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21 | What should I consider when evaluating libraries, engines and frameworks for making a game? I'm going to make a game. I've noticed that there are a lot of game engines, libraries, and frameworks available out there, and I'm having a little trouble deciding which one to use. I'm already pretty good with some programming languages, but there are others which I don't know at all. I'm not against learning new programming languages, if that'll help, but my real goal is just to make my game. What criteria should I use to compare engines, libraries, and frameworks against each other, so that I can decide which one will allow me to be the most productive to finish my game? |
21 | Limitations of p2p multiplayer games vs client server I am reading up on multiplayer game architecture. So far most of the articles i've found deal with the client server model. I'd like to know what are the limitations for using a p2p architecture? what "class" of games are possible (or more common) to implement using it? which aren't? and in general, what are its main differences and limitations against the client server model. |
21 | Engine for a Football Manager Type game (data driven, menu clicking) A friend and I had started developing a football manager two years ago, but ultimately squashed the whole thing because we found ourselves in a mess with developing UI and saving loading. The basic game loop of simulating matches and advancing days until the match day was already done. We also had a e mail system up and running (for receiving messages which might need decisions trigger events). In our lack of of knowledge, we tried building the game in GameMaker2. It made saving all the objects (a Team has 23 Player, a league has 20 Teams, there are several Leagues) a nightmare. Also, UI development (things like scrollbars for example) ate up incredible amounts of our time and still everything looked relatively bland. Short GameMaker2 seemed not suitable for the type of game we wanted to build. There must be a better engine system for developing a manager type game. Most of the game is spent in menus, There's no time critical interaction going on. Since we've benched the project, I started working a legit software development job and I have gained some skills which I hadn't have before, like knowledge of databases and a heap of Python experience. It has me looking at the game again. Now I see it as having a 'data backend' and an point and click frontend, with game design elements, like tough decisions, events and goals as the driving force in the middle. We want nice looking menus, where players can set the training schedule, make the line up for match day, talk to players executives whoever. The other necessity is managing all data objects, which there will a lot of. A league might easily contain 400 players which all need to have stats and so on and so forth. I see a relational database for this, but maybe there's something smarter regarding game development? So my Question is What is a suitable game engine development stack for developing data heavy, non real time menu clicking type manager games such as a football manager? |
21 | What are good games to "earn your wings" with? I believe that in order to become a good game developer, you need to make games. From a programmer's perspective, what are some good entry level games to get your hands dirty? What skills and challenges do each of these games teach you? |
21 | Are there any clever methods of regulating bandwidth usage for voice chat payload packets? 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 not jittery or choppy? This must be a solved problem in the VoIP world, but I'm not sure where to look. EDIT To clarify my abuse of the term jitter I mean, if two UDP voice packets arrive out of order, the audio would sound jittery in a colloquial sense (i.e. I mean packet jitter, not audio signal displacement). The choppy sound I'm referring to is related, where a UDP packet is lost instead of arriving late and causes a gap or jump in the audio. When I refer to muting the playback, I don't mean as a function of source input to avoid background noise. I mean on the receiving end of the conversation, if there's high packet loss, just stop playback instead of playing choppy audio. |
21 | Recursive dungeon maps as represented by an elastic 2d array I came up with a method for recursively generating simple dungeon maps by starting with one room and recursively connecting new adjacent rooms randomly to it. Maps are represented as two dimensional arrays where each cell contains a value of 0 15. 0 represents no room while each direction is represented by north 1, east 2, south 4, west 8. I wanted to start with a single non room ( 0 ) and then expand the 2d array as necessary to fit the generated map. The difficulty I face with this tree like recursion is that if the arrays have to be unshifted to add rows and columns to the left and top of the map, I have to adjust the current position of the function, what row and column it is at. This makes it so that separate branches are not aware of array index adjustments from other branches, only their child functions will know because they have the adjusted position passed to them as their row and column arguments. Is there a way to do this? I tried storing row and column offset values outside of the recursion, but it did not work for some reason. |
21 | Lua as a stand alone for game programming like Python? I've used Python before with PyGame to make games, but PyGame doesn't seem to be so popular anymore, and there arent that many good resources for it. I hear lots of buzz about Lua as a fast scripting language to be used inside of projects made in other languages. I work much faster and enjoy the higher level programming that is Python, so that naturally leads me to Lua, which seems to be getting a lot of attention recently. I know it's been around for a while but I think WoW add on creation made it more popular.. Can Lua make games on its own as a stand alone language with any 2D or 3D libraries, or is that not really the Lua domain? I won't bother asking about 3D in Python here, I'll make a new question for that. Thanks! |
21 | What language was used to write Starcraft II? Total newbie question , but what language was used by blizzard to crate the Starcraft II game play? 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 flavor of a know language? |
21 | How do I draw text once a countdown ends? I created a countdown in Game Maker using a variable of time. The countdown works properly and is displayed at the proper coordinates. However, when the countdown reaches zero, I want to make the countdown disappear and display "GO" instead. How can I do that? |
21 | Should a server run all maps in one loop, or a thread game loop per map? I'm working on a real time multiplayer browser based game. The game is top down on variable size tile based maps. There is no central map where all players come together, the entire game plays out in multiple maps. (Player chooses one on login, but has the ability to switch whenever they want). Let's take the following loop that runs on the server side of things let tick time Duration from millis(500) e.g. Tick 2 times per second. let mut next tick Instant now() loop let now Instant now() if now gt next tick Parse user input Update state Update to state to users in map next tick tick time else let wait time next tick now sleep(wait time Duration from millis(1)).await In my 'map based' gameplay scenario, would it make sense to spawn a thread for every map where one of these loops runs? Or would it be recommended to have only a singular thread with a singular game loop that updates every map? Or is there perhaps a better, already existing, pattern for this? |
21 | How to replace texture maps on models in a packaged game? I'm trying to do an experiment. I'd like to do some object masking to the assets inside of a game, so during run time, when you are playing, they're texture maps are replaced by the masks. The masks will literally be just color maps. They are supposed to be labels for a machine learning program. Preferably if one could replace the texture maps with color masks during runtime that would be better. |
21 | How to Duplicating and updating component data in systems I am new to game development. Coming across the ECS (entity component system) pattern I generally quite liked the idea. I have implemented the current version of my engine using the OOP style approach. In other words, Components are objects that have both state and behaviour and methods that can be polymorphic. My entity manager also means that when a SpriteRenderComponent has been added to an entity, entity.GetComponent lt RenderComponent gt () will return a reference to the SpriteRenderComponent. Of course, the problem with this is that components have to communicate with each other. E.g. the draw method will access the TransformComponent's transform data. Now I have dug a bit deeper and found that most sources recommend the pure ECS approach where the entities are an id or a list of components, components are just structs with public data and the systems are where all the magic happens ie where all the functions are. Of course, components don't depend on each other and the same is ideally true for systems as well. So now when I want to draw a sprite I create a SpriteRenderSystem which knows how to draw a sprite. The problem is that drawing concerns all kinds of drawable things e.g. to sort them depending on a zOrder and layer. This is what lead me to the idea of nodes as objects that are local to the system. So now the SpriteRenderSystem would add a 'SpriteRenderNode' to the RenderManager. The SpriteRenderNode could inherit from an abstract RenderNode and implement the virtual draw method. The SpriteComponent would only hold the data specific to the sprite such as colour. The vertex array and all the other stuff that is purely related to rendering is kept encapsulated in the derived RenderNodes. Problem 1 In order to be drawn by the RenderManager, the SpriteRenderNode would need to know and therefore store its transform data. The only way to keep this data up to date would be to copy the entity's transform component's transform data to the SpriteRenderNode every frame. I am not so much concerned about performance here but about the practice of duplicating the data in the systems. It feels like this is a violation of general good programming practices though I can't see any immediate reasons why it may prove harmful. Problem 2 Taking the data out of the components. From what I understand, the data should live in the components. However, taking the above presented idea a step further, there may be cases where storing data in components isn't necessary at all. Such an example may be an animation system which may simply store and update animation nodes for each entity and then change their components such as texture, position... The problem with this is that it would take away the ability to save the game by simply serialising all the components. As you see I am quite confused about how a good pure ECS should look like. Any help would be much appreciated. |
