What books would you recommend to dive into the world of game-development? at best no programming-language specific stuff...more about the basics(KI, Basic Code Design). ...
Regardless of the layout being used for the tiles, is there any good way to divvy out the tiles so that you can guarantee the user that, at the beginning of the game, there exists at least one path to completing the puzzle and winning the game? Obviously, depending on the user's moves, they can cut themselves off from winning. I just wa...
Anyone who is a fan of the Monkey Island series of adventure games from the early 90's will know how enjoyable and addictive this genre of computer games are. Are there any tools out there that could help you build your own point-and-click adventure game? ...
The kind of simulation game that I have in mind is the kind where you have things to build in various locations and workers/transporters that connect such locations. Something more like the Settlers series. Let's assume I don't want any graphics at the moment, that I think I can manage. So my doubts are the following: Should every e...
When building a "first person shooter" game similar to Doom 3, Quake 4 or Crysis (on a licensed engine), how much time is it going to take, including engine tweaks, 3D modeling, level building, and testing, assuming there is a team of capable software engineers, 3D-modelers, level-designers and testers. And is there any significant diff...
Does attempting to develop some sort of game, even just as a hobby during leisure time provide useful (professional) experience or is it a childish waste of time? I have pursued small personal game projects on and off throughout my programming career. I've found the (often) strict performance requirements and escalating design complexit...
I'm looking for some good references for learning how to model 2d physics in games. I am not looking for a library to do it for me - I want to think and learn, not blindly use someone else's work. I've done a good bit of Googling, and while I've found a few tutorials on GameDev, etc., I find their tutorials hard to understand because th...
I am using SetCursor to set the system cursor to my own image. The code looks something like this: // member on some class HCURSOR _cursor; // at init time _cursor = LoadCursorFromFile("somefilename.cur"); // in some function SetCursor(_cursor); When I do this the cursor does change, but on the first mouse move message it changes ba...
In my free time I started writing a small multiplayer game with a database backend. I was looking to separate player login information from other in game information (inventory, stats, and status) and a friend brought up this might not be the best idea. Would it be better to lump everything together in one table? ...
Hi, I have develop an XNA game on computer 1. When I send it to computer two (and I have everything to be able to run XNA Code). When the program execute game.run, I get an InvalidOperationException. I didn't tried to run code from computer two on computer one. But I know that both machine can run the code I've wrote on them. Do you h...
I'm writing a little tile-based game, for which I'd like to support light sources. But my algorithm-fu is too weak, hence I come to you for help. The situation is like this: There is a tile-based map (held as a 2D array), containing a single light source and several items standing around. I want to calculate which tiles are lit up by th...
Quick question: I've been in the web-dev world for several years now, I've wrapped my head around Java, Python, PHP, C# and Ruby- and currently make my living as a C#.NET programmer and I want to learn game development for real, no "build your own 2d sprite game over 14 days"-bs, the real deal. Where do I start? learning C? learning C++?...
I'm working on an iPhone game that takes place on the ocean surface. Can someone recommend some sample code or tutorials for implementing waves or ripples in OpenGL? iPhone supports OpenGL ES 1.1, so there is no support for shaders or other fancy effects. I don't need anything too fancy. I don't need reflections, for example. I don'...
I've used XNA and Visual Studio 2005 integrated with Flash. I'm curious to see what environments other people use and prefer. ...
i am writing a game in C++ and have a level consisting of many seperate meshes, each with their own vertex buffer. i am using vmmlib ( brilliant free gl compat. vector/matrix library ) to create my frustum culler and testing it against the bounding sphere of every mesh in the level. sadly my level can consist of up to 800 meshes and iter...
Hi all, I'm messing around with 2D game development using C++ and DirectX in my spare time. I'm finding that the enterprisey problem domain modeling approach doesn't help as much as I'd like ;) I'm more or less looking for a "best practices" equivalent to basic game engine design. How entities should interact with each other, how anima...
I recently started working on a small game for my own amusement, using Microsoft XNA and C#. My question is in regards to designing a game object and the objects that inherit it. I'm going to define a game object as something that can be rendered on screen. So for this, I decided to make a base class which all other objects that will nee...
i need to get the color at a particular coordinate from a texture. There are 2 ways i can do this, by getting and looking at the raw png data, or by sampling my generated opengl texture. Is it possible to sample an opengl texture to get the color (RGBA) at a given UV or XY coord? If so, how? ...
Hi, this is my first post here. I am 22 years old from Spain and I have finished university where I studied I.T. A group of friends and I want to develop a game which will consist of a 3D world in which simple 3D shapes interact with each other where "real" like physics is involved. I have no experience in the programming of video games,...
I was looking for a pattern to model something I'm thinking of doing in a personal project and I was wondering if a modified version of the decorator patter would work. Basicly I'm thinking of creating a game where the characters attributes are modified by what items they have equiped. The way that the decorator stacks it's modification...