Latest Posts in Game Development

Am having vB.Net on my system, am about installing XNA application but it still ask me that some requirement are missing i.e visual studio 2008, l don't know what to do about that.

A couple of years ago, a 17 year old was arrested for his part in a denial of service attack against gamers playing the online multiplayer version of Call of Duty: Black Ops. The teenager was accused of selling cheat software called 'Phenom Booter' which prevented others from playing (it's a shell booter) while at the same time enabling the player to boost their scores. As someone who is a bit of a Black Ops obsessive (currently fast approaching 9th Prestige level on Black Ops 2) any kind of cheating really gets my goat. But one that involves preventing me, and others, from playing at all really is at the top of the lame behaviour pile. Which is why I was disappointed to see that Battlefield 3 was taken offline by a DDoS attack earlier this week.

On the afternoon of 8th May, a game spokesperson revealed that "the current Battlefield 3 outages are a result of activity that appears to be aimed at overwhelming our back-end infrastructure. We are working on a variety of solutions to address this problem and are focused on resolution as quickly as possible... We are incredibly disappointed by these activities and the impact they are having on all of our ability to enjoy BF3, thank you for your patience as we work to resolve these issues."

Six hours later, the same person admitted "despite our security measures, we have been working around the clock to mitigate the impact of an ongoing denial-of-service attack on our Battlefield 3 game infrastructure over the last several days. While the motives are unclear, the focus of the attack has been interference with network communications preventing access to multiplayer gameplay." The attacks continued over a number of days, and the attempts to mitigate these by the game developers involved patches and restarts that effectively booted players out of games while they were implemented.

Ashley Stephenson, CEO of Corero Network Security, says that the Battlefield 3 DDoS attack "conforms with what our clients in the gaming industry have experienced, persistent and over several days. In this case it has impacted Battlefield 3’s back-end servers and prevented players from accessing multiplayer features in the game. So far it appears, according to EA that the attack was aimed at knocking the multiplayer servers offline and not as a diversion to pilfer data. The attack, however, has dealt a blow to EA, forcing it to cancel their planned “double XP weekend”. Whether it was timed to coincide with this event is unclear, and neither according to EA are the motives, but we have seen an uptick in what appears to be competitors trying to disrupt their competition as well as attackers carrying out attacks just for fun, or lulz."

But there is another explanation as to why games sites might be getting hit by the DDoS'ers, and that's simply botnet testing before rolling out financially lucrative attacks against the banks and other commercial organisations. In March, I was told by security researchers that the Brobot botnet was being used to attack online RPGs rather than the more usual banking targets. There's no evidence to connect the Battlefield 3 attack with these earlier gaming attacks, but there is some evidence that they were hit by the same Brobot botnet being used by the
Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighter hacktivist group, not least as the same newly developed attack tools were used against the game sites as used against banking targets such as Morgan Chase and Capital One.

how to download all net framework versions

So, OK, I have kind of solved the problem. All I did was a varient on an already tried bit of code.

bool start = false;
if (dbMouseClick())
    dbSprite (100, 0, 0, 100);
if (dbSpriteExist (100))
    start = true;

That works well enough but I think that it is a sloppy solution and would be open to a far more efficient way to solve this problem. Any takers?

Hi,

I wish to implement a 3D software renderer, so I started to read "Tricks of the 3D Game Programming Gurus Advanced 3D Graphics and Rasterization".

The first chapters are pretty straight forward, but my problem is that when he started with the math (Chp 4) I lost direction - he throws a lot of material (and I really bad with math), and there are no exercises which I can work on.

In exercises I mean writing some code, so I could see how each separate subject fits the whole image - for example, some exercises about polar coord's, other in vectors and so on...

From simple math books, I don't understand a thing - writing code using a feature will make it more clear and understandable to me.

Is there is a website or a book which gives such exercises, or even suggestion to other book on the subject?

Thank you very much.

