Olhovsky

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bio	website	olhovsky.com
	location	Toronto, Canada
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visits	member for	2 years, 3 months
	seen	May 21 at 10:31
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The Big O.

	2,678 reputation	bio	website	olhovsky.com	visits	member for	2 years, 3 months
724 badges		location	Toronto, Canada		seen	May 21 at 10:31

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Jul 7	comment	Why do many games have “timeouts”? 3nixios: Timeouts prevent you from playing too much. They make games like angry birds more casual -- not less casual.
Jul 7	comment	Scaling a game view with letterboxes? I'm not familiar with Android development. Why can't he just draw the game to a rendertarget, and then draw that rendertarget to the screen, using the screen's resolution? Bars on the left/right of the screen should happen automatically as a result of choosing scaling/offset - there is no special case to deal with.
Jul 7	comment	Why do many games have “timeouts”? In response to your points: First: Angry Birds does not require this mechanic to "keep the game moving" as in board games. Second: There is no player balancing required in Angry Birds that make this mechanic useful, like in online MMOs that you mention. Third: It does not help Angry Birds make more money in the paid version, which still has the mechanic. Finally: This point has nothing to do with the question, and "how this applies is an exercise for the reader" is not a very good way to answer someone's question.
Jul 7	comment	Why do many games have “timeouts”? -1 for this answer which is all over the place, and does not address the question. You make four points, none of them apply to Angry Birds, and none of them explain the reason that Angry Birds uses this mechanic.
Jul 7	comment	Polygon count target range for MMO being released in 2 years WoW was released ~6 years ago, and about ~3 years ago they started multithreading the engine (to take advantage of 2 cores). If you have many different models, drawing them all with few draw calls remains a challenge in modern engines. Consider that models that require shadows must be drawn in the shadow mapping pass as well as during the normal rendering pass. In fact, modern engines that use light-pre pass or a similar deffered approach may have to draw the models yet another time. So I don't see a reason to think that modern engines should require fewer draw calls/model than WoW's engine.
Jul 7	answered	Polygon count target range for MMO being released in 2 years
Jul 7	comment	Polygon count target range for MMO being released in 2 years Overall CPU power went up (you can make draw calls from multiple cores), and poly count costs per draw call depends on the GPU speed more than the CPU speed anyway.
Jul 6	awarded	Necromancer
Jul 6	revised	Where can I find free sprites and images? added 543 characters in body
Jul 5	answered	Where can I find free sprites and images?
Jul 5	comment	Game Sound Effects Availability Why the downvote? I want to learn too! :)
Jul 4	comment	Game Sound Effects Availability I wouldn't use findsounds.com, as it is just a collection of random sounds found on the intertubes, with no credit given to authors, and no license information.
Jul 3	comment	Timer not going off I upvoted this question because it is clear, and has a concrete answer. The question could be on-topic on stackoverflow, but it is also on-topic here, as the asker is using XNA. We have the answer here, and programming topics often overlap with SO, so I don't think that we should be marking questions about people who are programming a game as off-topic.
Jul 3	comment	Component-based entities without IDs? @Paul: If an entity has an ID, you don't have to be aware of the particular subtype that the object has, only the type that it derives from (assuming the parent type contains the ID). This doesn't break polymorphism in any way. So I don't understand what you're trying to say in the last sentence of your question. The "problem" you've identified with the use of IDs is not really a problem. Perhaps that is one of the causes of downvotes?
Jul 3	answered	Game Sound Effects Availability
Jul 3	comment	Casting ray from 2D to 3D As Crowley9 pointed out, this answer only explains the part of the ray projection that results from having a perspective view. It's a nice explanation of that part though :) In order to be a complete answer, it really needs to at least mention that the ray will point in some direction that is defined in part by the rotation and position of the camera, as the camera could be placed anywhere, and face any direction!
Jun 30	comment	How to do smooth sprite movement on WP7 XNA 3nixios: Good point. If sprites are not moving, then you actually don't want sub-pixel rendering. Sub-pixel rendering means that color will be added to several pixels around the pixel location, to give the appearance of a pixel "between" hardware pixels, instead of coloring just a single hardware pixel. So a sprite will be slightly blurred if you place it between hardware pixel positions. That said, the question is about moving sprites -- which will almost certainly look better with sub-pixel positions unless they are moving very, very slowly.
Jun 30	comment	How to do smooth sprite movement on WP7 XNA bearcdp: What perceived blur from snapping to pixels? Sub-pixel rendering will look better when sprites are moving.
Jun 30	comment	How to do smooth sprite movement on WP7 XNA You mean a `Vector2`, and yes. And to make sure that the floating point coordinates in the `Vector2` struct are not being rounded to an integer value!
Jun 30	answered	How to do smooth sprite movement on WP7 XNA