Scott Richmond
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Posts posted by Scott Richmond
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Yep. The scripting functionality is built into the model class, so it doesn't matter if it's being used in the editor, a BlitzMax program, a Lua program, or a C++ program. The same routine is called every time. The only tricky difference between the editor and a C++ program is the framework object, but that has been covered in the Lua tutorial.
The whole "framework" thing has been kind of a mess. It works the way it is now, and I am not going to change it, but that's one little detail I feel like the design of could have been better.
You don't think its worth changing while you can? I mean the LUA functionality has only been out for a month or two. Or is it too fundamental a change to dive into now?
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It needs to be stretchy IMO. I hate fixed width forums. I can understand static websites like your main page, but a forum needs to be 100% comfortable for the user to read and interact with. I don't see why you wouldn't just use IP.Board as a template for a new color scheme and banner.
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Josh, thats simple: Politics.
All the tech is there, always has been. All the big guys sitting in their decision making chairs don't want to change business model. Why should they? They make billions where they are. If they change it up and loose some money then they get a golden handshake and leave (Read: Paid 10M+ to go find another job).
Why do you think Apple is so restrictive in their file formats and supported software (Java, flash, etc). Its because they want to corner the market. Personally it makes me sick, specially when I see companies like MS who have done nothing but support every third party get slammed with a 8 billion dollar fine by the EU union for being 'uncompedative'.
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Oh and don't think for a second that the iPad can actually browse the web, because it doesn't support Flash:
It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. Unlike many other ebook readers using the ePub file format, consumers will not be able to access ePub content with Apple's DRM technology on devices made by other manufacturers. And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.If I want to use the iPad to connect to Disney, Hulu, Miniclip, Farmville, ESPN, Kongregate, or JibJab -- not to mention the millions of other sites on the web -- I'll be out of luck.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/28/adobe-on-flash-and-the-ipad-apple-is-continuing-to-impose-rest/
Thank you for nothing Apple.
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I think everyone has made some really good points, and it'll certainly be interesting to see how tablet PCs evolve this year. Because whether this iPad is a real hit or not is almost irrelevent - I think we'll start seeing all the other big companies (ASUS, MS, Samsung, etc) really kick it up a notch because Apple will create a market with this thing. And now that they've shown their cards, everyone else can now start touting their "better" product with more innovative features.
Personally I'm more excited to see what the others come up with: The Courier concept MS came up with completely blew me away and I would buy that device in a heartbeat. Lenovo have also show-cased a laptop at CES that is basically a laptop but you pull off the screen whenever you want and it turns into a touchscreen tablet. Now that is cool.
With that said everything I've seen so far, iPad included, has been half-way there. I don't think anything out on the market right now is worth our money just yet.
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You make some good points, and you also make some really bad ones. And I'm not even going to approach why in gods name you're using Macs as servers. But ask yourself this - What are you going to do on it? It can't be a phone or GPS. It could be a great eBook reader, except it can't read PDFs or any other kind other than Apple's standard, so we can cross that off the list. What else? Business? Yeah, right. Use a projector and an office if you want to present some slides. and you're certainly not going to draw up some excel spreadsheets on it. Game development? The iPad will be part of the iPhone game network. If you think you seriously have a strong business case to get into that crazy market (Have you actually done research on it? I have) then you should know you don't actually need the iPad - Its all there in the SDK already, you should be ready to go.
Well, theres not much left for it is there. We've got internet browsing and the iTunes store. Ok, so its an over-sized iPhone. I'd stick to that, at least you can do functional things on that device.
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I'll wait for the MS version where it runs an OS to let me do whatever I want to do.
Aye. MS have already prototyped my dream Tablet PC. Go google the Courier. Its pure awesome running on Windows 7. Who knows if it'll ever see the light of day though. Makes me sad.
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The OS/interface looks nicer and it's touch-screen. The book page-turning looks really fun.
You'd have to pay for every single song and movie, though, wouldn't you? Or would you be able to copy your DVDs and CDs to Apple's file formats?
No chance Josh. Its Apple's way or the highway. If its not on your account on iTunes then it aint gonna work.
