Latest posts of: sproingie - Java-Gaming.org

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1	Games Center / Cube World Projects / Re: A different Cube World	on: 2013-05-18 20:17:55
Quote from: Quarry on 2013-05-18 19:14:37 It's a voxel renderer that renders voxels in 2D! Also known as "pixels".

2	Discussions / General Discussions / Re: Game Engine vs. A Game Library	on: 2013-05-18 02:53:21
You're overthinking what's very much a loose terminology with no hard and fast definitions. A library is chunks of code. An engine does stuff. There's no final authority on what makes for which.

3	Discussions / General Discussions / Re: Blogpost about Java for Game Programming	on: 2013-05-17 21:44:15
Quote from: gouessej on 2013-05-17 19:21:00 Quote from: sproingie on 2013-05-09 03:36:35 An unsafe language like C++, or really more the C parts of it, can technically outrun any managed language runtime like Java, because they can bang on arbitrary memory to write almost any instruction sequence they want, and that's without embedded assembly. At the end of nineties, C/C++ fans gave the same kind of arguments to explain that as Java is written in C (Jikes was written in C++), it can't outperform C which is wrong. One of my teacher wrote a program that converted Java (1.3) to C code during his thesis and he only obtained a very small gain (less than 5%) after years of work. Brian Goetz explained that memory allocation and method calls are between 2 and 4 times faster in Java. I really think that almost no human being is able to write a better machine code or assembler code that a compiler like GCC except in particular cases on a small piece of source code and if you really believe you can be more efficient than the JVM, don't use Java. I'm sad to see these kinds of prejudices about Java even here on JGO. Where Java is faster, you can of course implement Java in C and do it that way. Kinda like how you can build anything out of raw materials, assuming you like working with only raw materials. Actually, I rather stretched the truth saying that you can emit any instruction in C, but most modern compilers support "rawcall" conventions and of course embedded asm. Not that you're really writing C at that point, of course. Jikes is indeed in C++, but is merely a compiler (and an obsolete one at that). The javac compiler is pure java. Curiously though, the Jikes Research VM is itself in java (presumably with some native code to bootstrap itself).

4	Game Development / Newbie & Debugging Questions / Re: LibGDX Actor - to use or not to use; or, when to use?	on: 2013-05-14 04:30:06
Actors are a scene2d thing, representing an object in the scenegraph. If you use scene2d, you're using scene2d.Actor. Now Actors in general are cool, the sort you get from the likes of Akka or Kilim, but they don't have a ton in common with scene2d actors unless you squint and tilt your head at it. It'd be kinda neat to see an Actor system built off that lightweight thread library that's been making the rounds here... any takers?

5	Games Center / WIP games, tools & toy projects / Re: SF Citybuilder- Buildings/Concept Art	on: 2013-05-14 03:46:33
That actually sounds like a pretty cool idea. I've had an idea for a "sim-roguelike" with multiple factions where one of the factions has time control powers (outright magic in this case). Mind if I use the idea too? I'm sure your game will be out years before mine

6	Games Center / WIP games, tools & toy projects / Re: SF Citybuilder- Buildings/Concept Art	on: 2013-05-13 17:18:17
Quote from: Morgan Allen on 2013-05-13 16:49:15 One of the things I'd like to do with indistinguishable-from-magic psyonic mojo would be to take a leaf from, say, the Prince of Persia reboot, and make functions like saving/loading the game a kind of rationed resource. I'd be really careful about this if I were you. Checkpoints in an action game are one thing, but messing with peoples ability to save in a single-player strategy game is not usually something people are going to accept. If you want permanent consequences to actions, simply making the game world persistent with no explicit save mechanic whatsoever might be preferable to erecting gimmicky barriers around save/load mechanisms.

7	Java Game APIs & Engines / OpenGL Development / Re: Shader Program Fatal Error	on: 2013-05-12 17:59:38
Nothing jumping out at me. What's glGetProgramInfoLog tell you? You should really have ShaderProgram checking the status after each of the compile, link, and validate steps and spewing the appropriate log out on error. It's handy to do that for warnings too, though some compilers like to make "successfully compiled" into a warning

8	Java Game APIs & Engines / OpenGL Development / Re: Shader Program Fatal Error	on: 2013-05-12 17:44:18
Paste the shaders too.

