At 7/14/13 07:15 PM, swishcheese wrote: Is iPage a good hosting site?I see right now hosting for $1 a month.

I've never heard of them before but I can guarantee they are terrible if they offer hosting for $1 per month. Like most things in life when it comes to server hosts you get what you pay for. If you pay next to nothing you will receive next to nothing.

If you want a good host, with knowledgable and helpful staff, that gives you 100% full control over your server you can check out betaForce's VPS selections. They host my VPS and I've had nothing but good experiences.

At 7/14/13 07:39 PM, egg82 wrote: make sure you know ... a server-side language such as ... PHP

I agree with everything you said except for that part. Throw PHP in the garbage where it belongs.

At 7/14/13 08:26 PM, Diki wrote: I agree with everything you said except for that part. Throw PHP in the garbage where it belongs.

hah, I knew you'd say something like that
No brownie points for mentioning Ruby or Python, though? :(

oh, so I figured i'd put in steamworks as well as the Steam API (to GameWork) - problem is, steamworks only has C++ compiled binaries, so I guess i'll have to make a C# wrapper for it. Ah, debugging's going to be a pain in the ass.
Also thought i'd integrate the Paypal API in, as well, because microtransactions.
And finally some very basic 2D/3D stuff (primitives, mostly) to help speed things up a bit.

And, of course, physics/collisions which are done by other engines. Thanks, people who are smarter than me :D

This framework is coming along nicely, with the exception that for some reason whenever I close the thing in the debugger, I need to manually stop it afterword. Dunno if that'll affect a final product, but it's annoying as-is.
I'd say it was a thread I accidentally left open, but I commented all of them out and it still happens. I'll need to narrow it down at some point.

At 7/14/13 09:09 PM, egg82 wrote: No brownie points for mentioning Ruby or Python, though? :(

One step forward, two steps back. :)

At 7/14/13 04:40 PM, egg82 wrote: I've been thinking about starting a D&D campaign with my friends ever since my whole "I AM THE DUNGEON MASTER!" statement.

They play D&D at my house every monday. Its one of the reasons im moving out. There's nothing but pizza boxes and garbage the next day. I've grown to hate that dumb game!

/rant

I'm doing some RPG prototyping and decided to start with the battle system, which I plan to use for Clock Day.

Thanks a lot, MSG, because your post-mortem was really helpful. I'm gonna follow OOP principles as meticulously as I can during the coding of the battle engine, for future's sake. ;)

At 7/15/13 11:24 AM, FlyingColours wrote: I'm gonna follow OOP principles as meticulously as I can during the coding of the battle engine, for future's sake. ;)

Real men use component-based design for game development. >:)

At 7/15/13 12:11 PM, Diki wrote:

At 7/15/13 11:24 AM, FlyingColours wrote: I'm gonna follow OOP principles as meticulously as I can during the coding of the battle engine, for future's sake. ;)

Real men use component-based design for game development. >:)

Which is OOP...

At 7/15/13 12:19 PM, Rustygames wrote: Which is OOP...

I was being facetious.

At 7/15/13 11:24 AM, FlyingColours wrote: I'm doing some RPG prototyping and decided to start with the battle system, which I plan to use for Clock Day.

Thanks a lot, MSG, because your post-mortem was really helpful. I'm gonna follow OOP principles as meticulously as I can during the coding of the battle engine, for future's sake. ;)

I'm glad my misery is of some use to you. The way I'm doing it now is that I have a couple States (battle, cutscene) and then a bunch of Managers (state, dialogue, child index, etc) and then the main engine. P helped me a bit here, basically you make the managers public then pass a reference to the engine throughout instead of using static classes. It's sooooo organized. The issue I'm having is that there's so much to add, idk what to work on =S

Clock day RPG? That could be...interesting.

At 7/15/13 12:40 PM, Diki wrote:

At 7/15/13 12:19 PM, Rustygames wrote: Which is OOP...

I was being facetious.

What framework do you use for your component based design out of interest?

At 7/15/13 04:55 PM, Rustygames wrote: What framework do you use for your component based design out of interest?

I lost interest in game development a long time ago. Back when it was a hobby of mine (3+ years ago) I didn't know about component-based design, so off-hand I can't name any that could be effectively implemented with it.

