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Are there any major/fundamental concepts that one should know about game programming versus control driven programming? Game Programming is event based? with a timer? An outer-infinite loop? I come with a background of C++, Java and Ruby. I'm interested in making a basic 2D Game in Flash. Is there anything else that m...
How to detect a collision between a sprite and a user-generated shape of some sort. For example. There are some objects on the screen. The user takes their finger and draws a circle shape around an object (The selection rule is painting circle around the sprite, but the painting shapes may be various). I need to detect...
I'm working on a game that uses sprite sheets with rotation for animations. While the effect is pretty good, the quality of the rotations is somewhat lacking. I exported a flash animation to png sequence and then used a C# app to do matrix based rotations (System.Drawing.Drawing2D.Matrix). Unfortunately, there are se...
I have the following problem: Although I know some of color theory, and the interface design ideals (about how it must be usable, and etc...), my interfaces are REALLY ugly. fugly, eye bleed material, etc... I am not finding anywhere, information on how to create the graphical part of a interface, how to choose the lay...
If a 24bit RGB image with a range of 0-255 per channel is displayed on a television that displays a range of approx. 16-235 per channel, color detail will be lost, correct? If so, should images be pre-processed to only store a valid range? I would like to do this with code, not in a picture editing application. I vague...
So my long term one-man indie project is turning into a two-man indie project, and I feel I need to take a step back and at least have a "sell-sheet" as a basis for the game design. Does anyone have any good templates or tips?
I own a small web dev shop, and in our down time, I plan on having my guys work on a game (I will be paying them anyway, right?). A few buddies and I started talking about this game, and have been going through the motions of talking/designing it out. Only problem we are at an impasse, and can't seem to get passed it. ...
I near completion of implementing mymultiplayer game (in WPF/.NET). I want to exploit the game commercially. To do so, I compiled a list of requirements: .NET/WPF Game server (multiplayer) Data server (website/ingame info/widgets/etc) Website (rules/docs/download) Forum Rating system (chess-like, but for 4 players) OS...
Okay, here goes. I have a camera at (Xc, Yc, Zc.) The Xc and Yc coordinates are latitude/longitude, and the Zc coordinate is an altitude in metres. I have a point at (Xp, Yp, Zp) and a field of view on the camera (Th1, Th2) - where Th1 is horizontal FOV and Th2 is vertical FOV. Given this information, I'd like to: tes...
Im a senior this year and I'm seriously looking at colleges that can help me get into the game in the Game industry. I've been told countless times it's better if I go to a University(Usc, Becker college, etc) than go to somewhere like Digipen or Full Sail. I'm just really confused about how I should tackle this path. ...
I'm following the book Microsoft XNA Game Studio Creators Guide v2. and there is a snippet in the book that is used to return a Rectangle that represents the safe area you can draw without the fear of 'drawing' outside the screen. Except in my IDE Visual Studio 2010, that method doesn't show up in intellisense and in f...
What type of support/format do you use to store and diffuse your game design documentation? Wiki? Doc files? Files in Repository? Shared folder? Google Doc? Please provide pros and cons for each one.
I create a math game where the user has to solve an equation. If the user is right, the application plays sound A. If he's wrong, it plays sound B. What criteria should I use to choose sounds for A and B?
I'm working on a simple Sinistar-style shooter in XNA, and I'm constantly running into trouble with transformations. I feel like I'll get it eventually, but this problem is really bending my mind. My little ship has two states: idle and engines-firing. Idle is a single frame, and engines is a few frames that animate....
i'm learning something about game programming from a book about "pyGame". pyGame is simple, but... python is a little complex and different from my previous knoweledge about programming. I know "classical" language: C# (also C/C++), Java ... I know a lot of people love Python but for me is a little harder to learn! So...
In a effort to learn the blender interface, which is confusing to say the least, I've chosen to model a model from referrence pictures easily found on the web. Problem is that I can't ( and won't ) get perfect "right", "front" and "top" pictures. Blender only allows you to see the background pictures when in ortograph...
A log of game events (as opposed to error / debug logs) for an entire cluster/shard is very useful for a commercial MMO that is in a live production environment, providing vital support for customer service, and the means for historical analytics. The project that I am currently working on uses a relational database to...
I want to compare angles and get an idea of the distance between them. For this application, I'm working in degrees, but it would also work for radians and grads. The problem with angles is that they depend on modular arithmetic, i.e. 0-360 degrees. Say one angle is at 15 degrees and one is at 45. The difference is 30 ...
I have a game that uses the accelerometer to move a guy back and forth on the screen. After a few seconds the screen goes dim. Is there any way to keep it alive and bright during the game activity?
