Game Development

Alex M.

00:06

your Great Depression books brought me to this

The Nanking Massacre or Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was a mass murder and war rape that occurred during the six-week period following the Japanese capture of the city of Nanking (Nanjing), the former capital of the Republic of China, on December 13, 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. During this period, hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were murdered by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. Widespread rape and looting also occurred. Historians and witnesses have estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 people were killed. Se...

don't ask how

for some reason, all articles lead to the Holocaust and then to WW2 and then to other wars for me, not to philosophy

I find the article above to be more horrid than the holocaust now that I mentioned it

especially since the overall opinion around here is how the Japanese are more civilized and <insert quality here> than most people

I wonder if there'll ever be a community of people not turning to savage animals after the rules limiting them are gone

Jimmy

It doesn't bother most Westerners because it occurs in Asia

There's still a huge cultural resentment in Asia over that

Alex M.

I wonder what such things the US army did, if any, and people didn't find out about

hell, I wonder what our soldiers did out there, if anything, that's comparable

Jimmy

it's very hard to cover up murdering 250,000 but there have of course been reports of smaller-scale atrocities in Vietnam and in Afghanistan

you mean, more exotic than drawing and quartering or gas chambers?

"People" in general have pretty creative ways to kill people, I'd say.

Alex M.

was going to say about gas chambers and how they're less painful than how people were killed in Nanking

I'd say that if we leave the deaths caused by lack of food and by diseases in extermination camps

as well as the medical experiments done on living humans

the Germans were quite quick in executing people

normally they'd go down shot, usually in the head

Jimmy

And I'd believe the majority if Chinese killed were shot

it's simply impractical to chase down a large number of people to run them through with bayonets

Alex M.

00:21

this reminds me

Jimmy

business inefficiencies will not be tolerated

Alex M.

were the Yakuza the ones with people sliced and stored in briefcases?

Dave

00:44

god damn i hate blender

Jimmy

what's wrong

Byte56

Flip the normals.

Alex M.

yeah, that should fix it

the only thing that's keeping me from doing anything useful for my game in Blender is UV mapping

I tried like 3 times but never invested enough time to actually learn how to do it

since I've now got an artist in my team, it's even harder for me to get to learn it

maybe tomorrow, yeah

Jimmy

easiest way is to mark seams and auto-unwrap

Dave

lol i cant get nice looking shadows they come out totally black

Jimmy

00:49

and preview with a grid texture instead of the actual texture so you can see how the UVs line up

Alex M.

yeah I read something about seams in the example which used a sphere

en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/UV_Map_Basics

Jimmy

@Dave use ambient occlusion or area lamps

Alex M.

this is what I used

Dave

so dont use "sun"?

Jimmy

.... no.

Dave

00:52

oh

Jimmy

well, you can use sun, but you have to add other lighting to get the soft shadows

Dave

ok ill just use lots of spots

Jimmy

if you're going to use lots of spots, use a hemisphere with dupliverts to dupe the spots

it's easier to control that way

wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Books/Essential_Blender/…

Dave

hmm interesting 2 spot lights opposite the object the less bright one is project shadows how odd

Jimmy

both should project shadows if you have shadows enabled for both of them

Dave

01:06

this take some serious artistic eye

ill try hemi

Jimmy

easiest way is to hit the "ambient occlusion" button

that's like, a one-button solution

Dave

01:25

ok

its amazing what some people can create

Byte56

@Dave Looking at my stuff?

Dave

did you post it ?

Byte56

I have no idea what you're talking about :p

Dave

ok i was bit slow there

Byte56

Well, I'm using my moderator powers to look at your screen. Yeah, that is amazing.

Dave

01:32

lols

Byte56

Ha, I was using my moderator powers to watch you through your web cam. I know you didn't really lol.

Also, put a shirt on.

Dave

but its hotttt

Byte56

Put on a wet shirt. The state change of the water going from liquid to gas states takes energy, reducing your temperature.

Jimmy

he just wants to see your nipples

through a shirt, as opposed to unadulterated

Byte56

Make sure it's a white shirt.

'Cause other science says white shirts are better at that.

Jimmy

01:36

I haven't done anything in Blender in like 8 years :<

did you guys ever see this starcraft mod for War3 called Project Revolution?

that dino skeleton is mine :>

Byte56

Nice work.

I don't do organic models well.

Hmm, seems like I'm going to need to update my profile image on this site.

Jimmy

I prefer organic models I think

mechanicals require some kind of precision I don't like dealing with

Byte56

Something with my face: gamedev.stackexchange.com/users?tab=moderators

Ah, that's what I like about it.

