++ edit / compile without reload? I imagine you can't do that with the base engine, so it must only be supported with the game dll. So I guess it must go something like: 1. compile new game dll 2. when finished pause and save game state 3. unload old dll, load new dll 4. restore game state, unpause Except he was moving the entire time without any noticeable hiccup or anything. EDIT: Actually there was a noticeable hiccup when looking at it a second time. I imagine if you aren't running on a beastly machine its even more noticeable. xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Jun 8, 2012 |
# ¿ Jun 8, 2012 18:02 |
|
PDP-1 posted:Does anyone have experience handling mouse inputs using SlimDX, or DirectX's DirectInput? DirectInput is kind of crap. I wouldn't use DirectInput for keyboard/mouse inputs honestly. Just use the standard Win32 API's (specifically RawInput) for that and XInput for joysticks/controllers. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms632585(v=vs.85).aspx http://bobobobo.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/rawinput/ And I realize not everyone will agree with the above opinion and is rather unhelpful, so with that in mind... With SharpDX / SlimDX they map pretty closely to the C/C++ version of DirectX so you should be able to take any tutorial on the subject written in C/C++ and map it fairly well to SharpDX / SlimDX. Just ignore the language specific stuff and pay attention to the API calls - because those won't be different. Also DirectInput is old and hasn't been updated in a long while now, so don't worry about trying to find 'current' tutorials. Pretty much any surviving tutorial on the subject should be relevant. http://www.directxtutorial.com/tutorial9/e-directinput/dx9E.aspx http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/directinput xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Jun 24, 2012 |
# ¿ Jun 24, 2012 03:49 |
|
xzzy posted:WoW eventually eliminated percentage effects because it got so hard to balance. Their biggest issue was with people not discarding old gear because the percentage values scaled so dramatically when the level cap increased. But they also stated that percentage interactions were confusing players and they wanted to make it easier to understand. Well, maybe that's true for WoW but you don't have to look very far to see that they do something completely different for Diablo 3 which has tons of examples of percentage based bonuses. I think you should do what makes sense for your game.
|
# ¿ Jun 28, 2012 17:20 |
|
Mata posted:Should I convert my XNA game to Silverlight+XNA? Yes Silverlight adds extra dependencies. First off its a web player, not just a set of API's, so people have to install it. You would be better off finding an XNA GUI Library, which I'm sure there are some out there.
|
# ¿ Jun 30, 2012 16:24 |
|
This is my opinion, of course, but I think if you are getting into programming, and games programming specifically, then C# is one of the better languages to start off from. If you are concerned about cross-platform, with Mono, it pretty much runs on every desktop platform and some mobile ones. I believe OSX and some *nix distros have the Mono framework installed by default now. Pickup Visual Studio Express or MonoDevelop. There are a bunch of game related libraries, whole engines, etc for C#. Some keywords for you to look into: xna monogame axiom 3d monotouch slimdx sharpdx opentk
|
# ¿ Jun 30, 2012 22:08 |
|
mmm11105 posted:What would you guys recommend for representing a Final Fantasy Tactics (specifically the GBA version in looks) style isometric map (pretty much looks like a square map rotated ~45 degrees)? This is C#/XNA based but it was a quick way for me to whip something up for you, as an example. code:
xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Jul 1, 2012 |
# ¿ Jul 1, 2012 21:52 |
|
Just a wild shot in the dark, but, main is missing [STAThread]. This can cause problems if using Windows.Form... But I'm not familiar enough with libtcod to say if that is the case here. Also another thing it could be is you may not have the appropriate visual studio c++ runtime version installed. Make sure you have the same c++ runtime the library was compiled with. xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Jul 5, 2012 |
# ¿ Jul 5, 2012 04:01 |
|
Deki posted:I've been learning a shitload while working on my game, which is great, but on the same token, I now know that a lot of code that I wrote earlier in the project works really should have be handled differently, as this was my first major game project in c++ and Allegro 5. I want to go back and rewrite a lot of it, like how I parse in game data/map information, but at the same time, I don't want to spend a lot of time working on something that later on, I'll have to redo anyway when I discover an even better way of doing it. Keep moving. There is always something that can be done better. If you get stuck on trying to 'do it right' you will never get anything done.
|
# ¿ Jul 9, 2012 20:42 |
|
So, I tried to watch indie game the movie but it only has two audio channels...? This is unwatchable for me because the sound is so quiet on my speaker setup. Is there a different version somewhere?
|
# ¿ Jul 10, 2012 06:50 |
|
For games dev you can do 99% of the project in C/C++ on both iOS and Android. And with the WinRT stuff on the new Microsoft devices they accept C/C++ as well now too albeit using DirectX though. The rest is just platform specific boiler plate which quite frankly requires very little code to get working, and once it is, very reuseble across projects. With WinRT, the hard part is going to be porting / abstracting your graphics layer to work with both OpenGL (for iOS and Android) and DirectX (WinRT). This can be difficult but it isn't impossible.
|
# ¿ Jul 15, 2012 07:40 |
|
You don't want to use Dx10 anyway. If you are gonna make the leap past Dx9 go to Dx11.
|
# ¿ Jul 19, 2012 15:12 |
|
When debugging UTF8 (which is multibyte) in Visual Studio you can put ",s8" in the watch window and it will display correctly.