At 7/15/13 05:21 PM, PSvils wrote: BETTER BE USING MINE!!!!!!!!!!!

"No external dependencies!" is quite the commit message. :)

At 7/15/13 09:28 AM, Luis wrote: They play D&D at my house every monday. Its one of the reasons im moving out. There's nothing but pizza boxes and garbage the next day. I've grown to hate that dumb game!

/rant

Well, I'm not one to leave pizza boxes everywhere :P
D&D doesn't leave pizza boxes everywhere, people leave pizza boxes everywhere. Don't knock the game until you've tried it, man ;)

Also, I finally snapped and punched the shit out of someone today. Honestly, I feel both sad and strangely happy about the whole thing. I mean, I'm sad that it had to come to fists, but in my opinion they deserved every once of pain they got, plus I was finally able to deflate their massive head. I dunno, it hopefully will make them a more respectful person later. At least, that's my justification for not feeling bad about giving 'em a few bruises.

At 7/16/13 12:53 AM, egg82 wrote: At least, that's my justification for not feeling bad about giving 'em a few bruises.

It sounds like we both got out of it relatively unharmed aside from a small bruise or two. There was only torso contact, he was too short to hit anything else and I was careful.

Long story short, never pick a fight with someone very clearly stronger and better at fighting than you are (duh?)

At 7/16/13 11:35 AM, Innermike wrote: all someone has to do is look at the resources the page is loading and they an see all your code, not that this is necessarily a problem but I imagine it could be annoying at some point? idk

I never have and never will understand why people are afraid of someone else seeing their code. Not that I'm implying you are; just speaking in general.

Open source is a good thing. It gave us Linux, Python and Git.

At 7/16/13 12:58 PM, Diki wrote: I never have and never will understand why people are afraid of someone else seeing their code. Not that I'm implying you are; just speaking in general.

I think mostly we're afraid of people criticizing our code. Notch, for example, probably wouldn't have livstreamed his development of Minecraft if he would have known a million and a half people would have poked fun at him.

Open source is a good thing. It gave us Linux, Python and Git.

Open source is always a good thing :D

At 7/16/13 01:20 PM, egg82 wrote: I think mostly we're afraid of people criticizing our code. Notch, for example, probably wouldn't have livstreamed his development of Minecraft if he would have known a million and a half people would have poked fun at him.

That should just give you more incentive to learn good coding practices. Notch apparently doesn't see it that way because he was, and still is, a laughably terrible programmer. It's unbelievable how he's a millionaire and writes worse code than high school students in under-funded computer science courses. He deserves to be laughed at.

At 7/16/13 11:35 AM, Innermike wrote: Dicking around with haxe/openfl

I am as well. I love love love inlining methods and stuff. I think ASC2 had that functionality, but it's only available for the latest flashbuilder and AIR right now. There's something I found called apparat which optimizes a swf, but idk if I care that much.

Considering the getter/setter for xyz in as3isolib takes up 75% of the frame time when things move, I might care a bit

open source

For a game, I don't care about the source code so much as why certain things were done the way they were. Having the source in addition to that would make a good teaching tool. I'd also cry myself to sleep after hearing some of the criticism of my previous coding habits.

At 7/16/13 10:48 AM, egg82 wrote:

At 7/16/13 12:53 AM, egg82 wrote: At least, that's my justification for not feeling bad about giving 'em a few bruises.

Wait what? That came out of nowhere! What happened?

At 7/16/13 01:35 PM, Diki wrote: That should just give you more incentive to learn good coding practices.

Yeah, i'm just saying I think that's what we're afraid of. At least, that's me to some degree. I can't speak for everyone.
I think I just don't want to say "hey, i'm a terrible programmer" because this is the thing i've dedicated my life to :P

At 7/16/13 02:39 PM, Rustygames wrote: Wait what? That came out of nowhere! What happened?

Somebody much weaker and shorter than I decided to try and punch me for some reason, so I hit him back a few times.
Nothing terribly exciting, I just haven't used my fists in quite a few years, so it's out of the ordinary.

I'm reading gamasutra articles while my java teacher drones on, and the most recent page and a half are very interesting as far as game dev and design. Much more interesting than topological sorting, which he still hasn't actually defined despite doing an example.

