And I'm familiar with DBs (well...Access lol) and SQL too. But I would assume I'd just use a data file of some kind that can be interpreted by my game rather then incorporating an actual DB into my game? Or is that what you are suggesting?
That could get massive, though, if you've got more than a few hundred things. Well, not massively different, but harder to get the data you want and you'll probably switch to a flat file DB like sqlite anyways.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
That could get massive, though, if you've got more than a few hundred things. Well, not massively different, but harder to get the data you want and you'll probably switch to a flat file DB like sqlite anyways.
This is what I like to avoid. The I/O performance of a json file is not going to kill anything even when you have a couple thousand enemy records. Now at that scale adding new enemies by hand will be difficult, but adding new enemies to an sqlite db will be harder.
Start with simple I/O and work on the things that matter ( unless you are writing an I/O library ).
Is it harder though? I dunno, first thing I do is work on an admin interface to simplify that stuff. In a place like iOS where memory is at a premium, seems like you'd not want to cache in an entire set of things. I guess you could get around that by having tons of files. Then you get into the position where you don't want tons of files so you find a way to package them...
And then we're back at square one.
But yeah, json seems like it'd be just fine!
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Is it harder though? I dunno, first thing I do is work on an admin interface to simplify that stuff. In a place like iOS where memory is at a premium, seems like you'd not want to cache in an entire set of things. I guess you could get around that by having tons of files. Then you get into the position where you don't want tons of files so you find a way to package them...
And then we're back at square one.
But yeah, json seems like it'd be just fine!
You are a true programmer.
Step 1 to making a game: lets write an admin interface to add elements to a flat file db.
I am going to totally ignore the statement that iOS is a place where memory is at a premium. Mobile user face application development is nearly the last place where memory is a concern.
The thing has :bleeping: virtual memory, something that tons of developers still don't have.
simultaneously, the application itself is usually given upwards of 30MB of RAM just for doing stuff on the main thread for application-exclusive code
which is a lot. and if you have 10 megs of JSON data for items and monsters, what are you even doing making an iPhone game
ios is not that starved unless you do some patently stupid things, like load up multiple mega-pixels worth of texture data and hold it in memory without handing it off to OpenGL or the UI libraries
For prototyping, it's pretty nice to just set up a nosql database like mongo and just use a document store. Gives you a good outline of what your schema should look like in the end, and you can transition to an embeddable database like sqlite.
Are there any decent embeddable nosql options out there? I'm sure there are lots of attempts (came across http://unqlite.org/), but not familiar with anything that I'd actually trust.
Is it harder though? I dunno, first thing I do is work on an admin interface to simplify that stuff. In a place like iOS where memory is at a premium, seems like you'd not want to cache in an entire set of things. I guess you could get around that by having tons of files. Then you get into the position where you don't want tons of files so you find a way to package them...
And then we're back at square one.
But yeah, json seems like it'd be just fine!
You are a true programmer.
Step 1 to making a game: lets write an admin interface to add elements to a flat file db.
simultaneously, the application itself is usually given upwards of 30MB of RAM just for doing stuff on the main thread for application-exclusive code
which is a lot. and if you have 10 megs of JSON data for items and monsters, what are you even doing making an iPhone game
ios is not that starved unless you do some patently stupid things, like load up multiple mega-pixels worth of texture data and hold it in memory without handing it off to OpenGL or the UI libraries
DON'T JUDGE ME
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Is it harder though? I dunno, first thing I do is work on an admin interface to simplify that stuff. In a place like iOS where memory is at a premium, seems like you'd not want to cache in an entire set of things. I guess you could get around that by having tons of files. Then you get into the position where you don't want tons of files so you find a way to package them...
And then we're back at square one.
But yeah, json seems like it'd be just fine!
You are a true programmer.
Step 1 to making a game: lets write an admin interface to add elements to a flat file db.
Does the entire library of congress still fit on a CD or whatnot? Or are they doing PDFs and all that instead of raw text?
