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I have a situation where I'm trying to push the output of an IK solver back into a user editable joint hierarchy (which stores components as it's primary source), and I'm not sure how to go about it. My IK solver returns three world space transforms representing the position and orientation of a chain of joints (0,1,2)...
I am looking for an algorithm to help me navigate between 'open' tiles in a Mahjong solitaire game. The game is to be played on a limited device with only left-right-up-down buttons and I want to speed up the time it takes to reach the appropriate tile. Toward this goal, I have made the movement work between 'open' til...
Following up on my earlier question about finding the slope of a 2D bitmap terrain I now need to know the best way of finding the point on the 2D terrain that the missile hit. Obviously, I can see if any pixels under the missile intersect terrain, but say it has moved quite deep into the terrain. What is the best way ...
I am trying to implement a system, where the cursor (in my case the player's avatar) is always about 1.5 seconds (a configurable interval) behind where the mouse actually is. If I change the cursor's location every time through, I get an emulated mouse cursor with no delay, I'm wondering if there are any pre-canned typ...
What are other retention and conversion (free to play to paying to spender) strategies in MMOs? I know some like promotions, social viral, content generation, intentional imbalance, perks and community management.
I really want to get access to some images of MUD (multi user domain/multi user dungeon) OLC (mud OnLine Creation), to use the structure of npcs/mobs/characters/areas/rooms that muds use on my own webgame project (http://www.ninjawars.net), which features a near predominant use of text itself. I've played a mud for yea...
My question is related with Fixed time step vs Variable time step. But where a fixed frame-rate improve the consistency of a physics based game, is it the case for a rythm game, or wouldn't it be preferable to use a variable frame-rate ? Say, I set the frame-rate to 100/sec, that will lead to an accuracy of 10ms, which...
It seems like WPF was created as the application answer to Adobe's Flash. Silverlight is used for creating web pages. But, can that same functionality be pulled into a standalone WPF application. Scaleform allows Flash to be used within unmanaged C++ games. Can WPF be used to create the same type of interfaces? Wh...
I am Dalilean and I am a gamer. There I have said it. Damn, feels like a weight is lifted from my shoulders… They say the first step is to admit the problem. Now the second step is doing something about it. So…. As more than a few of you know, I decided to design a game. Right now I feel like I am at a critical point ...
What is the best way in your opinion to find new ideas for games? I want to invent something really new (like Gish, World of Goo, Crayon Physics etc), but I'm having problems coming up with new, creative ideas.
Okay, this idea has come up for the 3rd time in conversation now, and it's been bugging me for years. The idea is a game where all players make decisions/issue orders to units while the game is in a paused state, and all the actions are executed at once, in real-time. This could be at any level from a TRPG (i.e. Final ...
Expanding on this question, what information do I need to communicate my artistic goals for a game to a professional artist? Assuming I'm an indie programmer. and I've found or hired an artist to for my game, how to I go about setting a template or a brief for the look and feel of my game?
I am building a simple tower defense game, and I have to take a decision between two(or more, feel free to suggest other ways) to do the game cycle. Option 1: Monolithic game cycle: I could have a global scheduled selector that calls update for every sprite/object/logic thing that I need to calculate. I could achieve ...
I've made a couple of games now. Starting from basic hobbyist projects like snake , I advanced into platform based games, board games, turn based games. While doing the latter of these projects I had to spent a lot of time redesigning certain concepts, sometimes even throwing away certain logic. So always I've felt the...
Ok so consider we have a vehicle like the one I described in my answer to this question, with a 2D position, velocity, angular velocity, and drag/friction. It can accelerate and break by a variable amount, but not stop dead instantly or reach top speed instantly. How can I make it move to a particular point and stop - ...
A game development company seems like an ideal testbed for experimenting with new or uncommon models for work environments. I'm curious if there's anyone out there successfully doing something creative with their methods of doing creative work, and how it's working out. This is a community wiki since there won't be an...
