SELECT * FROM posts WHERE tid = 'PA PROGRAMMING THREAD'

GnomeTank · February 2012

Even still...games aren't generally broken down in to discrete views, with obvious model/controller relationships. I mean, it could work, I'm just having a hard time wrapping my head around it, as someone who use MVC and it's derivatives every day.

baronfel · February 2012

@admanb has the right of it. Right now there's a slew of master classes that know how to do everything, when ideally I'd like there to be a split between objects that carry entity state and classes that can render that state. That would also have the side benefit of making classes smaller, more modular, more understandable, and more aesthetically pleasing to me.

Like right now, in the update loop there's a ton of little deviations for each main type of in-game entity that we had. I'd love for there to be a master list of IUpdateables that I can terate through and tell to update, and then when the next render loop comes around it can just iterate through a list of IDrawables and call render with some reference frame.

GnomeTank · February 2012

Okay, but that's not MVC. I mean, what you're saying makes absolute sense...it's just not MVC, it's good object oriented programming with good separation of concerns.

baronfel · February 2012

Ok, I'll give you that. I wanted separation of the data, classes that manipulate the data, and rendering logic. Not strictly MVC, but borrowing the organization/theory.

GnomeTank · February 2012

The actual theory is called Separation of Concerns, and pre-dates MVC by about 15 years, hehe

You're correct though, it's a good way to design things. MVC/MVP/MVVM are certainly built on the bedrock that is SoC.

Zek · February 2012

So I have a phone interview next week with a really good company for a Java web developer position. I've been doing Java/JSP development for 2.5 years but I want to make sure I ace it so I'm planning to do as much cramming as I can - I feel like I've forgotten a lot of the basic concepts and terminology that I don't use on a day to day basis, both for Java and general web protocols. Anyone know some good sources to study up on for maximum interviewing appeal?

GnomeTank · February 2012

Zek wrote:

So I have a phone interview next week with a really good company for a Java web developer position. I've been doing Java/JSP development for 2.5 years but I want to make sure I ace it so I'm planning to do as much cramming as I can - I feel like I've forgotten a lot of the basic concepts and terminology that I don't use on a day to day basis, both for Java and general web protocols. Anyone know some good sources to study up on for maximum interviewing appeal?

I can't say for sure in the Java world, because I don't know exactly what industry buzz/techniques they are actually using and abusing these days. If it were me, I'd just brush up on the big industry terms... separation of concerns, services oriented architecture, inversion of control (and dependency injection), could computing, et al.

Infidel · February 2012

Zek wrote:

So I have a phone interview next week with a really good company for a Java web developer position. I've been doing Java/JSP development for 2.5 years but I want to make sure I ace it so I'm planning to do as much cramming as I can - I feel like I've forgotten a lot of the basic concepts and terminology that I don't use on a day to day basis, both for Java and general web protocols. Anyone know some good sources to study up on for maximum interviewing appeal?

I don't know why, but every stereotypical Java interview, make sure you know and can explain overloading and overriding.

Everyone asks that if they're doing the bullshit checklist.

If you want to cram, google from the point of view of an interviewer. Find those common questions that lazy interviewers will probably ask because they googled the same shit as you.

If they're not doing bullshit, then you'll get by on your own merit just fine.

Jasconius · February 2012

There's no such thing as MVC game development

it does not apply

There is no V, and you'd be hard-pressed to prove a C

It's all very complicated M with traits of V and C woven in which gets dumped out into a framebuffer one way or another

To say any such thing is MVC I think would be making a stretch just to incorporate a buzz word

Phyphor · February 2012

Jasconius wrote:

There's no such thing as MVC game development

it does not apply

There is no V, and you'd be hard-pressed to prove a C

It's all very complicated M with traits of V and C woven in which gets dumped out into a framebuffer one way or another

To say any such thing is MVC I think would be making a stretch just to incorporate a buzz word

It can have a place, in network multiplayer games - you really want to separate out a bunch of stuff that sort of ends up as a MC relationship at least

GnomeTank · February 2012

So I needed to take a mental break from my proxy generator a bit, so I started working on a simple Zelda clone in Ruby using Ruby Game. Just going to make one room, with like two enemies and a very simple sword mechanic. Also using Sublime Text for the entire thing. Horizon broadening time.

Alistair Hutton · February 2012

Jasconius wrote:

There's no such thing as MVC game development

it does not apply

There is no V, and you'd be hard-pressed to prove a C

It's all very complicated M with traits of V and C woven in which gets dumped out into a framebuffer one way or another

To say any such thing is MVC I think would be making a stretch just to incorporate a buzz word

Oh, controversy.

