@ZackTheHuman yea I saw it, also thanks for the lnk todd

or if I should make another

basically, I have made this:

sharedObject = SharedObject.getLocal("sadMadScore");

which stores all the data from mmy game into thee user's hard drive

and I have been using it for everything

for the high scores, for the currency, for the character's speed, for the characteer's size, and more will keep piling up as I add code to the store's buttons..

am I doing it wrong? I mean... I have done most of it following a tutorial, but everything from the currency to the shop, the sharedObject containing more than just the high score... that has all been made from what I have experimented with, so there is a chance it migt not be the best way to aproach it...

any opinions?

The answer would be it depends

You are right that its going to keep piling up

@ToddersLegrande yea it will but I think I have to do something like that to make some "upgrades" in the game... or is there another way?

@Madcowe It sounds like you just need a storage format? Why not use JSON since it's basically serialized JavaScript.

silly question, there shouldnt be... it still needs to be saved

In general you want to separate out things into objects and pass the objects around as needed. There are many patterns that can be used to accomplish this and which one is "right" is up for debate

@Madcowe I honestly don't know much about deployable upgrades, but to "upgrade" your code - this could become a mess the bigger and bigger your project gets if you don't have something solid in place

another thing I thought is if I should make 2 classes, one for scores and currency, and another for sped and etc

Thats a big question

All in all the program design comes down to what works best for you

well... should I keep doing it like this and if a problem comes I try to ssee how to fix it? or think I should start looking?

Again, its whatever works best for you :P

I hate to say if what you are doing is working its good enough, but really it is that way

You just have to know that if you continue down a path that isn't very good, its going to become increasingly difficult to change and maintain

alright then, thanks a lot! I will keep coding it and IF I think of a better way of doing it I will, and if problems come, I will ask again =)

Unfortuntely I can't get too specific with answers here because there are literally limitless ways you could go about "doing it right"

All of which someone will tell you its the wrong way to do it and their way is better

@ToddersLegrande true

lol

well brb, gonna go get noms

did anybody know if there is a photoshop filter equivalent of FXAA method used in games ? (which works using only pixel information thus should possible in ps)

no idea

Find edges into an alpha channel, load it as a selection, then gaussian blur? That's basically the process..

cya guys, time for bed

hey every1, i have an engine class in c++ that when run either creates a server or client. i have some engine functions that iw oudl like to call in the server/client, but dont want to store a pointer back up to the engine. would it make sense for the server and client to inherit from the engine?

storing a pointer is usually the better way

but then that means the engine and client for exmple will be strongly coupled, because the engin creates a client and the client has to store a pointer to the engine that created it.... thats bad right?

"strongly coupled by composition" is still much weaker coupling than inheritance

or you mean, the user has to know this

in which case, you can hide the engine constructors behind some method that just gives "makeClientEngine" or "makeServerEngine"

i...........................c

the biggest issuei have right now is that from the client, you can create a new server in its own process.. like if you decided to host a game for example

but im not sure how to do that from the client... i would have to go back up to the engine and request it to be done right?

you can think of a full standalone single player as basically being one server + one client that are just holding hands

"requesting a server" is something like exposing a network interface to something you already have internally

my design was to start a client only, because if you want to join a dedicated server, i dont want to have a local server running all the time because it would waste resources... or can i make the server process sleep somehow and not take away any performance when im connecting the client to a remote server?

I don't mean you have to run the server as a separate process

i mean it was my choice to do so....

but what i wanted to know is if its possible to run say a client and a server process, but now have the server process eat up resources?

because if the server process doesn't eat up resources then i hav no problem having it running all the time while i play on some remote server...

what resources would it eat up?

well it will have its own continuous loop running eating up cpu i would guess

but it would have nothing to do

I presume the server process has some Start() method that you call to initialize "hosting a game" and some Stop() method to you call to dispose of everything.

o yes that is true

while your player is in the menus before jumping "into the real game"

your server shouldn't be doing anything

or you could start the server immediately but then stop it when the client joins a remote server

i wnat the server to pretty much identical to a dedicated server though... the dedicated server would just loop continuously looking for connections.. if my server isnt running then i have to figure out someway to start it before i can send connection packets to it right? this is assuming i put it in a seperat eprocess

the client just says "I'm going to play with someone else, you should take a nap and unload all your resources"

the reason being identical is so i dont have to change any code

but it is not limited by any kind of sleep or anything... so it will run as fast as possible right? eatup allmy cpu?