9	Games Center / WIP games, tools & toy projects / Re: [WIP] Daedalus	on: 2013-05-10 18:13:24
Just saw Daedalus on Greenlight and of course voted for it I read some comments about people wanting a single-player campaign, thought they were quite silly, but then for some reason I got to thinking of Dungeon Siege and the execrable Space Siege. Neither were really great games, but that's mostly because they ran too much on autopilot (ProgressQuest with graphics, basically). The idea of having seamless and nearly endless levels might make a pretty neat mode for the game, giving some sense of progression through as you unlock the next section and find new enemies and of course cool weapons. Just throwing it out there -- I'd buy it either way

10	Discussions / General Discussions / Re: Blogpost about Java for Game Programming	on: 2013-05-09 03:36:35
An unsafe language like C++, or really more the C parts of it, can technically outrun any managed language runtime like Java, because they can bang on arbitrary memory to write almost any instruction sequence they want, and that's without embedded assembly. The problem is, how much effort does that take for how much actual payoff, and what are the bugs that are created when the results of the effort aren't 100% perfect?

11	Game Development / Newbie & Debugging Questions / Re: Game Versioning or Numbering	on: 2013-05-09 03:24:52
I like semantic versioning, and build tools like maven can handle it for you, but yeah, I don't think you need to go crazy with it for a small game project. Build dates are usually fine for people running test versions, otherwise give 'em a clever name. And if it's a big game project, let's hope there's a project manager who makes a sane decision.

12	Games Center / WIP games, tools & toy projects / Re: LoaR: The Life of a Rogue	on: 2013-05-09 03:22:06
Quote from: HeroesGraveDev on 2013-05-08 07:17:47 Do you mind if I use that quote as the warning message when you try to break broken things? Go ahead, might be a wee bit anachronistic for a medieval RPG though

13	Game Development / Game Play & Game Design / Re: RPG Object Variables	on: 2013-05-08 05:46:32
Can't comment on the stats themselves, it's your RPG, your game mechanics. You should keep in mind you may want to change them around pretty frequently as you think of different ways to do things, so good encapsulation is a must. You have things protected, so that's a reasonable start, just watch how you use accessors too. You have several fields that are calculated, like "speed" and "finalAttack". Those should be methods, not fields. In a slightly more advanced design, consider designing things around interfaces first, and have your classes just implement a selection of interfaces. That gives you a lot more leeway in how you implement them, and in how you combine and split apart functionality as you make changes.

14	Game Development / Newbie & Debugging Questions / Re: Game Versioning or Numbering	on: 2013-05-08 03:57:15
Three digits is the common standard, and it's major.minor.patch (I assure you it's not a build number). This scheme is usually called "semantic versioning". Java 5, 6, and 7 are versions 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7. And the java.version system property actually lists three digits (the last tends to stay at 0) and that's usually followed by an underscore and an update number, which you can say is the "real" patchlevel.

15	Games Center / WIP games, tools & toy projects / Re: SF Citybuilder- Buildings/Concept Art	on: 2013-05-07 19:37:10
I love the art style, but one thing I've noticed is that on lower-contrast (read: average) monitors, the color looks very washed out and a lot of the fine details are lost. Looks fabulous on my expensive work monitor though. Maybe a gamma calibration screen would be in order (one of those "adjust the slider until you can see X" things).

16	Games Center / WIP games, tools & toy projects / Re: LoaR: The Life of a Rogue	on: 2013-05-07 17:53:42
You keep going at that chair with that axe and yer gonna cause nuclear fission and blow everyone up

17	Discussions / General Discussions / Re: Why don't many of you use JMonkey Engine?	on: 2013-05-06 03:26:54
Quote from: gouessej on 2013-05-05 23:11:45 and I don't see why it should not work on an old Pentium 2 MMX with a crappy Matrox Millenium G200. Should it also support a PC XT with a Hercules adaptor? Look, I like graceful degradation as much as the next guy, and I'd prefer an engine didn't demand I write shaders where a high-level API would suffice, but you still have to draw the line somewhere. You can always run an ancient engine for your ancient hardware. And if it doesn't exist, maybe there's a reason why.

18	Discussions / Suggestions / Re: Articles & tutorials - Name the author	on: 2013-05-05 17:50:35
You ask me, the article view is a mess. Having no visible date on articles or replies makes things really fun when a google result pulls up ancient obsolete texts.

19	Game Development / Newbie & Debugging Questions / Re: [Final Decision] LWJGL or LIBGDX	on: 2013-05-04 18:55:49
Using GDX with maven is simple too: https://gist.github.com/chuckadams/5518074 With this POM, there's no need to set java.library.path while developing, the natives plugin takes care of it. As for your final product, the appassembler plugin used in that pom will get you a launcher script but you'd probably want to switch to something like launch4j for a real release.