I also asked about this over on the UDK forums, but haven't had much luck getting any responses. Basically, I have some experience with UT3 modding, but I'm just getting started with the UDK, and I have a few questions about the degree of control over the rendering you have. I gather that, despite the presence of seve...
I only have a basic understanding of OpenGL, so I'm probably showing my ignorance here. I'm looking for a great iPhone/OpenGL-ES example of applying a texture (preferably from a texture atlas, but not really a requirement) to specific parts of some arbitrary object/model. I have a game where 3D tiles "flip" to reveal s...
I was going through a pretty good tutorial on Box2D here, but I ran into a problem when he made a b2PolygonDef, because the tutorials were made in 2.0, and I'm using 2.1. I could download 2.0 I guess, but I'd really like to know how to update how to do this to the newest version. If you guys don't want to watch the who...
How minimal should a games engine be? How much of the content pipeline should be embedded in the engine? Some use cases where the super engine might be useful: When loading user content, the user isn't required to package up his textures, the engine will do it at load time. A script requests a font at a much larger s...
I found Font Squirrel, and while it claims to have fonts free for commercial use, i can't find a license or legal pages anywhere. Are these fonts really usable for commecial use like they say?
I'm working on my Ludum Dare entry and trying to figure out how in the world I'm ever going to get background music. I found WolframTones, but the license is too restrictive: Unless otherwise specified, this Site and content presented on this Site are for your personal and noncommercial use. You may not modify, copy, ...
I want to use the behavioral AI from a game engine, for character conversation modelling. Most game engines provide very good graphics pipelines, like Unity, but I want to use the AI part, like in "Assassins Creed 2". It looks like the character is always in a state machine during gameplay, especially when he talks to...
Is there any algorithm for generating lightning? Lets say, you input the starting and ending coordinates (x,y,z) and out comes an array of coordinates to show where the lightning goes. It doesn't have to be scientifically accurate but as long it looks random and unpredictable EDIT: I found this, but can't figure out ho...
Note: I have to poll, rather than do callbacks because of API limitations (SFML). I also apologize for the lack of a 'decent' title. I think I have two questions here; how to register the input I'm receiving, and what to do with it. Handling Input I'm talking about after the fact you've registered that the 'A' key has ...
The question itself is fairly straight forward, but the answer takes a lot of industry insight. To give an example scenario, I am playing a game that's in closed beta right now. They have about 5000 people invited and the game is only open from Fridays to Mondays. On average there are only about 200-400 players online ...
I've got a renderbuffer (DepthStencil) in an FBO and I need to get a texture from it. I can't have both a DepthComponent texture and a DepthStencil renderbuffer in the FBO, it seems, so I need some way to convert the renderbuffer to a DepthComponent texture after I'm done with it for use later down the pipeline. I've t...
I am a Java web application developer (mostly server side) since 7 years who recently got interested in game development (i dont know why, maybe i am bored). Today I was looking for frameworks. I read about a few scene graphs and took a look at jMonkeyEngine. It was recommended here and here. My first goal was to creat...
Assume you have a game in which there are many (many many) entities serving some functions, not all of which are constantly needed or need to be considered in every frame. The concrete problem I am working on in which this issue is present is a detailed simulation of a body including its organs. In the game each creatu...
I'm testing a 2D OpenGL ES based iPhone game on both the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 4. It runs great on the iPhone 4... and pretty well on the 3G. The game state is updated at 60 Hz... and the rendering is done at 60 fps. Would the following conversion from Objective-C to c improve the performance at all? // current O...
I thought about making a simple 2D Sidescroller game like SuperMario. Then i wondered about how to save, load or create the levels for the game. The first thing i thought of was drawing a simple blocky png which represents the level, an making all the parts where the player can walk a special color (maybe lilac). I wo...
I'm trying to write some code to do post processing in OpenGL ES2 on the iPhone. All is fine an dandy, except I am having trouble working out how to scale the texture rendered in the rendering step, such that it ends up pixel-aligned to the final image displayed on the screen. I'm using a 512x512 texture, as provided b...
