Game Development

Lasse

3:04 PM

not sure if NSFW: i.imgur.com/OTKUNKz.jpg

Almo

A licky boom boom down

Jon

informer.com

SpartanDonut

Holy shit. Web 3.0 is upon us?!?!

Joe

im on 3.1 already

Lasse

3.11 here

Icy Defiance

3:11 PM

computers were way too ugly back then. how did people even use them?

Lasse

I had a PC with windows 2.0, that was one ugly piece of crap

Jon

i had a pc with no OS

you had to boot up with diskettes that ran programs

i guess the OS was just hidden

Almo

Lasse

I started with vic-20

SpartanDonut

8.1 bitches

Lasse

3:13 PM

no idea what the os was in that

Almo

that's System 7, from around 1996

Vic-20 didn't have what you would call an OS today

Icy Defiance

I don't remember the first computer I used... I just remember it had no start menu and there was a close button on the desktop that would shut down the computer.

Jon

Almo

the disk drive had its own processor in it as well

Icy Defiance

but now I can't find any screenshots of a close button on the desktop for any windows version

SpartanDonut

3:15 PM

Speaking of things with its own processor in it

The mother in law wants to do away with satelite TV... debating between a blue ray player with apps or simply something like a Roku. I'm leaning towards a dedicated device like a Roku but I'm open to suggestions

Almo

Roku is a good idea

Icy Defiance

I've used 2 blue-ray players with apps now and they're both horrible

way too slow to do anything the apps attempt to do

well, pandora works fine, but that's the only one

haven't used a Roku though, so I can't say anything there

snake5

basic bytes

Almo

My mom and my wife's mom both have roku

my mom uses it a lot

not sure about hers

snake5

I wonder what that means

Almo

3:19 PM

their tech support is really helpful

Joe

@SpartanDonut ooof thats hideous

SpartanDonut

@IcyDefiance that was my gut feeling based on what I've heard about smart TVs

@Joe you're just jealous

Almo

people buy tvs mainly on price, it seems. so they get really shitty computer hardware.

Joe

lol i just messing i would probably love the updates to win8

but ive never seen em

Icy Defiance

apparently Win9 will be going back to the old start menu and adding live tiles to that, and metro apps will run in windows instead of full-screen

Joe

3:22 PM

i own a roku and a chrome cast both good for different things

pretty much just use roku to put netflix on my tv

Icy Defiance

the windowed metro things were supposed to be in last update to 8.1, I thought, but they didn't make it or something.

snake5

why not 8.2

like "service pack 2" before

just the name change

Icy Defiance

I don't think there will be an 8.2

they're pushing 9 out a bit faster than normal

snake5

pushers

well, whatever, as long as I can have my (nearly-)free upgrade copy

can I?

Icy Defiance

no idea

there's a good chance anyway

SpartanDonut

3:24 PM

@IcyDefiance They made it. Probably just not as you expect... as in the task bar still gets covered up

Move your mouse to where the title bar would be and it shows up

They also appear as open apps in the task bar

Icy Defiance

yeah they're still full-screen

I'm talking this: stardock.com/products/modernmix/features.asp

but part of the OS

SpartanDonut

Maybe one day

Joe

anyone aware of the existance of an active stack chatroom such as this, on the subject of art / illustration?

Icy Defiance

I'd start here: stackexchange.com/sites#lifearts

choose a site related to what you want, then find the chat rooms for it

SpartanDonut

Graphic Design Chat - chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1240/the-ink-spot

Joe

3:27 PM

the design chat is weak

2 people...

SpartanDonut

lol

I've got nothing then

Joe

just curious

i bet theres a community for them

stack just might not be it

Icy Defiance

try starbucks :D

SpartanDonut

Well certainly. But you asked for a stack chat :P

Joe

@IcyDefiance ooo coffee

@SpartanDonut i figured i would check the best place first

then move on to the other junk

oh man

we got problems

they are also GDSE - graphic design stack exchange

Icy Defiance

3:32 PM

whoa...digital ocean just impressed me. their servers died for a little while on the 21st, and this morning they sent me an email explaining in perfect detail exactly why they went down and what steps were taken to fix the problem so it doesn't happen again, and they gave me money back for the time the servers were down.