21 | Where does the game code fit into the engine? I was wondering if somebody could tell me how the game and the game engine fit into game development. What I specifically mean is, the game engine does not actually contain a game. Do game developers build an engine, then create a new class that inherits from the engine, which becomes the game? For example, class ShooterGame public Engine I'm not sure about where the game code fits into the engine. |
21 | Tangible benefits to speed coding your personal game projects I noticed a few programmers setting time sensitive challenges for themselves, usually in the area of "write game of type X in Y amount of time" or "write X number of games giving only Y time for each". What are the tangible benefits for setting your workflow in this manner to speed code for a while? It feels like you have to trade off efficient code to get something done quick. And I suppose adding a final layer of polish isn't a big priority in these challenges, so it's okay to use programmer. I've made some simple 2D scrolling shooters and puzzle games a few years ago and out of stupidity I deleted most of my code. So now I'm curious about using the speed coding approach to get a couple simple things done again, and get myself more into game logic. |
21 | What are some great papers publications relating to game programming? What are some of your favorite papers and publications that closely relate to game programming? I'm particularly looking for examples that are well written and illustrated, and or have had a profound influence on the industry. (Here's one example in this GDC talk, Bungie's David Aldridge mentions that a paper called "The TRIBES Engine Networking Model" was the starting point for Halo's network code.) |
21 | Engine programming, is it supposed to be enjoyable? Now this might sound like a silly question and I apologize if this sort of question is not suited for stackexchange. But I am genuinely wondering this, and I feel like I get alot more proffesional awnsers on here. I'm getting into game development and have only worked solo since my study is not primairly about games. I'm only interested at 2D games atm, so am not really in need of any external engines for physics and rendering and such. So usually write the engines myself. I absolutely hate writing things as quadtree's and pathfinding algorithims, most of the time I wish I could just skip those parts and move on to programming the actual gameplay elements. Things that happen in the background don't really interest me at all. But at the same time, I can't stand it I don't know whats how everything is happening in the background. My dislike might be explained by my weak mathematical skills. My motivation gets me through, but it can take alot of time before I grasp the technical solution behind a problem. Now is it normal to have such a dislike towards engine programming? Or do you (people who also work solo) enjoy programming the engine? |
21 | What makes a good educational game? I'm currently creating a game framework engine for educational games. My hope is that this can be used in elementary schools. It is of course extremely important that the games are both fun and educational. Any ideas what should be in my initial requirement specification? What makes a good educational game? Which platforms should I target? |
21 | What should a game engine do? I'd like to improve my skills try something new and I'd like to start with 3D. I have read Starting programming in 3D with C but I have question about engines What should engine do? I know it is abstraction layer above 3D API (i.e. OpenGL or DirectX) but what should it exactly do? |
21 | How to manage in game factions, alliances, federations, etc So this question is code or engine agnostic but, I m looking for ideas on how a game can keep track of a pre determined number of factions or alliances. For example, say I made a space game that has 2 major and 3 minor federations of planets. A planet may join or leave a federation, but the federation itself may have an alliance or be at war with another (actually, to keep it simpler, I think all these changes will solely be reliant on the player s actions). However, I would also like to keep track of such diplomatic endeavours on the individual level as well. Say the player has joined one federation that is at war with another. If the player should encounter another ship of the opposing federation, that ship becomes hostile. On the other side, two ships have an alliance, they might help one another. What is the best way to keep track of all this? One way I was thinking was creating a manager that holds all the Federation classes (which hold the status it holds with all other federations say less than 0 and the federations are at war more than x amount, there s an alliance). Meanwhile, each player ship holds similar data in its class, along with its current alliance to whatever federation. Is my thinking logical in this or are there better ways of managing such things? Many thanks. |
21 | How can I transmit move information from player to player in a web application? I am trying to create an online chess game using ActionScript and Flex. It works well when I have two players on the same PC, but I want to publish it as a web app. How can I transmit a move or action from one user to another, such that the other user sees what the first one did? |
21 | Language agnostic game programming books Possible Duplicates Game programming books that don 39 t teach programming? Must read game development books Does anyone know any good language independent game programming books? I don't currently know anything about game programming or practices any good books on stuff like scene graphs, handling sprites, layers, collision detection, effects, events? I'm a college student without the time to learn a new language so the concepts need to be language agnostic enough they can fit into the languages I know Javascript, Python, Scheme Lisp and some light Vala (I'm considering using HTML5 or PyGame). I would use C books but my OS is Linux and I don't know about the whole mono thing when most C books use XNA. Also I know that game programming is an extension of general programming, but I think I've got that down. Like is there a cookbook of some sort? |
21 | Large game project, local variables I'm hoping that some experienced programmers can give me their point of view. I'm writing a large game in Windows with dx11. So far, I've got global objects of the class that interfaces with dx11, the class holding the position of the camera, the terrain data class, and a few other classes. In future, if I kept going with this way, I'd also have objects for all the game data, and so on. I'm thinking it might be best to rejig the code to only have local variables, because generally this is regarded as a Good Thing, but mainly because I personally have come to prefer using them. Here's some rough c ish pseudo code of how I imagine local variables would be implemented WinMain() cDirectX dx cCamera cam cTerrain terrain ... while (msg.message ! WM QUIT) ... gameLoop(dx, cam, terrain, ...) void gameLoop(cDirectX amp dx, cCamera amp cam, cTerrain amp terrain, ...) ... renderTerrain(dx, terrain) ... Is this (very roughly!) a good way to organise such a project? I suppose WinMain is the only function where the locals can be instantiated? The only disadvantage I can see is that top level function calls (by which I mean, functions like gameLoop(), functions at the bottom of the call stack) will have very long lists of arguments. Perhaps this doesn't matter. Thanks, Paul |
21 | Object oriented approach to debug mode I'd like to introduce a way to turn off on debug messages and in game tooling (tweak menus, for example) without non game related branches, e.g if(DEBUG MODE) show tweak menu some message console.log("In this function") Is there a more reusable approach to this problem? |
