Game Development

12:10 AM

Does serial upvoting cause a ban?

I don't know!

Really? I thought as a mod you would be the keeper of all rules and their punishments.

We keep a lot of the manual stuff. The stuff that's wired into the system itself happens without our involvement.

Are you worried you'd get banned for this?

And there's a degree of benefit to not sharing too much detail about exactly how the detection & consequence systems work, to make it harder for someone to game the system. 😉

12:14 AM

I've been generous with votes in the past without any problems. The StackExchange folks have tuned the algorithms pretty well it seems to catch misuse, without overly penalizing "wow, that was a streak of really great posts!"

So, as long as you're not going out of your way to target votes to a particular user, I think you're probably fine just honestly voting on content that you find high/low quality.

@Vaillancourt No, I was just going to upvote a bunch of DMGregory’s answers as a 100K gift.

But not anymore because it is manipulation of the system.

@OKprogrammer To "gift" reputation, you can award a bounty.

1:19 AM

@DMGregory thanks for responding! I want to load card textures from a card sheet containing 36 cards in a 6x6 grid each. They are in jpg format. I can convert the images to BMP offline if it is required, and in the worst case I guess I can break them into individual images. I am using Unity default environement

Also, before I get there, I need to solve this issue of sprites not showing up at all when loading xD. Specifically, I have a UI Image element which is a descendant of a canvas, and I want to set its texture using a script, which loads a specific image based on the position of the card. (This is a separate problem then above btw)

36 cards doesn't seem like an unwieldy amount. Why not just load the whole sheet?

Yeah memory usage is not the problem, but I want to make sure that I can create 36 independant cards from a single image file

@OKprogrammer Please do not do that. Upvote answers specifically as you find them useful, not to reward a particular user.

so I need some way to crop the image before loading as a texture

Set the image import settings to Sprite and "Multiple" mode, then you get that for free.

1:26 AM

is there a way to do this for multiple files? I have 40 cardsheets for 36x40 cards

Ok, I did this after a tiresome 4 clicks for each of 40 cardssheets. But I'll really appreciate it if someone can give a few tips about debugging the other problem. Have been googling for 30 minutes but none of the solutions work

1:41 AM

I am using this bit of code here. No idea why it is not working. I double checked that the paths are correct, but apparently it works even if they are not - and it does not show any errors in either case, but I can't see the sprites

        string path = Application.dataPath + "/Images/Covers/" + gen + ".jpg";
        Sprite current = gameObject.GetComponent<UnityEngine.UI.Image>().sprite;
        Debug.Log(path);
        gameObject.GetComponent<UnityEngine.UI.Image>().sprite = Resources.Load<Sprite>(path);

2:23 AM

@DMGregory Ok, I was just wondering whether it was allowed as a nice gesture.

2:40 AM

@MeetTaraviya I would recommend not using Resources.Load — direct asset references or Addressables are much better options in modern Unity versions.

@OKprogrammer No, it's not allowed. The system is built for promoting useful content, not for rewarding favoured users.

Also, I've got way too much rep as it is. ;)

3:13 AM

Turns out I just needed to get rid of the extension -_-

9 hours later…

12:38 PM

Remember that once you've built an image asset into your game, it's not really a jpg or png etc anymore. Unity will convert it to an appropriate format for efficient rendering on your target platform.

2 hours later…

2:31 PM

@MeetTaraviya Note too that this is stated up-front in the documentation: "Note that the path is case insensitive and must not contain a file extension."

> The path does not need to include Assets and Resources in the string, for example loading a GameObject at Assets / Guns / Resources / Shotgun.prefab would only require Shotgun as the path. Also, if Assets / Resources / Guns / Missiles / PlasmaGun.prefab exists it can be loaded using Guns / Missiles / PlasmaGun as the path string.

7 hours later…

9:13 PM

Lets say a player is upgrading their fortress and it takes 1 hour. Is it more common for the server game engine to save the ready state of the upgraded fortress using sequence numbers or through a timestamp?

With sequence numbers, there will sometimes be a period of time the sequence can't be incremented because the server is down and cant run the game loop, or the zone which holds player entities is empty and the game loop for this region is paused. You calculate the time remaining by subtracting the saved ready sequence from the current sequence, multiplied by the timestep.

9:48 PM

It sounds to me like you've reasoned for yourself why you would prefer different implementations for these two use cases. Do you foresee any problems with using these two implementations, as the needs of the feature demand?

@DMGregory Everything I've read about maintaining game state so far has led me to believe using timestamps "are evil" so I'm just wondering if there's any got ya's I'm not thinking of and if there are situations in games where timestamps are used to maintain game state like in my example.

I can't say I've ever read anything that claimed timestamps "are evil", so I'm not sure I can speak to this claim.

Did these sources provide any evidence for why they should be regarded as evil, or specific scenarios in which using a timestamp results in a negative consequence?

10:03 PM

I guess I got that impression from issues I read about maintaining state with timestamps like client inputs and client/server synchronization during gameplay.

Any specific issue? As long as you're clear about whose clock counts - like the server being responsible for both setting and checking the fortress timestamp - then it seems like this should work just fine.