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Say I'm a programmer who has done his own sprites or 3d models which would fall into programmer-ish kind of art. What steps can I take in order to improve or replace my own art?
Total newbie question, but what language was used by blizzard to create the Starcraft II gameplay? I've been playing it for the last couple of days, and I'm constantly astonished by the complexity and the performance of the game. Is it an in-house language, or do they use some flavour of a known language?
After I have been through more intensive C++ studies, I am thinking of giving it a start in my practices of computer game programming. Therefore, I think 2D knowledge (processing images, animating frames, etc.) would be a good place to start. However, I don't seem to find many articles on 2D (mostly 3D), and if found o...
I am not asking the theory of UI design, or how to do one, I am asking for examples and resources, like... How to draw this fiddly stuff, or how to code another circular thing, or a gallery of game menus, etc... I am seeking myself specifically sci-fi stuff, but no problem putting other stuff, references are never enou...
What are some good examples of procedural or screen-space pixel shader effects? No code is necessary; I'm just looking for inspiration. In particular, I'm looking for effects that are not dependent on geometry or the rest of the scene (so they would look okay rendered alone on a quad) and are not based on image process...
Ok so I have a idea for a neat GPU driven curve renderer, and I realised that the vertex shader can be hardwired to generate points of the curve segment (to be rendered as a line strip) without sending any vertex positions - gl_Position could be set completely procedurally. That said I'd still need to specify a "t" val...
As far as I can tell, most games have some sort of "game state system" which switches between the different game states; these might be things like "Intro", "MainMenu", "CharacterSelect", "Loading", and "Game". On the one hand, it totally makes sense to separate these into a state system. After all, they are disparate ...
Possible Duplicate: New to creating AI - where to start? i have been programming 2-3 games till now. but i have not used ai in any of them...so can u please suggest good ebooks or net articles or tutorials on game ai...problems featuring shortest path, pathfinding etc... Thankyou
In the light of DRY, it seems desirable to store a collection of related game objects in one container only. However, one might need sub-collections of these objects in various contexts. It might be sensible store these specific sub-sets in specific more suitable containers. This increases the effort to track objects...
I am having some trouble making bounding boxes for my models I am using within XNA 4.0. The way it was done in XNA 3.1 seems to be obsolete as you can no longer access parameters that were used before in XNA 3.1. Has anyone got any decent links I have been looking around the net for a while now and all I am finding is ...
With the pending release of MonoDroid we have decided to revisit MonoTouch as a possible alternative to gearing up some Objective-C skills. I was wondering if anyone had any experience and would share the gotchas before everyone else hits them. Set to CW, one hurdle per answer please. MonoTouch allows C# development ...
If I say I have a hierarchal entity framework, rather than a component model. Something like: (Yes, this is made up) Weapon->Gun->AutomaticGun->MP44 Or, more of a classical example: Entity->MovableEntity->Enemy->WalkingEnemy How far would you split up the source/header files for readability and organization? Is it ...
Most 2D screen/bitmap coordinate systems have the positive Y axis pointing down (with the the origin in the upper left corner). This is counter to how most people think geometrically with the positive Y axis pointing up (with the origin in the center). How do most games manage the two different 2D coordinate systems?...
How can I tell if a glut window has focus? Im using c#/tao, Ill use p/invokes if necessary. Basically I want to ignore input if it doesn't have focus.
What are some good approaches to procedurally generating an infinite 2d level? The level could be constrained in either dimension but not necessarily. The approach that makes most sense to me so far is using a grid-based radius. e.g. divide the play area into a grid with squares of a certain size and then load X square...
Has anyone used the Procedural CityEngine to generate levels in real-time? It seems to get used in production or pre-production due to its sizable overhead, but has anyone tweaked it to run in real-time either in a test or in a game? Edit: Please include the person or group who did this, the game or test it was used in...
