What Are You Working On? - December 2014

[FalconKrunch]

[QUOTE=COBRAa;46697169]I don't understand people using case; isn't it for predictable jumps without the need of comparing two things?

If you're using case for those things, how is that any different to an if/elseif/else chain, apart from a slightly different syntax?[/QUOTE]

-snip- I can't read.

[Contron]

I thought a good project to start with to re-familiarise myself with C# would be to port my existing ray tracer over to the language. It's been a valuable learning exercise, plus leaning of all the syntactic goodies C# offers that's been there for years but I'm only just discovering (for instance operator overloading, it's much clearer having familiar plus and multiply symbols rather than chaining together add() and subtract() methods - considering this stuff has been here for years already). Overall, I'm falling in love with the language again, and it's been fun adapting the code to it - being able to use things such as var and properties (instead of getter/setter method cruft). Oh yeah, I also added fog (which isn't that impressive).

[img]http://i.imgur.com/FHeZ4Qr.png[/img]

An interesting thing to note is that my previous Java implementation runs slightly faster than my C# version; whether this is down to the JVM being faster or just some obvious optimisations I need to do remains to be seen, but I'm not too worried.

[DrLuke]

[url]https://github.com/milankinen/ultimate-continuous-deployment[/url]

What an exciting time we live in! I'll try this out in my next project for sure.

[ben1066]

[QUOTE=Contron;46701033]I thought a good project to start with to re-familiarise myself with C# would be to port my existing ray tracer over to the language. It's been a valuable learning exercise, plus leaning of all the syntactic goodies C# offers that's been there for years but I'm only just discovering (for instance operator overloading, it's much clearer having familiar plus and multiply symbols rather than chaining together add() and subtract() methods - considering this stuff has been here for years already). Overall, I'm falling in love with the language again, and it's been fun adapting the code to it - being able to use things such as var and properties (instead of getter/setter method cruft). Oh yeah, I also added fog (which isn't that impressive).

[img]http://i.imgur.com/FHeZ4Qr.png[/img]

An interesting thing to note is that my previous Java implementation runs slightly faster than my C# version; whether this is down to the JVM being faster or just some obvious optimisations I need to do remains to be seen, but I'm not too worried.[/QUOTE]

You might want to try out System.Numerics.Vector though you'll need the RyuJIT beta from the 2015 preview, it has SIMD backed Vector types which should improve your performance.

[BooTs]

Just a quick question for you guys. How do you go about planning a project? Do you plan the whole thing out step by step and then work on different minor parts until the project is complete or do you just dive into it, with an idea of what you want to do and fix problems as you run into them? Do you use flow charts or Psuedocode? I have been trying to complete a decent programming project for quite some time now, but I always find myself getting overwhelmed with it and giving up. My theory is that I don't plan for it well enough and I just try to jump into it and end up screwing myself over. Either way, I am still interested in how you guys plan projects. Please let me know! Thanks! :D

[esalaka]

[QUOTE=DrDevil;46701116][url]https://github.com/milankinen/ultimate-continuous-deployment[/url]

What an exciting time we live in! I'll try this out in my next project for sure.[/QUOTE]

That's... horrible.

[editline]13th December 2014[/editline]

Upon closer inspection, this is a person from a community I used to be very active in.

[editline]13th December 2014[/editline]

If it's the same person, I actually once worked on a programming project with him. The project kind of fell apart, though I can't remember why.

[bunguer]

[QUOTE=BooTs;46701698]Just a quick question for you guys. How do you go about planning a project? Do you plan the whole thing out step by step and then work on different minor parts until the project is complete or do you just dive into it, with an idea of what you want to do and fix problems as you run into them? Do you use flow charts or Psuedocode? I have been trying to complete a decent programming project for quite some time now, but I always find myself getting overwhelmed with it and giving up. My theory is that I don't plan for it well enough and I just try to jump into it and end up screwing myself over. Either way, I am still interested in how you guys plan projects. Please let me know! Thanks! :D[/QUOTE]

You can try to learn agile development since it's (very) popular in the industry and useful to know. There are a lot reading material for this, most of it is overkill for a single person or even a small team but the main idea behind it is iterative development, which is contrary to the classic waterfall development, in waterfall development you must plan the whole project right from the beginning and you shouldn't deviate at all from that plan if possible, this seems fine in theory but in most projects the requirements change, new features need to be added or removed and waterfall doesn't deal well with changes, and that's where iterative development comes from.