At 7/16/13 03:44 PM, MSGhero wrote: I'm reading gamasutra articles while my java teacher drones on, and the most recent page and a half are very interesting as far as game dev and design. Much more interesting than topological sorting, which he still hasn't actually defined despite doing an example.

this is one of the best things i've ever seen for sorting algorithms. I loves it :3

At 7/16/13 04:16 PM, egg82 wrote:

At 7/16/13 03:44 PM, MSGhero wrote: I'm reading gamasutra articles while my java teacher drones on, and the most recent page and a half are very interesting as far as game dev and design. Much more interesting than topological sorting, which he still hasn't actually defined despite doing an example.

this is one of the best things i've ever seen for sorting algorithms. I loves it :3

That is the coolest illustration of sorting I've ever seen. I will be bookmarking this! I've not done many sorting algorithms, but it's exciting to see it is such a complex and wonderful problem! Awesome link dude, I don't do this often but... you've earnt this

At 7/16/13 05:15 PM, Rustygames wrote: That is the coolest illustration of sorting I've ever seen. I will be bookmarking this! I've not done many sorting algorithms, but it's exciting to see it is such a complex and wonderful problem! Awesome link dude, I don't do this often but... you've earnt this

yay, I has internets :3

Anyway, yeah, ever since I linked that i've been working on a static sort class for GameWork. I'll need to work on a search class as well o.o

on my quest for a 3-way quicksort algorithm, I found this Java code. Probably some of the most beautiful code i've ever seen. VERY clean.

At 7/16/13 06:18 PM, egg82 wrote: 3-way quicksort

what do you mean by that?

At 7/17/13 06:10 AM, Toast wrote: what do you mean by that?

http://www.sorting-algorithms.com/quick-sort
http://www.sorting-algorithms.com/quick-sort-3-way

:P

condensed version written by a man who hasn't had his coffee yet:
The three-way sort is MUCH better than the two-way when up against arrays with very few unique values (in fact, it's the best out of all of them) but uses more overhead to get the job done. The three-way partition is pretty much equal to or better than the two-way partition in every way.

At 7/17/13 09:59 AM, egg82 wrote:

At 7/17/13 06:10 AM, Toast wrote: what do you mean by that?

actually, that could be better explained as you probably want to know what a quicksort does, anyway.
A quicksort takes a value and puts everything in the array greater than that value farther down the list, and everything less than that value farther up the list, meaning the runtime is log2(n)
A three-way quicksort does this with two values instead of one, which results in a log3(n) runtime but more overhead.

At 7/15/13 01:04 PM, MSGhero wrote: I'm glad my misery is of some use to you. The way I'm doing it now is that I have a couple States (battle, cutscene) and then a bunch of Managers (state, dialogue, child index, etc) and then the main engine. P helped me a bit here, basically you make the managers public then pass a reference to the engine throughout instead of using static classes. It's sooooo organized. The issue I'm having is that there's so much to add, idk what to work on =S

Clock day RPG? That could be...interesting.

I'm not really making a clock day RPG, just a series of battles with RPG stats. However, I do plan to make an actual RPG in the future, and I'll certainly ask you for help then! :P What do managers actually look like, though, and what do they do other than passing values to the main engine?

At 7/17/13 11:27 AM, FlyingColours wrote: I'm not really making a clock day RPG, just a series of battles with RPG stats. However, I do plan to make an actual RPG in the future, and I'll certainly ask you for help then! :P What do managers actually look like, though, and what do they do other than passing values to the main engine?

Anything. Mine have public methods like...
TileManager: createLevel, getTilesInRange
MoveManager: pathTo, skipPath, dispatches movecomplete
DialogueManager: initDialogue, formatDia, inDialogue, dispatches diabegin and diaend, has a sprite to add to display the text field and buttons
ChildManager: the engine has overridden add/removeChild which calls add/removeKid and reorderKids. Order is determined by what got added first, so the order of initializing managers matters in some cases.
StateManager: swapState - states implement IState which has init,dispose,enter,exit,update,render
And the Engine class just calls stateManager.update and render which calls currentState.update and render

Everything gets added to the engine, addChild and addEventListener. Engine is the only class I have that extends anything (states have a sprite property that gets addChilded); the states just implement an interface. I'll upload some stuff later, maybe start a git repo :O

My code isn't that interesting, though...and I need a cooler name for my pathfinder