21 | How to make gravity in Blitz3D? I am making a game in Blitz3d and I made simple gravity, however once the object falls on the ground, it goes through it very slowly. The ground is a plane and I have collision on it. This is a pretty old engine, and not a lot of people are using it but I decided to use it because it's easier than Unity3D for me and it's very basic and customizable. Here's my code AppTitle "FPS" Graphics3D 800,600,32,2 SetBuffer BackBuffer() SeedRnd MilliSecs() HidePointer Objects Global player CreatePivot() Global camera CreateCamera(player) Global cube CreateCube() Global light CreateLight() Global plane CreatePlane() Global cube2 CreateCube(player) col plane 1 col player 2 col cube 3 Vars gravity .00001 plx 0 ply 0 plz 0 pldx 0 pldy 0 pldz 0 Textures CameraClsColor camera,135,206,250 box LoadTexture("models box.png") dirt LoadTexture("models dirt.jpg") Object Details EntityType cube,col cube EntityType player,col player EntityType plane,col plane EntityRadius player,1.2 EntityRadius plane,1 PositionEntity player,0,10,5 PositionEntity cube,0,1,5 PositionEntity light,0,2,0 PositionEntity plane,0,0,0 EntityTexture cube,box EntityTexture plane,dirt ScaleTexture dirt,5,5 CameraRange camera,0.25,200 Called Functions While Not KeyHit(1) Cls Collisions Collisions col player,col plane,2,2 Collisions col player,col cube,2,2 If ply lt 2 Then ply 0 pldy pldy .39 EndIf If ply lt 1.8 Then pldx .6 pldx pldz .6 pldz If KeyDown(57) Then pldy 2 EndIf pldy pldy gravity plx plx pldx ply ply pldy plz plz pldz PositionEntity player,EntityX(player) plx,EntityY(player) ply,EntityZ(player) plz control() RenderWorld() UpdateWorld() MoveMouse GraphicsWidth() 2, GraphicsHeight() 2 Flip Wend End Functions Function control() If KeyDown(42) Shift (for running) If KeyDown(17) And KeyDown(30) W and A MoveEntity player, 0.15,0,0.15 ElseIf KeyDown(17) And KeyDown(32) W and D MoveEntity player,0.15,0,0.15 ElseIf KeyDown(17) And KeyDown(30) S and A MoveEntity player, 0.15,0, 0.15 ElseIf KeyDown(17) And KeyDown(32) S and D MoveEntity player,0.15,0, 0.15 ElseIf KeyDown(17) W MoveEntity player,0,0,0.15 ElseIf KeyDown(31) S MoveEntity player,0,0, 0.15 ElseIf KeyDown(30) A MoveEntity player, 0.15,0,0 ElseIf KeyDown(32) D MoveEntity player,0.15,0,0 End If Else Walking If KeyDown(17) And KeyDown(30) W and A MoveEntity player, 0.1,0,0.1 ElseIf KeyDown(17) And KeyDown(32) W and D MoveEntity player,0.1,0,0.1 ElseIf KeyDown(17) And KeyDown(30) S and A MoveEntity player, 0.1,0, 0.1 ElseIf KeyDown(17) And KeyDown(32) S and D MoveEntity player,0.1,0, 0.1 ElseIf KeyDown(17) W MoveEntity player,0,0,0.1 ElseIf KeyDown(31) S MoveEntity player,0,0, 0.1 ElseIf KeyDown(30) A MoveEntity player, 0.1,0,0 ElseIf KeyDown(32) D MoveEntity player,0.1,0,0 End If End If While KeyDown(16) Q RotateEntity camera,MouseXSpeed(),10,10 Wend While KeyDown(18) E RotateEntity camera,0, 10, 10 Wend TurnEntity player, 0, MouseXSpeed() 6.0, 0 TurnEntity camera, MouseYSpeed() 6.0, 0, 0 If EntityPitch(camera) lt 70 RotateEntity camera, 70, EntityYaw(camera), EntityRoll(camera) ElseIf EntityPitch(camera) gt 70 RotateEntity camera, 70, EntityYaw(camera), EntityRoll(camera) EndIf End Function If there's some one who can actually help me with this, I would appreciate it. |
21 | Is game software design the same as non game software design? Is the software design process for a game similar to a non game? Do developers create UML diagrams? I ask because of the iterative nature of game development, I wonder if creating a UML diagram would just be a waste. |
21 | Effective methods to continuously update movement in a tower defense game? We are four guys making a Tower Defense game as a project in first grade on a university. The game is going to be really simple! Three different towers Three different monsters One map (maybe add some more if we have time) The game has to be object oriented. The class structure is as following Game Drawing of graphic, etc. Level Every level is an object of this class. Each level has a finite number of wave objects (in a list) Wave Contains a list of monster objects. Monster This is a superclass. We make subclasses for the different type of monsters Tower Superclass to the towers. There are subclasses for each type of tower. We are thinking about how to solve the problem that many objects have to do stuff, at the same time, e.g. move one pixel in one direction. What we came up with is the idea of implementing av class Timer, to control when objects do things. I am not sure this is the best way to do it. Could someone give some good ideas about how to solve the continious update case? |
21 | Experiences of test driven devleopment in large projects I've used TDD in personal projects, but I wondered if anyone had any experience of using this approach across a large team? Was there resistence to the test first approach? Did you keep code coverage high for the whole project? How did coverage survive fixing those two in the morning and you ship in four hours crash bugs? Did you run tests on all platforms, or just assume that passing on one meant passing the others? I love the decoupled code that TDD produces, and the large suite of regression tests you get for free, but if you only have a few in the team who don't want to contribute tests, won't everyone suffer? |
21 | Which programming language should I start with in game dev? I am a front end web developer and I've always been interested in building games. I work primarily with HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript on a daily basis, so I'm not new to coding. I would like to know which language platform would be most useful for me to build a simple, 2D, art heavy game, like something you'd see on the Super Nintendo. Thanks. |
21 | 'Real' AI that learns in games In my work I analyze and design Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), but for fun I'm learning game design, and, of course application of EAs in games. So I'm wondering if there have been any games where AI actually works as AI, i.e. learns from past solutions to develop new ones. I suspect it should be something like tic tac toe or chess. |
21 | Visually coding rpg dialog trees I am currently using XML to create my dialog trees in my rpg, but doing this by hand for hundreds of different discussions can get very tedious very fast. I was wondering if there is any way I can implement a flow chart udk kismet like system of visually coding these diolog trees. I still want the end result to be the XML because I already wrote the parsing and other logic around the XML. EDIT to give an idea of what I am looking for, here is an example. This was shown to me when I asked this on reddit and it is basically what I am looking for but it is limiting . Really what I am looking for is any dialog software that is already in use for games or software that is graph flowchart like and can be modified to suit my needs. |
21 | Is there any online programmer's community, focusing on core game development? I am looking for a stricktly mostly programming oriented game community, focusing on core graphics, middleware, and research. Any suggestions? Edit I am specifically looking for people community group, having expertise in core game engine design programming, directx opengl reservoir.(And specifically targetting the programming part only).(The platforms can be anything from PC to xbox360 ps3 wii and even 3ds.) |
21 | How are the same items generated with slightly different attributes? Consider games like Destiny. How do they generate weapons that have the same skins and names, but different attributes? Two people can have the same weapon or armor piece, but have different attributes on these pieces based on luck or drop rate etc. How is this accomplished programmatically? |
21 | Store and retrieve different objects on a tile (I hope the title is clear enough, if not feel free to suggest a better one) I'm trying to make a simple tile based map for a college project in Java. But I'm stuck on how to literally place things on my map. On the programming side of things, I still haven't got into graphics on this. As of now I have A "Robot" class, which implements an "Attackable" and "Spawnable" interface, the robot can attack and moved A "Obstacle" class, the obstacle too can be attacked, so it implements Attackable, Spawnable, but it also can be pushed by a robot (methods by the class itself). A "Station", which is nor attacable nor can be pushed, so it only implements Spawnable and other specific methods. A "GameWorld" class which hold the map (a 2D array of Tiles) and various methods. A "Tile" class (which is arrayed to create the map). It has a boolean "Occupied" (which doubles as a collision too). Previously it stored just a single Attackable variable, because both Obstacles and Robot can be attacked, so I just tought it would be easy to just store them as such on the map for when I need to attack something, and then use some other reference to Robot instances when I need to move the robots and have a reference to the station in GameWorld in order to use that. But then I remembered that the Obstacles need to be moved too, so it wouldn't really work. Now I'm thinking about having two maps, basically, an AttackableMap for the attackable object (which would store both robots and the obstacles) and a ObstaclesMap for the obstacles alone (with tiles occupied by robots set as occupied). Which would obviously mean having two tile classes, one to hold each kind of object. But it feels cheap, I think. It uses a lot of memory and I think it might be hard to render at a later time. But having only one map would mean having to check what kind of object I'm getting and I'd have to do loads of casts and I want to avoid that. So, I think, there must be a better way to do this. How do other people do it then? So basically my question is... How can I store different "things" on a tilemap in a better way? Is there some technique widely used? What I've come up with feels rigid, if I wanted to add another kind of object that can be placed on the map (like a mine) I would need to create another map entirely, another tile, write new methods... There must be some flexible (and not too complex) way to have some freedom in this aspect. |
