hello

You hear "hello, hello, hello", as it echoes through the empty room. Roll a d20

lol

hey @John

I love d&d :P

heh, I've actually only played once, and I lost, :(

and by that, I mean I died

lol

bbl

going to read c# and xna tutorials

If anyone here is using Joomla, I highly, highly recommend that you install this plugin asap: extensions.joomla.org/extensions/edition/editors/17104

Before this, I resorted to using HTML to get stuff the way I needed it. Lighboxing images, and embedding youtube videos was just a pain. BUT with this, I can use HTML for those things, and Markdown for the rest of it. <3

hey

Hey guys, could somebody take a look at my MoveOnXAxis(int negOrPos) and MoveOnYAxi(int negOrPos) methods in my Player class?

github.com/hasherr/Sharks

tomorrow morning, sure @hasherr

coop music, BTW:

@TheProgramm3r You back in school, yet?

next week

no, I lied

2 weeks

I get my schedule ths weekend :D

Hurray.

I can't wait

geometry is my ,ath course this year :D

*math

bbl! see you then!

no one's here anymore.... sadface oh well...

i am

HIiiiiii

hey dave

what's up @Dave?

just sitting here debating if i cba to do work on my game tonight

as soon as i play a game i want to stop my project and work on making a game simliar to the one i played so annoying

yawn

@Dave Just make one single game.

You'll feel better about it later.

i know but i cant help it

Considered working with a team?

nope

It's a good thing if you can find a decent couple of partner

partners*

the work load is fine its just other games im like "damn i wish i made this!"

Haha

Well, the secret is picking one you're passionate about :)

5 bucks to anyone who can find me a wordpress theme In eed :D

eed?

Morning

@KevinvanderVelden yo

Morning yourself.

hey blue hows things

Hello everyone :)

morning, hello, welcome, hi, hey

Evening, how do you do, thank you, hello, yo

Well said @Blue

greetings aside, hows things?

Very good, how are you @RhysW

@TorbenC good and bad, been better, you working on a game atm or just lingering until youre struck with an idea?

@RhysW I am actually being very lazy, and I am at cross roads. I want to do this accelerated learning thing, I got a couple pdf things and some seminars downloaded. It's supposed to make you comprehend things much faster, speed read, and take notes quicker. After this I want to learn copywriting and become a freelance copywriter.

anyone know any json lib i can use that works in both .net and mono

The cross road to that? Laziness :P

planning to use it for network comms

@TorbenC might be a stupid question but what does a freelance copywriter actualy do?

Writes sales letters, advertisements, etc.

^ @RhysW

ahh gotcha,

Pay is really good, roughly 1-5k per sales letter for newbies after learning your stuff.

Hey all :) may I ask a quick question? I am new here, and I just got my first downvote :O (I know, shocking) and I would like to know (cause I dont have a clue) what might have caused that downvote as to avoid doing it again in the future. Link to my question that somehow got downvoted: gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/60779/…

@HasseIona sure ill have a look, but dont take a single downvote to heart

Thanks :) Nah, Im just curious whether its just someone having a bad day or whether its actually something I can change. Im not yet accustomed to this forums unwritten rules ^^

nvm beaten it

@TorbenC oh not too bad then, especially if you can keep busy all year

christmas will probably be a really good time for you xD so many people will want advertisements then

man its hard to find startups around here :/

Startups?

new companies, just starting out in the field im interested in

Ah

seems like i might need a new job and id like to find a startup

@HasseIona The only thing I can really think of is that the question appears to be a "debug my code" kind of question, you don't seem to go into much detail into what your exact problem is, I think limiting your code down to strictly the "infected" area might help and being more clear on what you have/haven't tried. On top of this, doing research prior to asking may be a problem. I don't know XNA so I don't know if you provided proof that you have indeed looked into the problem before asking.

@RhysW Indeed. What are you trying to do?

@TorbenC i develop in c# so things around that is essentially what im trying to find, but there doesn't seem to be any nearby

@RhysW Any other interests as well?

C# governs a lot of ground. Should find an area of interests.

when i cant find something in a field that broad i cant really afford to narrow my search down though

@HasseIona But honestly, I think you just kind of got ripped off, the question looks fine :P

@RhysW where are you if you dont mind me asking ??? uK ???

Hmm, I can imagine the problem then, it is indeed quite a broad problem definition 'x doesnt work, make it work xD'. I am only a firstyear game development student, so I still simply dont know enough about xna/hlsl to be able to pinpoint where exactly the problem comes from :P Nor do I know enough about 'smart googling' for that matter :P Anyone any tips?

@William'MindWorX'Mariager if i had to narrow it down i mainly have experience in commercial desktop and intranet sites

@Wardy yeah in the UK

there's loads of C# work here

@RhysW But is that what you want to work with?

