Messages

61

SFML projects / Re: Rage - a "modern" rogue-like

« on: September 23, 2014, 09:37:02 pm »

I think you should consider changing the mechanics for how the visible range is rendered. The choppy motion of the light field around the player is almost giving me a headache from watching those brief videos, and would certainly make me not play the game.

Here are a few considerations from the top of my head:

• Make a simple gradient consisting of 2-3 blocks, so that the contrast is not so strong.
• Make the nonvisible area lighter, so that the contrast is not so strong.
  
• Make the light area larger, so that the choppiness is not so much in focus.
• Look into using shaders to create a per pixel smooth gradient. I don't know how the current shadow system works because you did not post your source, but I dare guess you don't use shaders.

Anyway, good luck and keep going.

62

General / Re: Threading problems.

« on: September 03, 2014, 05:14:36 pm »

Windows and Linux are both perfectly valid choices of an OS.

Well okay, but GNU+Linux systems are friendlier for programmers.

63

General / Re: Threading problems.

« on: September 03, 2014, 03:48:30 pm »

Visual Studio 2010

That's another thing, if this is your first time writing C++ your should probably upgrade to Visual Studio 2013 so you can write C++11 code (and learn RAII while you are at it). 

Even better, upgrade to linux and go for something like QT Creator + CMake. Try it with a babby distro like Mint or OpenSUSE, you will never look back.

64

General discussions / Re: SFML tutorial video

« on: August 30, 2014, 12:26:11 am »

No voice narration in a programming tutorial video is an instant deal breaker.

0 / 10

65

General / Re: installation by yum

« on: August 27, 2014, 01:32:23 am »

Yeah I don't know what repo you are using to find such an outdated version.

# yum info SFML

Installed Packages
Name        : SFML
Arch        : x86_64
Version     : 2.1
Release     : 1.fc20
Size        : 515 k
Repo        : installed
From repo   : updates

66

General / Re: bullet shooting help?

« on: August 26, 2014, 08:59:25 pm »

sf::Thread movUp(&moveUp);
sf::Thread movDown(&moveDown);

I don't understand.

67

General / Re: Memory leak

« on: August 22, 2014, 04:19:56 pm »

What about this?

#include <SFML/Graphics/Texture.hpp>
int main() {
        sf::Texture texture;
}

==6844== HEAP SUMMARY:
==6844==     in use at exit: 15,082 bytes in 68 blocks
==6844==   total heap usage: 5,418 allocs, 5,350 frees, 4,658,922 bytes allocated
==6844==
==6844== Searching for pointers to 68 not-freed blocks
==6844== Checked 2,635,864 bytes
==6844==
==6844== LEAK SUMMARY:
==6844==    definitely lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==6844==    indirectly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==6844==      possibly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==6844==    still reachable: 15,082 bytes in 68 blocks
==6844==         suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==6844== Reachable blocks (those to which a pointer was found) are not shown.
==6844== To see them, rerun with: --leak-check=full --show-leak-kinds=all
==6844==
==6844== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 2 from 2)
--6844--
--6844-- used_suppression:      2 glibc-2.5.x-on-SUSE-10.2-(PPC)-2a /usr/lib64/valgrind/default.supp:1286
==6844==
==6844== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 2 from 2)

I don't understand all the technical info that comes before that part, but as far as I know it should be concluding this:

All heap blocks were freed -- no leaks are possible

68

General / Re: Deciding on a language

« on: August 11, 2014, 03:00:13 am »

Most of my personal experience is with C++ and Javascript, languages which have had tons of money thrown at them, and performance has never been an issue for me (except when I did something stupid).  My suspicion is that Python is close to the same level, but that Golang probably isn't.

I don't know, Golang is in use by google in some pretty heavy weight systems. I'm no expert but I believe google had a good reason for inventing a modern version of C rather than cobbling together their critical server programs in python.

I'm planning on writing a graphical program using SFML for the first time. The only language I know is javascript, so I have to learn a new programming language for this project. I want something simple and efficient, so Golang and Python both look appealing to me.

Most important: Before committing to one of them, try writing small test programs in both. Just enough that you get a feel for how the SFML bindings work in them, how they integrate with OpenGL etc. After you have done that it will be very easy to decide which one felt better to you and better fit your style.