A few years ago I wrote a classic gauntlet style overhead 2d shooter. Player ran around corridors, shot zombies, collected loot.
One afternoon I was idly perusing an article on how to write a classic Wolfenstein3D style raycaster and went - why not. 3 hours later, without having touched a single line about how the game controlled or the models representing map state, player state, zombie state etc I had a first person shooter and could flip between that view and the 2d overhead view with the press of a key. All that had changed was the object doing the rendering. I hadn't even set out to specifically design my system in a MVC style - it just fell out naturally that way.

MMORPGS are the world's most classic 3-tier application design and, in my view, are so MVC it hurts.

My work colleague sitting next to me on the other hand agrees with you and thinks MVC has no intrinsic place in game development except for MMORPGs which are just glorified databases anyways.

Alistair Hutton · February 2012

Adobe to Flex developers: Fuck you, you've wasted the last 5 years of your career - suckers.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/whitepapers/roadmap.html

Biggest Fuck You wrote:

RSLs for Apache-released versions of Flex

Now that Flex is a community-driven project, it is no longer appropriate nor practical for Adobe to sign the resulting Apache Flex RSLs. This means that when using an Apache Flex release, framework RSLs will not be cached globally by Flash Player, but rather per domain in the web browser.

I don't see how their AIR vision for cross platform development is going to work for them now that they are kicking all the flex developers in the balls.

Starfuck · February 2012

Wow. I suppose it's not unexpected, but damn. I was just going over with my boss yesterday why I would prefer to not use Flex for future projects. The main reason being is I just don't know where support (as in this RSL issue) will be in a couple of years.

bowen · February 2012

I really wish ITT tech had let us pick our "senior" project because my friend and I were going to write a game engine instead of the stupid bank account tracking software.

That would've been way better. A better use of our 200+ hours.

Also a hospitals solution to a Java issue is to downgrade from 1.6.0_22 to 1.6.0_20 because they think that's the reason it's not working. How about... stop making Java based applets. I think theirs requires administrator to launch a specific application on the system. It works fine under an administrator account but doesn't work under normal user accounts.

Jasconius · February 2012

Not surprising about Flex

Adobe has really kicked Flash to the road. Even their highly touted OpenGL backed rendering library is "supported" in only the thinnest interpretation of the word. It can't run in Test Movie mode, and you have to have an MX extension to even build for it, and of course, no code hinting.

Alistair Hutton · February 2012

Jasconius wrote:

Not surprising about Flex

Adobe has really kicked Flash to the road. Even their highly touted OpenGL backed rendering library is "supported" in only the thinnest interpretation of the word. It can't run in Test Movie mode, and you have to have an MX extension to even build for it, and of course, no code hinting.

It's bizarre given that they are still pushing Flash-Apps-on-mobile-via-AIR hard. It's strange to not just completely abandon but actively sabotage the easiest way for traditional developers to produce Flash Player targetted apps like that.

Also, they are still planning on putting out a new version of Flash Builder (previous name Flex Builder) - which is bascially an Eclipse pulgin - but simply stripping all the Flex stuff from it, leaving just the Actionscript editor/compiler. That seems super bizzare.

Jasconius · February 2012

It's because Adobe is run by disorganized hucksters who have no real plan other than to meet a sales goal, and will do anything to achieve it.

See Flash Catalyst for what Adobe is all about when it comes to Flash

Ambitious, unsupported, and ultimately forgotten products

GnomeTank · February 2012

Man, I had so much fun messing around with Rubygame last night. Every time I go do a little Ruby project, I remember how much I love that language. The metaprogramming capabilities are just amazing.

Gilbert0 · February 2012

Zek wrote:

So I have a phone interview next week with a really good company for a Java web developer position. I've been doing Java/JSP development for 2.5 years but I want to make sure I ace it so I'm planning to do as much cramming as I can - I feel like I've forgotten a lot of the basic concepts and terminology that I don't use on a day to day basis, both for Java and general web protocols. Anyone know some good sources to study up on for maximum interviewing appeal?

I'm in the middle of trying to hire and typical ones we ask about OOP/webservices are

-Difference between override and overload
-Difference between abstract class and iterface
-What is WSDL and what's in it
-What is SOAP and what's in it.

GnomeTank · February 2012

Java is still doing the WSDL/SOAP thing? No REST for you guys yet?

Jasconius · February 2012

Gilbert0 wrote:

-What is SOAP and what's in it.

SOAP is the devil and nothing in it is worthy of note for any non-heathens

also: http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-stands-for-simple/

jackal · February 2012

Programmers hate SOAP? Way to be stereotypes.

GnomeTank · February 2012

I hate SOAP on principal. It's simple enough to work with, with the Microsoft tool stack, making that article sort of hyperbole...but it's still a bloated, overwrought, protocol that is slow to parse on both ends, and way too verbose. When it comes to web services, I am all about lightweight...which is why I love a nice RESTful service with a very simple interchange protocol, usually JSON. Rarely do I ever actually need all the discovery and client side generation provided by WSDL/SOAP as a technology stack.

bowen · February 2012

I prefer REST over SOAP, REST just makes sense because you can use an existing infrastructure (I mean we're talking about a php script there?). With SOAP you always end up seeing stuff like java services running on wackadoo ports and it's just annoying to deal with.