especially since most "listen" type interfaces have aome kind of built-in timespan to wait

but i mean in a real game scenario the server will be doing all of its serving duties so it isn't sitting waiting for connections... it just polls for any connection requests when it has time to

no, it will not run as fast as possible. for example, the last parameter in select is a timeout value

couldn't you run the poller in another thread?

thats what i was trying to avoid lol

so it doesnt wait at all it just checks to see if any request came in since the last time it checked

well

I wouldn't write it that way

but even if you do

while(true) {
    if (this.currentClientCount == 0)
        peek(50ms timeout)
    else
        peek(0ms timeout)

    process()....
}

hm

that sounds like a good idea

or, in your client, when you connect to a remote server, first you connect to your local server, send a "standby" command, and then go off and play

i will try doing that but just curious what way would u write it?

ok but then when my server gets a standby command how can i be sure that it is the local client that sent it and not a rogue user?

well, I'd use a separate thread ;) easier to reason about that way

lol

i will make a branch for both approaches

and then wheni finish both branches ill flip a coin

regarding anti-rogues: well, because your server has some method of authentication

ok good call

also, any kind of sanity check, such as "I will not standby if there's any players currently playing other than the player who ordered standby"

good idea

well thank you for the help youve given me a couple ideas on how to get started with this solution

how do i upvote your messages?

no prob

there's no reputation in chat

o :(

There's no numerical reputation in chat.

Reputations are still acquired in the usual way, though. See the comment about Snake, which is still starred in the sidebar, three weeks later. ;)

Grr. I have a persnickety problem that only happens when I'm not using the debugger...

@RavenDreamer Interesting; what happens?

Mornings.

Howdy howdy

hello

hooooodiiiiooooooo

Did anybody mentioned "morning" yet?

@Mr.Beast me

why?

i did something wrong mister?

oh, damn, I thought I would be incredibly clever and witty. but it appears someone else already though of "morning".

...

Okay...

Actually i don't what time it is for all of you guys so when i say "Mornings", it's mostly because , where i live, it's the morning.

It's always morning when someone enters the channel. UGT.

@TrevorPowell haha. I was not aware of this x)

you are now. :D

Yes i guess. I won't wonder anymore if i look stupid when i randomly say "Mornings!"

that's the great improvement in my internet user life

I wonder which exact moment was it when this suddenly was considered a problem: gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/44131/…

by default, all data is accessible from everywhere

@snake5 maybe not in his pattern.

it seems like he is overcomplicating things.

indeed

Lot of people like to do super complex things will high level abstraction, modularity etc.

But sometimes i think they just go (or want to go) too far.

Over-thinking or i don't know..

Most games don't need a lot of complexity. :)

I mean like i don't understand people trying to think a lot of something flexible, reusable, with lot of generic features etc. It's great but i don't understand them, i can't do that, if i want to do a game, i do a game.

Not a framework, not an engine or whatever.

I don't mean i don't do reusable code or think a bit before start developing... But, i don't spend too much time on it.

Maybe not enough, but at least i made few GAMES.

And i'm not working on en engine since 5 years and have not made any game.

I've been working on my engine for four years. ;)

@TrevorPowell that's gay :)

Joking.

Maybe you are more into doing engine than games :)

Well, I've released about ten little games in that time, too. :)

Ha.

You work hard!

Able to work on an engine and few games...

Do you have a lot of free time? :)

I wish!

Yeah me too... Maybe you are just efficient :)

i wish i'd be efficient on my coding session.

But the internet is an awful source of distractions.

I usually steal three or four hours on the weekend. And I might get almost that much in the evenings, during the week.

Yeah, internet is terrible for productivity.

I work all day long programming for a company.

So back home the evening, it's hard do to it again.

Even on my cute game.

Mm, same for me.

@TrevorPowell your engine? got some screenshots/webpage?

@snake5 if i remember well you do have an engine too, don't you?

someone that you qualified as really low level and not ready for being released

am i wrong?

you're right

cragegames.com/tools/sgengine

@snake5 "Engage in a violent orgy of explosions[...]" :)

sounds fun

well, I suppose it is since I won a split 1st place in a local gamedev contest (6 games were submitted to it) :D

@snake5 haha

i love topdown games.

And winning against five other games is a great victory!

4.5, technically

:D

yep x)

Where do you live? What do you mean by "local gamedev contest"?

