Game Development

Trevor Powell

00:19

My biggest career regret is not having quit a particular job. I really should have left that particular employer about six months before I did.

Could have had six fewer months of aggravation in my life. :)

"Question:How many people know the names of the people who get hurt the most in football?" Answer: Three.

Chunk-e-Yamani

I'm wondering, how can a question which was only viewed once, get two upvotes?

anime.stackexchange.com/questions

now it has 4 views :( and still two upvotes.

Jimmy

good question about the divergence meter :P

I bet it's because the designers were lazy about including extra digits

Chunk-e-Yamani

@Jimmy even if there were more digits there would only be finite set of possible futures which is not that much desirable.

Jimmy

i don't see why it's finite

Chunk-e-Yamani

it means whatever you do you can't create some potential futures.

Jimmy

00:28

the alternate universes exist on some N-dimensional plane

where distance between any two universes is a scalar unit

Chunk-e-Yamani

divergence meter shows the absolute world position, not the relative distance from previous world, as explained in this answer:

2

A: How are the Divergence Number and world line related?

In Steins;Gate there is an important thing called Attractor Field. An Attractor field is a number of world lines that may be slightly different from each other in small details, but provide the same end result. Each attractor field is "made of" a number of World lines, in some range. For exampl...

Jimmy

okay. So perhaps there are 10 major attractors that the meter can display

Chunk-e-Yamani

@Jimmy turned out there were 100 of them, the visual presentation in anime caused my mistake. but still the question exists.

Trevor Powell

@Chunk-e-Yamani A question starts with one upvote, when posted by a user who has at least a certain minimum amount of rep, as I recall. So it would have started with one upvote (from the author), and the user who viewed it first gave the second upvote.

Chunk-e-Yamani

@TrevorPowell my questions in GD.SE start with zero upvotes.

and I don't even have 1/20 rep in anime site

Trevor Powell

00:40

Hm.. then maybe I'm completely remembering wrong. :)

Madcowe

01:11

hey guys, can someone help me? this is very strange :S

my computer has 8 gigs of ram

I was playing crysis 2 but it froze for a few seconds when I did something "new" like the first time I shot the gun, when I ran, jumped, etc

and of course, knowing what I know about computers I thought it was RAM

and saw on the task manager that google chrome was using a lot of it so I closed it

however, after I closed the game (only had steam open) I checked the ram again and it was using 6.2 GB!

and I dont even have anything open, any ideas?

user4704

Yeah I don't understand what you're saying is using the memory.

user4704

Task manager is not a great metric for this, neccessarily.

Madcowe

yea I know that but still

having it display 6 gigs being used?

and now 7 out of 8?

I also know that the RAM was being overused because of the issues that I was having

user4704

What is displaying this usage?

Madcowe

the performance tab on the task manager

user4704

01:16

So look in the processes tab for private working set and see what's using the most

user4704

Or in the Resource Manager

Madcowe

uhm..

ok in resource manager

what now?

strangest thing is

user4704

Memory tab. Sort by various interesting columns. Et ceter.

Madcowe

if I go to users

it says "I'm" using 800 MB

forums.randi.org/archive/index.php/t-79635.html its something like this, I'm reading to see if I can find a clue

user4704

...did you look at the memory tab?

Madcowe

01:26

cs.unm.edu/%7Edlchao/flake/doom is this a good tool?

of course I did... but that's the problem

accounting all of the programs you only get like 800MB, but it still says it's using 6

(gigabytes)

Jimmy

do you have "show processes for all users" checked?

Madcowe

@Jimmy dont even know if it's here on windows 8, but I am the only user on this PC

user4704

There are several columsn in the memory tab

user4704

Which ones did you add up?

Madcowe

@JoshPetrie it doesnt matter, none of them even reach 1GB

Jimmy

01:30

lol

Madcowe

want a screenshot? xD

user4704

Yes. I think you're doing it wrong.

user4704

Processes don't just "use memory," the method by which it's allocated ot them by the OS is complex.

user4704

It's rarely an issue of simply adding a bunch of numbers.

Madcowe

@JoshPetrie yea but still, don't you think it's just a bit strange for the OS to use 6 gigabytes on standby?

user4704

01:32

I don't think the OS is doing any such thing.