Almo

that's pretty cool

Noctrine

Good Guy Digital Ocean

Kevin van der Velden

@Joe BURN THE BLASPHEMERS!

Joe

@IcyDefiance i got the 2 cent credit for my DO droplets also

DO <3

Icy Defiance

I got exactly $0.01 back..but still XD

SpartanDonut

3:34 PM

I got $0.03 so take that

Icy Defiance

D:

SpartanDonut

I forget if I have a $5 or $10 droplet...

@Joe they seem nice enough over at GDSE lol

Noctrine

Very

Almo

that's here.

user92578

Does anyone have exprience of a wacom intuos/bamboo tablet?

Noctrine

3:36 PM

I do

It's weird now, the bamboo is the intuos and the intuos is the intuos pro

SpartanDonut

Get a Cintiq ;)

user92578

@Noctrine Do you like it?

Noctrine

I prefer the Cintiq, but you make due with what you have.

You will be measurably worse for awhile using the Intuos or the Bamboo - while you get accustomed to drawing without looking at what you are drawing directly.

Make sure you have enough ram or the latency will make any work impossible. Also go for the Intuos (Intuos Pro) if you can - it's got a bit more sensitivity (more than the cintiq) and the added tablet buttons can streamline your work quite a bit.

user92578

Should I separate particles from entities?

Lasse

yes

particle engine can be an entity, but single particle should not be

even particle emitter could be entity

Kevin van der Velden

3:42 PM

Agreed, particles need to be very lightweight and can only have the minimum of information

user92578

It's actually going to be nice to program something "normally" without using the component archtiecture

Kevin van der Velden

Entities also have information about what they don't have

user92578

Bullet = Particle or Entity?

Icy Defiance

I don't either the particle engine or emitter should be an entity

entities are nothing but a collection of components

emitter would be a component

engine would probably be a system

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

@IcyDefiance Must've been stateside. I didn't get any mail about it.

SpartanDonut

3:44 PM

Sounds logical

@William'MindWorX'Mariager mine said NY region specifically

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

My server is running in Amsterdam.

Lasse

@IcyDefiance right, that's what I ment without thinking too much

Icy Defiance

yeah my droplet is on NYC2, so that's probably the difference

Icy Defiance

3:55 PM

ooh, GOG supports linux now. just Ubuntu and Mint officially, but those are the most popular distros so it's good.

Jon

Mint seems to be better in terms of gui

ubuntu gui is getting shittier by the revision

Icy Defiance

yeah, I have ubuntu on my laptop, but I'm actually downloading mint right now to switch to that

snake5

@Jon support for various hardware seemed kind of lacking, though

Jon

its ubuntu with a different skin

so whatever hardware ubuntu supports, Mint supports

snake5

I can't recall the exact details but there was something that didn't let me fully enjoy it

it could've been hardware support for that skin

user92578

4:22 PM

for (auto& particle : m_Particles)
	{
		if (particle->Update(deltaTime))
		{
			// The particle has died, destroy it.
			delete particle;
		}
	}

user92578

Stupid question: does the particle get destroyed in m_Particles?

Icy Defiance

uhh, if my miniscule C++ knowledge serves me properly, it gets deleted, but the pointer still remains in the array/vector/whatever (and points to where the particle was? less sure about that)

I don't think delete will also set the pointer to null, but I don't remember very well

however, you probably don't need to delete it, and doing so will make the thing a lot slower

Lasse

I smell premature optimization

user92578

Really? Memory freeing is premature optimization?

