Game Development - 2013-06-03 (page 1 of 3)

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2:37 AM

0

Q: Removing sock puppet accounts

Lately we've been experiencing a sock puppet issue. This person has multiple accounts, they create poor answers and poor questions. It appears they're now upvoting poor questions (or it's another sock puppet in the making, or they're trying to confuse their trail by upvoting accounts that aren't ...

5 hours later…

Mikolaj Marcisz

7:18 AM

lol

7:57 AM

Hello everybody

@ToddersLegrande - New image!

2 hours later…

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

9:59 AM

@Yellow, Pfft, old news.

2 hours later…

11:38 AM

@William'MindWorX'Mariager discordgames.com/?p=1954

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Funky. :P

Might be better documented that mine.

I'm looking at it

yeah

It has a form viewer

its pretty nice... I can play with it right out of the box

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Sexy. :D

Yes.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Then you should definitely use that instead.

11:43 AM

Yeah, I am going to use this version. Thanks for the tip.

Its from the maker of Chasm

user image

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Make the sky threshold smaller. You're wasting a lot of cycles making the sky. Remember that it does fractal for the whole area. :)

You can always just add empty space afterwards.

I'm interested in generating smaller sections at a time

What is sky threshold?

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Doesn't stop you from adding some basic optimization. If you know that above a certain y point there will always be air, don't waste time on the whole procedural approach. :)

but yeah, generating that image takes a good 20 seconds

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Divide it with the number of pixels and you'll know how fast each tile is made. :)

12:02 PM

Ugh, I wish I would of found this sooner.

Now I need to refactor significantly.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Hehe

I'd suggest you make something similar to the UML diagram I showed you. It gives full support for anything you can think of.

12:15 PM

Yeah, well it will be worth it.

This land generation blows away what I am currently doing.

I'm going to minimize the caves though, as I don't want them to be very big until you are really deep.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

That's simply a matter of stretching the gradient used to pick caves. :)

ah i see.

12:35 PM

Hey @Jon, still upsidedown I see.

@BillyVonCrampFart tips hat

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

:D

i hate "windows" as a trade name. makes it hard to search for anything on google pertaining to mac os x windows

@William'MindWorX'Mariager It currently seems to only generate values 1.0 or 0.0

ToddersLegrande

@Blue yessir!

12:51 PM

I'm doing a Combiner.Get(x,y) -- and this returns 1 or 0 all the time. What gives?

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

I assume that's the value range it gives you?

What else are you using? The fractals generate values in that region I think.

Yeah, well I was expecting a wider range of values, ehehe

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Just multiply by whatever range you want? :P

Math.Floor(Combiner.Get(x,y)*255)

Presto!

No I don't think you get what I mean

There are only two values returned in the entire generator.. 1 or 0

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Oh. There's a select function somewhere.

@Jon, accidentalnoise.sourceforge.net/implicit.html#Select

12:56 PM

argh looking at some source... it's about 75% K&R, 25% allman bracing, and it's inconsistent which is where :(

hiya

@William'MindWorX'Mariager Hmmm, strangely I changed the HIGH/LOW values of the select to 0,10

Now the .GET function returns 0 or 10

:/

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Yup

The select function won't give you a gradient value.

This is confusing at hell.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Not once you understand what's going on.

1:02 PM

Hmmm, so what am I suppose to use to get the gradient of all my things ?

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Well, you need to remove the select, that's for sure. :P

Try and build up a chain from the bottom up and see what each action does.

Then you see what's happening.

The SELECT seems to be merging a bunch of fractals together.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

It sets a value based on the base value.

So like, if the value is below 0.5 it'll be 0 and if it's above 0.5 it's 1.

Take a look at the gist link I gave you. :) I'm generating terrain with multiple types.

i lost the link

well, the link is at home

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

gist.github.com/anonymous/5694573

1:08 PM

I'm just not understanding how you are suppose to merge two fractals while retaining the height data.

this is really strange.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Hehe

Ugh, so what object do you use to get your height data then?

ok i see what is going on with chaining better now, i'll keep playing with this beast.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

Yeah, like I said, one step at a time.

ToddersLegrande

1:23 PM

Wow.

"We noticed you haven't been reading this weekly email, so to keep your inbox tidy, we've unsubscribed you. We hope this suits you better."

I'm impressed

(LinkedIn newsletter of some sort btw)

holy moley

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

I've seen that too.

