Yay, floating text indicators!

The red line is a temporary mining laser beam that disappears moments after the screenshot. The green +3 and +9 are the amount of minerals mined (for a total of 12 this time-frame), and fade as they move up

</blog>

Floating text is really really useful. Is it fire-and-forget, from a code point of view?

Yup

Love your work. :)

the miner doesn't even know it's happening, yay!

What's generating the numbers?

An "Accumulator" that's listening to an event on the Miner that occurs when he mines

So... technically the miner doesn't know what's going on, but the functionality is built into the miner to allow this sort of thing to happen

Oh, interesting approach! I like that.

I find I'm trying to use a similar approach everywhere. The object that's doing the action doesn't have to handle or care about what happens next

Events are great

nice, John

I'm thinking about totally stealing that for my own project. ;)

yeah, I totally stole the idea from a friend of mine

It can be used for so many things, like health bars can be completely separate from the objects they display the health for. They'll listen for move events and healthChanged events from whatever they are attached to, and update accordingly

Starcraft does this (apparently)

I haven't done that part yet, but it's on my list

I even take eventing one step further than my friend and have used it as the basis for my networking system. The network listens to all of the important events and is able to send those over the network and replicate the results of the event on the other end.

I'm actually a little bit nervous about doing it for my project. Just because I typically have tens of thousands of entities. Any sort of indirection adds up quickly for me. ;)

yeah, I started small

And really, it doesn't take a lot to start small. Just add... let's say an "EntityDying" event. You'll find places to use it, trust me

My AI listens to it's target's EntityDying event so that it knows when to look for a new one, instead of doing: Is my target still alive? is my target still alive? is my target still alive?...

I already have those events. Just that right now, they only propagate up through the entity. It'd probably be cheaper if I had things register for the specific sorts of events they want, instead of propagating everything through the entity's AI and similar control classes.

hmm, are you talking about virtual methods that are called when something happens?

gonna see if I can make my first youtube of AO here

Sorry, yes. I have a callstack that looks like: "Character::HandleEvent(event) -> Owner::HandleEvent(event) -> Brain::HandleEvent(event) -> CurrentBrainGoal::HandleEvent(event)"

ok

yeah, in C#, it looks a little different than what you're describing (I think). My call stack would be something like LaserMiner.Update() -> Accumulator.HandleAccumulationEvent() -> FloatingText.Ctor() -> then all the way back into the LaserMiner.Update()

@thedaian, You have some good videos of IsoTower, what do you use to make them?

The software I just tried sux

camstudio

i had to fiddle around a lot with the settings though

ok

anything is better than the last one I tried, lol

Video is great, but it doesn't want to cooperate with my sound card

(yes, I have one of those)

it is really tricky getting sound to record with video

so ic

i think i used "audio from microphone", and then set the microphone device to use "stereo mix" in the system sound settings in windows

heh, man, every combination of settings seems to pick up my mic loud and clear

you have to go into windows sound recording stuff and change things around a bit

hmm, I found one pair of configs (the app + windows/sound card) that produces quiet volume

and no mic sounds

that's a start. like i said, it takes some work to get camstudio to work right

And, and?

Is it as good as you remember?

Sounds cool. What is it?

Aw

oh.

I imagine that the two events were not connected?

I'm taking a break from the commercial games industry for a while. Starting in about two weeks.

I've worked for Melbourne House, Infogrames, Atari, Krome, and a mobile studio at EA.

That's impressive!

No really major titles to my name, though.

It's okay. With a badass name like Trevor Powell, who needs any more major titles?

Well, that's not true. I was lead on the Wii version of "Force Unleashed" a few years back. That was major. :)

And yes, it's positively soul-destroying to be covered on Zero Punctuation, thanks for asking. ;)

hahaha

Be careful what you wish for.

I don't think I've seen him review an MMO. I have trouble imagining that such a review wouldn't mostly consist of complaining about the game's community.

Anyhow, Guild Wars isn't going to have any shortage of press coverage, I can guarantee you that. :)

I'm really starting to love the using(somethingThatMustBeDisposed) part of C#.

No long need to worry about returning in the middle of a function or whatever other cases that can occur.

It's so easy. :P

When someone asks this question:

and then proceeds to ask about 5 more questions relating to openGL and panda3d, I begin to get the feeling that "pure" OpenGL is not very productive for him

hahaha

Hello world! I take it this is where all the cool kids hang out.

After digging my driveway out from under more than a foot of snow, Seattle is hilarious to me.

yeah, but Seattle (much like Vancouver) isn't prepared for snow

Good ol' Seattle

Vancouver doesn't even have snow plows

Understood. Neither is Denver, by the way people were driving around, here.

lol

(or, more specifically, not driving around)

I was imagining people slipping all over the road and causing accidents, thanks for clearing it up @TreDubZedd

Georgia was shut down for about a week last January from the roads icing over and having no way to clear them.

lol

Haha

@JohnMcDonald The reason they were not driving is because they had ended up off the road.

heh, nice

a couple years ago I was driving through indiana in a snowstorm

I swear there were more cars (trucks included) in the ditch than on the road

it was pretty surreal

I love it when someone asks a vague question then goes afk for hours

@JohnMcDonald That's just your OCD kicking in.

is he there yet? F5 nope, what about now F5

yeah, 99% of SE users are not going to be hovering over the question

I assume real people have real jobs to do

yeah, it's just us who are sitting around slacking off

F5

Feel like I'm downvoting questions a lot, recently. :/

wow: stackoverflow.com/questions/8935065/programming-efficiency

Java programmer gone game dev

I choose to believe that that's really clever dry satire.

yeah... good choice

Threads for each bad guys eh?

That's what I was getting at the "Java programmer gone game dev" because a java programmer would want to make threads for things that are all happening "at the same time", and when that's applied to games, you get: "every time an enemy spawns, it has a thread with it"

Genius. Those shmup sounding enemies must really be doing a lot of computing!

or... maybe he's not using a thread for each bad guy, but rather each bad guy is using a thread for something

Does sound like each enemy is being given its own thread, though.

yup