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I'd like to read up on path finding algorithms. Is there a primer available or any material or tutorials on the Internet that would be a good start for me?
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What pitfalls did you encounter when writing games for the PC with a managed Language like C# and how did you solve them?
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The last time I checked in on terrain rendering, ROAM was the new hotness. Yes, that was a long time ago. I liked ROAM a lot, though, because it was extremely simple to program, and gave pretty decent results. I imagine that the technology has improved quite a bit now. What are the most popular methods for terrain ... |
In what cases are what scripting languages better than others?
All answers are appreciated, please provide a description, and describe in what cases the language excels in.
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Working with the Wii I often find it necessary to recognize simple gestures, so far I've been able to mainly look at magnitude of acceleration in order to recognize the gestures called out for in our game design documents, but I'd like to create a more robust system that allows "recording" of example gestures and recog... |
I have been working with SFML(C++) and Flash(AS3) and usually creating prototypes for some ideas I have.
Is it better to use the language you are going to use in the end (C++ usually) or use something simple and quick (AS3, Python, etc) to get it working and then start from scratch when you start on the main product?
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I would like to understand on a fundamental level the way in which A* pathfinding works. Any code or psuedo-code implementations as well as visualizations would be helpful.
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I'm looking for a 2D graphics engine that would allow me to release to Windows, Mac and the iPhone, much the way Unity does for 3D.
Is there a good engine that does this and is specific to 2D?
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Are there any existing frameworks I can build on? Should I build my own? How can I prevent fake scores from being posted to it?
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I want to try my hand at writing a 3D game. However I don't want to start at such a low level of drawing individual triangles and writing my own 3D object loader and so on. I've heard of things like Irrlicht, Crystal Space 3D, and Cafu, but I don't have any experience with any of them. I'm looking for suggestions from ... |
I've heard about ambient occlusion and it looks nice, but what exactly is it?
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I'm wanting to test my hand at writing an RTS (something I've never gotten very far with), and so I'm looking for an indie engine that would give me the most success with a quick setup that I can then tweak and start to get the ins and outs of RTS design/development.
I've had a bit of familiarity with both Torque and U... |
What is the best way to implement a dialog tree system in my game? I want an NPC to give the player different sets of responses, some which may only appear when the Player has an item or a previous event has occurred.
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Those games that are not fortunate enough to run on a locked platform spec, like handhelds, need to run across various resolution formats and aspect ratios.
In a 3D game you might have a HUD or menu GUI based on raster graphics, and in a 2D game you might have a bunch of quads which are vessels for sprites.
So my que... |
I have a Unity project without any version control, and I need to share it with another developer so that both of us can work on the project.
What strategies should be use that play nice with Unity Assets?
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Do you have any Linux-specific game development resources?
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I've heard about this concept, but what is it?
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For instance, the Motorola Droid is as wide as the G1, but has more height.
Should I try to spread the UI out across the extra height found on the Motorola Droid? How do others handle this problem?
I'm not using OpenGL, but a SurfaceView for a 2D game.
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I made a game, and I want to port it to the Playstation 3. What do I need in terms of hardware, money, licenses and such?
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I know of Wario Ware DIY but is this the only option?
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I want to learn how to create custom graphics, not use freely available resources. But I have been looking around for articles or tutorials on how to start with 2D game design in general, and I can't seem to find a good starting point — books or otherwise. I mostly come across resources for those that have had formal s... |
I've heard about deferred rendering and how using it can allow for "lots" of lights in a scene without a huge performance hit, but what is it and (from a high level) how is it implemented?
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How would you store your game state at exit for an iPhone game written in Objective-C?
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I was having a discussion at work today on how to improve room acoustic modelling. It was suggested that very little work appears to have been done on the subject yet tonnes has been done in graphics. It was further suggested that as sound and light are just wave forms it might be possible to use things like ray trac... |
How can I successfully finish a hobby game project in my free time?
How do I motivate myself to keep it up and drive right through to the finish without losing interest or motivation along the way?
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I want to develop an MMO, like World of Warcraft, but some basic research says that it is going to take a lot of time and money. I'd like to know why.
Why is it so expensive to develop an MMO?
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At minimum, an OpenGL Android game has a UI thread and a Renderer thread created by GLSurfaceView. Renderer.onDrawFrame() should be doing a minimum of work to get the higest FPS. The physics, AI, etc. don't need to run every frame, so we can put those in another thread. Now we have:
Renderer thread - Update animati... |
What are the methods/tools for generating realistic skies with clouds and atmospheric shading?
FOSS alternatives and spherical projections get extra points.
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Has anyone used WiiFlash for developing Flash games? Any pointers on how to begin developing games for the Opera channel for the Wii?