Library of congress is pretty large. I believe they have never released official numbers but it is over 3 petabytes.
Edit:
Remembering saving for a library does not mean just the text. I would expect they are taking high resolution digitial photo's of each page. They need to capture all Marginalia ( margin notes ), etc. Plus I expect they run OCR on it all to be able to do cross referencing.
I expect the library of congress is a great place for a programmer to geek out.
Okay thanks for the advice. I already have my tables created in Excel (I was screwing around balancing out the game weeks ago) so short term it might be easiest just to write a program to parse it into json format and use that...just so I can get up and running, perhaps. But then later I can look into an embedded DB - I really like that idea.
Is it harder though? I dunno, first thing I do is work on an admin interface to simplify that stuff. In a place like iOS where memory is at a premium, seems like you'd not want to cache in an entire set of things. I guess you could get around that by having tons of files. Then you get into the position where you don't want tons of files so you find a way to package them...
And then we're back at square one.
But yeah, json seems like it'd be just fine!
You are a true programmer.
Step 1 to making a game: lets write an admin interface to add elements to a flat file db.
Pfft, I wrote a filesystem
Do tell me more, that does sound fun.
Well, we needed a way to access lots of resource files - models, textures, shaders, configuration, etc, and we had level editing built right into the game, so we needed to potentially save a bunch of files with the levels and so needed some way to pack them, not just the baked assets file to be shipped
The classic choice is a store-only zip file, used by things like Quake 3. Another choice is Blizzard's MPQ (which they finally dropped for something more like what I built actually!). The problem with those is they are static, if you change something you have to re-write the entire file to disk. You can see this with older WoW updates, where they download the update and then have to write the entire massive merged file to disk
So, I wrote a filesystem. Extents-based with inodes, noting special really, and since it was designed to be file-based, only 8kB of metadata (4 for the superblock and 4 for the root freelist) and insufficient space writes would try to extend the file
And then I tied it in with the rest of the I/O system. To load a map that was on someone else's machine, we "opened" a file that routed requests to the target machine and copied it locally. But because it was just another file, we could run the level setup at the same time and the requests (cached locally) would be mixed in. I/O requests would be split across extents as needed, I'd made sure the entire I/O backend was asynchronous anyway
Okay thanks for the advice. I already have my tables created in Excel (I was screwing around balancing out the game weeks ago) so short term it might be easiest just to write a program to parse it into json format and use that...just so I can get up and running, perhaps. But then later I can look into an embedded DB - I really like that idea.
As a side note, World of WarCraft managed it's entire data stack with Excel files through TBC. It was part of the huge infrastructure upgrade with WoTLK that they finally went to editing the production databases through an interface specifically designed for the task.
Okay thanks for the advice. I already have my tables created in Excel (I was screwing around balancing out the game weeks ago) so short term it might be easiest just to write a program to parse it into json format and use that...just so I can get up and running, perhaps. But then later I can look into an embedded DB - I really like that idea.
So one of the reporting tools I will be using uses SAP Business Objects to die into the database for our EHR. This thing writes terrible SQL. I say this as a guy who has pretty written SQL for about a week (not counting a class in college about 10 years ago).
I opened up this report someone sent me, and went to the SQL view. The WHERE clause is about 25 lines. About 10 of it is this set of lines where it's checking some code values against some other code or something which is then ANDed to check against an encounter or person active indicator.
And then, after all of those, it ANDs against a check for the active indicators all by themselves, further increasing the redundancy.
Basically this section looks like this
WHERE
(C AND A)
AND (D AND A)
AND (E AND A)
AND (F AND A)
AND (G AND A)
AND (H AND A)
AND (I AND A)
AND (A)
AND (B)
When it could be
A AND B AND C AND D AND E AND F AND G AND H AND I
Edit: When the query optimizer runs does it go "WTF is this shit?" and fix it?
Yeah.... As someone who owns an app on the business side that relies on BO - don't use BO.
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
In general, don't use SAP. It does nothing that you can can't do yourself with a modern software stack and some web services, over charges you for that privilege, and is built on 1970's technology.
