game-development

Territory Map Generation

Is there a trivial, or at least moderately straight-forward way to generate territory maps (e.g. Risk)? I have looked in the past and the best I could find were vague references to Voronoi diagrams. An example of a Voronoi diagram is here. These hold promise, but I guess i haven't seen any straight-forward ways of rendering these, yet...

Developing addins for World of Warcraft - Getting started?

As a long time World of Warcraft player, and a passionate developer I have decided that I would like to combine the two and set about developing some addins. Not only to improve my gameplay experience but as a great opportunity to learn something new. Does anyone have any advice on how to go about starting out? Is there an IDE one can us...

Alpha blending sprites in Nintendo DS Homebrew

I'm trying to alpha blend sprites and backgrounds with devkitPro (including libnds, libarm, etc). Does anyone know how to do this? ...

Automated testing a game

Question How would you go adding automated testing to a game? I believe you can unit test a lot of the game engine's functionality (networking, object creation, memory management, etc), but is it possible to automate test the actual game itself? I'm not talking about gameplay elements (like Protoss would beat Zerg in map X), but I'm t...

How do you separate game logic from display?

How can you make the display frames per second be independent from the game logic? That is so the game logic runs the same speed no matter how fast the video card can render. ...

Suggested gaming platform to learn - Direct X (C++), Open GL or XNA

My nephew is an aspiring game developer. I have taught him a bit of C/C++, and suggested he learn that for a start. Once he has come to grips with that, which game/graphics API's do people suggest he learn? I would think DirectX would be current industry standard, but with more games looking to go X-platform then maybe Open-GL would be...

Is Project Darkstar Realistic?

Project Darkstar was the topic of the monthly JavaSIG meeting down at the Google offices in NYC last night. For those that don't know (probably everyone), Project Darkstar is a framework for massively multiplayer online games that attempts to take care of all of the "hard stuff." The basic idea is that you write your game server logic ...

Recommendations needed for good AI references

I've been asked to help out on an XNA project with the AI. I'm not totally new to the concepts (pathfinding, flocking, etc.) but this would be the first "real" code. I'd be very thankful for any resources (links or books); I want to make sure I do this right. ...

What could prevent OpenGL glDrawPixels from working on some video cards?

The following code writes no data to the back buffer on Intel integrated video cards,for example, on a MacBook. On ATI cards, such as in the iMac, it draws to the back buffer. The width and height are correct (and 800x600 buffer) and m_PixelBuffer is correctly filled with 0xAA00AA00. My best guess so far is that there is something amiss...

Best programming based games

Back when I was at school, I remember tinkering with a Mac game where you programmed little robots in a sort of pseudo-assembler language which could then battle each other. They could move themselves around the arena, look for opponents in different directions, and fire some sort of weapon. Pretty basic stuff, but I remember it quite fo...

Secure Online Highscore Lists for Non-Web Games

I'm playing around with a native (non-web) single-player game I'm writing, and it occured to me that having a daily/weekly/all-time online highscore list (think Xbox Live Leaderboard) would make the game much more interesting, adding some (small) amount of community and competition. However, I'm afraid people would see such a feature as ...

Browser-based game - Which framework to choose?

I'm starting to develop a browser-based game (and by this I mean text-based, no Flash or similar stuff on it) and I'm struggling to decide on which development framework to use. As far as requirements are concerned, the most important thing that I can think of right now is the ability to translate it to several languages. A good object-...

Resources of techniques use for collision detection in 2D?

What are in your opinion the best resources (books or web pages) describing algorithms or techniques use for collision detection in a 2D environment? I'm just eager to learn different techniques to make more sophisticated and efficient games. Thanks. :D ...

Generating random terrain in Blender3D

I tried finding a python script in google that will generate a random terrain when the game starts (or each time a the player advances to a new scene) but all the tools I found are for creating a terrain to render it, not for the game mode. Any idea how/where to find one? (I'm assuming that since Blender3D has game programming capabili...

What's the best toolkit for doing 2d game programming with Python?

What's the best toolkit for doing 2d game programming with Python? I've heard of pygame but is there anything I should add to it or is there another group of modules that surpasses it? ...

Incomplete information card game

I would like to develop a trick taking card game. The game is between four players, one of which is a human and the other three hands are played by the computer. Where can I read up about developing the AI for such games? ...

Why is Lua considered a game language?

Why is Lua considered a game language? I have been learning about Lua in the past month and I'm absolutely in love with the language, but all I see around that is built with Lua are games. I mean, the syntax is very simple, there is no fuss, no special meaning characters that makes code look like regular expressions, has all the good th...

OpenGL or Direct3D for a new Windows game project? Or something else?

I'm starting a hobby game project on Windows that will make heavy use of 3D graphics effects. It will most likely be written in C++. Should I use OpenGL or Direct3D for my graphics backend? Why? Or should I use a ready-made graphics engine such as OGRE 3D? Which one? Some "how to get started" links would be useful. (On either technolo...

How do I model a chessboard when programming a computer to play chess?

What data structures would you use to represent a chessboard for a computer chess program? ...

Dealing with Latency in Networked Games

I'm thinking about making a networked game. I'm a little new to this, and have already run into a lot of issues trying to put together a good plan for dead reckoning and network latency, so I'd love to see some good literature on the topic. I'll describe the methods I've considered. Originally, I just sent the player's input to the se...