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I am reading a book on Game Development in which they show you how to make scripts for your game in Lua. They program Lua and use it from C++, but I was wondering if there is a library or API to use Lua from C#: specifically from XNA to develop games for PC and XBox 360?
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I have cube maps in lat/long format, and i need to convert them to Horizontal/Vertical Cross, and individual cross images, is there an utility to do that?
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What is the best (as in most used by professional game developers and/or companies) software development methodology used in game development?
I've heard that SCRUM is popular, but i'm not sure.
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What is the minimum content that a game design document should have?
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Android uses OpenGL ES, what is the difference between it and OpenGL?
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For a really good example of what I'm talking about, see how the developer of Replica Island does it based off of Player deaths: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-62tRHLcHk&feature=player_embedded#t=37m
How can I easily produce heatmaps based off of data that I pass in?
Halo 3 is another good example of heatmap usage in... |
I would just like someone to explain in relativly clear terms how hardware tessellation works considering it is the new buzzword with DX11.
Thanks.
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Anyone have any good examples, tutorials, or snippets to share that preferably in C# or C/C++?
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Suppose you've got an object floating freely in space. You have a vector you want this object to point towards, and a vector representing the direction it's currently facing. From these two, you can get the rotation (matrix, quaternion, whatever) that represents the change in orientation to bring the two vectors into a... |
Do you have any tips/recommendations when creating a cross-platform game in C/C++?
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Suppose I have three layers: a foreground, an intermediate-ground and a background. What is involved in using these three layers to create parallax scrolling?
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If you have any experience with any MMO middleware packages and have any positive or negative experiences with them, your feedback will be appreciated.
Specifically I'm looking for server packages. Price, functionality, speed, and ease of use would all be useful metrics to know about.
For example, doing some prelimina... |
This is a hypothetical question, but one I always wanted to know about. Suppose I wanted to create a game in the same fantasy style as Battle for Wesnoth. Having no arts skills myself, I could write the code for the game engine and borrow (steal?) their artwork and use it myself. IIRC, their stuff is licensed under ... |
In the past, I've used simple systems like finite state machines (FSMs) and hierarchical FSMs to control AI behavior. This pattern falls apart very quickly or any complex system.
I've heard about behavior trees. They seem like the next obvious step, but I haven't seen a working implementation or really tried it yet.
W... |
Fast iteration times are key to developing games, much more so than fancy graphics and engines with truckloads of features in my opinion. No wonder many small developers choose scripting languages.
The Unity 3D way of being able to pause a game and modify assets AND code, then continue and have the changes take effe... |
What's the best place for tutorials & other learning resources for unity3d?
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What are some tools I can use to create 2d tile based maps?
Please provide the information below, and try to limit to one tool per answer.
Name
Link to website
General features
Export format
Anything else you deem noteworthy
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I'm fairly new to game development, played around with xna before and just learning OpenGL & c now and I'm interested to know which c/c++ based model animation libraries are out there and which you would recommend? I don't have any particular model format in mind yet but probably a format that is supported by a free mo... |
I want to detect a collision between a sprite and a user-generated shape of some sort.
For example. There are 3 objects on the screen. The user takes their finger and draws an abnormal shape around 2 of the objects. I need to detect those 2 objects.
How do I approach this efficiently using Cocos2D?
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Based on Why is it so hard to develop a MMO?:
Networked game development is not trivial; there are large obstacles to overcome in not only latency, but cheat prevention, state management and load balancing. If you're not experienced with writing a networked game, this is going to be a difficult learning exercise.
I k... |
Every programming language has its standard library of containers, algorithms, and other helpful stuff. With languages like C#, Java, and Python, it's practically inconceivable to use the language without its standard lib.
Yet, on many C++ games I've worked on, we either didn't use the STL at all, used a tiny fraction ... |
You are making a 3d engine. You want best of multiplatform worlds. Suddenly you realize that if you want to use Direct3D on Windows machines and OpenGL on OSX/Linux, you'll have to sacrifice supported features of both to least common denominator.
Some may use OpenGL across three OS', since it appears to be least commo... |
Where can I find information on the legal or business aspects of running a game production company?
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I work for a relatively small company. We don't get a lot of resumes from people with experience, yet we're in a position where we should hire people to grow. We pretty frequently get resumes from people just out of school.
We'd like to try to find the diamonds in the rough, but flying non-local people out and taki... |
Ive read a few articles about SSAO, and i would like to implement it in to 3d engine at work, which runs on top of DX9. Can you give me an tips on getting the simplest implementation possible up and running using shader model 3, and how would you upgrade this implementation over time to tackle artefacts like haloing?