Simple question I have here. Say my tile map is based on 32x32 tiles for an 800x600 image so let's say 25 tiles across and 19 down. So now I have that cell 0 of any row contains the first 0-31 pixels, cell 1 contains then 32nd-63rd pixels, cell 2 has 64-96 pixels and so on. If I have my player somewhere and now I want ...
I am trying to turn some items visibility off when submitting a high score. I have the following code but it does not appear to work. Any suggestions? mSignText = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.sign); submitBtn = (ImageView) this.findViewById(R.id.submitbtn); mSignText.setVisibility(View.GONE); submitBtn.setVisibility(V...
The Bitmap has transparency, and only non-transparent pixels are solid and used for hit detection for the physics engine and gameplay. I have seen some versions done with convex hulls, but for multiple reasons I am not using convex hulls to build the levels in my game. How can I implement 2d shadows on a level made out...
I'm working in 3ds max on models for an Iphone game project and finding that using the Physique modifier is to general for rigging. When working with so few vertices I want to be able to directly tell how much weight a bone should have on a specific vertex. Is there a 3ds max equivalent to the Softimage XSI vertex weig...
Just curious for a rough estimate; how many impressions would it take to make 300 dollars, a day, in ad revenue?
I am playing sounds in my application I have the following code sounds = new HashMap<String, MediaPlayer>(); Then when guys are created on screen they are given a sound. sounds.put("sounds"+Integer.toString(ncount), MediaPlayer.create(this, R.raw.hit)); I want to remove the MediaPlayer from the hashmap like I do the ...
When should a Designer draw the line in design decisions when marketing does step in? Where should the bounds be set? (For most part I know this is might mostly be situational. Gut feel like thing. But would like to get some inputs on this as well)
I have a thread that uses TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.sleep(5); Problem is when I load my app on a faster phone say with a snapdragon, it runs at lightning speed. Is there a way to control this speed so processor speed is not an attributing factor? Thanks!
What I've seen in most Game Engines and game engine design is that the Physics Engine is the be all end all system. Basically, AI for example may want to travel to some position, but it simply sends that request (velocity, direction) to the Physics Engine. If the AI really gets to that position is up to the will of ...
Is there a good algorithm that simulates falling snow? I'm particularly interested in snow that falls slowly, so it doesn't quite fall in a straight line but deviates a bit. Maybe even including simulation of flurries (drafts of wind), variable size, etc. Are there any papers or articles on an algorithm that mimics rea...
I've found some HTML/Canvas/Javascript browser based games that I don't particularly enjoy playing, but which I think would be fun to write robots for. Are there any tools out there which help remove some of the tedium of the work, and get me closer to writing the actual AI portion of the code?
I have a platform flash game which includes a level with just two backgrounds which are flipped side by side so that a looping background effect is created. In this I have to include Obstacles. Basically, when I designed the level, that was neat and good. But now I want to make the obstacles come randomly . Another fac...
I'm wondering how to move objects, with rotation taken into account, to follow a curved line see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPpO24FeAX4 for an example In particular I wonder: how to store the points, how many points to store for a smooth line like that how to interpolate the curves how to interpolate between th...
I am casually working on an RPG type game in Java but I am having trouble figuring out how I can have items that can do many different things without creating a different class for every item. As an example, how would I create an Axe that could chop trees and attack monsters? If I extend either the chopping or the weap...
I asked this same question here, but was closed and told to ask it on this site instead. How much would it cost to develop a video game. I mean like a major PS3/360 video game. I know there really is no set price; but there has to be a pall bark, 100 grand, 10 mil, etc. I am asking how much the games cost to make, (stu...
I'm developing some algorithms in Lua which are run mostly in Lua (few calls to C++) and I'm noticing a huge slowdown when I'm running them from my app rather than the default Lua interpreter. The script returns in about 11 seconds with the interpreter, and about 5+ minutes with my program. I don't think it is a proble...
Can you give me an idea for a simple and interesting mission for online text-based game that doesn't require much reading? Or maybe link to a website with a list with missions? I love programming, but I hate when it comes to create things like this, because I am not creative at all. Thank you.
In many entertainment professions there suggestions, loose rules, or general frameworks one follows that appeal to humans in one way or another. For instance, many movies and books follow the monomyth. In video games I find many types of games that attract people in different ways. Some are addicted to facebook gem m...
Possible Duplicate: Game Development Degree vs Computer Science Degree Heres the best education I got in ky math is AP Calculus and no technology class that teaches a programming language. So should I just go get a Computer Science degree or a game programming-based one? Might not be a lot; ask if you need more info...