After seeing the comments on selling an idea to developer for a game, the general concencus is that without a game, or atleast a demo, it’s not going to happen. So…someone (yes, Noctrine, I am looking at you) suggested that it might me an interesting idea to turn it into a “public” project. A few people have asked if ...
I'm working on a game that uses Flash for the user interface. I'm running into an odd issue with the origin of a library movie clip. Here are the steps to reproduce: Create a new MovieClip and construct a single rectangle with both a fill and a stroke. Set position of rectangle to (0,0) and notice that the origin is ...
Seth Priebatsch recently gave a tedtalk entitled “Building the game layer on top of the world.” In it, Seth described four “game dynamics,” techniques used by game designers to make games fun and addictive. The four dynamics that Priebtsch described were: Appointment dynamic-a dynamic in which to succeed, one must ret...
I'm working with Starcraft 2 Map Editor, and am having a little bit of a trigger problem. It's quite easy to detect when a specific unit kills a structure (simply check if triggering unit == whatever) but I'm not quite sure how to tell when a building dies to to either fire (terran buildings) or bleeding out (zerg buil...
What I mean by this is - is it legal to make a game which asks (or proves) your age during install or on initial load, and then dynamically sets the content to the players age. For example if the players is under-age then all swear word assets are replaced with there PG13 equivalents. Or the same with blood and gore. D...
I have been thinking how to create realistic sound for a car. The main sound is the engine, then all kind of wind, road and suspension sounds. Are there any open source projects for the engine sound simulation? Simply pitching up the sample does not sound too great. The ideal would be to something that allows me to pic...
I'm using Irrlicht(C++) for a 3D engine, and it has a built in GUI system. The GUI events are something like this: switch(eventtype) case button_pressed: stuff case editbox_edited: stuff So far I have begun writing a system that allows me to create the GUIs with Lua scripts. It was very easy to make it so it cr...
With many games, you can say "oh, that's the Unreal Engine, for sure", or "this was made with an upgraded Rockstar Advanced Engine". We can often recognize the engine used for a game just by looking at its graphics, disregarding user interface. Why is this? All game engines use the same 3D rendering technology that we ...
I am preparing a conference session about game design, and a question occurred to me that I haven't been able to answer with Google: In Mario the player varies the height of Mario's jump by holding down the button while Mario is in the air. Has this approach ever been used to vary the power or attacks, i.e. hold down f...
...you know the ones. Something like "value overlays" or "value pop-ups" describes them quite well, but I was thinking they might have a real name?
i'm using cocos2d to build an iphone game. my game currently has two sprites: one for the main character and another for an item i should carry once he gets on him. the main character and the item are both box2d bodies. i can detect the collision between the two. what is want is to make the item body stick to the main ...
Read this Slate article. In particular, the following struck me: When he looks at video games from a critical distance, Bissell is concerned mainly with their lack of narrative meaning. Games ask us to save the princess, save the country, save the world, save ourselves—but no one plays games to achieve those ends. We ...
Perhaps this could be better answered on Stack Overflow, but I thought it would be worth posting here. Right now I'm trying to make visual transitions with pygame's surfarray module which uses NumPy. I'm using Cave Story's diamond-checkerboard transitions as a model right now (you can see them in this video http://www....
I'm not much of an artist, but I'm trying to make decent particle effects in a 2.5D game. I'm making a replica of Wii Play's "Tanks" and I can't quite get the explosions to look good. I'm not going for the exact style as they had, probably something more realistic, less childish. My particle engine just draws a 2d text...
I'm creating an app in XNA. I'm trying to load a custom save file. I named the file with my own custom extension. It's an XML file serialized with the DataContractSerializer. I've tried several things to load the file. And they all work when I'm running in my development environment, or when the game is running from m...