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What are some good resources (tutorials, code, papers, etc.) for learning about voxel rendering?
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When creating a free game what revenue options are there and how successful are they? What are the pros and cons of different revenue models such as ad-supported, freemium, partnerships, merchandising, virtual goods, etc.?
If possible, give specific examples of games using different revenue models and provide data as ... |
Is there an industry standard file format for texture atlases?
What are the apps that take a directory of images and turns it into a texture atlas png and a text file describing what's on it?
This is primarily for use in OpenGL iPhone/Objective-C, but it seems like there ought to be a standard across many platforms. I... |
If (for the purpose of collision detection) 3D objects are represented in a game by spheres, what is a good algorithm to detect a collision between spheres?
If each object has a position as of the last frame and a new (desired) position, what is a good algorithm that will identify collisions where the spheres didn't i... |
I'm looking for a physics engine to use in an XNA project (2D or 3D). Because it's for XNA, it needs to fulfill some requirements:
Not necessarily free, but close to it is obviously preferred
Managed code only (or it won't run on the 360)
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I am familiar with how the common ones technically work (BFS, DFS, Dijkstra, A*) but as far as their realistic benefits I don't quite see the need for them. Considering that, given the right heuristics, A* is more performant then why bother with any others?
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I recall some time ago that procedurally generated textures were becoming a big deal that a lot of people/companies were really interested in with some serious benefits (smaller deployments, potentially faster loading, higher quality, scalable textures, potentially cheaper to produce, etc.).
From what I can tell, the b... |
I'm looking at hosting my flash game on a site like Kongregate or NewGrounds, but with so many choices, I'm left wondering what are the pros & cons of the various options?
I'm interested in:
Reaching the biggest audience
Making some money (eg. I know that Kongregate shares ad revenue)
Other features/benefits of the si... |
Has anyone come across a software package that allows you to build animations in a similar way to how you can in Flash (i.e. using techniques such as tweens & bones & easings, etc) and then have the result exported as a sprite sheet?
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I've been trying to work on a game with the look of an 8-bit game using XNA, specifically using the NES as a guide.
The NES has a very specific palette and each sprite can use up to 4 colors from that palette. How could I emulate this? The current way I accomplish this is I have a texture with defined values which act ... |
When I took my Java courses a year ago, I was told that Java is used mostly in the overseas gaming companies while C++ is used here in the US. What languages should I focus on learning in-depth?
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I normally code my admittedly simple games by hand in either Assembly or C but I'm looking to go a little more high level. I also want to build more modern skills so I'm looking at UDK. What are the pro's and cons of it for indie 3D development. I plan to use graphics, control and physics from the engine so I'm wonderi... |
Are there good free ebooks on game development? I don't care if they are theoretical or technology specific, I want to start reading one free book that worth it.
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I want to be able to release my game as open source, and I need to be able to distribute font files with my game. Where can I find fonts which I can use in this way, and what font licenses should I be looking for?
Are there any further considerations if I want to release my game under GPL rather than a less restrictive... |
I want to load a mesh into my game (written in C#, if this matters) but am not sure what mesh format to use. What mesh formats are there, how easy/hard it is to load them into DirectX10 and what's the difference between those formats?
Or is it best to write my own mesh format?
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Even though C++ appears to be king, from what I've been told C is still widely used in games, especially on the consoles. However, would writing an entire game engine in C be unreasonable today? What are, if any, some advantages that C has over C++? Why would someone possibly want to use C over C++?
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While I know that functional languages aren't the most commonly used for game writing, there are a lot of benefits associate with them that seem like they would be interesting in any programming context. Especially the ease of parallelization I would think could be very useful as focus is moving toward more and more pr... |
I'd like to have as little portability issues as possible but supports hardware acceleration. The main priority is on PC and having a game run on Windows, Linux and MacOS. Porting to consoles would however be great, too.
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Supreme Commander 2 has something called flow field path finding. How does it work? Is there some article available I can read up on how it works?
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I have written some simple apps following the tutorials on http://learningwebgl.com. What is the simplest way to load and display Collada model files, particularly the files available from Google 3D Warehouse?
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So let's say you've got a spline-based racing AI. Assume it can already handle the basics of braking and steering around the track.
How would you structure and implement collision avoidance, overtaking, drafting, blocking and other behaviours so your cars remain competitive but make interesting races?
Links to papers/... |
As above really,
I'm writing an android based game in my spare time (android because it's free and I've no real aspirations to do anything commercial).
The game logic comes from a very typical component based model whereby entities exist and have components attached to them and messages are sent to and fro in order to... |
Let's say I have a game written in C++. But I want to add some modding or scripting functionality to it. How would one go about adding a scripting functionality to your game?