Ogre3D I would like to put some space junk in my game environment. Make it look like the first 2 search results. Those junks don't need to be interactive. Just need to have a 3D junk circling around the earth. Can the community give some suggestion on how to implement this? Should I use particle in Ogre3D or create ent...
I would like to add a new field to a Quake 3/Quake Live HUD that shows the following number: min(health + armour, health * 3) * (1.5 if guard_rune else 1) This is the amount of damage you can take before getting killed, btw. Is this even possible?
Some games, including Dungeon Crawl (example), use a balancing technique that attempts to prevent certain values (stats, damage, etc.) from being excessively high. The algorithm looks like this: if value > 20: value = 20 + (value - 20)/2 #70 → 45 ...and can be applied multiple times: if value > 20: value = 20 + (v...
I'm interested in working as an artist in the game industry. Many job postings contain the phrase "pixel art". What exactly is pixel art?
Is deferred rendering the future of real-time 3d rendering on pc hardware (at least until raytracing becomes feasible)? I'm aware of the benefits (lots of lights, less state changes) and also trouble spots such as anti-aliasing, translucent items, and higher memory bandwidth. But will the next-gen engines all be using...
In my game, I have a base Note class, and various subclasses of Note. In addition, I have a NoteCollection class which contains a collection of these Note objects and draws them to the screen. Normally, I'd just do something like this in NoteCollection: public override Draw(GameTime gametime) { ... spriteBatch....
I'm a bit confused. The question is: when I'm developing a XNA game for Xbox (or Windows), is it possible to use DirectX (to make use of the GPU)? Or is everything getting calculated by the CPU? A quick Google search didn't gave any results of combining those two...
I'm creating a component-based game object system. Some tips: GameObject is simply a list of Components. There are GameSubsystems. For example, rendering, physics etc. Each GameSubsystem contains pointers to some of Components. GameSubsystem is a very powerful and flexible abstraction: it represents any slice (or aspe...
I'm not good in math so I'm here to ask you how to manage, in a simple 2d game, the car acceleration and braking. I'm trying to develop it (as a hobby) in c# and sdl.net.
I am creating a simple input component to hold on to actions and key states, and a short history of the last ten or so states. The idea is that everything that is interested in input will ask this component for the latest input, and I am wondering where I should create it. I am also wondering how I should create compo...
I don't know whether I should go online for my game programming degree or to be on campus. The closest college that offers game programming degree is in a different state 6 hours away. Any advice?
Hi I'm writing a game where the player has to connect a group of letters to form words. Something like bookworm but it will be very different I hope. The point of the question is that I need to build a dictionary of words. I made a simple java program that crawls the web and extracts words, but a lot of trash is mix...
The most advanced games I've made are a 8-ball pool game made with the physics engine Box2dFlashAS3 and a platform game with levels. When I did platform games, I've always wished to know how to make an engine, so that I could re-use it. When I see games that have slopes, curved slopes, perfect gravity and real-life phy...
As you all know, Apple recently change the terms for app developers using 3rd dev tools. I'm wondering how could Apple know whether an app is made with a specific technology like Flash or Unity or GameSalad or any other engines out there?
Flash tutorials and examples have been around so long it is hard to know what sites to actually read for good, current AS3 game dev. I'm looking for a good start to finish for flash game development, covering things such as: Preloader (when to use, how to implement) UI (AS3 only, no FLEX) OOP architecture. (I come fro...
as i told in previous question, i'm using SDL.NET (wrapper in C# of SDL). Unfortunately the API website is down so i'm trying to learn it by myself. I would like simply to print text on my screen / surface ... i don't know how to do! My goal is to print variable status/values, to "debug" directly on the run and on the...
I'm getting back into hobby game programming after a long 4-year hiatus from college and I find that my understanding of coordinate systems is somewhat lacking. I'm trying my skills at creating a simple skeletal animation system but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around converting local coordinates (of say, a ...
I'm looking to get the palette of an 8-bit surface in SDL.NET if possible, or (more than likely) using Tao.SDL. This is because I want to do palette swapping with the palette directly, instead of blitting surfaces together to replace colours like how you would do it with a 32-bit surface. I've gotten the SDL_Surface a...
I'm having trouble understanding the benefit of the newer GL_EXT_draw_instanced over traditional VBO's. Don't both keep geometry cached on the gpu for faster redrawing? VBO's seem much more flexible.
I'm not a dev noob, but definitely never done anything in game dev. There is a trump based card game we play in town that I plan on coding. I'll be either using python/ajax/pyqt or c++/qt. My question is as follow, what kind of advice would you give to writing card based games?