Okay thanks for the advice. I already have my tables created in Excel (I was screwing around balancing out the game weeks ago) so short term it might be easiest just to write a program to parse it into json format and use that...just so I can get up and running, perhaps. But then later I can look into an embedded DB - I really like that idea.
Okay thanks for the advice. I already have my tables created in Excel (I was screwing around balancing out the game weeks ago) so short term it might be easiest just to write a program to parse it into json format and use that...just so I can get up and running, perhaps. But then later I can look into an embedded DB - I really like that idea.
There's a lot of resources out there for using SQLite for this type of thing I'm finding - it's a really common use case, and a really well developed DB for it.
Mere words aren't enough for me to express my level of WTF.
This requires a WTF Professional.
Why?
JSON was supposed to be the alternative to XML. Most of what you do in JSON has a pretty much 1:1 correlation with XML, there's no reason to translate it. Not to mention, this XML is really ... stupid I don't know there's tons of better ways to do that.
But this JSONx is basically XML... but JSON.
So we've come full circle basically.
XML->JSON->JSONx (which is XML++, from the looks of it, doesn't quite follow XML standards, but would probably parse for the most part)
Is it harder though? I dunno, first thing I do is work on an admin interface to simplify that stuff. In a place like iOS where memory is at a premium, seems like you'd not want to cache in an entire set of things. I guess you could get around that by having tons of files. Then you get into the position where you don't want tons of files so you find a way to package them...
And then we're back at square one.
But yeah, json seems like it'd be just fine!
You are a true programmer.
Step 1 to making a game: lets write an admin interface to add elements to a flat file db.
Pfft, I wrote a filesystem
Do tell me more, that does sound fun.
Well, we needed a way to access lots of resource files - models, textures, shaders, configuration, etc, and we had level editing built right into the game, so we needed to potentially save a bunch of files with the levels and so needed some way to pack them, not just the baked assets file to be shipped
The classic choice is a store-only zip file, used by things like Quake 3. Another choice is Blizzard's MPQ (which they finally dropped for something more like what I built actually!). The problem with those is they are static, if you change something you have to re-write the entire file to disk. You can see this with older WoW updates, where they download the update and then have to write the entire massive merged file to disk
So, I wrote a filesystem. Extents-based with inodes, noting special really, and since it was designed to be file-based, only 8kB of metadata (4 for the superblock and 4 for the root freelist) and insufficient space writes would try to extend the file
And then I tied it in with the rest of the I/O system. To load a map that was on someone else's machine, we "opened" a file that routed requests to the target machine and copied it locally. But because it was just another file, we could run the level setup at the same time and the requests (cached locally) would be mixed in. I/O requests would be split across extents as needed, I'd made sure the entire I/O backend was asynchronous anyway
You should throw that shit up on github, bro.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
In general, don't use SAP. It does nothing that you can can't do yourself with a modern software stack and some web services, over charges you for that privilege, and is built on 1970's technology.
Yeah, it's entirely out of my hands and not going anywhere. It's one of the two provided means of getting reports out of the DB for our EHR and it's the better of the two. When using our own stuff we use SSRS.
Question for developers:
Is it reasonable for me to rely on my developers to identify technology change risks (ex. iOS 7-8 transition), or should that be on the business team to identify and prioritize?
Question for developers:
Is it reasonable for me to rely on my developers to identify technology change risks (ex. iOS 7-8 transition), or should that be on the business team to identify and prioritize?
Honest question.
Depends on the developer. Most of my peers are dumb and lazy.
... let me rephrase that... almost everyone I know is dumb and lazy and can't be ass-ed to figure this shit out unless their job depended on it. (ie fear of getting fired)
So if you've got someone that knows their shit, they can probably tell you. If you've got someone that comes in, clocks in, zones out while they code, then clocks out... probably not.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Example: Guy at the hospital I was working with. Zip files are failing to send to their email, they're not getting anything, it fails silently, no one is notified. I ask him "this has been working, has anything changed on your end in the last month?"