I get regular spam (about 20 a day) from agents trying to poach me from my current job

Im in the UK too

You may have to travel up to an hour or so but i still consider work "around here" in that scenario

@William'MindWorX'Mariager that sort of stuff in a startup yeah, i wouldnt be against doing mobile development either

my current job is about half an hour away

i have been known to work up to an hour an a half away

@Wardy the one issue i do have is that i dont drive

that'll be whats holding you back

can you not get that sorted ?

@RhysW Trains/busses?

@Wardy no

UK public transport lol

@William'MindWorX'Mariager thats what i do currently, but finding jobs along soemwhere i can get to with those isnt easy

@RhysW is screwed unless he lives in a city

thankyou for the support :P

I'm used to Danish public transport. It's decent for getting around in most cases.

How old are you @Wardy, if you don't mind me asking?

Any C++ devs?

im not averse to going to other countries, so that should help broaden my search terms xD anyway im gonna get back to looking

@William'MindWorX'Mariager 31

I have been in the industry about 10 years or so now though

that can make life a bit easier

@RhysW Denmark is a great place to be. But it's very expensive here. Though I think, compared to the UK, it's pretty similar.

getting started is tough

i just cant find anywhere that wants to hire juniors xD

@TorbenC still here =p

everywhere needs senior this, or senior that :L

I remember my first job and I pulled up to the interview in a car that was basically scrap metal I beat in to submission in order to get there

@RhysW that's irony for you ... i've had issues finding senior jobs over junior ones

lol

@KevinvanderVelden How are you?

I'd say, getting started is even harder now. 10 years ago the competition was smaller.

@TorbenC fine, working :( you? :)

The competition was smaller @William'MindWorX'Mariager but then so was the demand

Not trying to imply you had it easy @Wardy, but things have changed.

within the last 10 years .Net work has exploded

@KevinvanderVelden Okay, lazy. :(

@Wardy It's nice to know.

I was trying to get in to work around the time Microsoft was announcing .Net 2.0 back then demand for .Net wasn't that great

the jobs were all java

I'm a huge fan of .NET and using it to do things and I hope to get into working with it some day

these days people chew ur hand off for a CV with the term "C#" on it

or even ".Net" in some situations

I've had employers play hard ball in an interview with me so i got up to walk out and the MD basically begged me to stay

the issue is that most can say they can write C# code but few can properly do it

gah i give up, ill just be a cleaner

What would you call being able to 'properly do it' @Wardy ?

by properly i mean actually write code that works, on time, and to some level of coding standards, as part of ascrum team

I've seen so many devs come and go because they have a uni degree and all they can do repeat what they read in a book

real devs learn to solve problems

not just spit out textbooks

seem it all to often

in fact it was how I got my first job

the job spec read "must have a degree in comp sci"

i didn't and still dont

Is SDL 2.0 a good improvement?

my argument was simply "i can deliver" and few uni students have had that

its all about passing tests

Yeah, I keep telling people to apply for jobs even if they don't need all requirements.

i would

@Wardy and how does one learn to deliver properly?

I do it all the time when im unemployed

Definitely

@HasseIona my understanding is that its not easy ... takes time and you have to learn

that's the bit where i got lucky

I was in a good team for my first job

so i learnt a lot

It doesn't matter if you went to school for it at all, they care about whether or not you can actually produce the code they need, not about whether or not you have a piece of paper that says "this dude learned how"

@TorbenC exactly !!!

Most places still want you to have the paper though.

But once you have the paper, they ignore it for the most part.

@William'MindWorX'Mariager they say that, but most places also have training agreements as part of mdsn packages

so paper is easy to get if you have the right mentality

its the mentality they look for

Yup

the paper is just a clearer indicator

@Wardy i have everything but the paper and the ability to find a job xD

which is why its preferred that you have it

Better than the paper is to just ask if you can meet with the lead programmer on the team to prove your skills

@RhysW when i got my first programming job it was for a small company (about 50 employees) I got it on a single MCP cert on my CV

The trick I find is to cite example of how you can meet their needs

for example

@Wardy my first is my current, i got it skill less as an apprentice

if the company specialises in say ... content management show them a web site you wrote

and its source code

and talk them through the process you used to build it

most people have a "coding style" which is a clearl indication of experience

yeah, i suppose the only way im going to help myself is to take up lots of projects in my spare time as a portfolio

a more senior dev uses better structure in their code

Yup, showing previous achievements that are within the realm of what they do is key. Proves far more than a piece of paper, it shows you have experience.