|
# ¿ Jul 22, 2012 05:55 |
|
With clang, verbose template errors are non-existent. God I love clang...
|
# ¿ Aug 13, 2012 16:05 |
|
Suspicious Dish posted:Torque 2D or Torque 3D? They're entirely different beasts. I worked at GarageGames for a better part of a decade so I feel I'm uniquely qualified to answer any questions about Torque or GarageGames. I wouldn't use Torque these days. I don't think I could even recommend it back when I was working at GarageGames either. Don't get me wrong. Torque wasn't necessarily a bad engine. it is just an entirely different beast to what Unity and UDK provide. Torque is not user friendly, and it isn't really ashamed of that fact either. It was an engine born from a number of professionally produced AAA games made by Dynamix and Sierra Online in the early 90's to early 00's, from Earthsiege to Starsiege and Tribes, and even a Trophy Bass game or two. GarageGames spent years adding to it, ripping parts out, bringing parts up to date, and so on. Part of the problem was GarageGames grew too fast and Torque development often lacked direction, had poor quality assurance and poor developer discipline. Another part of it was that GarageGames was bought out, and the people that took over or oversaw certain aspects of the company were loving clueless. Certain parts of Torque are amazing. For instance, the networking systems are still, in my opinion, the best in the industry. It has been co-opted by a number of professional studios by now, including Bungie for Halo for example. Other parts suffer from developers making changes when they didn't fully understand what they were doing and how it effected other parts of the code base. And later version of Torque often had newer systems that were over engineered and under performing. Everyone either left GarageGames or were eventually laid off by the parent company. Some people managed to get the GarageGames brand back, and license to the engine. These people are the GarageGames that stands today. But no one who had any major role in the development of Torque works there now. The sad thing about all of this is the parent company had to write GarageGames off at a loss, and couldn't take profits from any of its products anymore if they wanted to get the tax incentives of recording that loss. So products like Marble Blast Ultra for Xbox Live Arcade were taken off the XBLA store and are gone forever.
|
# ¿ Aug 15, 2012 04:47 |
|
Suspicious Dish posted:Oh hey! If you worked on Marble Blast Gold at all, you are awesome. I still play through that game every so often. Well GarageGames was started as primarily a game engine technology provider first. That was the primary goal, at least at first. Eventually games such as Marble Blast and all it's varients and sequels were made in house, as were a number of other games throughout the years. Torque2D was made somewhere in the middle of all of that and it did really well. At some point shortly after this we were approached by Microsoft about developing a game engine for this new technology platform they were working on using C# that was to eventually become the first version of XNA. It was around this point where we started to heavily outsource development of various parts of Torque. Shortly after this period we were bought and the whole InstantAction thing started which I would rather forget about entirely.
|
# ¿ Aug 15, 2012 05:07 |
|
The Gripper posted:Does Microsoft have any plans to update XNA for VS2012/Windows 8, or is XNA pretty much dead in the water until they release a new console? Their site is incomprehensible and almost impossible to navigate, and they shoehorned XNA into the Windows Phone Kit years ago so it's feeling like they just want it to disappear as soon as possible. XNA is dead. Microsoft doesn't have anyone working on it anymore. All the team members that were on it have been moved onto other projects, mostly related to Win8, WinRT, C++ CX and the new API's therein. My understanding is that there are C++ / C++ CX libraries written that mimick alot of XNA features but these are not really official libraries per say, just hobby projects of former XNA dev members. Microsoft probably will never directly come out and say XNA is dead. I don't think you will ever see XNA again, even after they release a new console, etc. xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Oct 22, 2012 |
# ¿ Oct 22, 2012 16:29 |
|
Sagacity posted:What's a good base library to start out with? I'd ideally like my code to be cross-platform (Windows/Mac mostly) and potentially be portable to iOS/Android, so that would mean having some kind of abstraction layer for OpenGL / OpenGL ES. I don't require state-of-the-art graphics, but I'd like to be able to write at least a bit of shader code. My current bet is SDL2, which is not officially out yet, but I was wondering if there any enticing alternatives. SFML is apparently the hot new thing these days.
|
# ¿ Oct 22, 2012 16:40 |
|
There is some kind of XNA like thing being created on top of SharpDX. I think it's called Anx. Might want to look at that.
|
# ¿ Oct 22, 2012 17:19 |
|
To be fair, rust is a pretty cool language. I think its chances are better than GO at becoming a good language that people use. Though those chances are still pretty drat slim.
|
# ¿ Oct 22, 2012 21:30 |
|
A lot of people I know in various circles have soured on Unity after their initial honeymoon phase with it. To the point where they don't ever want to work on a Unity project again. My impression of it, based on just hobby experiments, is that it's a great engine if you are trying to learn or want to quickly prototype - but plan on moving to something else later. It's better than Torque ever was though you got a lot more out of Torque if you actually know what you are doing and have the time to do it. xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Oct 24, 2012 |
# ¿ Oct 24, 2012 03:25 |
|
|
# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 13:22 |
|
Not really gamedev related but just got back from Wreck-It Ralph and it was really good. Can't beleive they got video game characters from real games in it. Didn't expect that.
|
# ¿ Nov 3, 2012 03:02 |