In short you can start by trying to define some really high-level features but these shouldn't go into details, these should describe the vision for your project (and this is not set in stone). After this you can do what it's usually called, "sprints", first you must define a duration (say a week or two for small teams) and in the beginning of each sprint you choose from a list of tasks, which tasks you will be working on for that sprint, you should always aim to have a stable build at the end of each sprint, and you should always define the tasks very clearly (e.g. if the task takes longer than 2 days, you probably can define the task into two tasks), during a sprint if you encounter a feature you want to work on, you don't start to work on it right away, you add it to the task list, you work on the tasks for the current sprint and only in the next you can chose those new tasks.

You keep this up until you have a good project (or until you reach a deadline, a common misconception in agile is that there' no deadlines, but there are. Time awaits for no man and that applies to Agile too, features can change but the timescale is fixed!), the big advantage of this methodology is that you are more focused on the tasks that matter, since you always aim for a stable project and since you choose weekly your tasks, you tend to focus on what's important at the moment and not on what was important 6 months ago.

[splenda]

I made some weird real-time generative video effect thing out of mathematics (used Max 7 with gen to write the effect's algorithms) and this came out of it.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TrEyeZ0Ock[/media]

Other fun note:

To export this video I had to write my own exporting code in the language and fucked up somewhere.

[img]http://puu.sh/dsHqw/ee488ec1c2.PNG[/img]

I usually don't work with raw video files but something tells me that the bitrate was a bit too high for a 1366x768 video. (Didn't help that adobe premiere refused to open it entirely.)

[Tamschi]

[QUOTE=paul simon;46698372][QUOTE=AtomiCal;46697208]Music from BIT.TRIP Runner

Messing around with art styles and whatnot.

[vid]http://a.pomf.se/guxhrs.mp4[/vid][/QUOTE]

Very clearly inspired from [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs8PpRTGs0Y]Edge[/url], which is a (great) game that has [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FTnMVOuNKM]really great music[/url].[/QUOTE]

This one has a different feel to it though. Calmer.
It makes a lot of sense considering how different the gameplay is.

AtomiCal: If you focus a bit more in that direction I think you can find something that people won't immediately call a rip-off if you decide to publish it (which you should, it looks like it may have a lot of potential with the right polish).

[Paul-Simon]

[QUOTE=Tamschi;46703473]This one has a different feel to it though. Calmer.
It makes a lot of sense considering how different the gameplay is.

AtomiCal: If you focus a bit more in that direction I think you can find something that people won't immediately call a rip-off if you decide to publish it (which you should, it looks like it may have a lot of potential with the right polish).[/QUOTE]

Doing something inspired from another title isn't a bad thing, it's a good way to learn.
I really just wanted to applaud him for choosing Edge, since I really like that game.

[Downsider]

some art im working on for a game. i haven't decided what the game is actually about yet, i just started spriting

[vid]http://a.pomf.se/nxktiq.mp4[/vid]

[img]http://i.imgur.com/Kys8dlP.png[/img]

[Natrox]

[QUOTE=splenda;46703269]I made some weird real-time generative video effect thing out of mathematics (used Max 7 with gen to write the effect's algorithms) and this came out of it.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TrEyeZ0Ock[/media]

Other fun note:

To export this video I had to write my own exporting code in the language and fucked up somewhere.

[img]http://puu.sh/dsHqw/ee488ec1c2.PNG[/img]

I usually don't work with raw video files but something tells me that the bitrate was a bit too high for a 1366x768 video. (Didn't help that adobe premiere refused to open it entirely.)[/QUOTE]

Reminds me of the effect used in some cutscenes in Max Payne 3.