Still, if you hand them an application that says "Self taught" you're not likely to even get to talk them through anything.

typically sapeaking

@William'MindWorX'Mariager that's basically all my CV said

@William'MindWorX'Mariager not self taught, i was put on training courses, completed exams and have certificates

i have projects ive done that are now live on big clients systems and i have examples of a lot of things

I had "self taught, got far enough to gain an MCP, built some projects, happy to provide source, [link]"

that got me in front of an MD

it was hard dont get me wrong

bloody hard

I guess I'm just unlucky then. I tried applying for internships and jobs a lot of places. I have a ton of experience with C# and I can make it do things most people think it can't, but I didn't get any positive responses.

Freelancer sites can help too, if you can say you did a few freelancer projects many consider that experience

I've decided to go with school and university instead now, since the paper is what they kept asking for.

@William'MindWorX'Mariager i would be interested to look deeper in to your approach

its often down to how they percieve your thought process

I guess.

there's no point being a genius if you can't explain it to a user

That's probably my biggest problem. I have a really hard time explaining what I do.

typically a dev is someone who translate "im a dumb user and need a smart solution to something I can't explain"

finding a way to prove that can be hard

I think my biggest issue is explaining myself in an application.

jeez i forgot how mind numbing async sockets are

I've gotten all jobs where I've got an interview. But getting to the interview is a big challenge.

im suprised there aint a standard client, server, and messaging thing out there for this

@Wardy Just remember to use the state object. :)

That's the thing its a custom async socket networking implementation

quite low level for C#

but effective

gotta love json

Hehe

Could you use something like Lidgren in Unity? It's pretty great.

yeh i could but that adds overhead

and I need to be able to do some heavy stuff

@Wardy But json doesn't? :P

like hand over messaging requests

and load balance

how do you transmit any object type (within reason) as part of a custom rpc call without the use of a means of getting a fairly optimised string from an object?

json seems to just do the worst of the work for me

and the .net stuff for it is pretty good and not dumping in extra whitespace

im taking that string and making a byte[]

so its further compressed :)

raw bytes :)

@Wardy I've used a custom Attribute to deal with that before. The Attribute would map types to ints and the int was transmitted and then using reflection, turned back into an object. :)

see you dont need to do that

if you know your operation code (the thing you're calling) then you simply give the byte array to that

from there it knows what type its expecting

so you can be pretty "whatever" about type info

If that's the case, then you could just use BinaryWriter no?

to the point where you dont even need to send it

binarywriter still works on byte arrays

its essentially the same thing

But that adds more development. The reflection approach I used was very dynamic.

but I cant use the .net binary serialiser

because it chucks in a ton of type info i dont care about

namespace My.Core.Sockets
{
    public class Message
    {
        public int OperationCode { get; set; }
        public byte[] Data { get; set; }

        public Message(object message)
        {
            Data = ObjectWriter.Serialise(message);
        }

        public T To<T>()
        {
            return ObjectWriter.DeSerialise<T>(Data);
        }
    }
}

this is all i need

But isn't it prone to being hard to refactor?

not when you see my object serializer

I might have to look into it. The methods I've transmitted packet/messages before either required a lot of coding or a lot of data. The Attribute approach was the best way I could come up with.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;
using System.Runtime.Serialization.Json;
using System.Text;

namespace My.Core.Sockets
{
    public class ObjectWriter
    {
        Stream baseStream;
        BinaryWriter writer;
        BinaryReader reader;

        public ObjectWriter(Stream stream)
        {
            baseStream = stream;
            writer = new BinaryWriter(stream);
            reader = new BinaryReader(stream);

try tsomething like that

it then means you can simply deal with methods that accept a Message object

and based on the op code they handle they then call message.To<T>()

that will get the actual object sent

from there your code is all "non networking"

obviously you'll need to pass a stream in to an object writer on your server and client classes but that handles the raw guts of it

for the most part

@Wardy you said you got lots of emails from recruiters about jobs near you right? just out of curiosity which part of the UK are you in?

Excuses for lazy coders: developerexcuses.com

The south

@Wardy ahh ok,

but many are for jobs up north too

I'm about 2 hours west of london from here

at a senior level though i presume

which kinda helps because a lot of companies have setup on the outskirts or in surrounding cities

Yeh I get variety ... but agents regularly just spam me crap that aint relevant

even junior roles

get yourself on the IT Job Board

theitjobboard.co.uk

setup an account, put a few keywords in to it

then never go near it again

@Wardy oh i didnt know about that, thankyou

you'll hate me in a few years when your career has taken off and they still spam you junior roles

lol

that and monster

@Wardy i have a seperate email just for spam

monster.co.uk

but i get a much better response rate from it job board

when you start getting in emails just do what i do

start talking to them

most of them are full of it and actually dont have a lot but on the odd occasion you meet one with sense and who has something of value

but you do need to to build a bit of a rapor with them

once they know you they will jump through hoops for you

you got to bear in mind most companies out there have an agent they "usually deal with"

so getting on agent lists is key

I had a spreadsheet somewhere where i mapped out the value of each agent based on the shit they sent me

was quite informative

but i cant remember where i put it

@Wardy haha i bet that was interesting

it had its moments

lol

ok so looks like i might have to bother some recruiters, work on getting my own portfolio of stuff, and maybe try and squeeze some more training out of my current company, thankyou for the help @Wardy

there ya go see ... thinking like a developer

that's problem solving !!!