I also saw one that had me reconfirm my subscription.

ToddersLegrande

First time I've heard of such a thing

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

user image

Basic inventory. :D

I need to get it setup as a grid instead.

disturbing music on right now: youtube.com/watch?v=wfQ_PAIw5S8

1:36 PM

sup folks

@ToddersLegrande why can't they already understand I don't want to join their site then? :(

they keep sending me mails over and over telling me there are others who want to have me in their friends list

the matchmaker has noticed I have 50% win rate on ARAM games, so they're getting much harder now.

@Almo hoo boy

ToddersLegrande

@Gajoo generally that means a REAL LIVE person has specifically requested that they be linked to you, personally.

It's like when Facebook apps ask you to invite your friends to use the app as well

If you join the site you can probably turn off the emails. Or, since that kind of defeats the purpose, just set up an email rule to throw their emails into your junk box.

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

1:51 PM

Seriously. I can't find any control that displays items similar to the icon view in folders.

Hmm

Maybe I found something.

FFS.

?

@StackExchange This.

@ToddersLegrande that's what I did

2:07 PM

Hey @Shotty

@Gajoo

@Blue howdy

William 'MindWorX' Mariager

user image

Much better. :D

@William'MindWorX'Mariager Now fix those non-smooth rounded corners. Their shading is all off.

The right one contains two lines; the left one contains only one.

2:23 PM

@William'MindWorX'Mariager much better

ToddersLegrande

Rounded corners are for losers. Being square is in.

3

ToddersLegrande

@ShotgunNinja Nice

2:43 PM

http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/56730/is-the-manhattan-distance-between-two-points-always-consistent

Is it just me, or the grid in the answer looks rotated CW a bit?

Just you.

not just you

looks rotated to me. cool optical illusion

Thanks, I almost thought I have to stop drinking.

yeah man youtube.com/watch?v=M7emQ-9vaMY

Webdesigner Depot ‏@DesignerDepot
Windows is a jQuery plugin for creating full-screen scrolling windows http://depot.ly/lDIhF

for a second there I thought Microsoft Windows was a jQuery plugin

2:49 PM

I think it is.

yeah you're right

only Windows 8

life is hard when you want to use Steam with my internet connection :(

encountered a bug in GTA SA which forced me to close the game

then Steam wouldn't start it again, thinking it's already running

couldn't close Steam either so I end tasked it

Hrm.

now it won't log me in again

2:51 PM

Crap, can't summon them here.

I'll wait until my traffic resets

actually it did log me in once but it said "NO CONNECTION"

Run another game in Steam next time @AlexM. , it can sort it out sometimes.

the problem is I can't login atm

Ah

let me try again

there's this other issue when it'd keep on saying "Checking for Steam games updates..." every time I'd try to start a game

deleting ClientRegistry.blob from inside the thing's folder usually works

but this forces it to do extra stuff w/ the network when logging in again

and might screw things up with my never-properly-working conn.

I guess Valve doesn't care about us 10KB/s guys anymore :(

also holy crap there's a lot of people here today :O

2:56 PM

This bight seem obvious but is your Steam setup to your connection speed properly?

@Blue I think so, I'll take a look

now it's stuck on logging in which is normal, because it takes some time to finish

might just work

woot, it logged me in

yeah, it's set on lowest possible speed

I passed at geometry :D

7/10 in the end

not bad for 20 mins of studying lol <3

ToddersLegrande

I just accidentally learned how to do this - windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/…

campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body

ToddersLegrande

I was very confused when it happened since I didn't know it existed

@ToddersLegrande barf, non-scrolling header?

ToddersLegrande

3:07 PM

I was referring to the content of the page actually (shaking a window)

@ToddersLegrande I know, I just had to say something about that though.

ToddersLegrande

But to add my two cents I really don't mind a non scrolling header. Only complaint being that it takes up real estate but given the right context it can work :P

At least the massive footer isn't glued at the bottom of the screen :P

@William'MindWorX'Mariager Hey, I don't get how to query for infinite space.

@William'MindWorX'Mariager I created a Gradient fractal, and when I loop through the values, it resets after a whiel on the Y axis.

Nevermind, my code was messed up... works now

So essentially, the theoretical maximum number of tiles here is Double.MaxValue

ToddersLegrande

3:24 PM

Played Mario RPG Friday and Saturday. 1 star to go. :D

Gotta get on that cloud bus and float on over to Bowsers Keep.