My problem is that I wish to use a single mouse click (or key press) to "turn on" a set of conditions then I will "turn off" the conditions when a different requirement is met. Alas! Every time I release the mouse button the bool reverts to its initialized state. I do not want it to do that and I do not want to set it to "toggle" on and off with each mouse click either. Here are some examples of what has failed:

// first, simple failure

bool start = false;
if (dbMouseClick())
    start = true;

// another unsuccessful attempt

bool start = false;
int click = 0;
if (dbMouseClick ())
    ++click
if (click > 0)
    start = true;

// more pain here

bool start = false;
if (dbMouseClick())
    start = true;
if (start == true)
{
    if (dbMouseClick() == false)
    start = true;
}

// and my desperate, embarrassing last ditch effort

dbSprite (100, 0, 0, 100);
bool start;
if (dbSpriteExist (100))
{
    start = false;
    if (dbMouseClick ())
        dbDeleteSprite (100);
}
if (dbSpriteExist (100) == false)
    start = true;

Even that last and rather cumbersome bit of code failed because the sprite kept redrawing!!! It is obvious that my mind is on the wrong track. Would anyone be willing to help derail it. I have been at this for WAY too long. This is one of the last hang-ups I have left before completing my simple game project and moving onto bigger and more daunting brain twisters.
Thanks for any help.

I am getting into game programming more and more. I have been learning DirectX11 but it is hard and very low level. I am looking for a game librarie that has these spesifications:

Must be in C++ (the library doesn's have to be written in C++. As long as I can code my game in C++)
Must free (I dont want to get a lisence)
Must suport:    1) Sound
                2) Graphics 
                3) Input
                4) AI
                5) Network
                6) Physics
                *Note: Basicly every thing one needs to make games
Must be rarther easy (I am good in C++ but not the best. So I dont mind a little complexity, but must be easy)
Must work on Windows
Must be a good one (Meaning it is still being updated, and if it is used for games today)

Hello all,

I wonder why I cannot play video games in facebook. Whenever I click the video games, it loads for a long time then done with a blury screen background.

Why is it?

I would like you to check out a sample i made and give me any instructions of how i can increase performance.

Open this link :
http://www.psygnus.t15.org/reels_test.html

It simulates a slot machine reel spinning with the help of TweenJS library.

In the PC i am working right now (core 2 duo, 2GB RAM) it is tearing and flickers quite much.
Is there anyway to improve performance and eliminate (as much as possible) the flickering?

Can i use something like double buffering in HTML5/javascript or any other technique?

Any suggestions would be great!

Thanks!

hey guys, I am currently having problems with my OpenGL ES 2.0 application. I think I may have done my matrices wrong im not sure, but I cannot see my quad rendered to the screen. I believe it is something to do with the matrices I have set up which is why I cannot view my quad? or it could be within my vertex shader.
below here is the code for my vertex shader

//works with object
attribute highp   vec3  inVertex;
attribute mediump vec3 inNormal;
attribute mediump vec2  inTexCoord;

//matrix for scene
uniform mediump mat4 projection_matrix;
uniform mediump mat4  view_matrix;
uniform mediump mat4 model_matrix;

//needed to pass tex coords to frag shader to operate on.
varying mediump vec2  TexCoord;

void main()
{
    gl_Position = model_matrix * view_matrix * projection_matrix * vec4(inVertex, 1.0);
    TexCoord = inTexCoord;
}

This is within the initview method and lastly underneath this is where I draw my quad and pass the matrices to the shader.

// Interleaved vertex data
    GLfloat sqVert[] = { 
                         0.5f,0.5f,0.0f,   
                         1.0f, 1.0f,//UV
                         -0.5f,0.5f,0.0f,
                         0.0f, 1.0f,//UV
                         0.5f,-0.5f,0.0f, //postions
                         1.0f, 0.0f, //UV
                         -0.5f, -0.5f, 0.0f,
                         0.0f, 0.0f,//UV
                         -0.5f,0.5f,0.0f,
                         0.0f, 1.0f,//UV
                         0.5f,-0.5f,0.0f,
                         1.0f, 0.0f //UV 
                       };

    glGenBuffers(1, &m_ui32Vbo);

    m_ui32VertexStride = 5 * sizeof(GLfloat); // 3 floats for the pos, 2 for the UVs

    // Bind the VBO
    glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, m_ui32Vbo);