Icy Defiance

no my advice is

I'd say it's more like a design mistake that will have to be redone later, but should work in spite of it

snake5

4:31 PM

@Tyyppi_77 it's not

Lasse

well yeah particle engines should in general be fast and optimized, because there will most likely be lots of them

snake5

it's a valid thing to do

except that, in this case, you're simply doing it wrong

you should not create and destroy individual particles

Lasse

but since @Tyyppi_77 is just learning here, I wouldn't advice to optimize it

snake5

you should manage arrays of particle instances instead

Icy Defiance

nooo don't even destroy individual particles

just overwrite them in the vertex buffer

Lasse

4:32 PM

@Tyyppi_77 if you want to optimize, learn about object pooling

but it's not necessary until your code is too slow

snake5

pooling is bullshit here

Lasse

why it would be mr @snake5

snake5

std::vector< particle > is the most basic thing to do

@Lasse because there don't need to be any allocations apart from the original array

Lasse

that's basically what object pooling is....

user4704

@Tyyppi_77 The pointer left in mParticles does not get removed.

snake5

4:34 PM

ideally, one should use SoA (structure of arrays) - handling each component separately

Icy Defiance

I don't know about object pooling, but all you need is one array. don't delete particles from it, just overwrite them. then each frame, just tell opengl to draw the active section of that array.

snake5

@Lasse pooling is delaying deletions in attempt to quick-allocate new items

Lasse

Particle[] particles = new Particle[500]; // this is basic object pool

Icy Defiance

btw, each particle should be a vertex, or 4 vertices, depending on whether you want to use a geometry shader

snake5

@Lasse it's an array, not a pool

user4704

4:35 PM

@snake5 It can be used as a pool.

user4704

Pooling is not just "delaying deletion," pooling is allocating up-front and reusing allocated instances instead of deleting and re-allocating individual instances.

Icy Defiance

through google, I have concluded lasse is right: gameprogrammingpatterns.com/object-pool.html

snake5

uhh, we're fighting over terms here

Icy Defiance

that's exactly what I found to be the best approach in my particle engine

Lasse

@snake5 no we're not, you are

user4704

4:36 PM

You can implement an object pool with arrays or any number of other things.

snake5

okay, fuck it, it's a pool

or can be used as

Icy Defiance

@snake5 yeah, you're the one who started this argument.

snake5

whatever

what I meant was the same thing

Lasse

@snake5 you've been doing that for the past two days, arguing with anytihng someone says here

user4704

@Lasse This is an excellent point, because as written above @Tyyppi_77 's code is incorrect and that should be fixed before worrying about speed.

2

Icy Defiance

4:37 PM

so yeah, @Tyyppi_77, this is what you want to look at (and it even uses particles as its example code): gameprogrammingpatterns.com/object-pool.html

snake5

not much point to fix something that's fundamentally broken

but yeah, I'd suggest NULL'ing all deleted pointers

easier to catch errors that way

as a bonus, it's easy to tell if the object is allocated or not

user4704

So, I have a metric fuckton of pork belly and chicken in my fridge, and probably not enough cooler space to transport it all to the wedding venue.

user4704

So I have frozen sandwich bags full of water to use as temporary ice packs.

user4704

This is almost certainly going to end in hilarity.

snake5

@Lasse uh, yeah, other times I feel justified, this time I fucked up, sorry

joapet99

4:44 PM

hey guys

Joe

@SpartanDonut you planning on participating in august for the Ludum Dare?

snake5

LD in august? whoa, that soon?

Joe

ludumdare.com/compo

snake5

I'd been in the previous one, thought it wasn't such a long time ago

Joe

big turnout?

snake5

4:48 PM

quite big, yeah

Ali.S

@JoshPetrie what's incorrect in that code?

user4704

It leaves a dangling pointer in the vector.

Ali.S

he could have handled that after the for loop...

Almo

wow cool gizmodo.com/5859173/…

user4704

But he doesn't, read the following discussion.

user4704

4:57 PM

Plus, once you leave the loop it's impossible to do.

user4704

You can't tell a good pointer from a bad pointer.