Ohhhh

I started playing it again too, on SNES :D

ToddersLegrande

Nice. I was using the Wii VC

Next Up, Paper Mario :D

2

haha, yeah, I had forgotten just how good that game was. I died a lot at first.

Granted.. my 5 yo was playing it along with me, and ended up dying a lot

ToddersLegrande

I can't super jump to save my life. I miraculously got 24 super jumps once but I generally can't get higher than 13 or 16 or so

I also got this Zelda hacked rom, the entire game is remade, it is pretty cool.

timing is everything ;)

3:33 PM

Zelda hacked rom? What exactly was hacked about it?

@Jon?

Everything. It is called Zelda Parallel worlds

Been playing it with my son

It is similar to the original, but new everything.

zelda.wikia.com/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Parallel_Worlds

ToddersLegrande

Speaking of Zelda... I want to get Oracle of Ages and Seasons for the 3DS now that they are out

I also think I better buy Wind Waker and play that on the Wii

Before I do either of those I should really finish Skyward Sword though

I rebought wind waker last year

I paid 60$ for it... it was impossible to find

Worst endgame ever for a zelda game though.

sail the seas for 20+ real hours looking for triforce chards... ugh.

@Jon Yeah, that part was BS

Wind Waker was seriously annoying

3:43 PM

You had to get 8 Triforce Charts -- Translate them for 400 rupees a piece... Then find the triforce pieces based on the translated charts.

music thing to cast spells was worthless

bad design mistakes

on several of the levels

I literally watched TV and checked back to see if I was at my destination or not while sailing

8 x 400 = 3200 rupees.... So you needed to get treasure to pay for the translations too..

TEDIOUSITY

Yeah, and then when you got back, you were game over, because a shark knocked you out of your boat.

they had to make the game long somehow

back then it wasn't that possible to stick three hours of cutscenes in the game

ToddersLegrande

But... I've heard it was sooo goooood :(

well the first final fantasy was groundbreaking for its time

3:45 PM

Sailing time aside, the game is great.

Take sailing time out of the game, you have it beat in 20 hours.

Sailing takes like 40 hours of your life away.

but right now it's a rudimentary 2D RPG that can be achieved with any RPG Maker Studio crap

mmmmhmm.. the first final fantasy was a true adventure

I enjoyed it

it made me stick to the GBA emulator for a long time

What's that? a flying ship? good lord this is amazing!

but it's still rudimentary

3:47 PM

@Jon Speedruns have it down to like 5-7 hours.

:O

I do remember watching a WW speedrun

Crazy how speedrunners can take advantage of obscure bugs to beat games quickly.

Ocarina of time was beat in like 20 minutes or something.

take a look at that bot that's learning to play Super Mario Bros

it takes advantage of glitches when killing enemies and jumping

Yeah, I LOVE NES BOTS. I think they are awesome.

ToddersLegrande

Mario 64 speed runs (70 and 120 star) are amazing

There is also a glitch in Link to the Past, you can beat the game in no time by falling under the world.

Oh and the recently discovered Super Mario World Glitch

You can beat the game without leaving the first world.

ToddersLegrande

3:50 PM

Which one?

Off to google I go

i'll find it

@ToddersLegrande have you seen a 0-star Mario 64 speedrun?

I know one where

you have to go to the second world

no

thats not the one sorry

ToddersLegrande

3:52 PM

@DanHulme not yet... I've been watching live runs though. Haven't bothered with old youtube vids

I can't find it..

@Almo For an EVE Online player this is natural practice :P

deanyd.net/smw/index.php?title=Orb

That's the freakest one I've ever seen

3:54 PM

cool thx

EVE-Online acknowledges this, and gives you an auto-pilot.

Mario sure found a lot of success in the US

in this part of Europe, barely anyone knows who Yoshi is

a character that eats mushrooms and grows? how could that not be a hit?

@Jon I'm calling bollocks on that - Not without serious hacks / glitches

@Blue It would be impossible to do without emulators/trainers

3:55 PM

lots of speed runs depend on glitches or design errors of some sort. Check Quake 1 done quick

Quake 1 speedrun was the first speedrun I had ever seen

I knew then, that I sucked at quake 1

I <3 Q1

@AlexM. Even my mum knows who Yoshi is. so proud

fast FPS games like Q1 are interesting for me

My mom used to play Super Maria Sisters with me on the C64

3:57 PM

it's as if I have some sort of charge bar IRL

I keep on playing faster and faster until I enter some sort of trance when I go full crazy and rocket jump all the place

@Jon calling bs

LOL, why?

it takes just a single stop to ruin the thing and get the charge bar at 0

@Jon If you can find a link to some picture or evidence of Super Maria Sisters for the C64, then I will believe you.