21 | Making a game for multiple platforms I am making a game with web, iphone, and android front ends. I want to make them all able to interact well through the back end so that any user can play with any user. To do this I've decided to make an "API" or really just a Ruby on Rails back end (with the rails api gem). Which option fits best 1. Back end First Process would be building entire back end functionality, one feature at a time until it is complete (can always expand missing features later). Can test it using different types of tests. 2. Back end alongside one platform (web) Process would be building one feature in the back end, then using it in the front end to make sure it works. Would be easy to build with web because most Rails projects already have views. 3. Back end alongside each platform Same as option 2, but building the feature in each platform before moving on to the next one. Would allow fixes for cross platform problems as you go along, being able to narrow it down precisely. Essentially I know possible ways to go about it, but have never made an API or cross platform game |
21 | How can I mock Google Play purchases? I would like to know what best practices should I do for testing the functionality when a user buy an item power ups via Google Play and purchased with real money? For example, basically, creating a simple test of purchasing and saving an item stored in the inventory during the game using a game money. (e.g. Gil from Final Fantasy series or Zenny from Tron Bonne for the PlayStation 1) I know how to make money purchase update only via game money when I'm programming in Unity3D or Eclipse w LibGDX library. Now, let say I have to create a program that checks the user if actually purchase a power up items using real money. Next, the system needs to check for online status. If connected, it will simply go to the Google Play dialog and asks the user if he she wanted to proceed purchasing of items. If yes and the credit card balance is sufficient, then goes back to the game app and check if the boolean returns true, then item that the user is bought will be saved. Another example is that the amount of real money will be calculated via programming and if insufficient, the user asks to add more real money value by purchasing it via Google Play. If return true, then, the real money value will be reloaded. This concept is basically needed for game developers. However, is there a safe way to test the real money purchase test stuff without using a credit card value or something before the actual publishing of the game app in Google Play along with this feature? Is there a tutorial, start up guide, recommendation or something for this? Please, I would like to know how will I start. Thank you. |
21 | What programming language were PS1 games written in? Is there any common language that is used to create Play Station 1 Games? Or how can I find out what programming language is used for one of those games? |
21 | Java game in a day or two We are three people who are going to make a simple game in Java as a school project (University, first year). The game has to be object oriented. We don't have much time, 10 20 hours tops. None of us has any experience in game development, but we all have fair skills in Java. We can choose exactly what kind of game, and that is where the problem lies. How high should we aim? There is a competition involved, so we do want to make the best game in the time we have. Is a 3d game unrealistic? Should we use any game engines libraries? What kind of functionality should we avoid? |
21 | Good practices while working with multiple game engines, porting a game to a new engine I have to work with multiple game engines, like Cocos2d Unity3d Galaxy While working with multiple game engines, what practices should I follow? For instance, we made a game with Cocos2d and released it on the AppStore. Now we want to port it to other platforms using Unity. What would be the course of actions to follow? |
21 | Cross Game Engine Compatibility Multiple Game Engines for one Game I am new to Game Development, infact getting started with it, so reading as much as I can. I came across game engines. Now atleast I have an idea of what a game engine is, and what it does. In order of reading about game engines, I came across various game engines Paid, Freeware, OpenSource. Some are good for physics, some are good for loading images, some for sound. At last, it always comes to performance. Now what comes to my mind, can I use various game engines to develop one game? I mean, one for loading graphics one for animation one for physics. Is this possible? I know, game engine is like a CPU, and what I am talking about is using various CPUs to work on one PC. But whatever it is, can this be done? Cross Game Engine Compatibility? |
21 | why is Lua so important ( frequently used ) in game development I have written some small games for fun myself, but never used Lua myself. I have seen people discussing Lua's use in games everywhere. The question is What benefit can I get from using Lua in game development? Can someone explain this a little bit to me? |
21 | Does Big O really matter? 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. |
21 | Clickable hex grid in c .net I want to create a Windows Form based adventure game where the player clicks a hex on a static map to bring up their next encounter. I have the map already and plan to scan it and convert it to a .bmp file. My problem is that I'm not sure how to tie the map image in with the game code. Unless I'm mistaken, I think I need to use some kind of imagemap control. If that's the case, do I need to plot each hex individually, or is there a way to plot the whole map in bulk? I found this article, but I'm not sure if it's relevant to what I want to do or not. I'm just looking for general information or links to relevant articles. Thanks. |
21 | Good practices while working with multiple game engines, porting a game to a new engine I have to work with multiple game engines, like Cocos2d Unity3d Galaxy While working with multiple game engines, what practices should I follow? For instance, we made a game with Cocos2d and released it on the AppStore. Now we want to port it to other platforms using Unity. What would be the course of actions to follow? |
21 | What should audio programmers know? I'm a music composition student also getting a minor plus some in computer science. I love writing music and making sound effects and want to write music for games. But, I also realize everyone and their mother wants to do that. With that in mind, and since I'm already equally in love with programming, I'm interested in looking at focusing some aspects of the computer science portion of my education towards audio implementation for games. What I've done am doing Wrote "MusicManager" classes that are aware of musical timings and a small amount of automated mixing based on game events Reading Who is Fourier? as I work my way toward understanding Fourier analysis and implementing the FFT Learning FMOD Designer and using the designer API in a game (of course not taking a class specifically on this, I'm good for learning APIs on my own) With that background, I've got a two part question. So aside from the things I list above, and the good ole fundamentals of computer science (data structures and algorithms, discrete math, OO structured design), what are studios looking for in audio programmers? Also, G.A.N.G. and Audio Engineering Society lecturers speak as though audio programmers are the next hot thing in games, but do many studios even have or think to hire dedicated audio programmers? |
21 | Should items in an RPG be hardcoded or loaded in some other way? Should static weapons (ie.. Iron Sword, Mythril Axe) be their own (static) classes that derive from something like ItemWeapon, which itself is derived from a standard Item class with their own (inherited) methods? Or possibly should there be just a standard Item class, an ItemWeapon class, and then every weapon is just an ItemWeapon instance loaded in at the start of the game? If I was going to do that approach, where would I be loading all the items and weapons into the game? init? If some weapons have special properties such as doing multiple attacks or a different effect, would it be beneficial to make them the separate classes to do it on an as is basis instead of having every Weapon in the game have that function except it doesn't do anything? |
21 | What can I do to make sure that I have the energy to work on my game while working full time? I work as a software engineer 40 hours a week and I find that between balancing my personal life and family responsibilities that I have literally no energy to work on game development. What can I do to make more time for my hobby without burning myself out in front of the computer? I am sure there must be someone here successfully developing a game while working as a programmer on the side. |
21 | how to breakdown my game project? I am a newbie so when ever i start over i get stuck how to organize things (code) or what should be the order of my work. Can you share your experience of project granularity so i can make my mind what should be done first and so on. |
21 | What is "tools development?" I have been looking at different jobs in the games industry and a lot of the jobs that I have seen advertised are for a "Tool Developer" position. I do not know what this actually is. Could someone explain what this is to me please? And if anyone has any links to material that would help me understand it more then that would be very much appreciated. |
21 | Does Big O really matter? 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. |
21 | How can I transmit move information from player to player in a web application? I am trying to create an online chess game using ActionScript and Flex. It works well when I have two players on the same PC, but I want to publish it as a web app. How can I transmit a move or action from one user to another, such that the other user sees what the first one did? |