Almo

^

Kevin van der Velden

@JoshPetrie unless it's 0x0BADBEAF

Then it's bad

Lasse

beaf? not beef?

Aidan Mueller

@KevinvanderVelden Not to mention 0x8BADF00D.

snake5

5:04 PM

@Lasse exactly, that's why it's bad

Almo

0xDEADBEEF

snake5

beef is good

Almo

though I like BADBEAF better :)

Kevin van der Velden

@Almo beef should be dead

Almo

:)

Kevin van der Velden

5:04 PM

Otherwise it's not beef, it's just cow

Almo

mooo

Aidan Mueller

sudo apt-get moo

^ try that sometime.

Lasse

moo

pacman does not have that, but it's got secret config flag that makes it eat pills instead of showing the progress bar with = chars

it's equally amusing

John McDonald

Where are all of these late answers coming from!?! 5 answers in the first 7 days, and 5 more in the last 12 hours: gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/80319/…

Is there a page to see bounties that are expiring soon or something?

snake5

bounties are very easy to notice

just skimming through the list of unanswered questions makes it easy to find some

John McDonald

5:19 PM

yeah, but it's been easy to notice for a week

shrug

Icy Defiance

I'd guess timing. you asked the question in the evening, so most people were home from work and it probably fell off the front page before the smart people looked at it. when someone answered it 12 hours ago it got bumped onto the front page and it has stayed there the whole day while people are at work.

snake5

maybe just the right people came along

these things happen

John McDonald

yup

Joe

gamasutra.com/view/news/221786/…

very good talk so far

Almo

gamasutra.com/view/news/221739/…

more work from Riot on removing toxic players

reading the comments, people really are dumb.

same incorrect observations over and over

Jon

5:30 PM

People are dumb.

Haven't you seen Idiocracy? we are all doomed.

lol, no i don't want to approve an SEO comment on my blog, k thanks.

apparently he had a hard time finding my link, as it was in position 17 of google

Noctrine

So, I need suggestions for things to build - I'm between projects at work.

Jon

a game?

Noctrine

No, too much overlap with the things I do in my personal time. I'd hate for them to claim IP ownership over my outside work.

Jon

ok

have a game playing beethoven symphony #5

and you have to go around blowing up people's heads

its in the public domain so you can use it depending on the performer

SpartanDonut

5:45 PM

@Joe I don't plan on much but I could be swayed into participating

Joe

im certainly thinking about it

trying to get another learning failure under my belt

i figure i need about 10 - 20 of them before i start getting the hang of this

SpartanDonut

@Noctrine Software or something else?

@Joe learning from failure never hurts... except when it does :P

Joe

ive got thick skin & motivation... ill be fine

Noctrine

Software

I've been trying to find an excuse to learn Backbone.js - but none. Angular is pretty nice though. I want an excuse to use Swift, about to read all the Material Design stuff.

Joe

@SpartanDonut im more concerned about losing interest

SpartanDonut

5:58 PM

What about that comic CMS?

@Joe So you need a team mate you can't let down or someone to "compete against" to keep interest and finish? :P

Joe

i get the sense you have a good idea where my heads at lol

Noctrine

Comic CMS is personal, can't work on it at work.

I was considering using BB for the theme support in that, and reducing most of the actual output to a kind of API - but that would just make creating themes really difficult for people.

SpartanDonut

Oh I misread / misinterpreted your "too much overlap" comment. My bad

@Joe I could certainly be swayed if I don't have anything going on that weekend

Joe

i might not dedicate 72 hours

but maybe 16

going super lean next attempt

SpartanDonut

Ditto

I was way too ambitious this last time

Lasse

6:05 PM

droppin' music

►

SpartanDonut

@JohnMcDonald is THE guy who knows how to scope projects for jams.

John McDonald

Guess so

Joe

whats the trick

SpartanDonut

The last two you seem to have had a day or two for polish.

The trick is to not do what we do lol

John McDonald

Well... for my first game it was waaayy down to the wire

SpartanDonut

6:10 PM

That was the time one right?