Madcowe

for anything to use 6GB while in standby mode...

but seriously, the thing that is using the most memory atm is chrome and it's only 72.2MB

user4704

I think your problem is that you're assuming too much.

user4704

Probably some process has a commit against that much memory; it's not in "standby" it thinks its actually needed.

user4704

It may even be doing something with it.

Madcowe

but its trange... I closed everything and all, I wouldnt mind that much if at least the computer didnt freeze for 2 secs every time it needed to free up ram

Jimmy

01:35

also, how is your chrome using 72MB; mine is using 1.3G :P

Madcowe

*1 tab of chrome xD

user4704

Not all processes have UI.

Madcowe

alright, lets try the ultimate fix: Restarting the computer

ok it's restarting, let's see what it does now

user4704

That will almost certainly fix the problem but you'll never know what caused it.

Madcowe

which remings me... when I play EVE and alt tab to the desktop, everything is really dark, like if it was a laptop and put the brightness to 0 (this one is a desktop)

if there is still a lot of ram being used, that could explain why even though its such a good PC

it still lags here and there

ok

fresh after rebooting the RAM being used is 5,6 GB

user4704

01:39

What's running?

Madcowe

disc usage stayed on 100% for a long time as well

Trevor Powell

When in worry, pain, or doubt: run in circles, scream and shout. Or reboot. That works too. :)

Madcowe

and still hasnt gone down

user4704

Loading will almost certainly hit the disk very hard.

user4704

Logging in, loading your user profile, et cetera.

Madcowe

01:39

yea but that's normal... it goes down to 0 in a while

what bugs me is the ram

user4704

What. Is. Running.

user4704

I won't ask again.

Madcowe

apparently some hosts

Trevor Powell

@JoshPetrie: liar. ;)

Madcowe

lol

user4704

01:41

I have no interest in helping people who don't want to be helped and just want to vent.

Jimmy

does win8 comes with powershell?

Madcowe

@JoshPetrie well my OS is in portuguese so I'll try to translate

@Jimmy actually it does, just found it

Trevor Powell

@Jimmy technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh847889.aspx says 'yes'. :)

Madcowe

I also have avg free running...

what do you guys need to know or me to do?

Jimmy

@Mad

could you show us what

ps | sort -desc WS | select-object -first 10

shows

in powershell

Madcowe

01:43

because it's a bit strange to have
CPU: 0% Memory: 68% Disk; 0%

Jimmy

Josh is trying to ask you what you have running but you've been cleverly avoiding a meaningful answer

or just the output for ps

Madcowe

@Jimmy I've tried but...

PS C:\Users\Vitor Costa> ps | sort -desc WS | select-object -first 10

Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) VM(M) CPU(s) Id ProcessName
------- ------ ----- ----- ----- ------ -- -----------
218 16 7796 261588 303 2940 IntelliMem
706 55 102988 121092 609 7,36 5824 powershell
1279 91 33724 80704 369 3,17 1112 explorer
637 34 38652 42192 128 1080 svchost
1506 57 15468 32476 133 616 svchost

this?

Jimmy

hmmm nothing there looks out of the ordinary

Madcowe

then how do you explain memory being on 80% now?

Jimmy

in your performance tab your total physical = 8G and available = 1.5G ?

Madcowe

01:53

6,1/7,9

in usage: 6, available: 1,8

allocated: 6,3/11,9GB

in cache: 1,1GB

Jimmy

what about kernel memory

Madcowe

dammit how do you say this again in english... uhm... "paginated"?

Jimmy

paged

Madcowe

ah right

paged block: 166MB

non paged block: 4,1 GB

@Jimmy where do I see that?

Jimmy

holy smokes

nonpaged 4.1

Madcowe

01:55

what?

Jimmy

lol

you have a bad driver somewhere

Madcowe

you see that from the paged part? xD

what's wrong and what should it be?

Jimmy

NonPaged memory is basically used by your drivers so it's not going to show up on the processes list

and it should be much less than 1GB

Madcowe

oh... damn! so that's the problem right?

Jimmy

so that's where your RAM is going

Madcowe

01:57

(damn because THAT is high xD)

any idea what I should do now?