GnomeTank · February 2012

Well, that's not really SOAP's fault though...SOAP is just a way to package up objects. That's just Java and it's service stack being wackadoo. You can do SOAP over HTTP just like REST.

The advantage to REST is that you are using standard HTTP verbs as your CRUD, and it allows you to use a much simpler interchange than XML...like JSON, or YAML. XML is just terribly heavyweight for something meant to be a wire protocol.

jackal · February 2012

I am boning up on ICD 10 for work, and I officially love it. While ICD-9 had specific code for bitten by rat, dog and unspecified, ICD 10 has a specific code for "Bitten by dolphin".

GnomeTank · February 2012

Was thinking of making a switch in my proxy system to using GUID's as the object ID's, instead of an incremented int. Just trying to figure out if the extra memory usage is actually justified. Since this is meant to be a long-uptime system, with potentially millions of objects being created and destroyed over the life of that uptime, I'm wondering if GUID's won't protect me from ultra-long-uptime int overflow of object mapping ID's. I guess I could use long as well, which is half the memory usage of a GUID, but still has a theoretical (though completely unlikely to ever hit) upper bound.

Saeris · February 2012

Let's say you're generating one million IDs per second. How long will it take to overflow 64 bits?

2^64 IDs / 10^6 IDs/s = about 18446744073709 seconds = about 584942 years.

Yeah, I think you'll be alright with a long.

Jasconius · February 2012

jackal wrote:

I am boning up on ICD 10 for work, and I officially love it. While ICD-9 had specific code for bitten by rat, dog and unspecified, ICD 10 has a specific code for "Bitten by dolphin".

I just finished writing a HCPC reference tool

I'm waiting on ICD9/10 because there are so many goddamned ICD codes that the iPhone processor literally has no chance of handling them all in a reasonable speed.

GnomeTank · February 2012

Saeris wrote:

Let's say you're generating one million IDs per second. How long will it take to overflow 64 bits?

2^64 IDs / 10^6 IDs/s = about 18446744073709 seconds = about 584942 years.

Yeah, I think you'll be alright with a long.

Yeah, I came to that conclusion myself. I switched it to long.

Alistair Hutton · February 2012

SOAP - It's not Simple and it's not an Object Access Protocol.

GnomeTank · February 2012

Really, it should be called NSROIP - Not Simple Remote Object Interchange Protocol.

That would be pronounced Noose Rope if you were curious...and yes, it's very fitting.

Alistair Hutton · February 2012

Oh arse, I see the linked article already used my joke.

bowen · February 2012

I don't even use int IDs anymore unless it's a temp thing.

Everything else I can stick with UUIDs (if I absolutely need an ID that's unique, like for a patient for instance). Everything else just gets composite keys.

GnomeTank · February 2012

bowen wrote:

I don't even use int IDs anymore unless it's a temp thing.

Everything else I can stick with UUIDs (if I absolutely need an ID that's unique, like for a patient for instance). Everything else just gets composite keys.

This is for mapping objects to and from the Lua context. In the database, I use UUID's for all my primary keys.

bowen · February 2012

GnomeTank wrote:

bowen wrote:

I don't even use int IDs anymore unless it's a temp thing.

Everything else I can stick with UUIDs (if I absolutely need an ID that's unique, like for a patient for instance). Everything else just gets composite keys.

This is for mapping objects to and from the Lua context. In the database, I use UUID's for all my primary keys.

Ah well, long will cover you unless you're on a super computer. Probably even then.

Though database wise, UUID if it needs a unique key for lookup, everything else gets composite, or, an int if it's a temp row in a table that handles temp data.

jackal · February 2012

GUIDs are better than longs in situations where you need to aggregate and keep the same id.

GnomeTank · February 2012

In this case, the ID's are purely a runtime construct and aren't persisted anywhere...so no real need for them to aggregate.

Gilbert0 · February 2012

GnomeTank wrote:

Java is still doing the WSDL/SOAP thing? No REST for you guys yet?

Oh java does that, but if you say you have 3 years of web service experience and you can't answer that, it throws up some flags.

Same if you PLSQL experince and 2 years of tuning experience. Ok what do you look at to tune in Oracle? I put it into the TOAD optimizer and leave it at that is a WRONG ANSWER. You look at a) explain plan, b) Indexs, c) hints, d) join conditions / number.

There is a LOT of misrepresentation on peoples resume's.

Penny Arcade

Quick Links

SELECT * FROM posts WHERE tid = 'PA PROGRAMMING THREAD'

Posts