I am working on a game, and the xml files are getting to be a few megs, and the final game might have a hundred megs of uncompressed xml. If I zip the xml files up I can get something that is about 3 megabytes to be under 100kb which shows that compressing the files will yield good results. How can I get the XML files ...
When you start a new game project, what do you do first? How do you begin? What gives you the best head start toward completing the project rather than burning out before it gets anywhere? Mods please help with the tags... I have no clue how to categorize this... :)
Following on from my previous question: I have the ball quite realistically bouncing from surfaces it hits. Now I'd like to make it spin from the friction of the hit. Showing this is simple enough: I rotate the ball by its angular velocity every tick and apply the same rotation when it's rendered. When a ball hits a wa...
What tools, patterns, or best practices would you recommend to implement the quest mechanics given below listed requirements? I am talking about software architecture (how generic should you be) and choices for object wiring, event subscription, and representation of conditions. Mentioning of tools / libraries you have...
When multiple collisions occur between balls, sometimes they stick together. Mostly in cases of either of the balls having high velocity.
I have the following problem: My game supports multiple powers, that you can use when you want, or even mix them, I currently assigned them to the numbers on the top of the keyboard. After so much time playtesting, I ended developing high skills in playing my own game, and several of my new tactics involve mixing power...
I'm playing with XNA for a game project of myself, I had previous exposure to OpenGL and worked a bit with Ogre, so I'm trying to get the same concepts working on XNA. Specifically I'm trying to add to XNA a scene manager to handle hierarchical transforms, frustum (maybe even occlusion) culling and transparency object...
Possible Duplicate: two balls stick together in a pool game? I have problems in circle circle collisions in a pool ball game.. The game has problems like the circles (or balls) stick together: they overlap after collision. I tried changing the directions after collisions and it works well, but when I arrange the bal...
So: top-down game, my enemies chase the player, when they get within a certain distance they stand still and fire. If they're all coming from the same direction they all end up standing in the same spot (i.e. standing "within" each other), as I'm not currently doing collision detection between enemies - they are free t...
I know that's it's easy to make buttons that highlight when you move your mouse over them, but when it comes to sub-menus I'm kinda stuck. Anyone got some tips on the best way to have a main menu with sub-menus? (like Singleplayer -> Load Save -> Save 1-5? -> Start game etc.)
I am interested in answers for any mobile device but I am mainly considering the iPhone and devices that run Java. I am developing a game that relies heavily on a particle physics engine for core gameplay (not just animation effects) and have been developing/testing on a PC up to now with the intention of porting it to...
The question came randomly and I think it will really help to know from everyone's experience. It all started from this article on gamedev.net http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/x64ErrCol/ and then I saw a couple of more tweets embracing the 64-bit architectures. So to you what is today's target plat...
First of all, I think I roughly know how a scene graph works. Please correct me if I'm wrong. It is a tree based structure, with each branch/leaf being a node. It means you can better organise children, like tyres on a car or something. I want to use a simple version of it, which makes me think matrices, but the graphi...
Software occlusion culling is often expensive, especially for smaller and older devices. Is frustum culling alone adequate on systems that can optimally display 10k triangles at most? If not, are there any relatively fast techniques for determining which objects (both moving and static) occlude others?
So I have seen many 3D tutorials creating heightmaps and big landscapes but I am hoping there is something simple that i can throw together. If I was to do something doom/wolfenstien-like, do i just draw a cube and texture it? I guess my question is, How should i go about creating a very simple box-like room?
Is there a standard name for the (fairly dumb) AI that most MMOs use where you 'aggro' a monster/mob when you are within a certain radius of it, and the monster chases your character for a set amount of time or distance when you attempt to run away?
I want objects to move between two physics simulations through a "window" and collide with those from both simulations in case they intersect the window plane. The coordinate systems of the simulations don't have the same origin and may have a different orientation. Wrapping a simulation to itself isn't necessary, but ...