glad to be of service :)

lol one of the job thigns says 'our system is predominantly java and c++ so we are looking for a c# developer' xD

classic job spec that

when im looking for work i just respond to every email "Ok I would love to apply for this / these jobs go ahead and send my CV over"

within about 5 minutes i get a response back saying "sure but could we have a little chat first oh and can you send me an up to date version of your CV"

the funny thing ... the email was sent because it matched keywords in your CV

obviously generated by some system but having an auto responder app setup to auto reply with such key words as "job" or "role" or "opportunity" can help save you some time

that way you only have to deal with the "human responses"

might be a good idea, any tips on how to get them to not completely change everything on your CV like ive heard them do? adding skills, adding years, ect

woah, i just found an awesome one that fits me pefectly locationwise, job wise, skill wise, might just have to give that a go

might need to brush up on my interview questions

Is it good practice to force a vector to shrink to fit the size every time an element is added or removed?

@TorbenC only on embedded systems with very limited memory or if you know it won't increase again

The whole reason a a vector is O(1) is that it spreads the cost of increasing the size over multiple adds

@KevinvanderVelden Okay, thank you :)

@KevinvanderVelden One more question, if I have a vector of structs and I clear it, will it call the destructor of the structs?

or classes

objects*

@TorbenC it should, if its a properly coded vector (as in, you can call memset(0) on the memory buffer, but that's an improperly coded vector)

Okay cool, I was going to use vector.clear() @KevinvanderVelden

And the only difference between classes and structs (AFAIK) in C++ is that classes have default private members and structs default public

@TorbenC a standard STD vector will call destructors on clearing

@KevinvanderVelden Thank you, man I've been at this temp house to long without my programming computer :P

THE HAT WILL REIGN SUPREME!

I mean... cough Hello.

I call upon the masses. Raise the hat revolution.

@Blue FOR HATS!

FOR THE HATS @KevinvanderVelden!

The purple with blue text-sss-sss

"You can now statically link to SDL because of the new zlib license" I read the zlib license, but what does it mean by "statically link to SDL" Does this mean I don't need to include the sdl.dll anymore?

damn... VS2013 sure takes long to install

2010 is better imho

@TorbenC yes

good answer blue. it has a typo in it though :)

I don't like VS2010 because it lacks most of C++11 features

Raise the purple with blue text-sss-sss!

FORTRAN '77!!!

Ahh right @MrPlow

@MrPlow it almost doesn't have any 11 feature at all

maybe just auto keyword

And even VS2012 lacks quite a few C++11 features

what? MS not supporting a standard? Unheard of.

those few features could easily be ignored

such as variadic templates, delegating constructors and what I've found weirdest of all is it doesn't support automatic move constructor / assignment operator generation for rvalue references

I keep accidentallying words

@Almo Perfectionist. Done :)

:D

ok coding for today

I got VC++ 2012 CTP compiler but it doesn't have a "Go Live" license (which I can't find what it means anywhere but I assume it doesn't allow releases) so I'm installing VS2013 to test the new features

was testing competitors' apps yesterday and the day before

Catan is an ABYSSMAL app

Carcassonne is very nice

Agricola is odd, but plays well when you get used to it.

Ticket to Ride is really nice, but has a poor tutorial and crashes on occasion.

The funny thing is... VS2010 and VS2012 both miss C++11 features but VS2013 C++ compiler not only has C++11 features but also C++14 features as well

pandemic will definitely be competitive with those

they're getting a bit ahead of themselves

I think in MS's internal mission statement must be a line: "Undermine all standards, in the interest of making whatever we do the standard."

Trust me... If I could find a better IDE than VS I'd switch to GCC compiler in a heartbeat

you can set up VS to use GCC, right?

I recall a team at ubisoft using VS with SCons to build through GCC.

I've searched online about it but I didn't find much

:(

what I did find was people saying that it's too hard and not worth it

since intellisense doesn't cover anything that's not MS

P4 open... check. Xcode... check. CocosBuilder open... check. Dub Techno... check. Coding time!

time to have all UI elements attach themselves to the main Layer so the coordinates aren't an issue in sub-layers.

decided that was the best solution given my architecture.

hey @Almo hey @MrPlow

hi

@RhysW yo

And now it's time to restart... oh the pain

cold boot takes 5 seconds, restart takes 5 minutes

@MrPlow o.o so hold down the power button for 5 seconds and cold boot for a total of 10? :)