Jimmy

install better drivers? I dunno. Could be a win8 bug too

Madcowe

@Jimmy yea but... any tips on how to pinpoint the bad one?

Jimmy

hmmm you could do a quick test

and boot up in safe mode

that would load a minimal set

see if that fixes the problem

Madcowe

also... my graphics card is the Nvidia Geforce M650 If I'm not mistaken... it uses that "optimus" system or whatever it is, and I put it to always use the graphics card by default

oh great, let me google how to boot safe mode on win 8 xD

Jimmy

according to this post stackoverflow.com/questions/395569/…

you might be able to get a clue using Procexp

Madcowe

02:00

howtogeek.com/107511/… JESUS CHRIST!

and it says "the easy way"

Jimmy

hmmm

social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w8itproperf/thread/…

according to that, "Intellimem" is the problem

you could also try killing that or removing it from autostart using Autoruns and see if that fixes anything

Madcowe

hm just went down a bit after I closed it

still at 75%... I'll read that page to see if I can find something

Chunk-e-Yamani

02:18

@Madcowe I don't see the need for shift

I mean all I did to boot into safe mode was pressing f8 button, and following exact same steps as shown in that post

Madcowe

@Chunk-e-Yamani havent tried yet, still seeing if I can do it without reboot

Chunk-e-Yamani

@Madcowe it shouldn't be possible without reboot.

Jimmy

well, if you can uninstall or disable intellimem from startup, then you should try a reboot

Chunk-e-Yamani

even with msconfig you need to reboot at least once, since the whole thing is loaded differently in safemode

Jimmy

because if it's doing something silly with kernel memory, it probably hasn't released it if you just whack the Intellimem.exe

Madcowe

02:22

ok, disabled everything except microsoft services (for now) and avg dog or whatever

something tells me that made it worse...

but memory is at 16% so far

Jimmy

made it worse in what way?

Madcowe

@Jimmy a bit laggy and unresponsive at boot, but then again I said to install the steam service

it's getting better now

its just the disk that being used

Jimmy

so I obviously have no idea what Intellimem is or what it does, so hopefully it isn't something terribly important. But anything that allocates 4 gigs of kernel memory sounds like a bug to me.

Madcowe

now it's the disk thats stuck on 99% 0_o

alright... now, like a place with many horses, my computer is stable

just rebooting again

oh yay, thanks you guys :D

maybe this was also why my PC kept overhearing...

ToddersLegrande

I'm running at 38% (3/8GB) with a bunch of apps idly running. CPU 2% and Disk 0%

Yay Windows 8!

Jimmy

02:36

Yay Windows 8 with nonbuggy drivers

@ToddersLegrande do you have an IntelliMem?

ToddersLegrande

hmmmm

Miles Alden

Can anyone help me with understanding the math in finding the normal vector of a plane?

gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/27785/… <----- working off this...

ToddersLegrande

@Jimmy Nope. Running the command without limiting it to the first 10, and sorting by process name shows "Idle" as my only "I" process

Jimmy

Maybe it's vendor-specific crapware

I'm glad it's 2013 and we're still dealing with that

Madcowe

++

anyway, tried to run crysis, just for a test, MUCH smoother

Jimmy

02:42

@MilesAlden what do you need help with

Miles Alden

Well I believe I understand the basic concepts behind it.

but

There are symbols being used here I just don't understand, like N vs |N|

What are those pipes representing? ----^

Jimmy

|V| is the magnitude of a vector V

meaning the length of it

Madcowe

I still find it ironic that intellimem seems a reference to "intelligent memory" (or something like that) and yet it hogs your resources

Miles Alden

okay, so piping means magnitude, which is the same as length.

Jimmy

yes

in one dimension, it reduces to "absolute value"

which you've perhaps seen pipes used as before

Miles Alden

02:44

cool. Is the Delta symbol (inverted triangle) a constant or something else?

Jimmy

delta usually means "difference of"

sometimes a "partial differential of"

which is a related concept

Miles Alden

Am I right in calling the triangle delta?

Jimmy

oh wait

melak47

its flipped

Miles Alden

ya...What's that mean?