Coming up with an appropriate one-liner question was so hard I wrote the body before the header... So we're a team of 4 developers; two designers, two coders to put it simply (naturally we don't tie ourselves up with labels). We've come up with a great game design together, and we're prepared to spend a great bulk of o...
I'm trying to figure out a good formula for determining a hit when the player attacks an enemy in a Roguelike. I'd like to come up with something simplistic but, still true to the way it's done in D&D or popular Roguelikes like AngBand or NetHack. What I have so far is adding the differences between player and enemy at...
I have a file containing mesh data whose blocks seem to start with DWORDS like: 0x1 0x1 0x3100026f 0x1 0x30000112 or 0x1 0x1 0x310007b2 0x1 0x30000112 or 0x10000006 0x3 0x310001f6 0x310001f6 0x310001f6 They don't look like .x binaries. Any other ideas? UPDATE: Here's more: 00000001 00000001 3100026F 00000001 30000112 0...
What game engine does the iphone game Mega Jump use? Im guessing it's unity 3d but it could be anything.
Within the scope of developing games in C++, what are your preferred patterns in regard to use of pointers (be it none, raw, scoped, shared, or otherwise in between smart and dumb)? You might consider object ownership ease of use copy policy overhead cyclic references target platform use with containers
You have an entity A that you want to turn towards another entity B. One way to determine the direction to turn is to compute the cross-product of the direction vector of A with the vector from AB. If the value of z is positive, then you turn right. If the value of z is negative, you turn left. Is this the only way...
The lengthy mission statement from its website states: The lack of game-specific research has prevented many in the academic community from embracing game development as a serious field of study. The Journal of Game Development (JOGD), however, provides a much-needed, peer-reviewed, medium of communication and the rai...
I am trying to write a match-three puzzle game like 'call of Atlantis' myself. The most important algorithm is to find out all possible match-three possibilities. Is there any open source projects that can be referenced? Or any keywords to the algorithm? I am trying to look for a faster algorithm to calculate all possi...
What are good ways to reconcile a desire to allow the user to have freedom of choice and have their choices affect the world, with the desire to be able to have a story without the player 'ruining' it?
what is the most used method or algorithm for saving game state (profiles), databases text files how there encryption goes and things related. I have seen Caesar IV used mySQL. any suggestions.
I need to add a scrolling background to a my game, the image is 512x512px. It's for a car game with two way traffic and I want to be able to cross over to the opposite side and drive against the traffic too. The game is in portrait mode and I use cocos2d. How can I make this in the best possible way?
The set linear velocity doesnt affect a sprite when written inside an event handler.. but if i call setlinear velocity inside the main constructor..ie if the setlinearvelocity is called at the beginning of game code ..it moves..but not when i call it within a event handler..either keypress or mouse,it doesnt work? Plea...
I'm still implementing my scene graph (see this question). Now, I wonder if a spatial representation such as a Kd-Tree or Octree to do View Frustum Culling (VFC) only makes sense with static geometry. The reason for my doubt is that usually dynamic geometry is a small part of the scene, while static geometry can be ver...
I'm working on a 2D sprite-based strategy-type game (ok, full disclosure: it's a tower defense game), and I'm having a problem getting the actors to behave correctly when I move the camera. I've got a Camera class, which contains data and methods for moving the camera and exposing its' current position. When I draw th...
Ok so I have a big list of all my entities which I loop through and update. In AS3 I can store this as an Array (dynamic length, untyped), a Vector (typed) or a linked list (not native). At the moment I'm using Array but I plan to change to Vector or linked list if it is faster. Anyway, my question, when an Entity is d...
I have been a code in full convertion mods for the source engine, but now im mostly coding C# applications. That provide utilties for games, during this proccess i have often wanted the ability to do a overlay that shows ingame. During my research i found out it seems i would need one "hook" for eatch version of major ...