John McDonald

But I was also learning how to use basically everything for it. No this was the bot programming one

SpartanDonut

I knew it was one of the two... I took a gamble

John McDonald

From then on, I always tried to get something working end-to-end pretty soon. Working on content or art always takes more time than you'd think

SpartanDonut

Yep... creating all the rooms in my game took SOOOOO long it was ridiculous

John McDonald

yeah, no doubt. If I recall correctly, I spent most of a day designing and testing the 12 "rooms" for [In and] Out of Time (the one with the skeletons)

Probably more than a day actually, when you include finding textures and getting a Tiled map to load in Crafty

SpartanDonut

6:15 PM

Yeah I was pretty silly for wanting to do the 30 some rooms I had... and even then they all basically revolve around like... 4 or 5 mechanics maybe

I would have liked more mechanics but time xD

ClassicThunder

Yeah mine was super down to the wire. Though I'm proud I got everything I wanted to done even if it lacked some really basic features.

Like being able to restart lol

SpartanDonut

lol

John McDonald

Ahhh, who needs to restart?

SpartanDonut

COUGH*gamepadsupport*COUGH

John McDonald

:p

>.>

ClassicThunder

6:17 PM

Restart instructions: Alt-F4 and double click icon

John McDonald

:)

ClassicThunder

@SpartanDonut I actually added that and have it working with my xbone controller :)

John McDonald

Nice

ClassicThunder

I'll post to the community project thread soon

SpartanDonut

Woot

ClassicThunder

6:26 PM

Its actually a lot harder with a gamepad though. I might have to tweak things for that.

SpartanDonut

interesting

ClassicThunder

Since it always shoots at the mouse you can use it to lead distant targets very accurately. With the stick its much harder to shoot things far away.

SpartanDonut

6:40 PM

Sounds like cheating to me ;)

Jon

my next game

SpartanDonut

It can't possibly fail.

Jon

that's the entire design document

ClassicThunder

@SpartanDonut lol it was balanced around that cheating. It's almost impossible without it.

SpartanDonut

Fair point

Joe

7:04 PM

this -> vlambeer.com/toolkit

MLM

@Joe Thanks for the link to that talk earlier

Joe

no problem i generally spam anything i find motivational or useful in any way

and im always looking for more so if you find one, ship it my way

MLM

The Spanish title was kind of misleading as it was all in English

Joe

and i think this guy is absolutely right

motivation is more important than everything else

Icy Defiance

7:26 PM

if there are multiple factors that are required for something - that is missing any one of them will cause your project to fail - I don't think it's fair to call any of them more important than the rest

Joe

if you told me here are 3 boxes, within them are the gifts of ultimate creativity, technical programming expertise and motivation - you may chose only one

i would take motivation every time - because when im motivated, i just make the other shit happen

ClassicThunder

Motivated people fail at things all the time.

Its not a silver bullet.

Joe

i fail constantly

and i learn everytime

im failing to make my point right now, but of all the challenges ive faced, lack of creativity, lack of technical prowess, lack of motivation

Icy Defiance

such meta

Joe

for me personally its so much more difficult to overcome motivational issues

and i guess i can see how that might not be the same for everyone

Icy Defiance

7:31 PM

see, for me motivation is my default state, at least with gamedev. exercising is totally different. >.>

ClassicThunder

Hmm most of my motivational issues are tied to an inability to achieve things. Frustration trying to express whats in my head demotivates me, an inability to solve a problem demotivates me.

Joe

somehow somewhere i developed this resistance to accept defeat

assign me an impossible task - i will happily fail at it for all eternity as long a i can keep myself interested / motivated

Icy Defiance

my motivational issues are all for one of 2 reasons: either I can't figure something out and figure I need a break, or I just have something else I'd rather do like playing mass effect

ClassicThunder

When I fail I like to fail early and hard. Anything else is wasting time.

