I'm currently working on a Level of detail system for an XNA game, the system subdivides triangles with high screen space error and merges triangles with low screen space error. World Space Error is a heuristic which estimates the error that this triangle has, so for example if there is a triangle which is on an almost flat surface, it'...
I have a pretty basic challenge-based iPhone game, and I wanted to know what my options are for player discovery & matchmaking. I may end up rolling my own server, but if I don't have to, even better. So far, I've found OpenFeint and Scoreloop, but I don't really care about the social part or discovering other games, I just want a simpl...
How do computer games render their ground? I will be using a heightmap for geometry (though I will later optimize it) but I am wondering what the best technique is, for example, to 'paint' my ground; grass most everywhere, dirt paths here and there, gravel inside towns, and smooth transitions between each type of material. Do I just use...
I'm designing a game for Android and I would like to use the accelerometer for some aspects of control. Has anyone come across a tutorial or example for something like this? thanks! ...
Hello! We are finishing a game that we would like to beta test. We don’t have the time nor the budget to do a large scale testing, we will simply show the game to some of our friends. (I hope that we can still gather something useful of it.) In the Age of Empires post mortem (Postmortems from Game Developer) I found the following: A...
I taken math in college (trigonometry, calculus II...) but I don't know why you use tan, arctan, etc., in game physics. I know I can find working code and understand everything except why I am using a particular trig function, but I don't want that. I want to know why I am using arctan or sin. Where can I learn about why I am using th...
Related to my question here but not enough to open a new question. I wanted to make a good tower defense game and found this site. I saw math in it and made the mental leap that it was "game physics." Maybe it's not. I don't know. I was hoping someone could tell me. If it is not what kind of game programming is it? Just math you h...
I am a hobbyist console C++ developer. I have worked with pointers, arrays, std::vectors, std::strings, classes, and several data structures, including stacks and binary trees. I have some experience in linear algebra and geometry, and know the basics of physics. I do NOT have experience with win32, QT, openGL, DX9, OGRE, etc. I am still...
Hi, I am in the process of developping a game, and after two months of work (not full time mind you), I have come to realise that our specs for the game are lacking a lot of details. I am not a professional game developper, this is only a hobby. What I would like to receive help or advices for is this: What are the major components tha...
In my spare time I like to play around with game development on the iPhone with OpenGL ES. I'm throwing together a small 2D side-scroller demo for fun, and I'm relatively new to OpenGL, and I wanted to get some more experienced developers' input on this. So here is my question: does it make sense to specify the vertices of each 2D eleme...
Every enemy type in my game is a different class, and the instances are stored in a C array. In the main game loop update() is run for each enemy/item instance, and draw() is run. Some of the update() commands require knowledge of where the main player is. What would be the best route to get that information to the instance? I don't thin...
I am developing a game. To test my map engine, I need pictures of 8 directions character walking. As a programming, it is not too difficult to write program, but it is a big problem for me to draw pictures. So my question is where can I find some free pictures for game developing? Pictures should be free because I might release some demo...
I've written desktop applications using Delphi and VB6 and I've written web applications using Java and Ruby on Rails, but I've never tried my hand at game programming. Do you think it's something that every programmer should try at least once in order to broaden their horizons? Whenever I've read about game programming it seems to be a...
I'm using Flex and AS3 to try and create a game, and I'm wondering how I can animate things easily. I would prefer to use sprite sheet images. I'm going to go a head and post the code (It's really short) I got so far, can someone look over it and tell me the best/simplest/easiest way to add animation support? Thank you in advance. <?xml...
I previously asked a question on here, but I was unregistered and wasn't able to edit my entry (not sure if you can) or add any information about the issue. I'm going to attempt to be more thorough this time so I can hopefully get an answer... I'm trying to find a static pointer and a list of offsets so that I can easily find informati...
I have been reading about collision detection in games on stackoverflow and other sites. A lot of them talk about BSPs, bounding elipses, integration etc. However, on the NES, they managed to do floor and wall collision detection in games and I find it hard to believe that they did many calculations to detect wall collisions. I guess ...
I'm currently working on a flash game and I need to know how to addChild a BitmapData or draw a BitmapData to screen. If I can't than how can I give a DisplayObject my BitmapData? ...
I'm creating a game engine using wxWidgets and OpenGL. I'm trying to set up a timer so the game can be updated regularly. I don't want to use wxTimer, because it's probably not accurate enough for what I need. I'm using a while (true) and a wxStopWatch: while (true) { stopWatch.Start(); <handle events> // I need a function for this g...
It animates but it put's the piece of the sprite sheet where it is on the sprite sheet and not where the x and y tell it to. It's very short, so please take a look? Thank you in advance. package cyanprime{ import flash.display.*; import flash.geom.Rectangle; public class Player{ [Embed(source="brownplane.png")] pu...
I am teaching myself, from online tutorials, how to write games in Java. I am using Java Applets to create a Pong game. each paddle is controlled from different keys for 1v1 competition. this works fine if both users are hitting the keys at different times. but when one key is being held down and then another key is held down(ex: holdi...