Well I like to play games that give me a wide breath of options. For most part I see games implementing certain archetypes like the usual RPG trinity (tank, DPS and healer). So far the most archetypes I've seen are in fighting, card and strategy games. Fighting games archetypes I've seen are: Rush down (GG Accent Core...
Many of the more diligent software developers I know are moving to inversion of control and dependency injection to handle references to objects. Coming from a Flash games perspective I don't know all the ins and outs of AAA studios, so: are these used in the retail game world?
Where is a good place to look for people interested in creating games online? I'll be using XNA. I'm going to start the project later this week, but I'm definitely commited to it. I'd like to find people who won't hit it and quit it after a month.
Kynapse Autodesk® Kynapse® game middleware is a leading artificial intelligence (AI) solution for game development and the creation of real-time simulations for nonplayer characters (NPCs). Havok AI Havok AI is a new platform-optimized SDK focused on efficient pathfinding and path following. Havok AI is built from ...
I have a scenario where I have red coin in a Carrom board game which should be moved outside of the visible window when it is pocketed, also if any coin either white or black is not pocketed in the next shot, the red coin should be replaced in the center of the board. Now my problem is WHEN I apply the setXForm() metho...
What are the hardware and software tools required to import physical worlds into a game engine? Can I use a HD camera to do that? What do the popular game engines support?
It's peculiar this issue is not well understood on NVIDIA forums and project forums. For example, the well known ioquake3 project based on id tech 3 requires to force 'Threaded optimization' off on the NVIDIA settings or there are severe FPS drops. Do you know what a programmer has to do to acquire compatibility with t...
I have problem with simple box2d physics: I have two bodies : 1 - static box , 2 - dynamic box. I only want to this dynamic box fall on this static, and lay. But now it looks like that at end , starting from . This is code, which bases on box2d HelloWorld: #include <SFML/Graphics.hpp> #include <Box2D/Box2D.h> #include...
What are the trade offs between inherent in linking geometry to a node versus using skinned geometry? Specifically: What capabilities do you gain / lose from using each method? What are the performance impacts of doing one over the other? What are the specific situations where you would want to do one over the other?...
Should I be using premultiplied alpha? Reading Tom Forsyth's article it seems a nobrainer. Premultiplied alpha (AKA additive blending) is superior in every sense. However, premultiplied alpha seems to have one major drawback, it's not well supported with tools. Do you/have you used premultiplied alpha? How is the too...
A friend of mine and I were discussing different idea for allow materials in a world to be destroyed in a very piecemeal fashion and he proposed the idea of representing solids as very viscious fluids. My intuition is that this would be either: A) very difficult, or B) very resource intensive, but I am unsure. Is such ...
I am thinking about working with a publisher for an iPhone game that I have developed. I have been independent until now, but want to look into the publishing route because I just don't have the resources to market the game myself, and I would rather not take outside investment. So, those of you who have gone this rou...
What is the best method for creating user definable or user changeable keys in a flash game? Edit: I meant, user changeable keys. Not user changeable flash buttons. Why would a user need to change the graphic of a button in a game?
I'm trying to compile a list of game mechanics, by which I mean high-level/meta game mechanics like Cooperation, Resource Management, Chance and Time Manipulation rather than low level mechanics like running, jumping climbing ladders, etc Does any one have any suggestions or can point me to good existing lists? My WIP ...
I've noticed that many 3d programs normally do vector/matrix calculations as well as geometric transformations on the CPU. Has anyone found an advantage in moving these calculations into vertex shaders on the GPU?
Is there an easy way to put music in a java applet? Preferably streaming so that it doesn't need to be preloaded.
A quick search through the web suggests there's quite a few methods of potentially detecting back-culled faces on the CPU. The purpose of the check is to evaluate whether to performing other operations such as tessellations is reasonable by dynamically altering the LOD of visible polys based on the number of polys on t...
Hey. I want to be able to create a system for 2D skeletal animation in my game. I'm using panda3d as my game engine. I'd like to be able to make simple bone structures and skin them with my sprites. I would prefer to do this with straight code and algorithms, but if I have to use a 3D modeler or something, then I can t...
