Cron jobs are good, but the 'similar backend device' I might recommend is a daemon. It differs from a cron job in that your program constantly runs, and can take care of as simple or complex of an update schedule as you want, while cron is strictly for 'run this process every x units of time'. The usefulness of either depends on your hosting environment. Some webhosts may not let you use either, but if this is running on your own server then you can use whichever you like!

Thanks for this! I actually used a slightly modified version of your solution here to do two passes of bloom (one on part of the screen, one on the entire screen) at different settings, without requiring MRT.

I believe the original poster is referring to SDL's inability to rotate sprites frame by frame, without certain plugins like SDL_glx. I agree that the poster should just try SDL_glx and see if there is really a performance hit before writing it off.

Instead of outright crediting kills to the one who did the most damage, simply make an assist worth more 'points' if more damage is done. The kill should obviously go to whoever had the killing shot, because that's what a kill is. But whatever is being calculated based on player performance (points, money, etc) can be weighted. So if one player removes 225 of 250 HP, and somebody else finishes the enemy off, then the assist weighting ends up meaning that the heavy damager got more points/money.

I'll add that Tiled has at least one importer for XNA, TiledLib: bitbucket.org/nickgravelyn/tiledlib

Thanks, I am in fact using steering behaviors in the game as opposed to this for that very reason. I wouldn't plan on using any a* pathfinding solution like the one I'm asking about in the game itself, for the reason, because as you said, it's not really how a pilot would fly his ship. I am really just asking this question because the problem itself piqued my interest.

Maik: Not really factoring inertia into the equation. It's not a full physics simulation. FxIII: Good point, although the concept of travelling through time via an a* search is actually very interesting :)