The answer: "No it's on your end."
So I spend a week looking into it, do all sorts of tests, get google involved (they host our email), nope, it appears it leaves our server just find.
What was happening? They installed a barracuda and encrypted zip files were getting silently tossed because it couldn't ensure it was virus free.
Now, if I was head of the department that did that, you're sure as shit I had to know what was going on. (Dumb)
What's worse, if someone had the problem, I'd at least look into it and figure out why it was failing. (Lazy)
He responded with what was essentially a professional "meh" when I questioned him why he couldn't tell me that a week ago. (no fear of getting fired)
The only reason I was able to tell him how his infrastructure worked, was because of a coworker of his I was working with at the time that handled VPNs, he could log into the barracuda and saw the test message I sent him just sitting there in an "unknown" state. This is a person that knows their shit.
There is nothing worse that grinds my gears than lazy people I have to work with. Lazy is okay, for the most part, but dumb and lazy pisses me the fuck off.
Dumb and lazy, and then you tell me I'm wrong? Oh I am going to motherfucking gut you bitch. If you can't give me evidence, fuck you.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
So one of the reporting tools I will be using uses SAP Business Objects to die into the database for our EHR. This thing writes terrible SQL. I say this as a guy who has pretty written SQL for about a week (not counting a class in college about 10 years ago).
I opened up this report someone sent me, and went to the SQL view. The WHERE clause is about 25 lines. About 10 of it is this set of lines where it's checking some code values against some other code or something which is then ANDed to check against an encounter or person active indicator.
And then, after all of those, it ANDs against a check for the active indicators all by themselves, further increasing the redundancy.
Basically this section looks like this
WHERE
(C AND A)
AND (D AND A)
AND (E AND A)
AND (F AND A)
AND (G AND A)
AND (H AND A)
AND (I AND A)
AND (A)
AND (B)
When it could be
A AND B AND C AND D AND E AND F AND G AND H AND I
Edit: When the query optimizer runs does it go "WTF is this shit?" and fix it?
Hey @Tofystedeth! I'm using SAP Business Objects too! It's absolutely terrible at everything it does.
Posts
And I'm familiar with DBs (well...Access lol) and SQL too. But I would assume I'd just use a data file of some kind that can be interpreted by my game rather then incorporating an actual DB into my game? Or is that what you are suggesting?
The most common is SQLite.
If you're doing swift on an iOS, I think they have a port of that:
https://github.com/nerdyc/Squeal
That's a library I pulled up for dealing with it.
This is what I like to avoid. The I/O performance of a json file is not going to kill anything even when you have a couple thousand enemy records. Now at that scale adding new enemies by hand will be difficult, but adding new enemies to an sqlite db will be harder.
Start with simple I/O and work on the things that matter ( unless you are writing an I/O library ).
And then we're back at square one.
But yeah, json seems like it'd be just fine!
You are a true programmer.
Step 1 to making a game: lets write an admin interface to add elements to a flat file db.
I started with a JSON flat file just to sketch out what kind of data I would need, but eventually you do actually need a tool
so.. not Step 1, for me it was more like step 80000, but it is required
i wonder if MySQL workbench has a JSON export... that would be pretty easy
The thing has :bleeping: virtual memory, something that tons of developers still don't have.
which is a lot. and if you have 10 megs of JSON data for items and monsters, what are you even doing making an iPhone game
ios is not that starved unless you do some patently stupid things, like load up multiple mega-pixels worth of texture data and hold it in memory without handing it off to OpenGL or the UI libraries
Are there any decent embeddable nosql options out there? I'm sure there are lots of attempts (came across http://unqlite.org/), but not familiar with anything that I'd actually trust.
Pfft, I wrote a filesystem
DON'T JUDGE ME
Do tell me more, that does sound fun.
https://cpp.zeef.com/faraz.fallahi
I can't wait until I get some spare time to check some of these out for viability in my game
source: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/
Does the entire library of congress still fit on a CD or whatnot? Or are they doing PDFs and all that instead of raw text?