Icy Defiance

I haven't programmed anything outside of work for a couple weeks now because of that stupid game :'(

Joe

7:33 PM

@IcyDefiance i buy and then uninstall so many games

good games that i enjoy

@ClassicThunder i iterate many series of failures if i have to

i dont just bash my head on one set path

Icy Defiance

I bought like a dozen games during the steam summer sales, and I need to play all of them. problem is I'm also a mild completionist. :(

John McDonald

I'm a non-completionist

Icy Defiance

basically what I'm doing here, Joe, is trying to demotivate you. :D

Joe

its working

buys some crack, throws it all away

the metaphysical "it" that is

MLM

►

Cool audio features coming to Unity 5

Icy Defiance

7:47 PM

okay, yeah, that's pretty awesome

Noctrine

7:57 PM

Man, I've put soooooo much time into AC4

It's so well done though, I feel like I can't not play it

MickLH

@snake5 Yes, it is... lol

Almo

8:15 PM

A licky boom boom down.

MickLH

rationale: unless the program you're designing is a memory manager, then freeing memory is not vital to the function, but instead a memory usage optimization

If you can't go back later and figure out where your objects should be freed, you probably fucked up the design in the first place

Almo

I've been following the memory optimisation discussion, and I can't decide how I feel about it.

initially, I think that freeing memory is just necessary, and not an optimisation.

MickLH

I see it as a practically necessary optimization

Almo

but the argument that it's an optimisation if you're not writing for memory makes an amount of sense.

"necessary optimization" I like that :)

MickLH

But it's not vital to the system functioning, in the worst case, you can consume tons of memory, and the OS will still free it when you're done

Wardy

8:22 PM

hey guys

what are peoples thoughts on dx12?

snake5

@MickLH for a particle system, it is rather vital

if you don't want the application to have a "forced trial mode" :D

MickLH

@snake5 Cool opinion :P Glad you don't need objective reasoning to make an argument, must make life a lot easier not letting silly things like conceptual accuracy get in the way

lets say you set max particles = 10 million, and never free them because it's a waste of time when you might need the memory again later, so you just overwrite the "least important" particle each time you spawn a new one. How again is freeing the memory vital here?

snake5

in that version, it isn't vital, yes

we're talking about two different examples then

MickLH

oh, ok so it's not vital for particle systems in general because the object pool approach is clearly effective? :P

@snake5 well can you explain this then?

Icy Defiance

he misunderstood what pooling was and admitted fault later

snake5

8:27 PM

overreacted (due to irrelevant IRL crap), apologized later

MickLH

cool :) glad things got smoothed out already

Noctrine

Mick! How've you been.

MickLH

pretty good noc, trying to handle real life or something, how about you?

Noctrine

Pretty much the same

MickLH

been doing a lot of this for money lately

and also my girlfriend is staying with me for a while

Noctrine

8:30 PM

Ack, no. Make it go away. (the circuit diagrams)

MickLH

:P

Almo

when i was a kid, could NOT understand transistors. terminology is all stupid

until I saw a Triode tube description

then it all made sense

send current INTO the emitter?

shouldn't the emitter "emit" current?

ClassicThunder

lol that was my favorite class. We made a little 16 bit processor and got to print them out. Not sure if I still have it...

MickLH

@Noctrine lol what's it called when you interpret something the way someone meant, but they continue to clarify their intentions which causes you to consider what they thought you could have taken it to mean

Almo

nobody bothered to explain wtf an emitter was in a triode, and how that resulted in the terminology for transistors.

Noctrine

8:32 PM

lol, There has to be a word for that...

Lasse

@Almo I had different problem. The teachers were like "these are capacitors, these are resistors, and these are (whatever the english name for them are), and now you can do LRC circuits"

Almo

cute

Lasse

I guess it's too obvious for the teachers how ohm's law work so that it's so damn obvious for them how stuff work

Almo

hehe yeah

MickLH

8:49 PM

Damn electrical engineers... human mathematics has been good enough for years, why u no optimal control theory?!

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