Until then, I am disinclined to do so.

@Shotgun LOL, are you serious? It was a very popular game.

3:58 PM

The Great Giana Sisters

The Great Giana Sisters is a 1987 platform game developed by Time Warp Productions and published by Rainbow Arts. Development and release The Great Giana Sisters was released on Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, MSX2, and Commodore 64. The Commodore 64 version was programmed by Armin Gessert, with graphics by Manfred Trenz and a soundtrack composed by Chris Hülsbeck. A ZX Spectrum version was planned and even reviewed by gaming magazines prior to its planned release, but was cancelled due to the legal pressures the game suffered. The license is currently held by Black Forest Games, who have ...

Also, you share a name with JonTron.

gianna sisters

oops

it's giana sisters

Maria sisters sounds better.

there's either a sequel or remake on GoG.com

it's in 2.5D

gog.com/gamecard/giana_sisters_twisted_dreams

3:59 PM

Yeah, the remake looks good.

A dual world that morphs at your command, affecting gameplay, graphics and music.
Features a two-sided retro/metal soundtrack by Chris Huelsbeck and Machinae Supremacy.
Challenging yet fair platforming with tight controls and fast-paced gameplay.

The original game for C64 was a rip off of mario brothers, i seem to recall there was legal action taken

the only Mario everyone in my country played is Super Mario Bros

on a counterfeit SNES

test

@AlexM. wait, EVERYONE in your country played on ONE counterfeit SNES?

Where do you live?

4:02 PM

on counterfeit SNESes*

better now? :D

Alexland

the good old days of the Terminator consoles <3

and those keyboard abominations

"Educative PC Video Game"

lol

Terminator 2 (console)

Terminator 2 (; real console name Super Design Ending-Man BS-500 AS) was a video game console sold in Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, India and Hungary (where it was known as Sárgakazettás nintendo - Nintendo with yellow cartridges). It was also sold in Spain, and in Italy, with the name "top consolle". It was a hardware clone of the Nintendo Famicom. Hardware {| class="wikitable" border="1" |- | Processor |colspan="2" | 8-bit MOS 6502 1.79 MHz |- |rowspan=4| Video | Clock | 5.37 MHz |- | Resolution | 256 x 240 |- | Color Palette | 2...

Beasts and Bumpkins, fucking loved that game

Every kid wants that new "Educative" PC video game. haha.

And Donkey Kong Coutnry

4:04 PM

there was this basketball game I used to play

One of my top ten, Maniac mansion.

really loved it, never won a single match

there were real teams in it I think, can't remember

Best basketball game on commodore = Street Sports Basketball

another bball game I used to play was allowing you to fight the players in the other team

forgot this one's name too

user4704

Hey @Noctrine

4:10 PM

Bronx Basketball Battles

@Jon nope, but I found a screenshot and the name of the other basketball game

ultimate basketball for the NES

user image

I just made that name up.

lol, the commodore64 basketball game looks better than that.

Super Design Ending-Man BS-500 AS

Bullshit-500 AgeSex

@AlexM. precisely what I thought

@JoshPetrie Hey

user4704

4:17 PM

As a diamond moderator, do you have access to any IP-based user lookup tools?

Yes, as for that issue the SO team is already on it.

For now, they just want everyone to keep flagging, and not engage with them directly

user4704

Yeah that's what I've been trying to do.

user4704

I have noticed, however that on the same day -- often within a few hours -- that the user in question comes back, somebody also goes and vandalizes wiki pages related to me on the GW2 wiki, so I'm wondering if they are related

user4704

So I have two sets of IP addresses, if that would be useful information for you.

So Josh, I actually had a question for you being my go-to help me not do something terribly bad with this psuedo-mmo development stuff.

user4704

4:29 PM

Sup?

WOOHOO 1000 REP!

Do you know anyone who does security auditing? This is still my very first time writing any kind of client/server architecture this extensive, and knowing that I've probably made some major glaring issues bothers me.