I recently start learning Unity3D and following VTC's video tutorials and others tutorial, so far i've found it very easy to work it and to create stuff, i havent got to the part where i need to script anything YET. While i still havent hit the scripting part yet i did like to ask: Do i really need to script anything ...
What are some good resources regarding procedural content generation in the context of dungeon generation? Closest article I could find was Algorithm for generating a 2d maze, which isn't quite what I'm looking for. Features, such as rooms and connected hallways, are ideal. Thanks!
I'm working on a game I intend to sell, and I want to use this font. The license says: "You may NOT copy or distribute the font outside of the licensed household, company, school or institution. Please ask external contacts who want to use the font to purchase their own license at www.CheapProFonts.com." Howeve...
Which combination of testing tools do you feel is best? Given the framework / library of your choice you might consider: suitability for TDD ease of use / productivity dealing with mock objects setup with continuous integration error reporting Note: While this is potentially a generic question like the one on SO I w...
What are the hot postions which are hard to get in game industry? Client/Server/Game Engine/Networking and database or else?
What sort of tools/processes are used for setting up hitboxes and make them move/resize/appear/disappear to match the character animations? I'm working in 2d, so attaching collision volumes to the character in a modeling program are no good for this case :).
I need to display text in my game, who doesn't. I had originally thought that I could just statically render all the text I would need to images and use those. I'm starting to think that is a bad idea. I figure I'll have to internationalize it in the future, and the game has score counters and such which cannot be st...
Basically, how I profile a game that have multithreading and script interpreter? (Lua in my case) I have no idea of where to look for that. Also it would be nice to be able to profile code that resemble somehow the release code, my "debug" binary is about 12 times bigger... EDIT: My game was made with C++, compiled wit...
I'm working on a top-down shooter akin to DoDonPachi, Ikaruga, etc. The camera movement through the world is handled automatically with the player able to move inside of the camera's visible region. Along the way, enemies are scripted to spawn at particular points along the path. While this sounds straightforward, I co...
What tool do you use to convert ttf fonts to bitmap fonts? Following is a list of features I'm looking for. I'd be happy with any tool really, but one that had these features would be better. outputs power-of-2 texture atlas parsible config file (so I don't have to use their rendering library) output kerning informat...
For example, suppose my code can determine that upstream bandwidth is unusually limited. And suppose I'm using a fully-connected mesh topology combined with a UDP-like protocol for voice chat. Is there an established way to reduce the risk of packet loss so that the voice playback will either be solid or muted, but n...
Per this excellent question, and excellent answers, I am attempting to write a breakout clone. Regarding the collision detection against the walls, does XNA provide a set of helper methods/objects to determine which side of the rectangle was hit? I'd like to use the Vector2.Reflect method to properly create a new veloc...
I have a code segment in which I use hitTest() a couple of times but at a particular section the hitTest stops working. It doesn't test the collision of body a and body b. I tried using _level0.exit.hitTest(ourcar._x,ourcar._y,true), along with exit.hitTest(ourcar._x,ourcar._y,true), but both don't work. Why?
I want to learn to develop 3D and 2D graphics with either OpenGL or DirectX. I chose OpenGL as it's being used in webGL and works cross-platform. I already know .NET well, and the C# language just fits my style very well and I feel secure with it. However, I want to develop a game that works on Windows and Linux. Is th...
i am a game programmer and i use actionscript to do all my collision checking, boundary checking etc...but recently i noticed there are things called "physics engines" that help me concentrate more on game making rather than physics making. so i would like to know more. i heard there are few engines called "box2dflash"...
I saw a review of the GeForce GTX 460 graphics card. It has 56 texture units. I'm not that knowledgeable about graphics effects. But, the ones I know use around 3 or 4 texture units. In this graphics card case, that would leave a lot of texture units idle. How are these graphics cards with so many texture units us...
I'm looking for some sort of list with most common game resolutions my game should support. Regards!