I really liked my drafting classes in high school.

On paper

Jimmy

also, Blender doesn't have very good tools for joining different curved surfaces

Dave

well it is a free program :P

Jimmy

01:40

like, making a ring around a cylinder intersecting with a 45-degree surface

Dave

was blender originally started by google?

Byte56

No

Jimmy

originally started by a company called NaN

Byte56

Sketch up was.

Jimmy

in the netherlands

Dave

01:41

ok sketch up that was it

Jimmy

like, 15+ years ago

Byte56

It was an internal tool, which is why it has fairly funky controls

Dave

well blender is pretty impressive for its price

Jimmy

that's pretty faint praise

Byte56

Yeah.

Jimmy

01:41

I had to learn Maya for a class. I have to say I prefer Blender

Byte56

I can barely see it.

Jimmy

until Modo came out the modeling for Blender was better than most commercial programs

Byte56

I used Cinema 4D for a while in school

I like Blender a lot though.

Dave

are the commercial versions that much better?

Byte56

Blender is pretty much on par with commercial apps.

Though it's been a while since I used a commercial app

Jimmy

01:43

Blender is still used in commercial pipelines for certain things. No so much mesh modeling anymore now that Modo and mudbox/zbrush are out there, but it has a fairly powerful and accessible physics engine for example

Dave

is it used in the industry though ?

well dont you z-brush them import to blender etc so they kinda go together

Jimmy

for Spiderman 2, the previsualization team used Blender to mock out animated storyboards

@Dave I mean in the olden days you'd hear of studios modeling in blender then importing into a commercial program to unwrap, texture, and render in like, VRay or something

Dave

ah

Jimmy

I haven't tried out the new Cycles renderer so I don't know if it compares with commercial raytracers

Dave

i think cycles is only best if u know how to use the node editor well

i personally aint got a clue how to use it - i'm still learning alot of the terminology

Dave

01:59

well my sprite looks average

had to photoshop the shadow instead

looks so blurry in my browser though

BlueBug

03:30

How long do you guys usually work on one project, assuming it's small.

; how much time period spent would you call a small, small project.

user4704

Time spent isn't a good metric.

John McDonald

03:47

(it's late, didn't read it right)

user4704

Hehe.

John McDonald

04:02

But yeah, depends on what you mean. Completed polished, ready to sell? No matter how simple?

BlueBug

oh

John McDonald

Or something you can show to friends?

BlueBug

did not know u could remove.

anyway, um let me think. one sec.

sorry this is not my language takes me a sec to articulate.

more of proof of concept but polished to the point(just simple textured uis) you can show it to friends

not "completed ; ready to sell" degree of craftsmanship but more of look at this! type of "portfolio level" of work.

*of course the more experience you have fancier your portfolio you will have/able to make, but say we limit to college graduate programmer level.

John McDonald

right, it really does depend on a lot of factors: experience, education, personality, etc.

BlueBug

say an average level of programmer who wants to dig into his way into industry(me?). How long should a "small but sufficient level" of work that demonstrates his capacity should take to build.

* a work that demonstrates a point such as I can implement something from game X; an element such as very simple physics or puzzle game.

*puzzle game- > puzzle element.

oh LOOK AT MY REP!

John McDonald

04:12

By "experience", I mean both programming xp, but also gamedev ex. From my experience, the two aren't always correlated

BlueBug

ITS 111!

i just noticed!

111!

I see.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

05:11

@Jimmy, I didn't know you worked on Project Revolution. That's pretty cool. :P

Do you remember xttocs?

ToddersLegrande

@0xFFF1 Lol I have no clue what you are talking about

Jimmy

09:03

that name rings a bell. I was under the impression he was active on a lot of projects at wc3c

Matt D

heh

Matt D

09:16

wc3c? warcraft 3 c????

Jimmy

warcraft 3 campaigns

it was where all the wc3 modders hung out

Matt D

ah i see

Jimmy

wc3c.net

Matt D

ever play competitively?

or just mod?

Jimmy

I was pretty bad

although a friend and I got to like rank 13th 2v2 USEast for a little bit. Mainly demonstrating how no one played 2v2s on USEast

Matt D

09:21

lol

im watching professional sc2 right now :) its funny how that works. im terrible at the game tho

Jimmy

hmm I played for like 6 months of WoL

quit because it was taking too much work

Matt D

hehe

yeah. sc2 isnt something you cna just play without effort

Jimmy

plus, my friends were Masters and I was a lowly Platinum

so it was a bit discouraging

Matt D

i hit platinum, but the amount of effort to get further was more than my guitar practice. so i went. meh.

