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At 11/14/13 11:34 PM, MSGhero wrote:

At 11/14/13 11:32 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: Radix sort. In any practical situation I would say you're right.

Stopped reading after here.

Typically these sorts of problems have very little practical application. That is not really the purpose. I mean.. when do you need find the shortest list of words by single letter permutation of "short" to"bread" ?

At 11/14/13 08:33 PM, MSGhero wrote:

At 11/14/13 07:03 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote:

At 11/14/13 04:34 PM, Rustygames wrote: I like it. Why not A* though?

Cool problem. A* would be faster. Use the current difference in letters from the target as your heuristic.

Here is one. Given two lists of unsorted unique integers, find the nth lowest of both in the lowest time complexity. No google.

Hint: Solution can be achieved in linear time

Example
[0, 10, 2, 5]
[4, 8, 1, 7]

3rd lowest is 2

There was some weird sort we talked about in java where you place numbers into "buckets" based on the last digit, then based on the 2nd to last, etc. 10 buckets for 10 digits it can end with, 10 buckets in each of those for 10 digits that can be in the tens spot, etc. It was linearish I think, maybe some coefficient based on the max length of a number. Then iterate through that thing to find the nth.

maybe

Radix sort. In any practical situation I would say you're right. This is a good solution. But just for fun what if each integer has a unique key length (number of digits) ? Maybe they are 64 bit floats instead of ints with many decimal places. We then have an average case of at least linearithmic time. How we do achieve an average case of linear time ?

I will post the solution I'm thinking of tomorrow if nobody gets it. I'll give you a hint. It involves the partition step of quicksort.

At 11/14/13 04:34 PM, Rustygames wrote: I like it. Why not A* though?

Cool problem. A* would be faster. Use the current difference in letters from the target as your heuristic.

Here is one. Given two lists of unsorted unique integers, find the nth lowest of both in the lowest time complexity. No google.

Hint: Solution can be achieved in linear time

Example
[0, 10, 2, 5]
[4, 8, 1, 7]

3rd lowest is 2

Just checking in. Been very busy with full time job. I really miss having time to devote to passion projects. I do have a side project going on, and it's pretty neat; but nothing really more to say about it right now. I am also pumping some effort into my Javascript Pathfinding library EasyStarJS: https://github.com/prettymuchbryce/easystarjs. I am redoing the website for it with node.js/express/foundation/pixi.js. I am also experimenting with implementing another algorithm called Jump Point Search into the library. Otherwise last night I downloaded Unity 4.3, and played around with the new 2D stuff a little bit. It's very clever and fun to use. The thing that is great about Unity is just how fast you can get going and making content. It reminds me of building games in flash with the IDE. Super fun.

I've been playing RimWorld, a super fun strategy-type game. You should check it out. I also played rogue legacy, but I felt it was a little too grindy for my tastes. Yeah.

At 10/17/13 09:30 AM, Innermike wrote: nice things

Thanks sir!

At 10/3/13 03:57 PM, Rustygames wrote: Yup sorry what I meant was, people don't do them professionally, as in, you aren't looking to make money and a living out of it, it isn't work, it's a hobby, you're not in it for the money.

Ah yeah. I agree. My bad. I think misunderstood what you were saying before.

I think it's funny too about how some people say Flash is dead long live HTML5 yada yada. It's just easy for people to latch onto. Personally I think there is a big place for HTML5 games on the web. I still think there is a place for flash, though. Definitely not for websites anymore, but for games -- sure. Actually right now we still aren't in a world where HTML5 has penetrated all of the market yet. If you were to build a game today for the web only, and you wanted to target the most people possible in the door, and have a rich experience, flash is still your best option. Obviously won't stay that way forever, though.

Anyways - wars have been fought over this. Some people feel more strongly about it than others. Personally I think, a technology is just a technology. If you sucked at making games in flash you will probably still suck in HTML5. The product itself is the most important thing and if you make something really good then people will find a way to play it.

At 10/2/13 10:21 AM, kkots wrote:

At 10/1/13 01:36 AM, 4urentertainment wrote: I really miss AS3. I've basically been coding in AS2 (Lua) for the past year on Joe. At least AS2 actually has OOP.