Less important, my opinion: It will be a lot easier to get started in python, because the language was designed to be easy and for people to very quickly throw stuff together, and it really excels at that. If you already know "programming" then you may be able to pick up python very quickly and can start working on your actual game not far from now.

But...

Choosing Go will probably make you a better programmer, and give you more benefits in the long run. The reason is that Go comes with the good stuff you need to write complex programs, most importantly static typing, but also rules that forces the programmer into keeping things simple and clean. Added bonuses include the whole built-in-concurrency thing if you ever need it, and a unit testing system as part of the standard installation.

That's my perspective as a person who started with Python, transitioned to C++ and am just now starting to learn Go, so because I'm a noob I may well be wrong so as per my original suggestion: Do your own research.

69

General / Re: Does anyone else have massive frame drops for no reason?

« on: August 10, 2014, 02:37:41 am »

Does anyone else have massive frame drops for no reason?

Nope.

Every frame rate drop and performance problem I've had definitely had a reason.

The most common reason is that I coded a bug into my program by mistake because I'm a noob programmer.

Although once I noted a frame rate drop in a program that was running fine earlier, and I hadn't really changed any code that would cause it so I was pretty confused. I profiled my program to try to find the issue, but everything seemed to be within normal parameters. Then I realized I had like 10 virtual desktops open, all of them running various other programs like browser, file manager, pdf reader, music player, torrent program etc. So when I closed some of the programs / desktops my SFML program was back to a clean 60 fps again.

But definitely never frame rate drop for no reason.

70

SFML website / Re: Youtube embedded videos not working

« on: July 30, 2014, 12:38:11 pm »

Well It's no big deal, I just noticed the problem while browsing the projects sub forum and thought I would mention it.

For what it's worth, here's an update to the report:

In this thread the first two vids are showing the error for me, but the video in reply #6 is able to display without problem.

While it's impossible for me to see what the two first videos in the thread are, I'm guessing they are the two other gameplay videos from doc lulle's channel. I can watch them on the posters youtube channel just fine, which increases my suspicion that the problem has to do with the embedding of videos on this forum, as opposed to youtube or my browser.

71

General / Re: How to best utilize C++/python combination?

« on: July 30, 2014, 10:08:18 am »

For clarification, everything related to game data would be in python, not just data manipulation algorithms.  So classes and their methods would be in python too.

I don't understand, what are your methods doing, if they aren't doing "data manipulation"? Please clarify what you are talking about with a more elaborate explanation, and preferably some pseudo code examples.

72

SFML website / Youtube embedded videos not working

« on: July 28, 2014, 01:09:12 pm »

For me it seems like videos in posts doesn't work. It just shows the gray box with a message about needing to install a plugin.

To make things clear: I do not have flash installed.

I do not know anything about web coding, but my guess is the forum doesn't support the HTML5 player perhaps. I can watch videos on youtube and other sites with embedded videos just fine, so I'm hoping it's not too big of a deal to fix this problem.

Using Mozilla Firefox and gnome version of Fedora 20 GNU+linux.

73

Window / Re: Creating sprites on whole/big map

« on: July 19, 2014, 02:04:46 am »

Can someone explain to me why this doesn't cause a green screen:

mMainWindow.display();
mMainWindow.clear(sf::Color(0, 200, 0, 255));

I was surprised when I tried it in my own code and everything just looked normal. I would expect it to just.. clear the screen.

74

Window / Re: Generate Event::Closed programatically?

« on: July 10, 2014, 12:09:07 pm »

Okay, well my question about events is answered in any case, thank you.

If you happen to user Thor, its ActionMap class also lets you push custom events.

I'm probably going to try Thor later, after I have a full working knowledge of SFML.

75

Window / Re: Generate Event::Closed programatically?

« on: July 10, 2014, 11:03:50 am »

I would use it to automate the testing of the event handling aspect of something I'm working on. I realize it's possible call the functions directly as you say, but it would be a better test to do so via emitting the actual events instead.

Also I don't think it's too weird or unreasonable to be able to push any event in general, and especially custom ones. For example I think SDL has that option if I recall correctly. One use case I can think of is to let the developer create custom events as an easy mechanism for deferring some action to the next iteration of the update loop, which I believe is not uncommon to want to do in a game application.