[splenda]

[QUOTE=Rocket;46704408]You might want to try writing it in GLSL. ShaderToy makes it super easy to write video effects.[/QUOTE]

This was more of a pet project of mine. I really just used Max because I wanted to try out some stuff with Jitter, its video engine, and I was feeling really mathematical that day. Surprisingly it works really well with live input, what I was using as the test while building it, but once I drop in any video, even if it is a smaller resolution than the webcam, it tanks in frame rate. That video played at 4 frames per second, mostly due to my ignorance of not assigning any of the video code to my gpu, causing my cpu to bottleneck hard.

[editline]13th December 2014[/editline]

Also Max is really good for doing video effect things but not when you code in a stream of consciousness/too lazy to look up any equations so you make your own horribly unoptimized ones.
[IMG]http://puu.sh/dt5sH/ad8d83b0de.PNG[/IMG]

[AtomiCal]

[QUOTE=paul simon;46703648]Doing something inspired from another title isn't a bad thing, it's a good way to learn.
I really just wanted to applaud him for choosing Edge, since I really like that game.[/QUOTE]

It's not a secret that we're taking heavy inspiration from games like edge, monument valley and the bit trip series.

[Fuyukai]

I've been working on a utility that prepares USB disks for creating bootable USBs off. It zeros out the first 32KB of the drive (why not?), and tells parted to make a new partition table.

Protip kids: Windows won't boot if you wipe the first 32KB of the partition.

[swebonny]

(@x=10; #INITIAL GUESS HERE PLS
f=f1=x1=h=1;thresh=0.01;)

[r:50]{
(@
    f = (3*x^4)-(53*x^3)-(13*x^2)+38; #f(x)
    f1 = (12*x^3)-(159*x^2)-(26*x); #f'(x) <--- derivative ok
    h = f/f1; 
    x1 = x - h;
    x=x1;
)

[cmp:(h);(thresh);
    [is:less; Converged at: (x)[BREAK]]
]

}

Newton-Raphson in Rant :v:

Edit: New link: [url]http://berkin.me/rantbox#BB89C84A384D6263759FFFA99D721673F4AF6C4E[/url]

[esalaka]

[QUOTE=Swebonny;46705654]

(@x=10; #INITIAL GUESS HERE PLS
f=f1=x1=h=1;thresh=0.01;)

[r:50]{
(@
    f = (3*x^4)-(53*x^3)-(13*x^2)+38; #f(x)
    f1 = (12*x^3)-(159*x^2)-(26*x); #f'(x) <--- derivative ok
    h = f/f1; 
    x1 = x - h;
    x=x1;
)

[cmp:(h);(thresh);
    [is:less; Converged at: (x)[BREAK]]
]

}

[URL="http://berkin.me/rantbox#ADC8072A9389726AA4B9AF9E2F30E118DBC2E057"]http://berkin.me/rantbox#21EE635DE81E2E2470D42566AF64919662F19BC7[/URL]
Newton-Raphson in Rant :v:[/QUOTE]

It doesn't seem to work

[alien_guy]

[QUOTE=TheEyes;46705583]I've been working on a utility that prepares USB disks for creating bootable USBs off. It zeros out the first 32KB of the drive (why not?), and tells parted to make a new partition table.

Protip kids: Windows won't boot if you wipe the first 32KB of the partition.[/QUOTE]

Would be nice if windows would allow you to install it/create multiple partitions on a removable drive.

[Berkin]

[QUOTE=esalaka;46705980]It doesn't seem to work[/QUOTE]

Because I just updated Rant to use a different kind of literal for math expressions.

[URL="http://berkin.me/rantbox#BB89C84A384D6263759FFFA99D721673F4AF6C4E"]This version[/URL] should work.