4urentertainment, could you, please, elaborate why do you think that AS2 actually has OOP in comparison to AS3, and why are you using AS2 (Lua) instead of AS3?

Because he has written his own engine in C++ for Concerned Joe and is using LUA as a scripting language for his game which is common, and is also a smart thing to do.

At 10/2/13 10:29 AM, Rustygames wrote: I never really saw game jams as something professionals do, I think they're more aimed at up and comers. You know, students and the like

I do game jams all the time and I am a "professional". What does that even mean anyways ? Such a BS term that just means somebody is willing to pay you a bunch of money to write code. It's a very loaded term and I don't take it very seriously. Game jams are tons of fun. I hope I continue to do them until I die. :)

I have a soft spot for NG. and it's sad to see things are going this way. Honestly, NG just hasn't been able to compete in a competitive space. Other competing sites have either been acquired, or have moved onto other areas of business like publishing. It's complicated, but I feel like NG doesn't really know what it is anymore. There is too much holding onto days gone by rather than trying to innovate or do something new and different. A lot of people that jive with these old things like Pico day or Madness day are grown up or gone. I'm skeptical that this stuff brings any decent traffic. Just adding support for HTML5 games, and videos won't cut it either I don't think. That's just my personal perspective from the outside looking in. Obviously the NG team works hard, and I am just a bystander that doesn't have a great grasp of the situation. So, ignore me. Regardless, I'll still always be lurking in the flash forums. :)

Oh wait, those are bundled with the example, not the library. My mistake.

At 9/24/13 02:21 PM, PSvils wrote: BAM.

I took a look at the first example. It makes sense to me. Pretty slick. I'm not sure about some of the specific implementations you've bundled with the library (CameraSystem, Propulsion System), but in general I really like this decoupled architecture style.

Yeah the flash export is deprecated. They are trying to compete instead with their own plugin. In terms of the stage/editor, you can just create your prefabs in code which are kind of like MovieClips in the library.

My biggest gripe is being forced into uses code components. I've heard people say that you can just put code onto the camera as your entry point, and then your project can live in code from there on out. There are other things that bother me too such as the global/static nature of a lot of the methods which give you access to other prefabs, or their code components. It seems sloppy to me, but I am probably just not used to it.

Anyone had a chance to check out the new Unity 2D stuff ? It looks pretty interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoZlMGU99qk

hey guys

At 8/25/13 11:40 PM, egg82 wrote:

At 8/25/13 10:25 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: Trying out full screen. It seems to perform OK on my computer. Any one have a bad frame rate ?

yeah, it uses 100% of my CPU (dual-core 3.2 GHz - it seems to use both cores?) and runs at about 10 FPS

Oh well. I'll just revert it back to non-fullscreen. Theres something about some systems that makes it just barf. It works fine on my mac, but on my windows machine it runs poorly. Thanks for checking.

My Ludum Dare game.

http://www.prettymuchgames.com/games/yea

Trying out full screen. It seems to perform OK on my computer. Any one have a bad frame rate ?

Anyone going to PAX next weekend ? I currently live in Seattle (working here), so it's an easy journey for me. I'll be there Friday and Saturday, and hoping to talk to as many devs as possible. So let me buy you a drink or a coffee or swing by your booth or whatever, and lets talk game dev.

At 8/7/13 07:06 PM, swishcheese wrote: Thanks for info guys. Almost always?? What would be a case where it wld be faster not using Vector or Dictionary?

When using a special data structure like a binary heap, which may be slower than Array's native sort method with few elements but eventually becomes faster because of heap's O(log(n)) vs Array's under the hood sort which is probably O(n log(n)).

At 8/4/13 05:06 PM, Innermike wrote: I hate the term 'method'. Just say function jesus

They are actually not the same thing.

The crazy thing is that flash still has amazing penetration over Unity on the web. Now, I can't seem to find an accurate statistic regarding the plugin penetration of Unity recently, but my guess is that it's still significantly lower than flash's penetration. This is what I see as the major thing flash still has going for it. Flash still has even more penetration than HTML5. If you are a major Facebook game developer, for instance -- you care about this. Each percentage point you lose = millions of players.

