Game Development

Pete O'Hanlon22-Nov-11 22:04

Pete O'Hanlon

22-Nov-11 22:04

It is possible to make a game in VB.NET, yes. As to whether you could, I don't know your skills level, your background, so I couldn't possibly comment.

If you want to program games with .NET, a good place to start is Microsoft XNA.

Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads

"Mind bleach! Send me mind bleach!" - Nagy Vilmos

My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier - my favourite utility

CDP180222-Nov-11 22:14

22-Nov-11 22:14

And he also does not really need our permission, so he may proceed Smile | :)

Edit: Why does the question, together with mentioning VB, let me expect horrible things?

And from the clouds a mighty voice spoke:
"Smile and be happy, for it could come worse!"

And I smiled and was happy
And it came worse.

Wayne Gaylard22-Nov-11 22:30

Wayne Gaylard

22-Nov-11 22:30

Is there really any difference in the XNA framework between C# and VB ?

When I was a coder, we worked on algorithms. Today, we memorize APIs for countless libraries — those libraries have the algorithms - Eric Allman

CDP180223-Nov-11 0:52

23-Nov-11 0:52

No. The framework is the same, as always. It's just that I don't like VB. Not the least.

And from the clouds a mighty voice spoke:
"Smile and be happy, for it could come worse!"

And I smiled and was happy
And it came worse.

Peter Hawke28-Dec-11 13:01

Peter Hawke

28-Dec-11 13:01

Well in C# it is very possible to make a nice game in 3D, using the BEPU Physics engine http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/blog/Get-a-free-and-open-source-physics-library-in-BEPUphysics-for-Windows-XBox-and-WP7[^]. Haven't tested the DLL with vb thought.

I am at home in VB but will adapt to anything!

Text drawing in embedded system

Andrea198211-Jan-12 2:14

Andrea1982

11-Jan-12 2:14

if you download the Windows Phone SDK 7.1, that contains Visual Studio Express 2010 for Windows phones, there is a default template vb.net to create games with xna (windows phone, windows form, xbox and zune) ... the great thing is that with vb.net 2008 was not allowed to use the contentpipe (to facilitate access to images, sounds, etc.), was only allowed in C#, is now allowed also in vb.net 2010. it seems that Microsoft has finally woken up.

A_Fa8-Nov-11 4:11

A_Fa

8-Nov-11 4:11

Hi.
I want to develop in an embedded system. It's OS dos not support any graphic API and functions except SetPixel for developer.
I need to use some standard font for text drawing.
If you have any idea to do that, please share with me.

Thanks very much.

your publication in magazine !

SoftwareWarsaw7-Nov-11 3:05

SoftwareWarsaw

7-Nov-11 3:05

Hello

Codersky Magazine ( software press poland) would like to propose you to write an article about Game Developement for our magazine. the topic can be chosen by you , you can tell readers about ur past experience .
The article should consist of 3500 words + 5 graphics and should be written in next 2 weeks.
We offer you own publication in our magazine and free advertisement.
Please let me know if you are interested in contribution.
Kind regards
M.M
maia.mekvabishvili@software.com.pl

Re: your publication in magazine !

Smithers-Jones8-Nov-11 4:34

Smithers-Jones

8-Nov-11 4:34

Have fun with the wave of spam hopefully jamming your inbox now. By the way, one more report on your profile page and your account here on Codeproject's history. Probably only a matter of minutes.

SoftwareWarsaw wrote:
about ur past experience

Wow, is that the level on which you are writing in that magazine? Doesn't look too great. Dead | X|

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." (DNA)

Multiplayer Poker

Hanzaplast5-Nov-11 2:13

Hanzaplast

5-Nov-11 2:13

hi,

i am working on multiplayer online poker. since this is the first time i am doing this kind of thing, i am not sure that i have a good approach. can u tell me your opinion and way this is usually done?

i have a asp.net web service on server wich holds information, data and state of games. on client i have Silverlight poker wich is connecting on server every 2 seconds to get current situation via "GameSituation" object.

i am afraid of those "2 seconds". if there will be 20 000 players online, is this 2 seconds from each player too much to handle? is this right approach in programming multiplayer games or it can be done like: server waits for client, client contact server, server send info ("GameSituation" object in my case) to all clients in game? is client "hearth loop" good or evil?

Re: Multiplayer Poker

AspDotNetDev5-Nov-11 10:48

AspDotNetDev

5-Nov-11 10:48

Polling is sometimes necessary. However, here are a few ideas to help you avoid it or minimize its impact:

Create a duplex service so client 1 sends info to the server and the server sends that info to client 2. I'm not sure if a duplex service uses polling under the hood, but if it doesn't then this could be what you're looking for.
Find a way to have client 1 talk directly to client 2 without using the server as an intermediary. You'll definitely need the server to hook them up, but once they are in communication they can in theory keep communicating without a server intermediary. I am not sure if Silverlight prevents client to client communication (this will require some research on your part).
Rather than poll with a constant time gap, decide on a minimum (say, 1 second) and a maximum (say, 10 seconds). The server will keep track of how many connections their are and inform the clients how often they can poll. As more clients are added, the server will increase the time gap between polling.
Add more servers. Assuming you will be charging money for this, as it becomes more popular you should be able to afford more servers.
Host it on the cloud. Rather than use your own servers, let Amazon or some other company that manages servers for you do all the work. Pay for more cloud space/time as your clients increase.