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I think the appeal is you can sit in a coffee shop and watch a movie, write email, or listen to music, and it's much less bulky than a laptop.
True enough. Too bad you're locked into Apples jaded view on the world with their file formats. All 500GB of my digital movie library wouldn't work. Plus, why get this when you can go buy a netbook for less that has twicethrice the feature set? All you loose is the touch functionality.
Don't get me wrong though, the idea is good. I just don't think Apple can pull it off - If you want a versitile tablet/PC you need a Windows/Linux based machine to get the full functionality. All Apple brings to the table is tasty UIs and wallet holes.
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i agree pretty much D... but there were two things that got my attention...
1- the low price of the service $15 a month for wifi... $30 per month for unlimited wifi... that's pretty damn cheap...
2- the keyboard dock... recharge while typing... then take the thing with you when you leave the desk...
i was planning on buying a new mac mini... but now if anything, it'll be this gadget...
--Mike
1. I can't comment on that other than that feature isn't worth squat outside of the US. But no wifi A/B/G/N is a complete joke. You have to use the GSM internet when your at home!
2. Typing what, exactly? This is my point - The thing is useless. If you're seriously thinking about using this thing to type away emails or perform work then you might want to move on. You can obviously only use the typing features with any speed while at a desk. Forget trying to type an email on the move. Which makes you wonder that if you're at a desk that often, then you'll want to do your eyes a favour and get something with a decent screen size and resolution. The thing has no multitasking functionality either, so forget trying to do any work with it.
P.S. Mac Mini? Seriously? To do what exactly? You realise they cost more than anything else on the market and do less?
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Video and more info here, for those interested: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/27/apple-ipad-first-hands-on/
I'll come out right now and say that I'm an Apple hater - Their products are often little more than overly expensive fashion statements. I did, however, applaud some of the innovation the iPhone bought to the table. On the flipside, this iPad looks pretty damn useless to me. It wants to be a netbook killer but has no flash, no camera, no wifi, is stupendiously expensive, and having watched the video looks like little more than a toy you'd use occassionally. If you already have an iPhone i'd stick to that. The iPad brings little more to the table other than a hole in your wallet.
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I can't interact with any objects either (but they push me though), and the physics debug mode is always on (can't press P key to enable/disable it), and the player model is missing also, so you can't even see other people.
*nods in agreement*
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Hrm, well that certainly is MUCH better in terms of feedback. But, I just jumped on a server (Chat20finland) and I couldn't interact with any objects at all.
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I disagree. The only reason most games don't do it is quite simply because it not economically viable - It often has very little value-add. Its totally doable, someone just needs to sit down and really nut it out.
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You are correct, but I think that when neat little hiding tricks come into play. Look at something like Tomb Raider. When she's about to start moving she plays a small animation to get down into position and move. That 1/4 of a second would be enough time to do that.
It would cause issues if say you have the force (star wars style) and you wanted to push someone with your hand in a given direction. There would be a visual feedback delay, but again it might be avoided by animation trickery.
Well there are ways to hide everything, but I'd like to think our goal here is to create a robust networking component. It is possible, Josh just needs to do the research and development. Which he is already in the middle of.
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You are correct, but visually it wouldn't be noticed by the client. The position of the barrel on the client will always be behind the server. So when the server see's the collision and sends the details to the client, the client then gets the barrel position followed by the collision information to react on it's local controller. When the server gets the collision it sends a barrel position along with the force of the hit. The client then does the interpolation of the barrel and applies the force at the same time the barrel is at it's final "hit" position on the client side.
I think my nose just started bleeding
Now I want to try this out
There will be noticable lag. Aren't you forgetting that there will be lag between you pushing the forward down when up against the barrel, and it actually moving. Between those two event the client has to ask the server what to do. The barrel will 'feel' really heavy because for a split second it'll have little to no movement. Not really acceptable.
Sure, but that's not even really a physics problem. The held object doesn't even have to be physically interactive. A much hard problem is if two players push a box in opposite directions.