Jimmy

02:46

it means partial diff I think

Miles Alden

hrm...

Jimmy

the right side up means incremental diff

I dont' know the name of the upside down triangle

Miles Alden

▽ == partial diff and flipped is inc diff...

I found the character at least...heh.

Jimmy

hmmm well not directly related

i assume originally "delta" is just "Greek D" because difference begins with d

I just looked over that answer

Miles Alden

ya I know. When you say diff are you abbreviating differential? or difference?

Jimmy

02:49

and I'm not sure upsidedowndelta F is actually the normal there

lol both

Miles Alden

hrm....

ha

Jimmy

okay lets start over ignoring the symbol then

because I'm not sure I agree with its use there

melak47

I know that as the laplace operator, but..

yeah, just put the x,y,z into N and that's it :p

Miles Alden

ha okay. "laplace" ...

Jimmy

hmmm

is that actually the Laplace?

man, it's been too long since I've done math :(

melak47

02:51

well, laplace is also written as a non upside down delta, apparently

Miles Alden

Ya it looks like it.

Laplace operator

In mathematics the Laplace operator or Laplacian is a differential operator given by the divergence of the gradient of a function on Euclidean space. It is usually denoted by the symbols ∇·∇, ∇2 or ∆. The Laplacian ∆f(p) of a function f at a point p, up to a constant depending on the dimension, is the rate at which the average value of f over spheres centered at p, deviates from f(p) as the radius of the sphere grows. In a Cartesian coordinate system, the Laplacian is given by sum of second partial derivatives of the function with respect to each independent variable. In other coordina...

melak47

oh, lol. that answer looks like a 1:1 copy from wolfram mathworld

Jimmy

doh

melak47

mathworld.wolfram.com/NormalVector.html

Miles Alden

hahaaa

Jimmy

02:51

laplacian is regular delta

and upsidedowndelta is the sqrt of laplacian?

melak47

pff

Jimmy

okay, anyways I'm still not convinced the normal is either partial differtial or laplacian

melak47

yeah, I'd ignore that...

Jimmy

so yeah, just ignore it and say, "Normal of plane ax+by+cz is (a,b,c)"

melak47

*unnormalized

Jimmy

02:53

yes.

unnormal normal

Miles Alden

I'm listening, just not sure I get it...

but plz keep going.

Jimmy

sigh

Miles Alden

:-)

Jimmy

okay

you know what a "normal vector" is right?

it's a vector that points "directly outwards" from a surface

we also use the word "normal" to mean something else

that a vector has length 1

so the terminology is clashing here

Miles Alden

yep got that.

melak47

02:55

normalizing a vector is equal to scaling it by 1/length(vector), as that will make it of length 1

Jimmy

once we have a "normal vector" (a,b,c) it is considered as not a "normal" vector

so in order for it to be any use at all

we have to normalize it

Miles Alden

ahhhhhhh...(ding)

You're literally the first person to explain that well.

<3

Jimmy

well, @TrevorPowell has a point

Miles Alden

I'd probably get it faster if my math didn't suck.

Trevor Powell

The standard terminology doesn't help make it obvious.

Jimmy

02:56

that un-normal normal vectors are weird

Miles Alden

ha, tks man

Trevor Powell

My comment was jumping ahead of where you were in the explanation. :) Removed to avoid confusion.

Jimmy

yeah, I was trying to point out the two separate meanings of "normal"

since it actually hasn't occurred to me before now that it could be confusing

Trevor Powell

un-normal normal vectors cause all sorts of problems. Especially in lighting calculations, in my experience. I imagine that they'd cause problems for physics as well.

Jimmy

we should just banish the word "normal" from English

it took me a long time to realize what a "normal school" was

Trevor Powell

03:01

It's a school that is perpendicular to the ground, and is one unit high?

Chunk-e-Yamani

@Jimmy is it an school which comes straight out earth?

Trevor Powell

/me ninjas.

Chunk-e-Yamani

/me typing while almost sleeping :P

Trevor Powell

/me has a deep-seated belief that if he keeps using /me in chat, SE will eventually notice and actually implement it.

There should be a meta.chat.stackexchange.com.