21 | Limitations of p2p multiplayer games vs client server I am reading up on multiplayer game architecture. So far most of the articles i've found deal with the client server model. I'd like to know what are the limitations for using a p2p architecture? what "class" of games are possible (or more common) to implement using it? which aren't? and in general, what are its main differences and limitations against the client server model. |
21 | What are windows used for? I have a very general question In games, what use does the programming concept of a window have? Or, in other words, why do some game dev libraries offer interfaces through which to create multiple windows? mdash Why would you need more than one windows in a game? Are multiple windows used as different views states of the game? (I.e. in game, main menu, pause menu, etc.) |
21 | How are the same items generated with slightly different attributes? Consider games like Destiny. How do they generate weapons that have the same skins and names, but different attributes? Two people can have the same weapon or armor piece, but have different attributes on these pieces based on luck or drop rate etc. How is this accomplished programmatically? |
21 | connecting multiple anti aliased lines together I implemented copied the wu line algorithm from pseudo code on wiki pedia and other places. When drawing a sine wave it breaks down at the point where the line changes from y dominant to x dominant (or vice versa). (I did not copy the endpoint code because it looks terrible and I do not need them for my purposes. ) Does anyone know a solution for this issue? If not I will modify the algorithm myself to get it to work. I am just curious if someone else has run into this and knows exactly how to fix it. Is it possible to implement without the lines being globally aware of each other? Or is this why drawing API's implement moveto and lineto functions? The pseudo code |
21 | Game Design Patterns ( think GOF ) literature? Possible Duplicate What are some programming design patterns that are useful in game development? Is there any literature on game design patterns? I'm taking a software design class and would like to learn how some of these design patterns would apply to game development. |
21 | What is an OO way for my input layer to act upon objects? I'm building a top down RPG specifically to practice Object Oriented thinking and design. I am keeping in mind coupling, single responsibility, and so forth. One design issue that's been bugging me is how to ultimately have objects talk while maintaining the loosest coupling possible. As an example, I'm designing the input class now, which will be made up of two layers, like so The conundrum is that I don't know how to bridge that gap between Input and HeroActor, which is initialized from the PlayState class, which is also where the hero.update() method is called. Let's say Keyboard has just executed public void keyPressed(KeyEvent e) switch(e.getKeyCode()) Some cases case KeyEvent.VK UP Assume InputEvent.INPUT1 is a defined enumeration in InputEvent inputHandler.passInput(InputEvent.INPUT1) break Some more cases I've basically landed here public class Input public void passInput(InputEvent e) switch(e) Some cases case InputEvent.INPUT1 ???????????????????? Some more cases My ideas have been Pass a reference to the instance of HeroActor to the Input object, then have Input directly call the moveUp() method on the HeroActor instance. case InputEvent.INPUT1 actor.moveUp() My instinct tells me this is bad OO design as it tightly couples the two classes. Make the instance of HeroActor global and basically do the same as above. Even worse OO design. Write a registerInput(Input inputHandler) function in the Actor class, like so public class HeroActor extends Actor Existing fields and methods private Input inputHandler public void registerInput(Input inputHandler) this.inputHandler inputHandler Still, then the HeroActor would have to poll the inputHandler every frame to find out if any actions have applied to it. I'm in the same situation trying to figure out how to write the collision engine without passing it specific references to the player's HeroActor instance or the dozens of EnemyActor instances in the PlayState constructor. Any help would be greatly appreciated. My request is not for specific code, but rather common techniques for handling the many objects in a game without ending up with a god object. I've seen some material suggesting an Observer pattern being applied for things like the input layer above, but before I go too far, I'd like some feedback from the community since I've got so many different answers among all of my Googling today. |
21 | What basic non games related computer knowledge should a games programmer possess? So the question will very likely need re phrasing. I thought about asking this for a while, but held off because it's a tad vague. To explain I have been a programmer for 4 years and only begun doing it when I took a university course. Now that I'm working as a programmer, I find that often people assume you know a number of things that I feel people who have been messing around with computers know by default, and I don't. Things like shell commands, how to use subversion, stuff about how websites work at their base level, how to use databases and so on. What I would like to know is some of the basic stuff, the nitty gritty that people in a programming job are expected to have encountered and know how to do. Also, I'm sorry if people feel this question is not a perfect match for the Q and A format please let me know how I can improve it or just edit it heavily. Thank you in advance. |
21 | Actionscript 3 Which side of object is hit? I have a two objects colliding with each other. I am testing for the collision with if(ob1.hitTestObject(ob2)) do something . Is there a way to determine which side of the object was hit, i.e. if ob2 is a square, which side of the square was collided with? |
21 | Engine for a Football Manager Type game (data driven, menu clicking) A friend and I had started developing a football manager two years ago, but ultimately squashed the whole thing because we found ourselves in a mess with developing UI and saving loading. The basic game loop of simulating matches and advancing days until the match day was already done. We also had a e mail system up and running (for receiving messages which might need decisions trigger events). In our lack of of knowledge, we tried building the game in GameMaker2. It made saving all the objects (a Team has 23 Player, a league has 20 Teams, there are several Leagues) a nightmare. Also, UI development (things like scrollbars for example) ate up incredible amounts of our time and still everything looked relatively bland. Short GameMaker2 seemed not suitable for the type of game we wanted to build. There must be a better engine system for developing a manager type game. Most of the game is spent in menus, There's no time critical interaction going on. Since we've benched the project, I started working a legit software development job and I have gained some skills which I hadn't have before, like knowledge of databases and a heap of Python experience. It has me looking at the game again. Now I see it as having a 'data backend' and an point and click frontend, with game design elements, like tough decisions, events and goals as the driving force in the middle. We want nice looking menus, where players can set the training schedule, make the line up for match day, talk to players executives whoever. The other necessity is managing all data objects, which there will a lot of. A league might easily contain 400 players which all need to have stats and so on and so forth. I see a relational database for this, but maybe there's something smarter regarding game development? So my Question is What is a suitable game engine development stack for developing data heavy, non real time menu clicking type manager games such as a football manager? |
21 | Do retail games use "inversion of control" and "dependency injection"? 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? |
21 | Converting DirectX 9 code to DirectX 10 Preface I purchased Programming an RTS in DirectX recently, and I know the code uses DirectX 9, but it has fantastic reviews and is apparently one of the best books you can get on beginning DirectX. Question To my understanding, DirectX is just a means of displaying graphics to the scene. I will still have to code any games in C using game logic code, input, etc. Was I naive in thinking I could read the book with the MSDN tutorial site open for DirectX 10, and convert all of the samples to DirectX 10, or is that gonna be extremely difficult for me to do? Also, is DirectX 9 still relevant, or would it really behoove me to go about converting to DX 10? Thanks! |
21 | New to Game Development, need advice Possible Duplicate What are some good resources for getting a beginner started in developing games? I'm a CS student, having plenty enough knowledge in programming, and general algorithms. What is your suggestion in game developing? How to start? Thanks a lot! |
21 | Is game software design the same as non game software design? Is the software design process for a game similar to a non game? Do developers create UML diagrams? I ask because of the iterative nature of game development, I wonder if creating a UML diagram would just be a waste. |
21 | Building a unified interface for a swap chain in both DirectX 12 and Vulkan Most objects in DirectX 12 have natural analogues in Vulkan, e.g. VkInstance IDXGIFactory VkPhysicalDevice IDXGIAdapter VkDevice ID3D12Device VkQueue ID3D12CommandQueue VkCommandBuffer ID3D12CommandList However, when it comes to the swap chain, it's not clear how the entries in VkSwapchainCreateInfoKHR correspond to entries in DXGI SWAP CHAIN DESC1. Clearly, there is not always a 1 1 correspondence, but I would really like to know how I can implement a unified interface for both. |