I'm currently working on my master's thesis about LOD and mesh simplification, and I've been reading many academic papers and articles about the subject. However, I can't find enough information about how LOD is being used in modern games. I know many games use some sort of dynamic LOD for terrain, but what about elsew...
What are the pros and cons of using Exceptions in C++ in relation to game development. Google style guide says that they don't use Exceptions for a variety of reasons. Are the same reasons pertinent towards game development? We do not use C++ exceptions... - google-styleguide.googlecode.com Some issues to think ab...
I know that having global variables or singleton classes creates cases that can be difficult to test/manage and I have been busted in using those patterns in code but often times you gotta ship. So are there cases where global variables or singletons are actually useful in game development?
Are there any shoot-em-ups in which the enemies actually evolve as a response to their relative success against the player? By evolve, I mean that each enemy has some genetic information encoding their behaviour. Enemies which last longer or do more damage are allowed to mix their genes to create new enemies. This way ...
I've got a fixed solution space defined by a minimum and maximum float which has no divisible slice. You then have 0..N Gaussian distribution probability sets which I need to combine. In the end I neeed Method to define probability set with a numeric range (not sliceable) and 0..N Gaussian functions A function which c...
I'm getting some artifacts when I try to use a colour attachment on an FBO. I'm saving my first pass as a texture, then passing it as an input to an anti-aliasing shader. The result is, as below, some weird noise and an enforced black background. The AA is applied fine. GL.BindFramebuffer(FramebufferTarget.Framebuffer...
Something I've often wondered about is the "bind pose". The bind pose for human skeletons is one where their legs are straight, and their arms are perpendicular to their body: My question is: why? Is such a pose easier for the animators to work with, or the programmers, or both? As far as I understand the math, the bi...
As a semi FAQ question attempt : Where can you find people to work with you on a project? Particularly programmers. One thing that is obvious is that all programmers have a project (or twenty), and the chances of a programmer just hanging around looking for something to do is a lot less likely than if it were an artis...
The examples are quite challenging to grasp if you are still getting your head around other things, so the simplest example would be great. Is there a simpler example?
I have a basic character controller set up for a 2D platformer with Box2D, and I'm starting to tweak it to try to make it feel good. Physics engines have a lot of knobs to tweak, and it's not clear to me, writing with a physics engine for the first time, which ones I should use. Should jumping apply a force for several...
It might be outside the domain of open source (as there isn't much in the way of open source games that would want/need to implement all these) but is there an existing open source game or rendering engine capable of things such as : day/night cycles dynamic weather wind/rain/clouds/etc wet surfaces (surfaces look wet...
I am trying to design a game with some interesting features but one question I have is regarding terrain. I want a terrain that will make for a very large game world, and I want to be able to have such features as "roads" and "rivers". What options do I have in terms of terrain and what will give me the best result in ...
I am having trouble with a camera class I am trying to use in my program. When I change the camera_target of the gluLookAt call, my whole terrain is rotating instead of just the camera rotating like it should. Here is some code from my render method: camera->Place(); ofSetColor(255, 255, 255, 255); //draw axis l...
I'm curious as to what the best method for sketching out and prototyping a map is, and if there are any tools available to facilitate this. Pen and paper is probably a good place to start, but I would like to know if there are any worthwhile tools to look into, something akin to a UI mock up tool like Balsamiq
What is a good texture packing algorithm? Technically, bin packing is NP-hard, so a heuristic is what I'm really after.
Since graphic designers/end users are not programmers, what are the technique to allow them to add new tasks or change application logic in a game? what are the end user tools? I want some popular examples.
I recently purchased some short (approx 3 min) background music tracks. I have the tracks in three formats: AIFF, MP3 and WAV. How can I compress these files such that the quality remains intact (for the most part) and the file size is relatively small? I'm especially interested in the "before" and "after" file forma...
In the industry, people with various skills and talents all work together on a team. They are most often specialised in their field. However, this is unpractical for a hobbyist team. All people in such a team need some skill in various fields and people have to wear many hats. Which skills are crucial for an average ho...
