Brent Taylor
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Posts posted by Brent Taylor
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Edit: Forgot just one thing that personally trumps all: Screen size: I use 2 full HD 24inch screens and sometimes even my 42inch TV. I don't think I'll ever be fully happy with mobile platform screen size until it gets up to A3 size. I'm talking like an electronic visual diary.
Remember, I highly expect to be able to simply dock our mobile device and be able to USE these larger screens. As for speed, they're getting faster and faster with each generation. The new ARM chips they are showing off are blazingly fast. And of course, when docked, they can use more power and achieve a higher speed.
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So our phones become real Personal Computers, we can bring them around wherever. Go to the library, pop your phone/PC into a screen-mouse-keyboard dock and away you go.
Exactly. We're smack dab in the middle of that shift right now. For example: http://usa.asus.com/Tablet/Transformer_Pad/ASUS_Transformer_Pad_TF300T/
I see this as only an intermediate step in that direction, but it is a step.
Sales are doing fairly well. iOS even allows for bluetooth keyboards and devices (as I'm sure Android does as well). We're getting close. I predict we'll have a working device that does exactly what I talk about within five years. It'll see widespread use in ten with all the knockoffs that'll come about. -
Thats not quite what I meant about mobile devices replacing desktops. We're already starting to see it happen here and there.
I highly expect our tower will be replaced by our cell phone/mobile device. Place it in a small docking station and we have a full monitor, keyboard and probably a mouse. There's little reason we couldn't do development on such a device. This is already starting to happen.
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You have three options really:
1) You can break out of the cygwin sandbox via the /cygdrive path. All your drives are represented here and you can either navigate to said files, or simply call them directly from within the sandbox.
2) MSYS from MinGW tools. http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS Download, install and add the bin directory to your system path. Gives you access to a number of the standard GNU tools (grep, sed, awk, etc.) from your standard cmd.exe command line.
3) Unix Services for Windows. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=274 A very large number of Unix tools for windows, officially supported by Microsoft.
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I never did...
This argument/discussion has gone on way to long. If you don't want to use it because LE2 works better, fine, that's good. But I have a problem with actually bashing it.
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Let's just quit the argument at this point. There's no bashing going on in this thread. There are users legitimately concerned and upset about the sudden change. LE2 may work just fine now, but longterm support is one of the primary reasons for buying an engine. If the engine changes too much and no longer fits your needs, then it no longer is being supported in a manner conducive to your goals. A large portion of the vocal people in these boards have little interest in mobile dev. The sudden platform focus change is a legitimate concern.
EDIT:
I would like to mention, on a personal note, I'm fairly happy with the direction Josh is taking on this. Mobile games are here to stay. In fact I highly expect that within the next decade, our phones (or other such mobile device) will be our primary computers for most tasks. The only people still running Desktops or Laptops will be content creators, where the extra power may be necessary. And I'm not sure programmers really need all that much power in reality.
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No I have no problem with your opinions. They are valid points. And my opinion is that you are being to critical, to the point of bashing it. That's how I feel. I am entitled to an opinion am I not?
You are certainly entitled to the opinion that people bashing the engine. You however are not entitled to tell them to stop.
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Your chart is very subjective....
iPhone and iPad use the iOS so there is no difference.
You clearly haven't seen his other charts. Honestly, that chart is an improvement for him.
So now I am a fanboy for defending my opinion. Whatever.
No, you're a fanboy because apparently we're not entitled to a differing opinion than your own.
If you don't want to use it because LE2 works better, fine, that's good. But I have a problem with actually bashing it.
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i've seen many reasons that team projects have stumbled or have stalled... but this is the first time i've ever seen something like this...
"every day is a winding road"...
--Mike
You'd unfortunately be surprised.
It's one of the reasons I recommend things like Github or Bitbucket so heavily. Aggror, have you looked into Assembla? They have a free package along with forums, wiki, ticketing and Git hosting.
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@Rick
DarkGDK itself isn't particularly horrible, but you have to go into it understanding that the ID system used is there specifically due to being a C module to be used from other languages. Some of that functionality is definitely designed to be wrapped.
I took a similar approach as you. Rather than creating a singleton, I created a base DBObject class that was designed to be inherited from. It automatically kept track of used ID's as they were created and used, recycling deleted object ID's. It included a static method as well to get a unique ID for the rare situation where inheriting from the class was not practical.