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A friend and I are doing a 2D XNA game. Thus far, the API seems really cool and performance is acceptable. My question is more towards the release of it though. As other developers how have done games, how well have they done for you on PC (as far as downloads, sales, etc)? I know the statistics about the Xbox360 fr... |
I've been looking at Lua and Löve for developing simple 2D games. But since Lua is interpreted and I know it can be compiled to some point, but how secure is that to decompiling. Or is there a better way to distribute the game?
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Back in the day, TCP connections over dialup/ISDN/slow broadband resulted in choppy, laggy games because a single dropped packet resulted in a resync. That meant a lot of game developers had to implement their own reliability layer on top of UDP, or they used UDP for messages that could be dropped or received out of or... |
I have added some social features to an iPhone game (Lexitect if you're curious), such as email, Twitter, and Facebook integration for sharing high scores. Along with these features, I am measuring how many times users make it to each step. The goal of these features are to make the game more viral, and I am trying to... |
With me going it alone in development I only have limited resources at my disposal i.e one pc with which I develop and test the game. so I only know for certain my game works with that setup.
What options have I got in testing the game on the many different hardware/operating system combinations? Its a windows desktop ... |
We have a lot of information on the internet out there on plenty of engines, SDKs, fancy IDEs, etc.
But how did people manage to develop games in the past? Are there 'famous' tools? What was the most used programming language? how were they deployed into cartridges?
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What is wrong with the Linux/*nix family for games? What makes the development of games for this platform too slow compared to Windows or even OS X?
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Punkbuster exists just to prevent cheating, and yet cheating is common in punkbuster enabled games. Modern Warefare 2 is seriously locked down from the end user running their own server or making any mods, and cheating happens constantly.
For a multiplayer game where each client is running on a PC, what can be done to ... |
Are there any good resources for learning about game architectures? I am looking for high level overviews of different architectures. I tend to find information about the various pieces of a game such as entities, physics engines, scripting, etc but not about how to bring all of the pieces together.
As a bonus, how doe... |
Are there any libraries or frameworks readily available that handle player metrics, rankings, matching, tournaments, etc? Anything for managing the player community? (Please don't say DotNetNuke)
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Some examples could be the animations framework used in Aquaria, or in Crimson Legend.
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Working on a prototype for a Flash game that will use networking communication. It would be better to use Peer 2 Peer connection, since it will be a multiplayer game.
Has anyone used Stratus or tried to make a multiplayer game via the built in socket?
The game will be a turn based game, similar speed to poker but if I ... |
There's a lot of learning material in the DirectX world that uses .fx files to manage shaders, and .fx seems to be well integrated with 3D packages such as Maya and 3D Studio Max
What do larger OpenGL projects use? Do they all have a bespoke format or are there any common standards in use that might have some tools to ... |
There are a lot of version control systems available, including open-source ones such as Subversion, Git, and Mercurial, plus commercial ones such as Perforce.
How well do they support the process of game-development? What are the issues using VCS, with regard to non-text files (binary files), large projects, et ceter... |
This could include specific game dev, general dev or general game podcasts.
Please provide a brief description along with links.
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I would really like to hear how other independents generally approach marketing their game with limited resources. I know how critical marketing is since I've seen it first hand on several fronts. I've been part of teams that didn't put an ounce of marketing into their project and didn't come close to meeting expectati... |
I am planning on developing my first iPhone game, and I was wanting to know whether I should use OpenGL or CoreGraphics for a 2D game. An outline of the benefits would also be helpful.
Edit: Set this for the community wiki as the answer will be too subjective
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I have a limited experience in game development and would like to get involved with open source game project. Where should I look and how should I begin?
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I have some experience in creating, however I like to have some well written reference material to help me produce better products. Are there any game design books that are not aimed at a particular programming language?
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I looked into this a while back for a small project, but didn't get too far. I'd like to create a small program that lets a user draw a train track and then allows a "train" to follow said track on a 2D plane. I'd like the track to be pretty free form and result in a nice smooth line. I played around with cubic spli... |
Game development is a large process. In your experience, how are the total hours for releasing a game divided over the following major areas. I believe this is useful because few people (none?) are really good at all the areas, so this helps me balance the cost of items I'm not so good at when estimating the complexity... |
Google Sketchup is about the only 3d cad program I can use, because I suck. Do any 3d engines natively import Sketchup models? Are there any major caveats when doing so?
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If I understand correctly, there are two major kinds of artists involved in game development - 2D and 3D.
I think I somewhat understand, that if I want to go 3D, I should learn some 3D modeling package really well and that would be it. Please correct me if I am wrong.
With 2D I am completely lost. There are a lot of tu... |
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