In order to detect and reproduce bugs in an MMO, recording game sessions on the server can help. How can such recording and replay of the data be implemented to be accurate, i.e. be 100% deterministic / produce exactly the same result on each replay? I intend to record timestamped incoming messages as the only data nec...
What's the most efficient way of creating shadows for object on a isometric terrain with OpenGL and JOGL? Note that this terrain is not flat and is not heightmap generated. Think it as another model. However objects' shadows on other objects is just nice to have.Objects must drop shadows just on the terrain.
I'm sure you all know of games like Dwarf Fortress - massive, procedural generated wilderness and land. Something like this, taken from this very useful article. However, I was wondering how I could apply this to a much larger scale; the scale of Minecraft comes to mind (isn't that something like 8x the size of the Ea...
Imagine having a 4x4 square, with 16 smaller squares inside of it, with associated data on what the squares should look like (ie., opacity, colour, etc...). Is there an existing, efficient, algorithm, for converting this set of squares into an open-gl compatible triangle strip?
I am a very seasoned Delphi developer (over 12 years of experience not counting my Turbo Pascal experience) and was wondering does anyone write games in Delphi? I have seen DirectX API wrappers in Delphi that allow you to program against DirectX (even wrote a simple solitaire game with a friend), but haven't seen anyt...
Let's see history of success. Which popular games (and game engines) were built using component-based game object system? Each answer should contain: Game Title (one per answer) Author / Company Year Development time (optional) Link to postmortem (optional) Links to docs/source code (optional)
How is a game cinematic made? I can't find a decent article anywhere to give at least starting point into understanding what it takes to create a cinematic. I don't mean typical scripted game play, rather, the really nice cut scenes games have, like the ones Blizzard has for almost every game they develop. http://www.y...
What are language/platform-agnostic best practices for a small game development team of intermediate to advanced developers? High-level strategies (as well as suggestions in terms of frameworks, engines or IDEs which might offer a good ROI) are welcome.
There are two projects we can work on. One would be a small free game to try and get our name out/build an audience. The second is our main idea for a first product. What are the pros and cons of building the small, simple, free game first instead of focusing that time/effort into the main money making project.
I'm in the process of developing a game for the iPhone and I want to add Game Center support to it. The problem, as I see it, is that I need to have named my app, created an icon and uploaded screenshots etc. before I can create a leaderboard and start implementation? My game is unfinished and the iTunes Connect develo...
For a new studio that will be focusing on social, mobile platform games. What are roles do we need to fill and how many of each role would be ideal?
I'm considering how to implement a component-based game, as that seems to be the hot thing and I like the idea of such a flexible design. One of the features of such a design is that adding new things to the game can be done through data, often presented as loading content through text files such as XML. This has the...
What is elasticity? How do I implement such a thing?
I say "deceleration" because I'm not using acceleration at the moment; what I mean is moving the velocity back towards zero, eventually stopping. I'm new to vectors and not so great with physics and such. How is "deceleration" normally handled? What I have now works, but it seems kind of hackish. update:function(Game,...
I know that there are several open-source/free 2D game engines out there; I am just wondering about commercial ones (if any). The idea of wanting of looking for a commercial engine is for support and continual updates. Off the bat I know that there is DarkBasic, Blitz Basic and Torque 2D. What's else are there? What I ...
By scripting here I mean not just putting config data in a script, but scripting parts of the project like some class methods, test specific game loop, etc. This would be not just to accelerate development, but also allow players to see some of these scripts to tweak some aspects of the game. Some language like Lua hav...
I am a student in Game Programming at University and a lot of students like me are wondering the best way of entering the industry. With a bachelor degree in game programming, but no real experience in the game industry, how can students begin developing real projects ? Major game companies requires you to have 2 - 3 y...
I've been working in the 2d art side of games for a while now, and my full time job keeps me very busy on the art side of things, but I'm becoming more and more interested in learning to prototype my own games. I know very very little programming, though I did take some in college (in TorqueScript, of all things), and ...
I want to make a very simple "escape the room" game. I was hoping for something that looks something like this. You would see images of some room and you click around to move or to add things to inventory. Then, you can select something in your inventory to use that item with something on the screen. During the who...
Has anyone found an official spec or documentation on the XFL file layout? Are there any design tools in existence or planned that can create XFL files? (Besides the official Adobe Flash Professional program)
I have a game in which the player earns money for wining races and, then, he can spend that money to unlock new levels or to improve his vehicle. Now, I am choosing the money you earn and the prices of things without a clear criteria, I just test them and see if it feels right... Do you think there is a better way? How...