Now this isn't exactly what I did (seeing as that code is long gone), but this is the gist of it. Please note, I wrote this off the cuff and I have no idea if this compiles.
typedef unsigned int DBObjectID; class DBObject { private: static DBObjectID IDCounter; static std::list<DBObjectID> RecycledIDs; protected: const DBObjectID ID; public: DBObject() : ID(GetNewID()) { } static DBObjectID GetNewID() { DBObjectID TempID; if (RecycledIDs.empty()) { TempID = IDCounter++; } else { TempID = RecycledIDs.front(); RecycledIDs.pop_front(); } return TempID; } ~DBObject() { RecycledIDs.push_back(ID); } }; DBObjectID DBObject::IDCounter = 1; std::list<DBObjectID> DBObject::RecycledIDs;Gist can be found here.
EDIT: It compiles cleanly now.
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@Brent.. a question...
your response had me scratching my head... i don't understand how you can extrapolate out your reasoning to raise the functional programming paradigm to a level of comparison between procedural v. object oriented...
Keep in mind most if not all functional languages are procedural/imperative languages as well. Functional languages simply have a general feature set that other procedural languages simply do not have (C for example).
lua is purely procedural... just like c... both being extensible to include OOP capabilities... within either can be applied in a functional methodology (which is nothing more than applying a paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data)... at least that's what i think...
Not exactly. Keep in mind functional languages borrow heavily from lambda calculus. C for example lacks functions as a fundamental data type and doesn't support closures (which are fundamental to functional languages). Lua does support these things.
the people at lua dot org seem to think similarly
Keep in mind, as mentioned, Lua is a procedural language. It's also multi-paradigm. For example, you rarely see looping constructs in functional languages outside of recursion. However, lua still uses functional paradigms even when using some of these "foreign" looping constructs. For example one of the foreach loop variants iterates over a table, passing each element over to a user supplied closure. In most functional languages you'll see this functionality in the map/fold/reduce functions.
Lua is multi-paradigm, but it's functional roots are fairly dominant in it's entire feature set. From it's support of closures to it's Lisp like choice of a Table as it's primary data structure and the way things are designed to be used. It's very powerful, yet that power is rarely tapped as few people these days actually know how to use a functional language.
You can use Lisp or Scheme as if it were C but you'll quickly find that it becomes very cumbersome until you make that paradigm shift. If you really want to learn about functional programming, pick up a pure functional language like Haskell or maybe even Scheme.
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I don't have a thought, just a sound... *ugh*
Lua is probably one of the most misunderstood languages in the public eye. Everyone forces OOP down it's throat all the while calling it a proceedural language. We have hacked up partial implementations of OOP paradigms in the language all over the place attempting to turn it into something it's not.
Lua is a wonderful language, but it is not a language with an OOP paradigm. Lua is a wonderful language and people call it a proceedural language largely out of ignorance (If it's not OOP, it MUST be proceedural!)
Lua is a wonderful language and it is a functional language. Let me say that again. Lua is a functional language. It is not a pure functional language seeing as it does in fact revolve around state and mustable data due to being designed as an embeddable language, but it is still very much a functional language.
A few common misconceptions:
- Functions are NOT ojects. They are a fundamental datatype in most functional languages (Lua, Python, Lisp, Haskell, etc.)
- Tables are not Dictionaries, Hashes, Tree's or lists. Tables are a data type who's functionality is designed to be altered via metaprogramming and in effect creating new data types. Embrace it!
- Lua is not an OOP language. This doesn't mean you can't write an OOP model in the language. Did you know that the entire OOP paradigm was written in and for functional languages? It was originaly created in smalltalk. That said there is little resemblence to it's original intentions. One of the key original OOP concepts was a lack of global state for objects. Sadly this never carried over outside of the functional world and is part of the reason parallel programming is so difficult in the usual OOP languages.
Excuse the rant. This is just one of my pet peeves (of apparently many). It's rarely taught or even understood that there are more paradigms than OOP, proceedural or imperative programming. Functional programming is only one of a great many. When I was teaching I made sure my students knew they existed and at least at a basic level, understood the difference.
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Now as to the original question...Yes, there's no reason you can't make an entire game via Lua, depending on the scope. LE2 has it's problems with Lua, as has already been pointed out by others in the thread and so I would not suggest it. But it can certainly be done.
- Functions are NOT ojects. They are a fundamental datatype in most functional languages (Lua, Python, Lisp, Haskell, etc.)
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Ok the "100 times faster" was unreasonably but it think it is usefull to use ASM for stuff like vertex/matrix/vector calculation.Some functions in CPU "extras" like 3DNow! use that too.
Do keep in mind, you can have your compiler take full advantage of any feature your processor supports. Though, in most cases, compilers default to featuresets that are common amoung most chipsets of it's type (AMD and Intel for example).
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Whoever told you this is in denial. It wasn't even close to "100 times slower" when the first C compiler was released.
On the whole, few programmers are going to produce assembly code more optimzed than your average compiler. Even then, it's rare to shave off more than a few pico seconds in any particular function.