21 | How to profile CPU and GPU performance if I have a monster PC? I'm going to upgrade my PC soon. I'm worried that I will no longer spot performance losses in my game because of the better specs. I can check memory usage easily, but how do I check and debug CPU and GPU usage? I used to rely on the framerate, but I guess that it is not accurate. |
21 | Finding other programmers to help on a project 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 artist needed on the team. So, where do you post? Where do you search and follow people around until it looks like they are a viable team member? Is it really difficult to assemble a team that are not close friends or chat buddies? Are there sites with this sort of posting? To clarify I am referring to a team. Example 1 I am making gameEngineOfAwesomeness. I need help. Example 2 I am 70 complete on this game, and i need help. Example 3 I have an open source project idea, with a prototype. I need help. It doesn't necessarily mean open source, just programmers who can work with me on something (and where to find them )) |
21 | Making game constants tables available to game logic classes routines in a modular manner Suppose I have a game where there are several predefined constants and charts (a XP chart, cost of goods and so on). Those could be defined at runtime, or load from files at start up. The question is how should those logic routines access the constants and charts? For example, I could try using global variables, but that cause all classes relying on the variables to be tightly coupled with them. |
21 | Recursive dungeon maps as represented by an elastic 2d array I came up with a method for recursively generating simple dungeon maps by starting with one room and recursively connecting new adjacent rooms randomly to it. Maps are represented as two dimensional arrays where each cell contains a value of 0 15. 0 represents no room while each direction is represented by north 1, east 2, south 4, west 8. I wanted to start with a single non room ( 0 ) and then expand the 2d array as necessary to fit the generated map. The difficulty I face with this tree like recursion is that if the arrays have to be unshifted to add rows and columns to the left and top of the map, I have to adjust the current position of the function, what row and column it is at. This makes it so that separate branches are not aware of array index adjustments from other branches, only their child functions will know because they have the adjusted position passed to them as their row and column arguments. Is there a way to do this? I tried storing row and column offset values outside of the recursion, but it did not work for some reason. |
21 | Should I use Game Engines to learn to make 3D games? HI i am a software engineering student in his second last year. I am proficient with C,C ,C and java programming languages, and being a student of engineering I have studied calculus, vectors etc in both 2D and 3D amp various other mathematical, probability and statistical topics. I have made several 2D games, my most recent being a Super Mario like game with side scrolling and multiple levels. Due to my these small game projects,i have become really interested in making games. So now i want to move ahead to learn to make games in 3D. Now I know that there are several game engines available which can take care of rendering details and other "low level" stuff for me... My Question is 1) Is it a good idea to learn to program everything yourself, from making 3D shapes, terrains (using polygons meshes) etc, to programming mechanism for collision detection, lighting etc, considering my motive is to learn how to make games in 3D (but am not too eager to get into the game industry quickly, want to build a solid foundation first) Or could I do without these details amp work on the abstraction level which the game engines (like UDK) provide ?? 3) If I should try to develop from scratch, then can anybody suggest which API to use Direct3D or OpenGL?? (which i would be more comfortable with, in light of my above mentioned skills) amp can anybody also give me references to some good books, reading materials, tutorials, etc to get me started?? (I wouldn't mind theory as long as it helps me make a sound foundation) Many Thanx in advance (for even reading my question, i know it's lengthy... but i need a DETAILED answer... D D ) |
21 | Time loop ticking architecture Say I build a snooker game, where balls need to jitter around. Balls belong to a class (ball class), where all the ball functions are defined. In the animation, time evolves by a clock ticking within a time loop. I wonder if the clock function time loop should be optimally defined in the main program or the class file? If defined in the class, the advantage is that all functions regarding ball movements, collisions etc, which take time to happen, can be put in the class, without worrying about the time loop the disadvantage is that time will tick for every ball separately, which obviously looks bad. |
21 | Time loop ticking architecture Say I build a snooker game, where balls need to jitter around. Balls belong to a class (ball class), where all the ball functions are defined. In the animation, time evolves by a clock ticking within a time loop. I wonder if the clock function time loop should be optimally defined in the main program or the class file? If defined in the class, the advantage is that all functions regarding ball movements, collisions etc, which take time to happen, can be put in the class, without worrying about the time loop the disadvantage is that time will tick for every ball separately, which obviously looks bad. |
21 | How should bots be recognised in a game? I'm interested in how bots are usually written. Here's my situation I plan to make an online 2D mecha game in HTML5, and the server side will be done with node. It is intended to be multiplayer, but I also want to make bots in case there aren't enough players. How does my game logic see them, as players or as bots? Is there a standard by which I should make them? Also, any general tips and hints will be OK. |
21 | Game programming course materials What should it include? I am tasked to create the course materials for a game programming class, and I d like your opinion on what aspects and areas of game programming, such as game state management, game object storing or simple AI, should I include in it? The course is intented to be the first step into game programming for students with novice skills in programming. There will be mathematics as well, but I found that there are multiple questions, with good answers, on that subject already. |
21 | Looking for an elegant way to represent fixed parts of a randomly generated level map I'm coding from scratch a small experimental game on a medium sized random rectangular square tile map. (Say, a map of a dungeon.) There are several types of tiles (for example floor, wall, monster, boss, treasure, player etc.). There are no extra information stored in the map tiles, just tile type. Most parts of map are randomly generated. However there are several features that are to appear on every generated map in pre set places. Say, walls around the dungeon, boss locations, player spawn point and the treasure. Note Since the game is small, coded for fun, and the only game designer is a programmer (that is, me myself), I do not plan to spend resources on coding a level editor or supporting an existing one. Also, I do not plan to support existing tile map libraries as I want to dig into some of the related coding problems myself (see above about fun), but I be happy happily to look at relevant existing code as a reference. When I look at my map generation code, I find it rather ugly. Is there an elegant way to deal with the problem? If that matters, I'm writing this game in JavaScript, but I will be happy to see a relevant reference in any programming language. Here is a partial pseudocode to illustrate how my current tile generator solution looks like this.init function(w, h) this.w w this.h h this.tile presets var mid h Math.floor(h 2) var quarter w Math.floor(w 4) Here is the part I don't like a set of generator rules this.preset col (0, Tile.GRASS) this.preset tile (0, mid h, Tile.FLOOR) this.preset col (1, Tile.GRASS) this.preset tile (1, mid h, Tile.FLOOR) this.preset col (2, Tile.WALL) this.preset tile (2, mid h, Tile.FLOOR) this.preset tile (2, mid h, Tile.PLAYER) this.preset tile (1 quarter w, mid h, Tile.BOSS) this.preset tile (2 quarter w, mid h, Tile.BOSS) this.preset tile (3 quarter w, mid h , Tile.TREASURE) this.preset col (w 1, Tile.WALL) Implementation details that may help to understand the code above this.tile function(x, y) var preset this.tile presets x y this.w if (preset ! undefined) return preset return this.random tile () this.preset tile function(x, y, tile) this.tile presets x y this.w tile this.preset col function(x, tile) for (var y 0 y lt this.h y) this.preset tile (x, y, tile) Note that I shown a rather simple set of generator rules above. Actual thing is several times longer. I hate that the code looks imperative and it is hard to figure out what is going on from the first glance. I think that declarative approach could help. But so far I can't figure out a good solution. Any clues? |
