Lank posted:

I think that will work well enough to make the game not come to a halt but if characters bunch up for any reason, I'm back at square one with n^2 distance checks per frame where n is the number of players and objects.

Stramit posted:

It's cool that you are using pygame, but I just wanted to clear something up. For pretty much any game you are going to be working on by yourself or in a small group that is not AAA Java is fine. Performance wise it is slower then C++, but given the scope of the game you are making this will not be a problem.

krysmopompas posted:

The needs of Epic in Gears are vastly different from the needs of the general industry. Go ask someone from Midway about native vs. unrealscript performance.

Kimani posted:

That's right, if you run this game and have Task Manager next to it, you'll see the amount of threads go up to potentially over 200 at times. Every entity in the game runs on it's own thread - every character, every bullet. It made for an interesting game programming exercise, writing it using message passing and being event-driven, but yeah. Massively parallel.

Kimani posted:

Now before I go too far, while I do intend to use this game environment for future projects ( wouldn't want to waste the effort... ) for this program I sort of fudged the collision detection because it needed more work and it was fudgable - and I wanted to finish the drat thing.

The simplest way to do it is just lock the whole scene graph, do your collision test, and get out. But there's multiple things wrong with that. If all you're doing is testing, and not moving things around within the scene graph, then you don't need to impede other threads from doing testing at the same time. So you don't need to lock. But if you are moving things around in the scene graph, you do need to lock so that you don't get 'bad things'.

However, if you're moving things around in area A, there's no reason to deny another thread to do testing in area B. So rather than lock the whole scene graph, you only lock a portion.

not a dinosaur posted:

The rightmost pixels on the character's head are malformed- they are not square anymore. The "l" above his head is sometimes straight, and sometimes crooked like in this picture.

Mithaldu posted:

Sure there are.

ultra-inquisitor posted:

Have you seen DungeonMaker? It's by far the best generator I've come across.

Morpheus posted:

Me, I'm doing a more open roguelike, and I've got to figure out random city generation algorithms on the small scale. Being able to, say, make a suburban area where suburbia has an x to y amount of houses, z% chance of a police department, and stuff like that while still making the place look 'normal' (houses in front of streets that go somewhere), that's something I'm working towards.

SlightlyMadman posted:

Hanpan posted:

After that, I tried out pygame and some of the libraries associated with 2d gaming. It's nice but I ran into the same performance problems I encountered with Flash.

It seems to me the only real way to get the performance I want is to either build something for scratch. Does anyone know of any other engines out there I could try?

Hanpan posted:

Isn't Python similar to Flash in regards to performance? I'd really like get some parallax scrolling on the go and all sorts.

FateFree posted:

I'm looking for advice on a good beginner book for game developing, what language or platform to consider for a long term 2D project (while I love Java, I want to work on a language more geared towards professional gaming), and any other starting advice.

Hanpan posted:

Does anyone have any recommendations for 2d physics with XNA? I think someone here recommended Farseer, but it doesn't seem to get updated very often. It's a shame that there is no direct implementation of Box2D

HappyHippo posted:

Is it just me, or is Blender's interface really annoying? It took me forever to texture a simple cube. All the tutorials I've found online seem to be out of date, and Blender likes to change things somewhat radically between releases it seems. Anyone know of any up-to-date tutorials for version 2.49?

monsterland posted:

The rest was fairly obvious. Though OpenGL's scaling flags suck donkey cock, so I had to make the bitmaps 64x64 (and maybe that's not even large enough for uber-displays), so that the scaling method used is very basic, and yet due to being DOWNscaled it doesn't look ugly.

quote:

Compile with the “-Cl” switch, this makes local parameters static. Otherwise they’re allocated from the CC65 software emulated stack, which is understandably very slow. One drawback to this is that every single temporary variable will now take a byte in RAM, even if it’s used very rarely. It might be a good idea to have some generic temporary global variables for that purpose instead.
Use #pragma bss-name and/or data-name to place variables on the zero page.
Avoid passing parameters to functions — use global variables. If you need parameters, use the __fastcall__ calling convention, which can pass two byte variables in the A and X registers.
Use the optimizer (“-Oirs” switch) BUT be aware that it might in some cases produce broken code. One such case is when you read the controllers by strobing $4016, then reading it eight times. The first read is optimized away. Of course when you’re using this library you can simply use read_joy().
Don’t use structs or at least be very careful with them! Instead of stuff like struct Foo { int a; char b; }; struct Foo foos[NUM_FOOS]; try using struct Foo { int a[NUM_FOOS]; char b[NUM_FOOS]; }; struct Foo foos; for performance.

roomforthetuna posted:

Have you considered homebrew DS? There's probably more people who'll play a DS game if you make a decent one, and there's a reasonably functional C library and documentation for it, and even an emulator with debugger (no$gba is the emulator, I think the version with the debugger costs a few bucks).

Tw1tchy posted:

Anyone have some good examples/tutorials/libraries to use for netcode in gaming? I tried winsock but holy poo poo there's like 3 tutorials for it in total that aren't just codedumps and they don't explain half the stuff, and winsock seems really old anyway. Anything for c++ for use with SDL/openGL.

Tw1tchy posted:

Thanks for the help. I'll read through all that soon when I get the time. Also what I'd be using it for would be a tile-based game, so would all the stuff in it still be completely fine for what I need to do? And does it mention what libraries to use for netcode; because that's still a big problem of mine.

dangerz posted:

The cube dictionary is already local to each chunk.

dangerz posted:

Dictionary let's me do a fast key lookup (o(1)) and iteration through the whole thing.

Array has a fast iteration but not a fast lookup. I'm def open to suggestions if you have a better idea.

Winkle-Daddy posted:

As someone who did tech support for Adobe, I can tell you postscript is not dead. In fact, PDF files are created by taking a postscript file and running it through the Adobe Distiller to convert those postscript instructions into a .pdf/.ai document (really they're the same thing with a different extension. If you have illustrator, rename a downloaded PDF to whatever.ai and open it!)

Learning to read postscript sucked, and I don't remember any of it.

My Rhythmic Crotch posted:

Just curious if anyone has seen a complete tileset suitable for 2D RTS use? I know most everything is done in 3D these days so... I probably won't have any luck, but I thought I would ask.

Shalinor posted:

As I am about to dive in head-first, does anyone happen to know of a Hello World-esque walkthrough of all of the back-end PHP et al that typically drives a web/Facebook game?

HaB posted:

So...does anyone know what method it's using to choose? Thanks in advance.

Internet Janitor posted:

Thanks, guys! If you have any thoughts about the gameplay I might still do some tweaking. I feel like it's a little threadbare.

Kaf posted:

Can anyone recommend any books on designing/implementing match-making services? Getting into this soon at work and it's a whole new field for me.

HappyHippo posted:

Anyway I just thought I'd share in case anyone else was having similar issues. Does anyone have any other suggestions/good reading material on this? Most of what I found on google was similar to my first two implementations.

Surprise T Rex posted:

Are there going to be any negative effects from coding a game in an interpreted language like Python? It's what I'm learning at University at the moment and I figure that I might try to knock out a really simple game in my spare time.