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Thanks for the kind words.
My point is, don't try to put anyone in a cell of a chart of a group, people can grow up by themselves,
Oh don't get me wrong, just because you fit in one group on my chart doesn't mean you won't fit in another the next day. The only difference between the three groups I listed is the willingness to learn and how far you want to go. There are only so many hours in the day and we need to prioritize what is actually import to us. Priorities what they are, not everyone has the time to continue broadening their knowledge set in a given subject. There's nothing wrong with that. I only get grumpy when someone actively refuses to learn something.
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Just one last thing I want to clarify. When I say "academic" learning, I do not necessarily mean schooling. In fact I'd say it's rather rare to actually learn how to program in college. At most, people learn syntax and some of the basics. I consider "academic" learning to simply be active studying. Whether you get your information from school, books, online forums or google....really doesn't matter.
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I've been programming professionally for 10 years and I've never done proper unit testing. Believe it or not both jobs I've had (they weren't technical companies (retail & trading)) didn't do any formal unit testing. I think the fields programmers are in might have a big role in ones experience with this.
I guess I'm doomed then, although I seem to make a pretty good living by coding "off the seat of my pants" and not doing proper unit testing (this is how the team I'm on works). What industries are you guys working in to give such luxury? The only thing my bosses care about is getting the programs done as fast as possible and it "basically" does what the verbal spec the business person gave us. Traders want their programs in hours not days/weeks/months.
Unit testing isn't done very often in most dev houses (web dev tends to be the notable exception). You'll see it a lot in Java dev houses and of course with Ruby on Rails devs. I've seen it occasionally elsewhere, but it's fairly sporadic.
In my experience there are really three types of programmers:
- The most common are those who are fresh out of college and their acedemic learning stops there. They tend to work for VB or VB equivalent Java shops. They may have some grasp of the basics, but they tend to do a lot of copy and pasting of code found on google. You don't want to work with these people if you can avoid it. Unfortunately most of the non tech biz hire these almost exclusively, usually out of ignorance or the cheaper cost.
- Your general programmers are a little better. General programmers tend to stick to one area of expertise and rarely learn anything outside of their usual problem domain. They do know the basics and maybe a bit more, but new paradigms or frameworks aren't much of a concern as what they already know and use works just fine. General programmers will do the occasional personal project but it's rare it's outside their usual problem domain. When it is they tend not to learn the new concepts or paradigms that go along with it and produce cobbled together projects as a result.
- And you have my favorite group. The fabled "Rock Star" programmer. They are constantly working on personal projects, always learning new frameworks, concepts and paradigms. These guys actually know the difference between OOP, procedural and functional languages. Usually they actually know a functional language and their code is better for it. These guys don't have a primary problem domain, they are simply problem solvers at heart. They love a challenge and they love teaching even more. They hate working with the first group and love working with the second group provided they are willing to learn and experiment.
To be clear, "Rock Star" programmers are not know it alls. They have a lot of experience, but they never look down on you for not knowing something. If they do, they aren't a Rock Star programmer. They're just a jerk and a nuisance to a good team.
You'll run into all three and some of them just rub you the wrong way.
As for me, I've done a lot of things. I do mostly freelancing at this point in any number of areas. I taught both programming and game development at the university level for two years. I worked IT for a school district for three years (experience with both Windows Domain Controllers and Linux server/client rollouts). I've been reverse engineering programs, file formats and protocols for as long as I can remember. I've built VPN solutions in perl, inventory applications for store chains, software for automating different types of reversing and analysis, quake 2 mods and UT2k4 mods. I've a lot of experience in developing game engines and of course games themselves. Heck, I've even done a little OS dev. Oddly enough I originally went to school for art. I've got a pretty decent amount of experience doing 3D modeling, texturing and animation. My projects folder is littered with experiments and personal projects and I've got a pretty decent portfolio as a result. At the moment I'm working on two different startups (Quest Companions, check us out on Google!), one being a web service, the other being a game dev house.
I'm 25 (26 in May). You're making me feel old.
- The most common are those who are fresh out of college and their acedemic learning stops there. They tend to work for VB or VB equivalent Java shops. They may have some grasp of the basics, but they tend to do a lot of copy and pasting of code found on google. You don't want to work with these people if you can avoid it. Unfortunately most of the non tech biz hire these almost exclusively, usually out of ignorance or the cheaper cost.
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My understanding of this, which I've never formally done this but only read about it, is that you are to create test cases that will fail your code AND you are to do these test cases BEFORE you even write the functional code in question. This seems very odd to me to even try and think in those terms, so was just wondering what people who have used this method think about it.