I have an arbitrary destructible bitmap terrain like the one in "Worms". It's easy to work out if a character or missile intersects the terrain, but how do I work out the angle of the slope at the contact point, so I can make grenades roll down hills, bounce off at the right angle, etc. I know it can be down by somehow...
The game I'm working on has OpenGL (2.1) vector graphics, and I need to draw up to 1000 enemies, each of which is composed of between 4 and 100 lines. Each enemy can be drawn as a single line loop, so one strategy for drawing would be to call glDrawElements(GL_LINE_LOOP, ...) once for each enemy. This results in too ma...
I have developed an iPhone app. When I have installed it in the device, it worked fine, ie it showed, the logo screen, the title screen and goes to game screen and now I have exited pressing the home button. The problems starts when I relaunch the app, it straightly goes to the game screen, by skipping the splash scree...
Developing in Android is going to be different for me, having spent the last 10 years coding games in C++. What's the main differences / pitfalls / bottlenecks to developing for the Android? My big worry is moving to Java, what am I going to miss most? To be clearer: what would I miss if I coded the whole thing in Java...
How does one separate the acceleration due to gravity from other motion in accelerometer input?
In comparison to the U.S.A., there seem to be far less leading or successful game companies in Europe. The recent salary survey of GameCareerGuide shows that the average salary of a games programmer in Europe is only 46k versus 80k in the U.S.A. While only 378 European developers replied to the survey, 1014 developers...
Is there any cross platform libraries available for handling input from a microphone? I am thinking beyond voice chat to noise / voice recognition. I am putting together a plan for a role playing game and in thinking of features I was thinking it would be nice if the player could be standing in a crowded place and yell...
My partner and I are starting to get into game development on the iPhone. I'm a programmer and he's not. We are looking for some good language agnostic game programming books. Hopefully things that will explain basic game development principles without focusing too much on the particulars of a language and more on the ...
I'm currently prototyping a simple two-player adversarial game, where the players are able to move around and shoot at each other with cannons. I would like the playing area to feel essentially unbounded, but I don't want one of the players to be able to stall the game by just rushing away from his opponent. The standa...
With barely enough time at our hands to complete the games we craft, how can you strike a good balance between solid software architecture and making good progress to get it all done? My personal challenge: How about being effective today and long-term thinking at the same time? Plus, while you're doing it you may just...
I recently started to program some basic OpenGL stuff in Java, but OpenGL and DirectX is too much to handle and to understand for me and I'm getting bored really fast. Now I am wondering if there are other possibilities than OpenGL (or DirectX) to make simple 2D graphics and to get started in Game Development, even if ...
In my current project, Lua scripts are called by the C++ functions on the server side. After that, the scripts again call the C++ functions still in that solution. Why should we do such things and not call the C++ function directly? What are the situations in which scripts are needed?
I'd like to use either Bullet or ODE on low powered devices (mobile and consoles), but the frame rates are below the acceptable 25-30fps for simulations. I've found that one articulated body by itself is enough to degrade the performance of either engine. Are there optimizations or tricks I can use to get around these ...
Is it practical to use a testing framework like JUnit in a game development situation? What sort of design considerations can you follow in order to make your game more testable? What parts of a game can/should be tested and what parts should/must be left to human testing? For example, if the game loop is encapsulated ...
Firstly I'd like to say that this doesn't seem like the right "forum" for this question as it actually doesn't relate directly to the development of games. As this is my first post on 'game development', I cannot include more links - sorry. I recently obtained a Game Doctor SF7 ("Professor SF2" in the US I believe) bac...
I'm most interested in your experience with Torque-X, the Managed XNA version of their engine. How did it perform in your use case? (also info on your use, would be helpful) What was the usability of the tools? What did you build with it? 2D, 3D, both? Did you find any "gotchas" that you had to work around? If you h...