For the purpose of posting feature requests for chat.

Jimmy

there isn't even a meta.stackexchange.com

it just redirects to SO

but isn't there a uservoice for SE?

I've never used it but I think that would be where feature requests would go

oh wait, that just points to meta.SO as well

46

Q: /me command for chat

I love the "action" command /me found elsewhere, and think it would be fun to have in the chat. A message like: /me loves the new chat system Would show up as: Josh loves the new chat system Rather than: Josh: loves the new chat system I'm trying to think how it would work with ...

Trevor Powell

03:08

It's actually been heavily discussed.

Yeah, I was just about to link that.

My response is to point to Jeff Atwood: codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/…

Jimmy

What if the organism wants to know whether to use Unity3D or UDK or JQuery or MySQL to make their MMO?

back to upside-down-delta

Del

∇ Del operator,represented bythe nabla symbol Del is a symbol used in mathematics, in particular, in vector calculus, as a vector differential operator, usually represented by the nabla symbol ∇. When applied to a function defined on a one-dimensional domain, it denotes its standard derivative as defined in calculus. When applied to a field (a function defined on a multi-dimensional domain), del may denote the gradient (locally steepest slope) of a scalar field (or sometimes of a vector field, as in the Navier–Stokes equations), the divergence of a vector field, or the curl (ro...

I've never heard it called either "del" or "nabla"

but I guess you could just pronounce it "curl" or "gradient" or whatever you mean by it

melak47

we call "curl" "rot" because German :)

but it would be weird to determine the degree of a vector being rotten in English :p

Jimmy

well, curl is basically a measure point-rotation

to it's not too far off

Trevor Powell

@Jimmy Not a problem. Other organisms will want to close-vote. Thus, the majesty of the circle of life is maintained. ;)

(Fair point!)

Is it bad that I cringe whenever someone uses the word "curl", even when they're not actually talking about the library?

melak47

03:24

@TrevorPowell what's so bad about the library?

Jimmy

it makes him want to curl up into a corner, apparently

Trevor Powell

@melak47 Maybe nothing. I've just had bad experiences with curl-using code written by folks who don't know what they're doing. Seems like curl's interface makes it easy to indetectibly shoot yourself in the foot, and only notice ages later.

Madcowe

btw guys, dont remember well which one gave me the links to those courses, but they are awesome so thanks ;)

Trevor Powell

"don't know what they're doing" == C# programmers who are suddenly forced to program in C++. Folks who aren't familiar with needing to think about memory. Fine programmers in C#, just unfamiliar with the new (old?) language.

Jimmy

this probably describes me. What should we noobs use in lieu of curl?

Trevor Powell

03:28

No clue. But if anyone has a suggestion, I'm interested too.

Jimmy

or is the recommendation just to understand curl better before pulling the trigger

melak47

I haven't used curl much, I wrote a quick and dirty flickr photostream downloader with it and that was pretty straight forward. once I figured out that flickr image titles can contain all sorts of characters not suited for file names :)

Trevor Powell

Spent a few hours trying to track down a memory corruption issue which eventually turned out to have been someone giving curl a request header value of "myStdString.c_str()".

melak47

how did that cause the problem? :S

Jimmy

I was trying to figure that out too. is there an asyncronous call?

I guess myStdString could be a local that goes out of scope before the async call returns

Madcowe

03:37

or is it one of those
"If your code doesn't work: God knows why;
If your code does work: God knows why." kind of things?

melak47

I don't think I've seen any async calls, only callbacks

urgh. my dev folder is 15.5 GB, I think I need to delete a few mingws, boosts and Qts...

Jimmy

Mark and Sweep! check all projects into source control, reformat, reinstall.

melak47

@Jimmy ....hmm?

/dev is where I put libs and sdks and crap

Jimmy

oh, I'm just delineating my Garbage Collection strategy

oh, I don't have a good strategy for libs

lately I've been trying to use a package manager to do dependencies. It's not as much unicorns as I would have hoped

melak47

I need package x? get package x! build package x! done! :D

vs. I need qmake to build Qt? Get qmake! now I need qmake to build qmake....blargh

Jimmy

03:42

well, specifically, for my F# projects I've been using Nuget.

for common libraries the public Nuget repositories have the binaries I need, and I've had some success setting up local Nuget repos

Now I just need to figure out how to update the repo from a build server

user58869

are you using nuget package restore?