Library of congress is pretty large. I believe they have never released official numbers but it is over 3 petabytes.
Edit:
Remembering saving for a library does not mean just the text. I would expect they are taking high resolution digitial photo's of each page. They need to capture all Marginalia ( margin notes ), etc. Plus I expect they run OCR on it all to be able to do cross referencing.
I expect the library of congress is a great place for a programmer to geek out.
Yeah I'm just being stupid.
Well, we needed a way to access lots of resource files - models, textures, shaders, configuration, etc, and we had level editing built right into the game, so we needed to potentially save a bunch of files with the levels and so needed some way to pack them, not just the baked assets file to be shipped
The classic choice is a store-only zip file, used by things like Quake 3. Another choice is Blizzard's MPQ (which they finally dropped for something more like what I built actually!). The problem with those is they are static, if you change something you have to re-write the entire file to disk. You can see this with older WoW updates, where they download the update and then have to write the entire massive merged file to disk
So, I wrote a filesystem. Extents-based with inodes, noting special really, and since it was designed to be file-based, only 8kB of metadata (4 for the superblock and 4 for the root freelist) and insufficient space writes would try to extend the file
And then I tied it in with the rest of the I/O system. To load a map that was on someone else's machine, we "opened" a file that routed requests to the target machine and copied it locally. But because it was just another file, we could run the level setup at the same time and the requests (cached locally) would be mixed in. I/O requests would be split across extents as needed, I'd made sure the entire I/O backend was asynchronous anyway
As a side note, World of WarCraft managed it's entire data stack with Excel files through TBC. It was part of the huge infrastructure upgrade with WoTLK that they finally went to editing the production databases through an interface specifically designed for the task.
http://www.convertcsv.com/csv-to-json.htm
Yeah.... As someone who owns an app on the business side that relies on BO - don't use BO.
Cool thanks.
There's a lot of resources out there for using SQLite for this type of thing I'm finding - it's a really common use case, and a really well developed DB for it.
It's an interopability layer.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
You should throw that shit up on github, bro.
Yeah, it's entirely out of my hands and not going anywhere. It's one of the two provided means of getting reports out of the DB for our EHR and it's the better of the two. When using our own stuff we use SSRS.
Is it reasonable for me to rely on my developers to identify technology change risks (ex. iOS 7-8 transition), or should that be on the business team to identify and prioritize?
Honest question.
Depends on the developer. Most of my peers are dumb and lazy.
... let me rephrase that... almost everyone I know is dumb and lazy and can't be ass-ed to figure this shit out unless their job depended on it. (ie fear of getting fired)
So if you've got someone that knows their shit, they can probably tell you. If you've got someone that comes in, clocks in, zones out while they code, then clocks out... probably not.
The answer: "No it's on your end."
So I spend a week looking into it, do all sorts of tests, get google involved (they host our email), nope, it appears it leaves our server just find.
What was happening? They installed a barracuda and encrypted zip files were getting silently tossed because it couldn't ensure it was virus free.
Now, if I was head of the department that did that, you're sure as shit I had to know what was going on. (Dumb)
What's worse, if someone had the problem, I'd at least look into it and figure out why it was failing. (Lazy)
He responded with what was essentially a professional "meh" when I questioned him why he couldn't tell me that a week ago. (no fear of getting fired)
The only reason I was able to tell him how his infrastructure worked, was because of a coworker of his I was working with at the time that handled VPNs, he could log into the barracuda and saw the test message I sent him just sitting there in an "unknown" state. This is a person that knows their shit.
There is nothing worse that grinds my gears than lazy people I have to work with. Lazy is okay, for the most part, but dumb and lazy pisses me the fuck off.
Dumb and lazy, and then you tell me I'm wrong? Oh I am going to motherfucking gut you bitch. If you can't give me evidence, fuck you.
Hey @Tofystedeth! I'm using SAP Business Objects too! It's absolutely terrible at everything it does.