Somebody in an online forum wrote:
INTJs never really joke. They make a point. The joke is just a gift wrapper.

Re: Multiplayer Poker

Alisaunder6-Jan-12 2:54

Alisaunder

6-Jan-12 2:54

I would suggest examining this article, [^]

I used this style when creating a Battleship style online game.

'Self-aware' classes?

Purge1t30-Oct-11 18:54

Purge1t

30-Oct-11 18:54

Hi guys... long time reader first time poster. Please be gentle.

I avidly create games in VB.net. Being a hobby programmer I give my games away for free. Since I'm a hobbiest without formal training I do try and educate myself on proper programming principles and follow them when programming such as OOP. There are however some things I have obviously missed being self-taught that perhaps I would know if I were formally educated.

Once such issue that has really been my bane is how different classes (from now on referred to as objects) 'know' about each other WITHOUT programming specific interaction (stay with me here... please...)

Okay imagine this, you have a space game and the following objects

clsShip
clsMissile
clsAsteroid
clsSpaceJunk

Now each one of these objects has a Health, X,Y and Z private members and properties that are all inherited from clsSpaceEntity for argument sake. Now one way of programming collision between them would be to code out the following logic in the main game loop

for each ship in a list of ships
check each clsMissile in a list to see if it collides with it and if so, reduce health
check each clsAsteroidin a list to see if it collides with it and if so, reduce health
check each clsSpaceJunka list to see if it collides with it and if so, reduce health
... and so on and so on for every object
next

ect ect ect...

Now this might seam okay if your talking about the simple example above but some of my games have tens or even HUNDREDS of objects that interact in this basic way.

Now my question to the experienced programmers out there.

Is there a way in OOP to do the following...

for each thing that inherits from clsSpaceEntity
check against every other object that inherits this type (except itself) and if they collide then reduce health
next

?

This sort of ability for a type of objects/class or whatever to be 'aware' of another and how they are the same/different and interact would save me tonnes and tonnes and TONNES of coding.

Any assistance/help or feedback on this would be very appreciated. Thank you for your time, sorry for the long read.

CDP180231-Oct-11 9:21

31-Oct-11 9:21

Of course you could write a method in your baseclass for each object which takes the list of objects and performs a collision test on each one. Then you would just have to go through your objects and call the method. But if you think about it, this is just a refactored version of what you had before. You would gain nothing.

What you need is something out of the old algorithm and data structure box. The problem begins with using simple lists. If you have n objects in the list, you will have to do n^2 collision tests. When the number of objects gets larger, this very quickly becomes very slow. If you have only 10 objects, you must do 100 collision tests. For 100 objects it would already be 10000 collision tests and for 1000 objets it would be a million.

You need a way to reduce the number of tests. For example, you can have a sorted or an unsorted list. It's obvious that things are easier to find in a sorted list than in an unsorted one. By being sorted, a list can offer additional information which makes searching or testing the objects easier. But graphical objects usually are not lined up, so a sorted list will be of little help. They are distributed over a plane (2D) or in a volume (3D). Now, what could be the right data structures which can hold additional information on how the objects are aligned to each other?

The answer: Trees. For 2D graphics usually quadtrees are used. The objects must be sorted into the tree according to their positions. Then you can easily find objects which are close enough to each other and you must only test those for collisions. But, as always, there is one catch: When an object is moved, it must be taken out of the tree and inserted again according to its new position. Unfortunately you will have to deal with this as well.

So here you have it: Search for quadtrees (2D graphics) or octrees (3D graphics) and you will probably find a million pages discussing this stuff. And you will see that those trees are not only good for collision detection. Good luck!

And from the clouds a mighty voice spoke:
"Smile and be happy, for it could come worse!"

And I smiled and was happy
And it came worse.

Purge1t31-Oct-11 14:26

Purge1t

31-Oct-11 14:26

Thank you so very much for taking the time to reply.

The largest problem I have at the moment is actually my physics routine increasing in ms/tick at a dramatic rate. This physics routine calculate the gravity between EACH space entity. As a dense rock or even a ejection pod has density (as well as the blackholes [warpholes] and planets etc).

I have optimised this routine many many times to keep reducing the time it takes but it's near 'perfect' for my level of knowledge. I would love to have more then 100,000 objects in my 'universe' however any more then that and I start to suffer noticeable lag.

I wonder if the quadtree method will assist with this problem. I'll look into it!

Thank you

CDP180231-Oct-11 15:39

31-Oct-11 15:39

Ahh, gravity. If only Newton had not invented it. Then everything would be much lighter Smile | :)

I see some room for optimization already.

1) It's a game. You don't have to be overly precise. For many problems even a physicist tends to cut some corners because after a certain point precision is lost due to rounding errors anyway. You could, for example, ignore every object if it is too far away and even precalculate this distance individually, depending on each object's mass.

2) You have large objects with a strong gravity field (planets, black holes and the like) which probably don't move around very much. You also have very small but mobile objects like ships. Why not sweep the smaller objects under the rug and calculate gravity only for the big chunks? The small objects should have little to no significance anyway.

3) If the big objects are static and don't move, you might as well precalculate a map of local gravity vectors with a resolution that fits your needs. Looking up a value in a map is far less an effort than calculating the value at every frame.

And from the clouds a mighty voice spoke:
"Smile and be happy, for it could come worse!"

And I smiled and was happy
And it came worse.