I live in Latvia, local=organized by a few local enthusiasts in the country's gamedev forums

@snake5 vectorstorm.org

@snake5 Just read the comments, have you tried using ANGLE?

(the comments on your page)

@Mr.Beast heh, where?

sgengine

ah

why should I use angle?

I don't want to emulate the GL API on Direct3D

it's a crappy API

It would be a pity to restrict yourself to MS platforms.

I don't

as a matter of fact, I originally had an OpenGL 2/3 rendering system implemented there

I moved away from it because it was a pain in the ass to support

thought I'd much rather work on D3D first and just fix up the GL port later

@TrevorPowell heh, is that all yours? for some reason I thought you were doing that for some company

well, with ANGLE you would have one code-base which is often better than half-assing some ports afterwards.

no, I'd have one codebase and some fake implementation under it

not cool

I'd much rather just use plain OpenGL than that

why?

because it works as expected perhaps?

ANGLE is just another OpenGL implementation, you are writing plain OpenGL. You are just linking it to a different implementation.

...

no, it isn't

to prove this, just render a fullscreen quad with 0-1 texcoords and look at how the texels align

OpenGL is a API, nothing more.

no, it's a specification

a specification for a API

and ANGLE follows that specification

not exactly

it specifies some bits of the pipeline too

D3D cannot and will never strictly follow that

and I don't need another source of misunderstanding and confusion

especially since I know both D3D9 and GL2 quite well

@snake5 Yes, that's all me. :)

@TrevorPowell it looks awesome :)

Thanks. :)

@TrevorPowell you are working on a MMO? : )

@nathan No, I'm working on a game about MMOs. It's not actually an MMO.

@TrevorPowell ho yeah true. vectorstorm.org/get-games/full-games/mmorpg-tycoon

just found this x)

Yep. I'm working on the next version of that. :)

Looks great. I think i'll give it a try as soon as i'm home.

JavaScript*

latter is more flexible but nothing to do with arrays

less restrictions on names

kk :) You mean no javascript syntax restrictions ?

probably

well, I'm not 100% sure but it should be logical to support all kinds of strings as keys

@ZackTheHuman I'm rendering cubes. When the cubes are adjacent to each other, any interior faces shouldn't be rendered (because they're inside the polygon and won't ever be seen, anyway. When I add cubes to my scene in a particular order, one of the cubes does not properly turn off its interior faces. When I step through the same placement with the debugger active, the cube properly turns off its interior faces.

ohio

@RavenDreamer is each cube turning off its faces individually? could you just consolidate all cubes into one mesh and strip inside faces there?

@TrevorPowell Do you have anything playable yet? I remember getting excited about your game quite a while ago

@ZackTheHuman @melak47 I just found it, actually. I was failing to clear the faces after setting the flag, so every time it decided to draw a face, it didn't clear the faces from the previous placement.

The issue with the debugger was that in the act of pausing the game (to toggle the breakpoint), it refreshed the variable, neatly hiding the problem from me.

Heisenbugs; great fun.

indeed

well, not as fun as memory bugs though

I'm hunting a really interesting one currently

it managed to bypass my 128-byte fences and damage the heap anyway

or even 16kB fences

tracked it to freeing of an unregistered allocation

which either means that it was freed before or allocated differently

not sure how it could destroy the heap, though

never loaded stuff form a .dll myself :/

Never really used OS X outside of best buy :P

or developed for even

@JoshPetrie not enough if it's in the PATH?

mkay

PATH? LD_LIBRARY_PATH? no idea if OS X uses that too.

I haven't touched anything apple since I played some flight sim on my neighbors first gen iMac with a puck mouse when I was a kid :p

PATH would just be executables

not libraries

well, I've no idea about it.

but there are said to be some parallels to Linux

what prevents you from linking it directly?

hey guys, quick question, how do you draw text like nameplates affected by perspective and depth?

but i guess it will always draw the text with size 10 =x

@GriffinHeart did you try setting different matrices?

I wonder why I feel the urge to optimize that code.. :P

oh hi there guys ,(^_^)/

it depends

it should set a texture and draw a quad

all that shouldn't be that slow

well, there might be a few texture states to set, too, but I'm not sure if that would actually stay that way these days

immediately as in glBegin/glEnd? probably

iirc, some apps were still using interfaces like those

Blender, for example

not sure if in post 2.5, but definitely in pre-2.5 versions

@ToddersLegrande of all the sites , why did you choose to link the the worst possible one !?

and who the hell stared it to boot

let me guess.. is that about w3schools?

yeah =/

well, it might be slightly imprecise but it's also undeniably handy

partly because it's always on top of google search results

@snake5 .. i would love to see your reaction when surgeon describe his study materials this way

@GriffinHeart By not using glut and any other of that horribly outdated stuff?