``x=10; #INITIAL GUESS HERE PLS
f=f1=x1=h=1;thresh=0.01;
``


[r:50]{
``
    f = (3*x^4)-(53*x^3)-(13*x^2)+38; #f(x)
    f1 = (12*x^3)-(159*x^2)-(26*x); #f'(x) <--- derivative ok
    h = f/f1; 
    x1 = x - h;
    x=x1;
``


[cmp:`h`;`thresh`;
    [is:less; Converged at: `x`[BREAK]]
]


}

[Fuyukai]

[QUOTE=alien_guy;46706005]Would be nice if windows would allow you to install it/create multiple partitions on a removable drive.[/QUOTE]
ntfsfix can fix up to 16kb or so

[sidneys1]

[QUOTE=TheEyes;46706336]ntfsfix[...][/QUOTE]
Sorry, only thing I could think of when I read that.
[t]http://imgur.com/2i1QDga.png[/t]
Edit: 10 more minutes in PowerPoint:
[img]http://imgur.com/lZXLRca.png[/img]

[Divaya]

Today I learned that uploading .php files to mediafire without zipping them first is a bad idea:

[t]http://puu.sh/dtGRo/d413894c61.png[/t]

That's suppose to be a mediawiki captcha page, but instead mediafire somehow merged itself with the downloaded .php and displays a mediafire page instead :v:

[shodan]

Or just use [url]http://pomf.se[/url]

[Fleskhjerta]

Starting making a remake of the retro arcade game "Blaster" in Unity.

[vid]http://webmup.com/KOWqy/vid.webm[/vid]

Just noticed that movement is weird with mouse, I guess i'll do key-based movement.
There is still a lot to do, add enemies, random floating bonus astronauts, and maybe a chance that when you transition into a new level, you go in "Deep Space" where there are much more enemies, and let's not forget the famous big "E" energy power-up from the original game, so far all of this is coming along pretty well.

[TheClayMan]

(To Anyone)
How long after starting to learn programming where you able to create something simple? (ie, Pong, simple calculator, etc.)

[naelstrof]

[QUOTE=TheClayMan;46708072](To Anyone)
How long after starting to learn programming where you able to create something simple? (ie, Pong, simple calculator, etc.)[/QUOTE]

Depends on the person and the language. The first day I started to learn programming was the same day I followed a tutorial to create something simple (2d space shooter). So one day?

[TheClayMan]

[QUOTE=Naelstrom;46708239]Depends on the person and the language. The first day I started to learn programming was the same day I followed a tutorial to create something simple (2d space shooter). So one day?[/QUOTE]

Damn, I'm discouraged because I've been in a Computer Science class for the past few months and still can't do shit.

[TheClayMan]

[QUOTE=Rocket;46708277]What language are you learning?

e: This wasn't meant to be sarcastic. Serious question.[/QUOTE]

Java

[bunguer]

[QUOTE=TheClayMan;46708244]Damn, I'm discouraged because I've been in a Computer Science class for the past few months and still can't do shit.[/QUOTE]

That depends on many factors, usually in Computer Science they start by putting emphasis on theory and fundamentals of programming, only reaching practical and interesting projects after some time.

With that said, a simple calculator should be easy to do after a few months in any language - but don't let that discourage you. The most important thing you can learn is the mindset and that takes practice.

If you give more details about the language and what challenges you face when creating those projects we may be able to help you.

[Crayz]

Implemented an A* pathfinding system - [url]http://arongranberg.com/astar/front[/url] - gives me more control in the back-end with movement/access to pathing data etc. Also starting on my first iterations of the GUI/hud.

[url]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/96502721/S/astar.mp4[/url]

edit: As far as visuals are concerned I wont be putting any effort towards it anytime soon. So it's just all basic blocky psuedo crap meant for getting the core code built in.
edit2: Does anybody know how FPS limitations work in Unity engine? Sometimes I'm bouncing between 65-75, sometimes around 150, sometimes 300-400, though I have vsync disabled in quality settings. Is there some sort of benchmark type deal going on?