Hot answers tagged programming
17
In short: Develop programs used by others to create something (i.e. tools).
A popular and easy example would be a level editor for a game.
But this could be a lot more behind the scenes, like some version tracking program, a bug tracker, forums, some checker to verify content is without mistakes, etc.
13
A tools programming position is generally about being a force-multiplier for the rest of the development team. The exact nature of the work will of course vary widely from studio-to-studio, depending on the individualized needs of that company.
Primarily, however, you would be tasked with creating software that was going to be consumed by other developers ...
7
No. Regardless of whether or not that rule is sound you have to remember that "one job" can have different scopes. "Update" is one job - updating the (whole) logic of your application each frame. But this task consists of several smaller tasks, like the ones you mentioned - "updating AI", "updating player" and so on. They can, of course, consist of further ...
3
A tools programmer is a specialized role, one that is becoming essential to production. You are essentially someone who looks at the pipeline used to create a game and find ways to optimise the process.
As a tools programmer for several triple-A games, I have done:
Create new editors, e.g. level, graph, and sound, for designers to use.
Extend, fix bugs, ...
3
Beware that there are multiple ways of getting the relevant directory:
The Environment.CurrentDirectory(MSDN) gives you the working directory of the app. That is not always what you want. For example, you call the .exe of your game from C:\, and the working directory will be C:\ not the one where the .exe resides
AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory(MSDN) ...
1
For absolute laziness, it might be possible to just use those images as a background; it may end up being the joke of the class that 20MB of your 20.3MB game is just the menu background, but if you haven't slept for days some people are okay with that.
Some options I can think of for animations:
Use a spritesheet. This isn't a good idea here, but often ...
1
Scenario 1:
Flash and AS3
Sometimes you need to create certain functionalities which will help yourself more in your game production pipeline . By 'tool' it means something that can help speed your development process.
For example Flash basically does not provide with perfect pixel collision detection. So you could either write one yourself or try googling ...
1
It kind of sounds like you're doing things on update that should be done on trigger. Let's take an example I thought of:
You want a particular puzzle-related light to shine much more brightly if the hero is standing in a particular spot in the room, to alert his attention to it.
You probably shouldn't be checking each frame whether he's there; you should ...
1
Java is an excellent option to start with given the fact that you can put to good use that experience into creating games for Android if you want to. Besides, it's better to start with Java being strong-typed but developer-friendly when it comes to memory management. The best approach is to learn Java and Java2D. You can load your image files but have to ...
1
If C# is an alernative ( it is quite similar to Java ) you could check out C#/XNA. It's very easy to make games in it. It helps you with several topics such as intersection, sprites and audio. But you will handle all the logics yourself.
C#/XNA will be easy to start with. Make a few games with it. If you want to handle more of the game engine yourself, you ...
1
Well, this is some specific case of the Observer pattern.
There is a solution that involves callbacks. This is the best way of doing this if you want loose coupling, and I think it's also the cleanest one. This won't involve any global managers or singletons.
Basically, you'll need to have some sort of SettingsStore. There you store the settings. When you ...
1
Without messing your current architecture, I see two ways. First, you could store a pointer to the Game instance in the OptionsScreen class. Second, you could the Game class fetch current settings in a given interval, say every second.
To actually adapt to the new settings, the Game class has to implement some sort of reset functions which fetches the ...
1
This is what I do for my game. I have 2 separate functions for initialising stuff, 'init' and 'reset'. Init is only called once at startup and does things that do not rely on any settings, such as loading main assets. Reset does things like laying out the UI based on screen resolution, so is called every time the settings change.
init();
bool quit = false;
...
1
From what I've seen, the easiest approach is read an options file on startup to determine current display settings; then, when your options screen is displayed, load all current options from a file.
When changes are finalized via an apply or ok button, they are saved back to a file. If any changes effect the display, notify the user that the game must be ...
1
I tackled this problem recently using some of these answers as a starting point. The most helpful thing to keep in mind is that boids are a sort of simple n-body simulation: each boid is a particle that exerts a force on its neighbors.
I found the Linde paper difficult to read; I suggest instead looking at S.J. Plimpton's "Fast Parallel Algorithms for ...
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