21 | How could you parallelise a 2D boids simulation How could you program a 2D boids simulation in such a way that it could use processing power from different sources (clusters, gpu). In the above example, the non coloured particles move around until they cluster (yellow) and stop moving. The problem is that all the entities could potentially interact with each other although an entity in the top left is unlikely to interact with one in the bottom right. If the domain was split into different segments, it may speed the whole thing up, But if an entity wanted to cross into another segment there may be problems. At the moment this simulation works with 5000 entities with a good frame rate, I would like to try this with millions if possible. Would it be possible to use quad trees to further optimise this? Any other suggestions? |
21 | Doesn't multiple inheritance solve all problems that entity systems do? The question is pretty self explaining doesn't multiple inheritance solve all the problems that entity systems also solve? I just remembered a term called "multiple inheritance", and that seems to solve a lot of bloating problems that classical inheritance imposed. |
21 | Time critical events based on framerate Problem Description Basically, I've made a "programming game" in which I've made my own scripting language. It is a completely standard Lunar Lander game, though instead of directly controlling the lander using keyboard input, it instead fires a sequence of commands you have provided through the scripting language I made. This all works, and I've hit a critical problem. So essentially, using the scripting language, you specify something like After 5 seconds, activate thrust for 10 seconds, and then after 2 seconds, rotate the lander for 4 seconds. The goal is then to chain together a sequence of commands which will get you to land the lander safely. Of course, this comes with one problem. If you repeat the sequence of commands, each command will have to be fired at exactly the same spot in the level, that is, after x amount of seconds, but also with the lander being in the exact same spot. If you did not use timer based movement, sure you could indicate that a command should activate after 5 seconds, but the lander moving at 60 FPS would have moved way further than a lander moving at 30 FPS. Why of course, I thought I would simple just make the lander use timer based movement so it is independent of FPS (I am using the very standard approach of taking the amount of time passed last frame, and multiplying it to a constant move speed). Then I would count seconds using the system clock. So the after x amount of seconds, the lander would be in the same spot in the level when the command activates. Unfortunately, this approach do not work. Every time I run a sequence of commands, they will be activated with, sometimes very slight, variations, making it impossible to actually get a consistent and reliable path for the lander. My Question So my question is, am I tackling this problem a completely wrong way? What exactly do you do when it is absolutely critical that timed events defined by the user will activate at exactly the same time and spot in a level? I seem to be quite stuck with this question. |
21 | Computer Games Technolgy or Software Engineering? I'm in the last year of my college and going to university next year. Could you tell me what the difference between Software Engineering and Computer Games Technology is? I know a bit of both but don't know the actual difference. I'm kind off in a dilemma between these two. I want to be a programmer, I'd love to go into gaming but I heard getting a job within a computer games company is really hard. |
21 | When or why would someone use a programming language (Swift, Java, C , Rust etc...) over an engine like Unity? Everytime I've read about people asking whether they should write their game in C or Unity, Unity is usually the default answer, unless they want to go through the hassle of creating an engine by themselves when Unity already does everything for you. If that's the case is there ever a case where writing a game in C , Java, Rust etc... is better than using Unity? If so what are these cases? |
21 | Deep copying or cloning in actionscript 3 I would like to make a mirror reflection of an entity in Flashpunk. So I would like to copy a spritemap from one Entity to another (reflectionEntity). If i use something like this reflectionEntity.sprite otherEntity.sprite reflectionEntity.sprite.scaleY 1 to reflect then the graphic of the original entity is also scaled. Is there a simple way out of this? I have been searching for the solution for more than an hour and have not found a suitable one. |
21 | What programming language were PS1 games written in? Is there any common language that is used to create Play Station 1 Games? Or how can I find out what programming language is used for one of those games? |
21 | What's the difference between a "Gameplay Programmer" and a "Gameplay Engineer?" I was reading some job descriptions from some AAA developers in the gaming industry, and I noticed there were jobs for "Gameplay Programmers" as well as "Gameplay Engineers." Are those the same thing? Do they do the same thing? |
21 | Random numbers inside instance (Game Maker) I've recently run into a weird problem. When I create instances through with(instance create) ... , I can always randomize their variables individually (inside ... ). However, when I try running randomize() random(...) inside their object (in one of the events), they are all synced. Please tell me this isn't a major Game Maker flaw and, most importantly, how do I fix this. Thank you! |
21 | How should bots be recognised in a game? I'm interested in how bots are usually written. Here's my situation I plan to make an online 2D mecha game in HTML5, and the server side will be done with node. It is intended to be multiplayer, but I also want to make bots in case there aren't enough players. How does my game logic see them, as players or as bots? Is there a standard by which I should make them? Also, any general tips and hints will be OK. |
21 | What are some ways to separate game logic from animations and the draw loop? I have only previously made flash games, using MovieClips and such to separate out my animations from my game logic. Now I am getting into trying my hand at making a game for Android, but the game programming theory around separating these things still confuses me. I come from a background of developing non game web applications so I am versed in more MVC like patterns and am stuck in that mindset as I approach game programming. I want to do things like abstract my game by having, for example, a game board class that contains the data for a grid of tiles with instances of a tile class that each contain properties. I can give my draw loop access to this and have it draw the game board based on the properties of each tile on the game board, but I don't understand where exactly animation should go. As far as I can tell, animation sort of sits between the abstracted game logic (model) and the draw loop (view). With my MVC mindset, it's frustrating trying to decide where animation is actually supposed to go. It would have quite a bit of data associated with it like a model, but seemingly needs to be very closely coupled with the draw loop in order to have things like frame independent animation. How can I break out of this mindset and start thinking about patterns that make more sense for games? |
21 | Game programming course materials What should it include? I am tasked to create the course materials for a game programming class, and I d like your opinion on what aspects and areas of game programming, such as game state management, game object storing or simple AI, should I include in it? The course is intented to be the first step into game programming for students with novice skills in programming. There will be mathematics as well, but I found that there are multiple questions, with good answers, on that subject already. |
21 | Computer Games Technolgy or Software Engineering? I'm in the last year of my college and going to university next year. Could you tell me what the difference between Software Engineering and Computer Games Technology is? I know a bit of both but don't know the actual difference. I'm kind off in a dilemma between these two. I want to be a programmer, I'd love to go into gaming but I heard getting a job within a computer games company is really hard. |
21 | How should I handle functions, where two classes have equal use? I'm working on a few features for a strategy engine I'm making. I'm trying to figure out the best spots to separate the components, as either option will provide the same amount of coupling, with the same effectiveness. For example, all players have a Damage component, a Player component, and a HealthBar component abstract class Damage protected abstract void sendDamage(Player targetPlayer, int rawDamage) public abstract int calculateRawDamage(Attack attackUsed) public abstract void receiveDamage(int rawDamage) class Player List lt Armor gt equippedArmor List lt Buffs gt currentBuffs public Damage damageComponent public List lt HealthBars gt healthBarComponents abstract class HealthBar can be inherited for mana or health bar protected Color color public float percent 0.0 1.0 When a player receives damage, I need to show a red number floating up from their head, indicating the amount of damage. This can either be implemented in HealthBar, or in Damage. It fits damage better, but then healing works in the same way, and wouldn't be called from damage. I could abstract damage into something like ChangeValue, which would change mana, health, etc in any direction, or I could use the abstract HealthBar class to show this number being changed. I'm trying to think of a general rule that would solve this and other problems, where two classes use the same function equally. This is an oversimplified version of my classes, but it makes more sense this way. How should I handle functions, where two classes have equal use? |