If I develop a game using gamecenter, does itunes connect lock me in to only supporting 3GS and above with iOS 4.0 and above, or will it still allow sales of my game on older devices (as long as I build in fallback so it never calls gamecenter framework)?
I have several Spline2D objects in my code, each of which has a Position, Velocity, and Acceleration method that returns a vector of the specified quantity at a particular time. I've been using these vectors in order to construct geometry to create gradient strokes for the curves, but I'm having problems with self-inte...
I'm coming to the end of my first year of CS which has been primarily a Java based course. I'd like to get my feet wet with some game development but I'm not sure where to start. Some people have suggested I start with game maker which has a C-styled scripting language(which should be easy to pick up) as it is probably...
I understand that an XNA project for XBox 360 will use a specialized version of the .NET Compact Framework. But let's say I want to release for both XBox 360 and Windows. Will the XBox version (using compact framework) still work if distributed for Windows, or would I need to rebuild against the regular framework (o...
I have some objects in my game which are "thrown". At the moment I am trying to implement this by having these objects follow a parabolic curve. I know the start point, the end point, the vertex and the speed of the object. How can I determine at any given time or frame what the x & y co-ordinates are? Is a parabolic ...
Any good pointers on how to get the refractive look of glass? I'm looking to create a think piece of glass type of look, sort of the type that you'd have on bathroom shower doors.
So I'm writing a small game using Direct3D 9 and I'm using multitexturing for the terrain. All I'm doing is sampling 3 textures and a blend map and getting the overall color from the three textures based on the color channels from the blend map. Anyway, I am getting a massive frame rate drop when I sample more than 1 t...
Just curious what to do from here. So I am done with my tile editor program and currently have it set up so that my background (which is one large image) is mapped in XML to 32x32 tiles (again, a mapping, nothing is really split into tiles). So when I have my character (this is a platformer rpg) comes across a tile wh...
I am programming a particle engine for a 3D game written in XNA. I was wondering if somebody could point me in the right direction or perhaps give me some pointers in making the particles collide with geometry in game. In essence, I want to be able to make a spark emitter that will bounce and collide down say, a cylind...
I am tinkering around with some simple Canvas based cave flyer game and I would like to make it multiplayer eventually. The plan is to use Node.js on the server side. The data sent over would consists of position of each player, direction, velocity and such. The player movements are simple force physics, so I should be...
This is kind of an odd question, but what would be the best solution for rendering a 3D scene without a render window active? The end goal would be to simply render a 3D scene to an image file. I have done similar things in the past with DirectX and XNA but both required me to have a render window running in-order for ...
I am working on generation 3d perlin noise. The C# Math library seems like overkill for what I need since most of its functions use double percision. I use Math.Sin() in several places to generate the noise. Does anyone know of a faster sine function?
Specifically iPhone/iTouch, Droids, and the new Windows Phone 7? I don't know how to quantify this, or if any research has been done. I am wondering how important the music is to the gaming and what % of games come with music at all, if good music at that.
There are more or less standardized TV-show/movie formats and recommended timings: 1. By the early 1960s, television companies commonly presented half-hour long "comedy" series, or one hour long "dramas." Half-hour series were mostly restricted to situation comedy or family comedy, and were usually aired with either a...
I have seen the PCG wiki, and it is a great resource. But a lot of the articles are very brief and it is hard to find good links on specific things. I have been searching for ways to transform my Perlin noise height maps to make ridges, rivers, and other terrain features. I also can't find any articles on how to divide...
I'm wondering what would be the best way to store password and login in the client. Many people complain that they need to re-enter this every time they log in and they want me to make a way to save it. But how to save it? Saving it as plain text in game folder wouldn't be clever, but neither would encrypting it help s...
I'm looking for a high performance vector graphics library I can use in my games. I'm thinking along the lines of vector graphics such as those that can be made with SVG. I'll consider any language at the moment (but must run on Windows). A solution that takes advantage of GPU hardware would be great. Thanks in advance...
I would like to start a little discussion about serious video games. Do you think serious games DO have their place in today's world ? What kind of serious games do you think the most interesting in term of education / work tools ? I've recently read an article about the educational power of such games in early ages. D...
Is there code available to view the specs of a phone that is running your application?
When I visualise a three dimensional rotation matrix, or scaling matrix I visualize it as three axes. Is there a similar way that I can visualize a rotation quaternion?
I'm trying to write a game where player picks where they are going by just mouse-clicking on that position and it goes there (just like RuneScape's point-and-click mouse interface). I'm trying to get it working on the jme3test.bullet.TestWalkingChar example. I've tried: character.setLocalTranslation( cam.getWorldCo...

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