20	Game Development / Game Play & Game Design / Re: Game art for developers who have no artistic sense whatsoever?	on: 2013-05-03 23:54:11
Go abstract. Line art with shader effects. Complex shapes composed out of primitive ones using generation algorithms. Basically, if you can't do pretty, do clever.

21	Discussions / General Discussions / Re: Xbox 720 - IllumiRoom, we'll be stacked in our living room for ever	on: 2013-04-30 17:35:52
Only thing I use my Kinect for is as a microphone to voice control Netflix. It's all right, but it occasionally hears conversation and thinks it's a command. The gesture controls are useless in every respect, I actually have the thing angled so it doesn't see me and go into gesture mode accidentally. But IllumiRoom loooks ... wow

22	Games Center / WIP games, tools & toy projects / Re: 3D Turnbased Rougelike (LWJGL)	on: 2013-04-25 20:49:55
Yeah the physics in myth were impressive for the time, and even now. I remember one time blowing up a Ghol with one dwarf, and watching his sickle fly across the screen, slice a dwarf who was getting set to throw a grenade, who dies, drops all his satchels and a live grenade, and promptly blows himself and the rest of his unit up. Shrapnel could be a real menace sometimes

23	Game Development / Newbie & Debugging Questions / Re: rotating a single object without rotating the entire screen with Graphics2D	on: 2013-04-24 01:50:26
For some bizarre reason I read Graphics2D as ... Slick2D. I think I'll go back to lurking now.

24	Game Development / Game Mechanics / Re: First Post - Bufferstrategy, jpane and canvas?	on: 2013-04-23 18:09:26
Quote from: ra4king on 2013-04-16 08:01:48 The daemon thread forces the system to use the high precision timer. This will cause sleep(int) to be more accurate A little semi-necro since I'm behind: Just to clarify, you only need this daemon thread trick on Windows. The precision of the scheduler timers on Linux and OSX are always pretty good and can be made better with system calls (involving JNI stuff you probably don't want to mess with)

Game Development / Newbie & Debugging Questions / Re: rotating a single object without rotating the entire screen with Graphics2D

on: 2013-04-23 17:58:28

Going through my old threads ... surprised no one got back to you on this. Use push/popTransform to save and reset the state of your modelview matrix (that is, the current rotation/translation/shearing/scaling states)

1
2
3

g2d.pushTransform();
... do your rotates/scales/etc
g2d.popTransform();

You can stack transforms up to 16 deep, though I really don't recommend going that crazy with it.

26	Java Game APIs & Engines / OpenGL Development / Re: OpenGL - alternatives to Java	on: 2013-04-23 08:24:27
"Cog in the machine" is just an old saying, dating back from the time when, er I imagine, when people still used the word "cog". The analogy to being an interchangeable part is something I figure is pretty self-evident.

27	Java Game APIs & Engines / OpenGL Development / Re: OpenGL - alternatives to Java	on: 2013-04-22 23:15:59
Quote from: davedes on 2013-04-22 21:20:10 Quote the marketplace for Ruby or Scala skills is negligible compare to Java or (for example) C#, so why bother!? Not exactly true. A lot of studios and companies use Ruby or Python for backend development. Not to mention that some of us just happen to love programming and don't view everything through the lens of what will make us the most efficient cog in a corporate machine.

28	Games Center / WIP games, tools & toy projects / Re: Xcylin: A sci-fi open world voxel game.	on: 2013-04-21 19:04:43
Looks pretty spiffy ... though I keep wanting to call it "Xyclin", which is a brand name for doxycycline Rhino is pretty slow compared to other JS engines, but soon enough you'll have Nashorn to play with. Wouldn't be my first pick as good languages go, but as goes familiarity with it among the community, it is hard to beat.

29	Discussions / General Discussions / Re: Steam Questions	on: 2013-04-19 17:46:18
It's just the usual "they get big, they get evil". Sometimes deserved, sometimes not. Google was once the underdog, now they're the all-seeing panopticon of the internet. Hell there was once this plucky upstart company taking on IBM, called themselves Micro-Soft or something like that. I think Valve's got a long way to go before it gets even a tenth as bad as EA.

30	Discussions / Miscellaneous Topics / Re: Procrastination Issues	on: 2013-04-18 16:58:04
Quote from: greenOwl on 2013-04-13 20:44:33 A really good article on one of my favourite websites: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/ Cool link, I saved it in my Read It Later bookmarks

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