Jimmy

yes

although I'm not sure it does exactly what I want

user58869

i've used msbuild on the build server and it works with nuget package restore

Jimmy

oh, I see

I've been removing that metadata

since I assumed i just really needed the .package configuration

Trevor Powell

03:58

Sorry, yes. myStdString went out of scope before the async call returned.

Er, well..

To be specific, it went out of scope after setting the option, but before the function was called which was going to do something with that option.

It was sort of a if (conditional) { curl_setopt("THING", CalculateOptionValue().c_str()); } thing. The std::string was never really in scope; it only existed as a temporary.

melak47

ah

yeah, I suppose that'll do it :)

if I wanted to make curl split a file that is to be downloaded into n chunks that are downloaded simultaneously, how would I go about that? First get the file header to get the file size, then add a bytes=x-y GET parameter for each chunks request?

ToddersLegrande

05:38

Sweet. Got TFS set up with the branches I currently want for my project. Loaded an empty XNA project into it and I'm good to start developing! Tomorrow. :)

Trevor Powell

06:21

@melak47 No idea, I've never done that. Seems plausible though.

Stack Exchange

08:45

0

Q: Can PlayStation Mobile questions be asked here?

PSM is a platform for indie development on the PS Vita and PlayStation Certified Android devices. You code in C# using what it seems to be a heavily modified version of mono, with a rather minimal API to control some of the features in the PS Vita. They also support publishing to their online st...

discussion

BaSha

11:07

Hello world!!...can i replace scene in cocos2d like this?..

[[CCDirector sharedDirector] replaceScene:[[NSString stringWithFormat:@"mainScene%d",selectedLevel] node]];

im getting selectedlevel properly...

Chunk-e-Yamani

13:15

@TrevorPowell need a quick help

melak47

@Chunk-e-Yamani with what?

Chunk-e-Yamani

"struct addrinfo" is not defined on mac

I'm wondering if I need to add any package

user58869

14:29

Has anyone read "Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming" by Jason L. McKesson?

snake5

@Chunk-e-Yamani you need some headers, probably

Chunk-e-Yamani

@snake5 not some, i needed something around 4 headers.

snake5

<_>

crispyfriedchicken

15:02

@user

@user206586 no

user58869

@crispyfriedchicken I'm going to give it a go

user58869

I'm quite worried about the math though, specially the mathematical notation

crispyfriedchicken

the book?

user58869

@crispyfriedchicken yes, I'm going to try and read the book

user58869

Though I might need to read a few others on maths first

user58869

15:07

It's been many years since I was at school and I was average at math back then

crispyfriedchicken

I've used GLFW a few months ago but not too extensively

this book is a good reference

have you ever used opengl before?

user58869

I've never used it, I think I did I did a tutorial a few years ago that resulted in a yellow triangle, that's it

crispyfriedchicken

It's not exactly math heavy unless you need maths for animations

it's more of concept heavy, and your school maths don't really help unless your school math has a lot of vector math

to start with opengl programming, you need a very good foundation on how vectors work

better yet, linear algebra in general

ToddersLegrande

16:22

@JohnMcDonald Awesomium is Awesome.

Thanks for the demo project

Noctrine

@user206586 I started, but haven't completed it yet. Bonus is, if you are having trouble with the concepts in it, he'd probably respond to questions here about it.

Shaun Wild

hello

user58869

@Noctrine If I have any problems I'll post a question, does he ever come into chat?

Noctrine

He dislikes chat :\

@ShaunWild Hi, welcome.

Shaun Wild

@Noctrine Hi, thanks

@Noctrine I'm making a game.

Noctrine

16:37

Cool

Shaun Wild

In Java game programming, what is the need for using BufferStrategy as a pose to a Buffered Image

Noctrine

java-gaming.org/index.php?topic=23945.0 ?

Kikaimaru

16:57

Ha, so finally GrindFest can be just downloaded and run! github.com/Kikaimaru/GrindFest

user58869

what is it?

Kikaimaru

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