It's a good mindset to have, even if you don't actually write unit tests for everything. As you become more experienced as a programmer you tend to code by the seat of your pants less and less. That time is taken up with proper planning. When you're doing it right, unit testing takes little work and time but produces far more stable code.
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First, I'd just like to point out, you'll notice I didn't say I agree with TDD, I only specified what I believed to be a misconception on your part. I was defining what TDD is, versus your explanation.
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Now that said...
Put this in the context of most applications are either web enabled or cloud based to begin with. Where security is of the highest concern. TDD can and often will close off a number of attack vectors. The problem isn't just the public facing API's and views, it's anything down the call stack that happens to see that data that is at risk. TDD certainly lowers (but does not eliminate) most attack vectors. That's a big deal.
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@Pixel Perfect
Not necessarily. There's a big difference between simply compiling and running your code to make sure it works and TDD. TDD relies heavily on unit tests. Small tests that check the input, output and result of every function, object and method in your code are behaving as intended. It's time consuming, but you produce far more stable software.
Now you'll find this isn't often done in game dev houses for a number of reasons. It however IS very common in web dev fields and any number of other development fields. I'd say the Ruby on Rails community in general would be one of the larger and best examples. It's integrated directly into the Rails solution.
@Rick
I follow it sporadically. It depends entirely on the work I'm doing. I do a lot of Rails work these days, so I've been doing quite a bit of it as of late. Not so much when I'm doing gamedev work, though I should seriously consider it.
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Maybe you read my post with an angry face on. I don't know...
Not at all.
Are you high or something?
Derisive remarks?
it is a waste of space on the forum but I just can't take this anymore.
Anger and frustration over something rather minor.
No, I didn't read your post with an angry face. I read it at face value. Seriously, chill dude. Mistakes happen.
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Are you high or something?
Cuz nothing you're saying is making any sense... you just bumped a 2 year old post where the original poster is long gone and his question was answered. No he is not still asking for an answer... He's gone... nothing funny about it. Unless you are the original poster from 2 years ago in which case this makes even less sense......
I didn't really want to bump this thread because it is a waste of space on the forum but I just can't take this anymore.
Dude, try and calm down a little. Yes, he bumped a thread from two years ago. I don't think he noticed he had done so at first and he's just shrugging it off. No need to get hostile.
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I'm just thinking that how could I possibly have placement in the editor with this? I would have to spend ages messing with XYZ space to position all. No matter how much I want to use C++ I cant make a level in it.
By the way pixel I'd like to see about how your one works.
I think you're misunderstanding things very slightly. While Lua can be used in the editor, that is generally used for quick tests, not for actually building your game. Furthermore, if you're building your game with C++, generally lua is used strictly to script entity behavior.
If you're using C++, you can load levels created in the editor. Check the documentation. Specifically here.
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You went to Xors3D because it was
- Cheaper
- And you liked it better?
Is that it?
Those seem like pretty good reasons. Would you want to use an engine, that in your view, is more expensive and you didn't like?
- Cheaper
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thx a lot guys... but there's a lot of room for improvement... after watching that racing video i've been humiliated into going "back to school" in an attempt to improve my skills... i'm really hoping Leadwerks 3 will help me come closer to something that looks a lil more AAA...
--Mike
LE3 isn't going to magically make your game look awesome. It's entirely down to the art direction. Focus your efforts there.
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I'd be very cautious about using that website. Just doing a quick glance through the Character, Vehicles, Watercraft and Weapons sections you're looking at pretty much nothing but copyright and trademark violations if you were to use them in your game.
Characters are pretty obvious. I'm pretty sure Michael Bay (and a good many other individuals and corporations) would have an issue with one of the Transformers showing up in your game.
Vehicle and Weapon manufacturers are also very strict about their use in games. They all require licensed usage in most cases. Turn 10, for example, just now finally came to an agreement with Porche to have their cars in Forza 4. Dice is now having issues with Textron (owners of Bell) over the use of the Viper and Huey (and several others) being used in Battlefield 3. Someone forgot to get proper licensing apparently.
Just be aware of what you include in your games.
LE3 Release date when..?
in General Discussion
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Two things.
1) Desktops and laptops...really aren't getting any faster these days. They haven't for a while. i7's introduced hyper threading, which, in the general sense, is just better pipelining of instructions. The same number of instructions are being passed to the proc as the previous generation and at the same speed. Just fewer nop's are being used.
2) As for everyone using desktops over laptops...Thats debatable and very much subject to their field of choice. I live in the Bay Area of California. Very close to San Francisco and the Silicon Valley in general. The vast majority of coders around here are running laptops. This includes game developers. I'm not saying "laptops have taken over", but I would point out that laptops have been greatly outselling desktops since roughly 2004.