    // Set the buffer's data
    glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 6 * m_ui32VertexStride, sqVert, GL_STATIC_DRAW);

    // Unbind the VBO
    glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0);
    return true;

    //set projection matrix,
    //first param field of view, this specifies the angle of view
    //second gets the aspect ratio
    //third and fourth gets the near and far plane and fifth is the clip space
    bool bRotate = PVRShellGet(prefIsRotated) && PVRShellGet(prefFullScreen);
    p_Matrix = PVRTMat4::Perspective(60.0f, (float) PVRShellGet(prefWidth) / (float) PVRShellGet(prefHeight), 1.0f, 100.0f, PVRTMat4::OGL, false, bRotate);
    v_Matrix = PVRTMat4::LookAtLH(PVRTVec3(0.0f, 0.0f, -3.0f), PVRTVec3(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f), PVRTVec3(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f));
    m_Matrix = PVRTMat4::RotationX(45);

Here is the code within the renderscene method

glUniformMatrix4fv(m_ShaderProgram.auiLoc[ePMatrix], 1, GL_FALSE, p_Matrix.ptr());
    glUniformMatrix4fv(m_ShaderProgram.auiLoc[eVMatrix], 1, GL_FALSE, v_Matrix.ptr());


    // Bind the VBO
    glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, m_ui32Vbo);
    glUniformMatrix4fv(m_ShaderProgram.auiLoc[eMMatrix], 1, GL_FALSE, m_Matrix.ptr());
    // Pass the vertex data
    glEnableVertexAttribArray(VERTEX_ARRAY);
    glVertexAttribPointer(VERTEX_ARRAY, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, m_ui32VertexStride, 0);

    // Pass the texture coordinates data
    glEnableVertexAttribArray(TEXCOORD_ARRAY);
    glVertexAttribPointer(TEXCOORD_ARRAY, 2, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, m_ui32VertexStride, (void*) (sizeof(GLfloat) * 3) /* Uvs start after the position */);

    // Pass the second texture coordinates data
    glEnableVertexAttribArray(TEXCOORD_ARRAY2);
    glVertexAttribPointer(TEXCOORD_ARRAY2, 2, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, m_ui32VertexStride, (void*) (sizeof(GLfloat) * 3) /* Uvs start after the position */);

    // Draws a non-indexed triangle array
    glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 6);

***************SOLVED***********************
anytime there is an access violation, in this context, it means that I was trying to access resources that device->reset had, well, reset! The simple solution was to find and track down which object I had not called OnLostDevice and OnResetDevice for. This includes all ID3DXSprite and D3DXFont and D3DXLine interfaces/objects.

God bless you in Jesus name

Hi,

Im using DX9c and learning from Frank Luna's book to try and handle OnLostDevice and OnResetDevice, when switching to fullscreen and back (and alt+tabbing).
If I dont draw anything I am able to go from windowed to fullscreen, and back, with no trouble. But adding a draw and flush then pressing the fullscreen key causes the following msgbox error: (at the m_pSprite->flush();)

Unhandled exception at 0x56E5B1FC (D3DX9_43.dll) in DXTB 14.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation writing location 0xCCD020CC.

Although I do enjoy getting stuck on problems I have been rearranging my code and typing like a monkey for 1 week now (on this issue). Please can you correct where I am going wrong?

Resolution is sweeter the longer you wait. (please dont qoute it back at me though! hehe)

It seems that using only javascript/html5 is not enough for producing high quality motion graphics.
It handles sprite animations quite impressively but it really struggles with moving objects.

BTW i used EASELJS library.

P.S. I mangaged to code 3 animations in a couple of hours without any previous knowledge, and i remember doing the same for the first time in DirectX... it took me almost a week...
:)

I have to try WebGL i suppose.. but i remember OpenGL being more difficult than DirectX and i am afraid of it..!

Thanks for the links!
Very useful for start.

So if use html5/javascript without WebGL (not supported by older Graphics Cards), do you think i will be able to produce a commercially acceptable product?

Because all i could find was experimental stuff.
Perhaps it is too soon to pick it as a proffessional solution...(?)

Thanks again!