Jimmy

yeah, it feels like work. Which is probably why strategy games are a niche market

Kikaimaru

09:48

ah i dont know if i should make my rts tilebased

it would be much simpler for player to orient in such space, but it seems so limiting :)

and shooting cant ever be tilebased, but warcraft 1 worked like that so i guess its not a problem

Matt D

09:59

you know

sc2 is technically "tile" based

unit position isnt though

its much easier to author, and do pathfinding with tiles tho

Alex M.

11:36

if you watch video trailers of other Gameloft games, you get some ingame currency

you can watch the same video up to 3 or 4 times in case they haven't brainwashed you the first time lol

Matt D

11:48

or, i could not

and not play gameloft games

Alex M.

that's one solution

also this is cool

@jeremyncole We've sent a replacement voucher, hopefully this one gets to you! As an apology we think @RoyalMail should draw you a chicken!

Tweeted by NandosUK on July 3, 2013 at 11:49 AM in reply to jeremyncole

check the replies

also x2, have you guys seen the new Destiny gameplay trailer?

►

looks cool & all

Alvar

12:15

Hi all

How do i most easily an element of chance in a game made in php? Like what are my options, feels like this must have been asked before

Almo

searching Stackoverflow.com for "php random number" brings up this:

6

Q: PHP: Best random numbers

I heard that PHP's rand() function doesn't give good random numbers. So I started to use mt_rand() which is said to give better results. But how good are these results? Are there any methods to improve them again? My idea: <?php function rand_best($min, $max) { $generated = array(); for...

@Alvar That should help

Matt D

also you typically dont just want "random" you typically want weighted random

like option A at 60% of the time, B at 20% of the time, and C at 20% of the time

Almo

12:32

I'm going to dispense with protocol and go straight to the Triple Dog Dare. I Triple Dog Dare anyone to star this message.

Alvar

Thanks that helped a lot.

Almo

sure :)

Alvar

I want to make a "seller" that sells xx% of the stuff for this price. And controll it by random numbers

Never done this before so have no real idea on how to start.

Matt D

see above re: weighted randoms

Alvar

12:51

Have several ideas on how to do this, just need to decide which one is the best right now.

Will probably do present it to the player like this, this seller can sell between 70-80% for this price and then let the actual sold stuff have the random diff of 10.

I have so many ideas for this game, need to decide which to use...

Alex M.

13:30

I'm confused

there's already functionality for code contracts in mscorlib

then why do you need the Microsoft.Contracts plugin thingy lib

Kikaimaru

code contract in mscorlib are just methods that throw exceptions

i dont know exactly about what plugin you are talking about, but you need to turn static analysis for contracts to do something useful

Alex M.

visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/…

this one

Kikaimaru

isnt it just for pre .net 4?

Alex M.

dunno mate, you're the microsoft fanboy here

I'm the one who's confused

Starting with the CLR v4 (or Silverlight 4), the Contract class and related types reside in mscor-
lib.dll says the manual

Kikaimaru

yes and before that it was stand alone library, so maybe this was vs plugin for that library

or maybe its extension that will enable you to write postconditions which require rewriting code

Almo

13:50

anyone here know how to construct an http request so it sends a json object using application/json encoding?

I have httprequester in firefox, and I'm not able to get the post data to work right

Alex M.

looks like Contract.Require in mscorlib does not work

10

Q: Contract.Requires usage

Here is my problem. I am a very big fan of Design by contract, I am using this concept especially when developing libraries that can be used by other developers. I just found out a new way of doing this which is: Contract.Requires instead of Exception: So instead of having: public void SomeMetho...

c# design-by-contract

and I can't install the plugin because I'm using Express

fuck this crap, I'll do something myself

Almo

VS Pro is only $13k or something. :)

Alex M.

haha yeah

I would have used Xamarin Studio but for some reason the MonoGame templates are broken

actually I think I can import the solution

one sec

yup, it works

Icy Defiance

I got VS 2012 Pro for free, via MSDNAA :D

Almo

what's msdnaa?

Alex M.

14:01

xamarin studio is quite pretty haha

Icy Defiance

@Almo microsoft something something academic alliance. I think it's called DreamSpark now.

Almo

ah ok

Icy Defiance

basically I get a lot of free software because I'm a CS student

Almo

cool

"First hit's free!"

Icy Defiance

lol something like that.

I get free copies of every Windows OS since XP, and most of Microsoft's other products, with the main exception being Office.

does Xamarin have a dark theme, Alex?

Alex M.