Unity claims that 1/3rd of Facebook gamers have the Unity player installed. So 33% of Facebook 'gamers' (What is it defining as a 'gamer' anyway?) have it installed. Compare that to 99% for flash. Facebook is a great demographic, were talking about the most casual game player. The people who you might actually want to play your game perhaps ?

We're all nerds here so we're all focused on the technical aspects of the platforms, but if you look at it from a business perspective Flash still makes a lot of sense if you're talking about web-only.

BTW I'm guessing this was not totally trivial on Unity's part to maintain this flash compilation process. I think they were using FlasCC, and I'm not sure how well Adobe was supporting this. I bet Unity's engineers were pulling their hair out to try to port every Unity feature over to it. With their own plugin gaining momentum they did the right thing to divert the resources to somewhere else.

At 3/10/13 02:00 PM, Rustygames wrote: It's all about transferable skills. If you know Actionscript then you just have to swallow some bleach then you'll be smart enough to do Javascript. Game development is game development, regardless of platform, syntax is the easy part.

I agree that a lot of the skills are transferrable, but I would argue against this notion that javascript is just 'dumbed down' Actionscript. There are a lot of different programming paradigms with javascript, and it's more than just syntax. Yes both of them are programming languages, and a certain amount of that knowledge is transferrable. It would take you time to become great at it, just as it would a great Java or C++ developer trying to learn Actionscript. It is going to take you a few years before you are completely comfortable with the language, the frameworks, the design patterns, etc. That's my opinion anyway.

At 3/10/13 09:58 AM, Rustygames wrote: Using something a lot of people use and has a lot of documentation is desirable over a custom solution because it's easier for people to learn (and they might already know it) when you add people to a team or company which uses it. It's why PureMVC is very appealing to me.

And ha ha we tricked you into talking about it! :D

I hear what you're saying there. If you want to talk about skills that will add value to your career then I definitely wouldn't put anything related to flash on that list over the long term. Everything you know about flash will most likely be completely useless in 10 years, unless you find yourself maintaining legacy code or in some really niche situation.

Since we actually are talking about deployment and automation now, I am not the biggest ANT/Maven fan. I think I would prefer to write a build script on my own with Ruby, or Node. In terms of deployment, I've had good luck with capistrano. :)

Oh my god. Are we discussing TDD in here ? Is this the enterprise software engineering forum now. What's next ? Wanna talk about deployment and automation strategies ? :P

Just a reminder for you jammy types. The 2013 7 day rogue-like challenge starts this weekend.

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=7 DRL_Challenge_2013

I have to respond to the awesome screenshots.

PSVils This looks really cool. I have heard of Ogre. What do you think of it so far ? I probably don't have enough time at the moment to give you the help you deserve. :[ I'll shoot you a PM if that changes, though.

FlyingColours Don't be so hard on yourself. This looks like a cool little strategy game. I don't think I could do any better. It looks like you're still prototyping. So have at it!

Rusty This looks absolutely epic. When do we get to play it ?

MsGhero I love the artstyle. Did you do the art? I have a soft spot for 16-bit lookin adventurey games with dialogue like that.

I have a proposition.

How about we designate a day of the month or week that we all post screenshots of what we're working on ? It could be a game, website project, school project, whatever. The point is that we're showing what were doing. For some reason it seems like this board has gotten a bit snarky in the last month, which is ok, but maybe we're getting off track. I know you're all smart. You don't have to prove it with each and every post you make. Sometimes you can just chill out. That's why this is a lounge. I am building a little prototype in Unity (screenshot). I'm not sure if it will be fun yet. Other than that, I have been exploring C++ a little bit. I am also sending you all good vibes and positive feeling beams right now.

Guys you'll have to excuse egg. He did a bunch of LSD earlier today.

At 2/22/13 04:32 PM, Innermike wrote: Basically in title. Apart from Newgrounds what websites do you guys go to to find artists?

I've found some good ones on the PixelJoint forums, or Twitter.

At 2/18/13 05:14 PM, Glaiel-Gamer wrote: I can just make it so if a player gets -kickban'd from a few different host servers, they get marked as a cheater and can't join games that disallow cheaters

I think your head is in the right place. Fucking with networking would be premature optimization at this point anyways since you are still building, prototyping, seeing what works.