Some of you may know fraxy... Basically, I was watching this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL7zWdDCtOE And there are some times where some sprites spin really fast (4:00 mark for example), and I cannot figure how the motion blur effect was done. I looked in the game folder, and found the sprite, it certainly do...
What are the common mistakes or oversights made when starting a new game studio? Please only one mistake or oversight per answer and if you can explain why it is an issue and what one should do to avoid falling into the mistake or recover if they've already made it.
It seems that the current climate of games seems to cater to an obvious progression of player power, whether that means getting a bigger, more explosive gun in Halo, leveling up in an RPG, or unlocking new options in Command and Conquer 4. Yet this concept is not exclusive to video or computer games -- even in Dungeons...
I'm trying to get lighting effects on a textured object; I'm using .obj and .mtl files to define them. No matter what I try my object is either invisible, unlit (plain texture), or completely white. I defined my mtl by having my texture mapped to diffusion (that is, map_Kd texture.png). I found that if I don't set both...
(I've split this question into two. For 2D, see: 2D collision-detection middleware) Are there any recommendable middleware available for 3D collision detection? I believe I've heard Bullet has a pretty good 3D collision detection that can be used without the physics engine. I'd like to hear if people have any experienc...
I want to programmatically determine at runtime how much video card memory is being used by my program. Specifically I'm wondering about how to do it on a Windows machine using OpenGL, but am interested of ways to do it on other platforms as well. I know there are utilities out there that will show me the memory usage...
I'm beginning to write an iPhone game using OpenGL-ES and I've come across a problem with deciding what format my 3D models should be in. I've read (link escapes me at the moment) that some developers prefer the models compiled in Objective-C .h files. Still, others prefer having .obj as these are more portable (i.e....
Floating point has always been troublesome for precision on large worlds. This article explains behind-the-scenes and offers the obvious alternative - fixed point numbers. Some facts are really impressive, like: "Well 64 bits of precision gets you to the furthest distance of Pluto from the Sun (7.4 billion km) with sub...
It's easy to deal with the way locations interact on a clean Cartesian grid. It's just vanilla math. And you can kind of ignore the geometry of the sphere's surface for a bunch of it if you want to just truncate the poles or something. But I keep coming up with ideas for games where the polar space matters. Geo-cod...
In academia worst case Big O is taught over everything else. Compared to space complexity, normal case analysis, simplicity over complexity, etc. In particular to game programming and industry, what really matters most and why? References would be very helpful.
I NEVER, EVER did ANY sort of network code in C++, I don't know even the libraries that exist, but a popular demand for my game is online leaderboards... So, what sort of libraries I should research into? My game is multiplatform (win, gnu, mac), uses C++, ClanLib 1.0 and Lua. Also the engine is zlib (so proprietary st...
I'm developing an Android game. Basically I want to pre-load all graphics/sounds when the app is first loaded. But I also would like to show a progress bar as this is happening. Here is a snippet of Java/Android code to display a progress bar while doing some work: public class LoadingScreen extends Activity { priv...
What Linux Game Engines are out there? Name, link, and intended use.
Which 2d rendering algorithms are popular for mobile game engines (specifically Android) and why? Are the same ones for the desktop and/or console world as effective here?
Possible Duplicate: Best place for learning how to write games in Unity3d Hi all, I am just a new candidate who is going to work upon the Unity 3D game engine so guys I need some help to get some good tutorials where I can learn the moving characters, effects, and creating the surroundings. Is there a place where I ...
I am new to game development. I am interested in developing 2D games for the Android platform. What is the best place to start with (i.e) What are the basics and how to proceed? I already have programming experience in Java but don't have any experience with graphics or animation.
For the architectural side of rendering, there's two main ways: having each object render itself, and having a single renderer which renders everything. I'm currently aiming for the second idea, for the following reasons: The list can be sorted to only use shaders once. Else each object would have to bind the shader, ...