@tereško I'm more afraid of the unexperienced ones

and seriously ... why would you post first google result? If someone found this place he/she already can use google.

if a surgeon has experience and he isn't fired from anywhere, I'd trust the guy regardless of how he learned things

it's not like he doesn't have assistants

@tereško who says they found this place? friends can point people to websites too

and the ability to find something with google isn't as widespread as one might think

i will have to concede that point

Google? Who needs that if you have StackExchange.

that said, I don't support helping people who can't google myself

but even then , should you try to point people to good materials , instead of just picking the top result

well, you have any suggestions on that?

everyone's smart about web development so the first developers get to be most rated

@JoshPetrie so i have to draw the text to a texture?

btw :P performance is not important atm

same way you are uploading a image to the GPU.

just that you feed it with the rasterized text instead of the content of the image

Freetype is quite good at rasterizing text, but Bitmap fonts might be a simpler alternative

(Bitmap fonts = Load a image with all the characters already rasterized then drawing text is just a matter of drawing quads with the correct texture coordinates)

"all the characters"? let's see what UTF-8 has to say on this... >_>

hmmm....in anyway i can't do that with just glut* stuff right?

you'll need to use gl* stuff

:D

glut* is a subset of gl*

glut is nothing but convince functions. There is nothing you can do with glut but not with plain gl.

depends on skill level

and glut is horribly outdated, so I wouldn't recommend it.

freeglut

still horrible

anyway, is it hard to generate the bitmap and then get the bits to assign into a texture?

with Freetype it's fairly simple, but will probably require some debugging

how simple is it? I'm interested too

:P just want to use nameplate like text, that gets smaller with z

is the info that my implemention for loading, storing and rendering is 150 lines of code enough info?

dunno, first time dealing with font rendering, but yeah if you don't mind i would appreciate it

@Mr.Beast could be :P

i was coding when i heard this: youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_pLWt7xPCfM

i'm still chocked...

my horse is amazing!

hmm

looks like something is regularly pissing on my memory allocations

god dammit... does anyone here know a lot about networking?

I have a home wireless network but it keeps failing!

fixing these sorts of bugs makes me feel like a police officer :P

lol

since the heap is thoroughly checked, what's left is going through all memory writes and checking things myself

@snake5 good luck

thanks

UE3: GWorld->FarMoveActor. Any way to access this from script?

cam

can't find much info online about farmoveactor

@tereško the person I was talking to really had very little background on JavaScript and the w3schools link actually wasn't the first one I posted but I chose to post the w3schools one in addition to that because it explains things in a manner that a beginner can easily pick up on

@Almo never heard of it

@tereško the point of the link was to provide a high level overview of the data types JavaScript has and nothing more.

ugh, finally found the problem

*yay! finally found the problem!

@ToddersLegrande bonsaiden.github.com/JavaScript-Garden/#types

turns out it was like in games - you have 3 lives and then there's horror

discarded my rule of "have single point of object initialization" once, nothing bad happened

looks like FarMoveActor is completelyhidden in script :(

well, I'll just have to make it available, or do this natively

@tereško that link has nothing to do with what we were talking about. At least not the linked section

assumed I obeyed the rule at all times, everything broke

I wasn't at my best shape two times and everything crashed

that's how it is with C code

one has to be prepared to write it >_>

@tereško The point was to show JavaScript just has a few basic types (numbers, strings, arrays, etc.)

Not a whole bunch of number types like integer, double, float, long, etc.

That was all

.. and to do that, you picked a site which is harmful

Yeah not really

I'll admit the star on the comment is definitely unwarranted but the site served its purpose just fine

@tereško harmful how exactly? and where's the better alternative?

It's probably bad because there's not enough jquery in it.

-1 No jQuery.

;)

@snake5 better alternatives : eloquentjavascript.net , bonsaiden.github.com/JavaScript-Garden , developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript

woa something i said got some stars! that's a first, I think

@snake5 as to "how exactly harmful" : w3fools.com

for some reason this "bad education" actually helped me get a job

go figure..