Sure it does. If you pick up a barrel with a grav gun or just your avatars hands, for example, then you'll be moving it around and expecting it to be interacting with the environment.
RE: The two players acting on one object issue - Is it really that big an issue? Think about it. Physics isn't really a constant force in computer science - It is applied at every update. So say for example you have 2 players pushing a barrel into each other. In my mind I'd say the two players taking and giving back ownership in quick succession every time they update and realise they're colliding with the barrel. What a macro level this would cause and back and forth motion between the players. But in a live environment I'd expect you to see nothing as the forces match and nullify. If they were really big forces I'd probably expect to see some back and forth jitter as the forces over-coming each other.
Does that make sense? Am I wrong?
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So how would the reaction of a player throwing a barrel at another player play out with this? Who owns the barrel? At what point does the ownership change to make it work on the client getting hit by the barrel that was thrown by the other client to give a proper reaction?
With the way I was describing the server would be able to recognize the collision and know the point of collision, force, etc. It would send that information to the client, who would then have that same force applied to give the proper reaction. The barrel would have the proper reaction on the server and update it's position to the clients accordingly because it has a working physics body for each client attached to the non working physics body that is getting it's position updated.
With your method, one still experiences client<->server lag because the client has to wait on the server to tell it where the barrel is going. Thats not good enough.
To answer your first question - The client throws the barrel and then relinquishes control back to the server as it no longer is interacting with it. Then the server gives control to client2 when it catches and stops it.
Again, I didn't really think too much about this, so there are no doubt flaws. (eg, who applies the gravity?)
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Thats why I suggest being able to transfer ownership of those drums to the client that is interacting with them for the duration of the interaction. That way there is no lag for the client and everyone else (server, other clients) see a seemlessly working interaction, albeit delayed by the server delay, which is fine because that won't appear to them as delay.
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Too complex. The client should be performing physics on its own. The server should only ever be acting as the communication conduit, performing basic sanity checks, and owning the location of all the public objects.
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It just needs to be architected better. For example:
All objects have one parent owner, which can be actively swapped in and out. Eg, player controllers are almost exclusively owned by the client that spawned it. This client tells the server, and by extension everyone else, where it is. Similarly, objects such as barrels are most often owned by the server. Exceptions to this may be things like when collision occurs, the client temporarily takes control. Or maybe when a grav gun grabs an object.
This allows instantaneous feedback at the client machine and removes perceivable lag to areas where it isn't really noticeable (watching other players move).
Thats it on the most basic level. On top of that I guess you'd want the server to be running basic anti-cheating checks such as playerx.prevLoc - playerx.currentLoc != >10;. Or of course much more advanced stuff. And some simple animation smoothing on the client side to remove any correction jitter from server corrections.
Note: This was just off the top of my head, I've no doubt there are problems I've not thought of yet.
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There was a constant jitter for me and my 300 odd ping. I think what needs ot change is that the client should be assuming it got the physics right. In other words, don't ask the server that player x is moving here then update the client - Let the client tell the server where its going and wait for no one. Just have the server monitor the client movements and if they're outside of some magic tolerance level, pull the client back.
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Version 7 is available. I came up with a motion smoothing technique that is so simple and so effective. I am eager to see how it performs, so find me on one of the chat servers now!
URL is fixed.
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Ah, so not a very good way to do things eh? I've actually started reading up a little on C++ + LUA. It seems LUABind does fairly well at creating an interface between the two languages and passing function pointers between the two. Leadwerks currently does the same thing doesn't it?
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Give it a crack now.
Horizontal Hinges
in Programming
Posted
I haven't really read everything here and have not played around with this stuff just yet, but I thought this might help -
As far as I know there are 2 types of movement in 3D space commonly used in engines - World relative and Object relative.
My guess is that the hinge is being rotated in relation to the World, and not the object. So when the object rotation changes, the hinge is still rotating long the unchanged world...if that makes sense.
Most, if not all, modelling programs have world and object relational rotation features so you should know what I'm trying to get at BrokenPillar.
I don't have a direct solution here, but maybe that is the root cause of the problems.