Although I did this a couple of times from scratch, still no solution really fits. I'm using lua for scripting in my games. Lua holds the "prototypes" of the game elements, that are copied to each entity on it's creation. A prototype represents a class of objects ("Soldier with shotgun"). Also, each prototype may hold...
Let's say I want to make a character (an animal) with a stick in its mouth. I dont understand if the animation (done in Blender) should have the stick in its mouth or if it should be done in Unity/Shiva, etc. Is there any place where I can read the theory behind it? How shall I do interaction between two objects like a...
This contest looks pretty interesting but I'm having some concerns about the wording in the rules: Once submitted, a prize winning Submission becomes the exclusive property of Sponsor and will not be acknowledged or returned. You expressly agree that by entering into the Contest any rights you may own in respect to a p...
I will preface this by saying I haven't looked a huge amount of game source, nor built much in the way of games. But coming from trying to employ 'enterprise' coding practices in web apps, looking at game source code seriously hurts my head: "What is this view logic doing in with business logic? this needs refactoring....
I am writing a fairly simple breakout-style game for Android phones. I have successfully detected the collisions between the ball(s) and bricks. The problem that I am having is in calculating the new vector for the ball. Even though the bricks are rectangular, I want to treat them as circles for the purpose of introduc...
(This question was split off from 3D collision-detection middleware) Are there any recommendable middleware available for 2D collision detection? I believe I've heard that Box2D could be used for collision detection without the physics part. I'd like to hear if people have any experiences on Box2D or others libraries f...
I studied computer engineering before but have been lagging in the technical aspects as of late. Seeing as I think it would be to my advantage as a designer to understand how resources are used and calculated. I would like to ask if people here know of methods to compute to a certain degree how much power/resource a de...
Nowadays, game programming is like a big business-ish, technological, academical, programming havoc. There are dozen of engines, free or not, don't-reinvent-the-wheel dos and don't, plenty of different platform, plenty of game genres, and a lot of languages. The video game economy boomed around the 90's (I guess, with ...
Is there an Silverlight 3d API ? or Isometric API ?
I am using an entity system for my MMO server and I was thinking about defining the behavior of "actions" using Lua scripts. The server is written in C++. I am not very familiar with the speed/memory usage of Lua in C++ but I have used it for scripting the GUI of the client. Would using Lua to define the game logic on ...
I am not using the built in 3d MovieClips, and I am storing the 3d location my way. I have read a few different articles on sorting depths, but most of them seem in efficient. I had a really efficient way to do it in AS2, but it was really hacky, and I am guessing there are more efficient ways that do not rely on possi...
What are the best 3rd party DRM solutions available from a user experience, development integration, and security perspective?
I'm curious to know if there is an XNA-like library for Java; that is, a library that Handles the game loop - i.e. you just implement an existing method, and it will get called every frame. Handles the rendering - i.e. you just tell it what to render, it will take care of displaying it to the monitor, hiding implement...
I am developing a game, a word game. I have UIView, in this I have to show the keyboard, without using UITextField. Could you please suggest me something on how to do this?
If I create a client program using say C#, or develop something for the Android or Iphone, can I use Google App Engine for the server and communicate with the client application mentioned above?
I downloaded a game called Brain Exercise with Dr.Kawashima. It contains only one executable and no data files. However, it's still possible to save the game! Where does the save data go?
In some games, when you miss a pickup, you can never get it again unless you restart the game, and those pickups count in your collection. (therefore, you must restart the game to finish the collection, if you made any mistakes). In Pokémon, you have only one Master Ball, limited supply of Ethers and legendary Pokémon ...
I've worked with several engines and I'm most comfortable with a mature engine, world editor and C++ codebase. I'm now looking at Unity as a side-project and have mostly been working in Javascript. Has anyone done a large scale project with Unity and does it require Visual Studio or is sticking to the Javascript approa...

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