Go on, ask me anything.

General Discussions
#141

Yes. But then you’ll soon realise why it makes sense not to use perfect scanning when you add network latency into the picture. See Quake3 for their solution - just big old bounding boxes around the players, sometimes positioned slightly ahead of where they actually are to account for lag.

Cas :slight_smile:

#142

All development on Windows Vista 64, which I moderately hate. I just bought a Mac Mini to do testing on, which I hate considerably more. My Vista box dual boots into Ubuntu 64 10.10, which I think I hate about as much as Vista 64.

Somewhere along the way I think someone lost sight of what good operating systems do and it’s just gone downhill for years :confused:

Cas :slight_smile:

#143

If you hate all the operating systems, why don’t you write your own?

#144

Heh, in my dreams :slight_smile: You know the last one I can remember using that I thought “This is quite good” was NT3.51. Before that, AmigaOS had some good bits.

Cas :slight_smile:

#145

…or maybe, hmm I don’t know…Windows 7? ;D

#146

yeah i’d go with XP or 7. Vista just sucks. Surprised you don’t like linux though i’ve always found it quite dependable.

#147

jnode lol

#148

1.ever made any FPS games?

2.ever played doom or quake?

  1. How is your AI implemented? is it hardcoded? scripted? dynamically loaded classes? what?

  2. what do you think of the idea of using classloaders to load a custom class containing AI routines?

#149

I discovered I like Win7 even less than Vista since they screwed up the Taskbar and Explorer even further. I think the problem is they’re trying to make it more like a Mac… which I hate the most of all.

  1. No
  2. Yes
  3. Three simple “brains” which select target buildings; then an A* pathfinder. The A* pathfinder has a pluggable “topology” which describes the map to A*, eg. the cost of moving from A to B, whether a move is legal, etc. and the gidrahs in RotT all use the same topology implementation, which is a little lame as there are several distinct gidrah types and the implementation is littered with if/boolean cases :slight_smile: That’s evolution for ya. The topology implementation in conjunction with a many-layered map does a few nifty things which make the gidrahs seem cleverer than they actually are.
  4. Er, reasonable, I suppose, but you’d better be doing something thoroughly complex to be worth the hassle.

Cas :slight_smile:

#150

You will find that I am most probably the biggest Mac hater of all. Yet I do not see how they’re trying to make it look more like them. I love the new interface more than Vista’s, very versatile and unique ;D

#151

i lost a bunch of data by plugging a flash drive into a mac. it didn’t recognize the filesystem and decided to format for mac.

  1. vista’s look isn’t too bad, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that other than that, its a piece of crap, and win7 just looks wierd. windows are not supposed to be semitransparent.
#152

Ouch!! I take back what I said, you probably hate it more than me :stuck_out_tongue:
I hate it for the quality/content per price ratio: a verrrryyyy tiny fraction. It might look pretty, but the only thing it’s useful for is web browsing and documents.
What file system did you have on the flash drive?

But…but…I <3 transparency :’(

#153

I can’t stand the transparency! In fact I’m not really all that keen on how the whole windowy paradigm has gone. I think the Amiga got it right with Screens. They were a great idea and really well executed.

Cas :slight_smile:

#154

i think it was actually a camera i was using as a flash drive, with a FAT-something filesystem.

another thing i hate about macs: the os has a linux kernel, but they put a really sucky WM on top of it.

#155

I’m in a similar boat with Cas here. I don’t hate all modern OSes…they are all equally “meh”. There’s been some cool stuff over the years in research that (for some strange reason) haven’t made in into consumer level products. All the fanboy-ism around this or that really confuses me.

However, I have to admit that when I first used NextSTEP (around '88)…I was wowed. Never had an Amiga.

Note: OS-X is mach based, not linux. So it’s closer to various BSD flavor unix-a-likes.

#156

OS X started using the Mach Kernel from the NeXTSTEP project, which basically a dumbed down OpenBSD.

#157

I will ask again

  1. How long exactly demo version of PuppyGames can be played?
  2. Did you use lwjgl on your AlienFlux? it just look different from another games.
  3. Is it good idea to treat Texture class as Image class? so I can put something like TextureFactory class that will pass each Texture needed by all entities and do active rendering.
  4. What is your approach in calculating dx and dy of your bullet when move diagonal (given by mouse cursor position, like Ultratron)
  5. what is kind of music you hear when coding? heavy metal rock? :smiley:
#158

Again? Did I miss one?

  1. Revenge can be played as long as you like, but only up till the end of the Moon. The other games randomly choose how long they can be played for in various ways (max level, max time, max games limits).
  2. Yes, but that was our first game, and we hadn’t settled on a style.
  3. No idea :slight_smile: A Texture is a GL concept; an Image is a general concept.
  4. It varies - sometimes I’ll use Bresenham’s line scanning algorithm, sometimes just plain old floats.
  5. Now there’s a good question :slight_smile: Revenge of the Titans was coded extensively to:
    Nine Inch Nails
    Led Zeppelin
    Dr Phibes and the House Of Wax Equations
    Faith No More
    Dr Dooom
    and tons of miscellaneous stuff :slight_smile:

Cas :slight_smile:

#159

I bet this is your favorite topic now :wink:

#160

Bzzzzt! Wrong answer! Thank you for playing! My NeXTSTEP box was my main dev machine from 1989-1998, even though I had more powerful boxes. Afterwards it move to a secondary role until roughly 1999-2000. In that entire time I had exactly one OS crash, which was due to me setting an invalid parameter. I’ve never had an OS/hardware pair that reliable. The “cool” thing about it in 1988 was the fact that it is a microkernel, so hot deployment of kernel level software and a crash in ring-0 code doesn’t bring the whole OS down. Not that I’m in the microkernel rule, monolithic kernels suck camp. Hybrid solutions are the best solution IHMO. Beyond the kernel level there is a long list of cool features that made it a very productive machine, esp for rapid prototyping.

As for it being a “dummied” down version of OpenBSD, that would be a neat trick, since it wasn’t released for another 8 years. If fact (if memory serves, too lazy to check wikipedia), no free version of BSD exisited at the time. Also, BSD is the poster child of monolithic kernels. And yeah, OS X is derived from NeXTSTEP, but what was cool is '88 is “meh” in 2001.