And, it being security, makes me think this isn't the kind of "Fix it in Beta" thing.

user4704

No. :( We had a guy who was really good at it who did an internal review of a bunch of our code and messages, but he left

user4704

He's at Valve now. I don't know of any external companies that do it.

user4704

But one thing you can do easily enough is fuzz all your messages by injecting random bytes into them, and setup some tests that reply sequences of messages over and over and over, looking for crashes

user4704

4:30 PM

It's not fool-proof, but it helps

user4704

And log everything

5

user4704

You'll never ship without exploits in the system, so you'll want to be able to reconstruct enough stuff as the game is live so you can figure out what's going on and how it might be happening.

I've got the logging everything bit down, at some point I'll prolly have to make an analytics system for processing everything.

I was concerned that people may find exploits and then use them to their advantage when preparing for tournaments and stuff, so all of the major events that happen to their character / pets I keep track of

With the plan that, when we actually get to that point, I'll have a tool that can regenerate their pet

user4704

Yeah. That's actually an easier problem to solve since you can put lots of observation and guards around character-modification operations.

user4704

Other things that are more subtle are economic imbalances.

4:34 PM

Like the guys on Eve that made a worthless item the most expensive item in the game :p

user4704

So if you have accidentally created an economy loop where you can, for example, buy a bunch of items, decompose them into crafting materials, and those crafting materials sell at a vendor for more than the original item

Or, all of eve.

Will definitely have to make a note to check that kind of stuff when crafting because a thing

user4704

That's harder to statically validate because the loop could be several levels deep, so if you log all your economy events you can look for spikes in the frequently of patterns which might indicate people have discovered that doing a specific loop is very profitible

All? Like, everything being purchased, sold, and collected in the game world as a whole?

user4704

Every time value is transferred -- vendor transactions, item decompositions or transmutations, player trades, etc

user4704

4:37 PM

This also makes it hard for players to launder gold they've purchased from RMT vendors, as a nice side-effect

Oh, ok. So it's really looking for ways that have figured out to game things by moving things around.

user4704

You can track the gold and then delete the value

I never really thought about the RMT side of things, so that brings me two more questions.

How do you guys effectively fight chargebacks against those type of accounts? Wouldn't they in most cases, when you catch them, just issue a chargeback against you?

Or is that the benefit of deleting the value?

user4704

Well deleting the value is to help your in-game economy.

user4704

chargebacks suck, but in the case of RMT sellers its a player buying gold from a third party, so the chargeback would be the seller's problem

user4704

4:46 PM

(of course a player could still issue a chargeback to refund their purchase, if you don't have a return policy, but that's an unrelated issue)

user4704

(a chargeback from a player for that player's account should, of course, disable the player's account)

user4704

Fraudulent credit cards are a bigger problem, and our billing endpoint has support for dealing with that. There are systems like kount.com you can employ

user4704

if you need to

Yeah, that's what I was getting at.

And that was the second part

Is there anything I can check against

sweet

user4704

no idea how expensive that thing is

user4704

4:50 PM

but i'm sure there are other options

Probably a lot, it'd just be a cost/benefit decision that would have to be made at some point. From what I know of finance products, they are rarely (indie)-cheap

user4704

Yeah.

user4704

It's possible whatever small-business CC processor or whatever you're using has a similar service though

5:49 PM

Hello, I'm trying to create a simple gui library for the first time and was wandering if someone could help me with a conceptual problem I'm having.

I'm writing the gui in C++ ...I have a GuiElement base class and a window class which can contain any other GuiElements

If I'm not mistaken, usually these classes have a draw member function, but it sounds stupid to me to have the class draw itself

plus, I'd like to have different rendering methods i.e. OpenGL, software renderer etc.

Is there any way to implement a draw function without breaking the class encapsulation?

why wouldn't a class draw itself?

it just doesn't seem right to have the class 'know' about how rendering is done

I would prefer to separate the logic

Hmmm.. I have all my classes draw themselves.

If a class knows how to draw itself, and you later change how it draws itself, you know exactly where to look for its draw code

if the draw code is somewhere else...

Not sure how you would write code that can draw anything.

5:57 PM

So I recommend getting used to classes drawing themselves, unless I'm missing something.

Consider a Sprite object. Why wouldn't that sprite draw itself?

Anyways, I'm outta here for now. later coders

Pass in a handle to the graphics context into the Sprite class' draw method, and have it use that handle to draw itself.

Almo, it's just nice if you can separate the logic so that you can concentrate on the rendering implementation separately. It also gives more flexibility

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Jun '133

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