14:18

let's see

You can now 'add' visual studio themes in Xamarin Studio 4.0.2 and higher. I think this can be considered implemented as there are many good themes available for download (eg: studiostyl.es )

xamarin.uservoice.com/forums/144858-xamarin-suggestions/…

done, wrote my own

Contract.Pre((X >= 0) && (X < height));
Contract.Pre((Y >= 0) && (Y < width));

obviously not as full featured as whatever microsoft's offering, but it does the job for me

Icy Defiance

ah cool. I have that dark theme in VS 2012, and it's probably the first reason I would give to upgrade from 2010. something like this:

Alex M.

I don't like the dark theme very much :(

but for VS2012, it's better than the light theme

because the light theme is downright fugly

Icy Defiance

really? I usually find light themes to be a bit blinding. if I'm going to be staring at something for a long period of time, I'd prefer it to be dark.

oh well

Alex M.

I find yours hard to keep focused on lol

can't read the text X_X

Icy Defiance

interesting

iAmbitious

14:25

anyone here iOS game development using objective-C background?

Icy Defiance

well I'm opening LoL now for a couple matches, so that may be a problem for me too, but I don't think it's the theme's fault XD

yeah there were a couple, but I don't remember who... I'm not one of them.
if it's not a syntax question, though, we may be able to help anyway.

Almo

OK it's all working now. Sending JSON across https to php webservice, send data back, no problem. :)

@iAmbitious I do

the Obj-C part is quite easy

pastebin.com/vUusCeVg

iAmbitious

i want help conceptually actually. I'm little bit strong in objective-C language.

i want to show hearth bits graphical animated representation in the game. I have a sound file exist already in my local directory of iOS sandbox. The problem is how i show graphical representation of heart breath and simulation-sly its sound play.

Alex M.

@Almo awesome, what was the issue?

Almo

I don't quite understand the question. I think there might be some typos in there.

json does not populate $_POST

need $inDataArr = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true);

so I had the iOS part right

Alex M.

14:40

so the php was the issue

'aight

Almo

yeah

I thought it wasn't cause I got it working with the xapplicationencoding or whatever

much happier now

Alex M.

turns out the LoL kid who was jailed is now under suicide watch in prison

Almo

what's this about a LoL kid?

Alex M.

edition.cnn.com/2013/07/02/tech/social-media/…

dang US, for a democratic bald eagle, you're pretty !democratic right there

the bad part is most people are brainwashed and are on the side of the authorities :(

no chance for rioting

Almo

I think it's pretty obvious from the "eat beating heart" part that he was joking around.

that's ridiculous :(

Alex M.

14:50

I'll be waiting though

imagine a coalition of 20 Snowdens fucking things up from the inside

such drama!

how long does a question stay on hold before being closed?

Almo

no clue

Kikaimaru

15:07

@AlexM. wow thats messed up

Alex M.

But someone else -- Carter says a woman in Canada -- noticed the comment and reported it to authorities.

dang lady, you just went full retard

Kikaimaru

and shes from canada, shes supposed to be a nice guy!

Almo

^^

Alex M.

"Hello? The police? I have found this comment over here, it made me mildly upset. Would you please take measures and remove it?"

John McDonald

@iAmbitious Synchronizing sound & animation could be a good question for the site

iAmbitious

15:20

yeah, Exactly. Synchronization of sound and animation i want

Almo

John's right. that's a good question to ask on the main gamedev.se site

not something I've had to do

I provided a working game, and the sound guy just engineered the sounds so the matched the game events.

iAmbitious

ok

Kikaimaru

how would you call enum with North, South, East, West and enum with Left, Right ?

Alex M.

Cardinal direction

The four cardinal directions or cardinal points are the directions of north, east, south, and west, commonly denoted by their initials: N, E, S, W. East and west are at right angles to north and south, with east being in the clockwise direction of rotation and west being directly opposite. Intermediate points between the four cardinal directions form the points of the compass. The intermediate (intercardinal, or ordinal) directions are northeast (NE), southeast (SE), southwest (SW), and northwest (NW). On Earth, upright observers facing north will have south behind them, east on their ...

the 2nd is just 'direction'

John McDonald

@Kikaimaru Compass, and ... ??

ToddersLegrande

15:28

Compass and.... hand?

Alex M.

why would you name an enum "Compass"

John McDonald

probably clearer as CardinalDirection and Direction

Alex M.

a Compass is not an enumeration

ToddersLegrande

Compass.North

John McDonald

Why both?