21 | Entity Component System based engine Note I'm programming this in Javascript, but it should be language agnostic in the most part. I am thinking about converting my engine to an ECS based one. I get the basic idea (note this is wrong, see my answer) Entities are game objects. Components are bits of functionality (reactToInput()) or state (position) which can get "glued" to entities. Systems have a list of entities they manage and update. But, I'm not quite sure that I get the implementation and some details... Question can a system operate on different kinds of entities? I usually give the example of a class called Scene in my engine, and it will serve this purpose now, as well. A scene is a container of all objects that can be rendered, updated, affect the rendering (lights), and maybe, in future, even 2DSoundEmitter objects. It has a high level interface so the user doesn't need to worry about the type of the object he's scene.add()ing, and all that kind of stuff. I realize that the Scene could be a system. It takes in entities, stores them, and then it can call their update methods, and maybe even do some state changes. But, there is a problem as I described above, the Scene can be fed different types of objects! What should I do in, say, a situation where a scene has both renderable objects ("drawables") and lights in it? Should I make it type check entities before interacting? Or, should I solve it at an even lower level make a LightSource component which can be added to any object, and the light would just be an entity with LightSource and Position components. Is that acceptable? Also, is it a good practice to still use conventional inheritance and traditional classes? For example, I just can't figure out what would my Renderer be! It's not a system, as its only function is to take in a camera and a scene, render everything and apply effects (such as shadows). It also manages the context, the width and the height of the game, makes translations... But it's still not a system! Edit could you maybe link any resources you found on the ECS? I'm having trouble finding good ones. |
21 | What exactly is a 'set of states'? Whilst looking into game oriented applications of programming patterns I discovered a question on this site which suggests that a 'set of states' is superior to a 'stack of states' but does not clarify how a 'set of states' would be applied. A stack of states is simple enough to comprehend the state on the top is the active state. But what exactly is a set of states? A set as I understand it is merely a collection of unique objects (i.e. there are no duplicates). Presumably all the states in the set are currently active. But sets are unordered, so how does one maintain order in an unordered collection? An ordered set could be used, but that then brings the question of why use a sorted set and not a list what benefit does the uniqueness bring? I'm just not sure I can imagine how such a thing would be implemented or what benefits it would bring. (Presumably the former issue is causing the latter). So what exactly is a 'set of states'? (In the context of game design programming). |
21 | Visual Programming tool for creating game quests I've found a question for visual script editing software tool for creating game behavior logic, but I am looking for something more flexible. I would like to configure the tool to make it produce code that I need. I use Lua for creating quests in my mmorpg game, but every time there is need of creating a new quest I feel like writing the same code all the time. I'd like to allow my co workers to do this job in some easy way. The easiest way I can think of would be some sort of making graphs that would represent the quest, and fill all the nodes with different if statements and game texts or procedures like spawning mobs. Is there any tool that I could use for this purpose? |
21 | Benefits of implementing systems like classes instead of just functions In an Entity System I am making, there is a central class called World, which stores all component instances. It's a dictionary of arrays, and entity ids are indexes for the arrays. To access a component of an entity with id 3 you would do this world.storage "ComponentType" 3 . So, each loop of the game, these arrays would be fed to their respected systems ( movement(world.storage "Position" , world.storage "Velocity" ) ). Now, I don't see why systems couldn't be implemented just as functions, as I showed. What optimizations can be made by using classes with data and methods (caching)? Also, these systems would need to iterate over all the entities that exist, doesn't this make entity frameworks much slower than regular inheritance based engines? Why do some people "register" systems to the World class? |
21 | What are the most commonly used programming languages? 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? |
21 | What are good games to "earn your wings" with? I believe that in order to become a good game developer, you need to make games. From a programmer's perspective, what are some good entry level games to get your hands dirty? What skills and challenges do each of these games teach you? |
21 | Problems with instaling SFML I've followed the instructions on installing SFML on the website to the letter. But, I get this when I try to build the sample program on the same page using Code Blocks. C Users nic Desktop sfmltest.o sfmltest.cxx undefined reference to imp ZN2sf6StringC1EPKcRKSt6locale' ... Build failed 20 error(s), 0 warning(s) (0 minute(s), 0 second(s)) I get 20 error messages, which are all similar to the one given above. SFML worked like a charm on my ubuntu 14.04 amd64 install, but it simply does not work on Windows. I am using SFML 2.1 (the GCC 4.7 TDM (SJLJ) 64 bits package as the other ones did not work) on a Windows 7 x64 installation with MinGW (gcc 4.8.1). How can I make SFML work on Windows? edit I'm not sure if I have to copy paste all the SFML dlls to the working directory. Should I do this? edit2 c ping the dlls does not help. |
21 | Display a Message Box over a Full Screen DirectX application In our custom assertion handler, I'd like to display a message box asking to see whether or not this failure can be ignored. However, when our DirectX game is full screen, I can't get the MessageBox function to display above the full screen. Note The first parameter to MessageBox is the the HWND used to create the device, and it still does not work. Is this even possible? |
21 | How to setup a client to work with a remote server or a local included server? I'm working on a Networked multiplayer game, but while developing and for testing I want to set up a local server that acts like the multiplayer server. My thought is to approach the server as a proxy setup. Creating a class that the client sees and essentially allowing it to either load the server code in itself or to use a networking layer. Is this a good approach? Are there other approaches to look into? What pitfalls should I be watching for? Update A bit more specifically I need to do this because I am targeting the Ouya and I can't guarantee a network connection, or even a spare machine to run the server on. And inside Android it is more difficult to setup and launch a service rather than include my server code right into a client build. |
21 | Best solution for "level string"? I have a game that generates a random level map at the start of the level. I want to implement some way to save and load the level. I was thinking maybe XML would be a good option for saving all the variable, then it would be easy for me to build something that can parse that XML and generate the exact same level. But XML is probably overkill for my needs. I remember back in the day with the old Sega console that didn't have the ability to save your game (I think the Worms game did it too), that they would give you a bunch of character that you could write down. If you punched in that string later on, it would load the exact level. Would a "level string" be a good option? Would it be some kind of "base60" conversion? How would I implement this? |
21 | Creating VR Headset Video So I have a video stream of known resolution and I have a VR headset via HDMI at a known resolution. Is there an existing library to create the slight fisheye and side by side layout for these single screen headsets? (It's a custom build, so no hardware locked API please) Target Win 7 8 10 |
21 | How to manage in game factions, alliances, federations, etc So this question is code or engine agnostic but, I m looking for ideas on how a game can keep track of a pre determined number of factions or alliances. For example, say I made a space game that has 2 major and 3 minor federations of planets. A planet may join or leave a federation, but the federation itself may have an alliance or be at war with another (actually, to keep it simpler, I think all these changes will solely be reliant on the player s actions). However, I would also like to keep track of such diplomatic endeavours on the individual level as well. Say the player has joined one federation that is at war with another. If the player should encounter another ship of the opposing federation, that ship becomes hostile. On the other side, two ships have an alliance, they might help one another. What is the best way to keep track of all this? One way I was thinking was creating a manager that holds all the Federation classes (which hold the status it holds with all other federations say less than 0 and the federations are at war more than x amount, there s an alliance). Meanwhile, each player ship holds similar data in its class, along with its current alliance to whatever federation. Is my thinking logical in this or are there better ways of managing such things? Many thanks. |
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