ToddersLegrande

15:28

Compass.South

Kikaimaru

CardinalDirecion and Direcion is good i guess

ToddersLegrande

CardinalDirection is better yeah

anything is better than hand :P

John McDonald

@AlexM. Unless you actually plan to have a compass in your game, this makes sense: myEntity.Direction = Compass.North;

Alex M.

if Compass was a static class, yeah

but otherwise, nope

Almo

And I'm decoding incoming JSON. good deal. :)

ToddersLegrande

15:30

woot

Almo

now to send the receipt, have the php send it to apple and return the verification response

John McDonald

You're making me want to get my networking code working again

Almo

haha :)

I wrote a game matching client server one back in 1998 or something using RealBASIC

had 3 games on it; worked quite well

iAmbitious

dealing with JSON always good

Almo

included chat lobby, challenging people to games

yeah i like JSON

human-readable

iAmbitious

15:34

its also reduce so much effort in parsing

John McDonald

yeah, I'm doing a whole lot of JSON stuff these days too, :)

Almo

yeah

I wrote a parser for it once.

iAmbitious

its provide us proper collection of item and directories

Almo

or... did I write the encoder?

don't recall

John McDonald

The encoder would be easier

imo

iAmbitious

15:36

i'm used standard Apple API for JSON parsing in objective-C, Yeah its pretty much easy write and read JSON

Almo

you're right John

must have been that

John McDonald

I've started to use Json.NET instead of fastJSON, and am really enjoying the Collection Initializer syntax:

JObject asdf = new JObject{
        { "Position", new JObject{
                { "Center", String.Format("{0}, {1}", roughPosition.X, roughPosition.Y) },
        }}
}

in C#

Almo

I don't remember what I was using in C#. I think it was the default MS stuff.

John McDonald

16:04

right, I need something a little more complex than that (from what I've seen)

TheProgramm3r

hey all!

hey Josh! whats up?

no one's talking D:

i just hit 125 rep :D

bye all!

Code Assassin

16:43

@TheProgramm3r yey

user4704

16:58

Hi.

user4704

So after attempting to use Xamarin Studio for a few hours already, I don't think I like it.

user4704

It's clunky and slow.

ToddersLegrande

Youtube has been trying to convince me I need it... it found out I'm a programmer apparently.

Icy Defiance

meh youtube annoys me. it's like Facebook, except for videos: everyone only uses it because they're clueless, or because everyone else does

only difference is the sites with better players don't have better community features

so the alternatives aren't that great either

user4704

Yeah, I think Xcode's actually a better IDE at this point. O_o

John McDonald

17:16

I'm guessing Xcode isn't awesome?

user4704

It's not as nice as VS, especially in the debugger area.

Code Assassin

myLevel.Draw(spriteBatch);
firstPlayer.Draw(spriteBatch);

user4704

Xamarin Studio (for Mono) tries to be like VS, but fails horribly.

Code Assassin

(XNA) Does anyone know why the level would be drawing over the player? Am I doing something wrong?

John McDonald

Depends on how the SpriteBatch is initialized (so it's probably not set up correctly for what you expect it to do)

Code Assassin

17:20

Lol thanks

I had BackToFront.

Fail

John McDonald

nm

Yeah, actually I do just use the default constructor

(So that's SpriteSortMode.Deferred)

@Josh, So are you looking at making something outside of work? Or is ArenaNet really looking in to those tools?

user4704

@JohnMcDonald Oh, yeah, I'm just writing some for home.

user4704

We use Xcode at work for our iOS stuff (the mobile authenticator)

John McDonald

Cool. What are you working on?

@JoshPetrie Right, that makes sense

Almo

17:43

Xcode is not great. Though I don't like VS, either.

user4704

Writing a simple Markdown parser.

Icy Defiance

well this is strange. unique_ptr works in 3 files without the std:: prefix, but not in any other files. can't figure out why.
I mean my program works - I just have to use that prefix - but the inconsistency is going to annoy me for a while.

user4704

Something evil is 'using namespace std'

user4704

or you are in namespace std (which is bad)

Icy Defiance

yeah I can use that line, but I'm not in the files where it works.

I have 'using namespace DirectX;', but that's it. and I have that line in other files where it doesn't work.

user4704

17:52

what about headers you include? pastebin the code where you can use unique_ptr unqualified

Icy Defiance

my code is horrible right now. I'm overhauling a bunch of things, so I'm embarrassed to show it off, lol. but okay, one second.

I'll link you to the relevant files on bitbucket

this file works: bitbucket.org/IcyDefiance/tetris-clone/src/…

but if I add unique_ptr's to this one, I get a whole lot of errors about semicolons being expected and stuff: bitbucket.org/IcyDefiance/tetris-clone/src/…

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