As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 9 years ago.
I am starter game developer. And also i am 2nd year student of software engineering. I have a team, and i am the only 1 who can code something!(And i have a guy from Marvel :))) )
So, we have decided to do a 2D game targeted to PC. I have made research in this side. And found not so many choices, because at the moment 3D games are in fashion. I do not want to use a game maker by the way.
So i decided to ask you this questions:Can you give some advise about using an engine or i have to write my own one? And if i have to write my own engine, which resources must i have?
Appreciate each of your answer !
Thanx !
Since PC games has many awesome titles out there, I think indie developer like you should heading for simple and time-killer games for mobile, a good game engine for mobile (free version available) is Gideros Mobile (http://www.giderosmobile.com). It use Lua language and you can publish for both Android and iOS platform. Gideros also has an active community which are ready to answer all your questions at here: http://www.giderosmobile.com/forum/
Currently I have 6 month experience with it, publish 3 games with about 60.000+ downloads.
I would say you should start by researching what a typical game engine gives you. There's a lot usually, such as physics, wrappers to draw objects, wrappers to load assests (such as sound and models or pictures), possibly even networking.
A game engine is potentially a huge, huge undertaking. If you're looking to make a game, focus on that by utilizing what's available to you.
My suggestion for starting would be XNA. It's a quick learn for the basics and easy to scale for large projects. They provide a lot of what I talked about and allows you to focus on what you started the project for.
Good Luck.
If you want to use a lower-level language like C++, I suggest SFML. It is extremely simple to use and provides both high-level and low-level graphics, audio, and networking functions for different uses.
You can also use it to easily create a context for OpenGL.
http://www.sfml-dev.org/
You will have to build the latest and best version (2.0) yourself, but this tutorial will show you how:
http://sfmlcoder.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/building-sfml-2-0-with-mingw-make/
Have fun!
I'd suggest checking out FlashPunk or Flixel. Both are Flash-based engines, so they use Actionscript 3, and can target the web-browser (Flash), or PC/Mac via the use of Adobe Air. Also, the performance isn't quite there yet from what I have read, but Adobe Air can also deploy to both iOS and Android. This is merely just a suggestion though, and if I were you I'd test out a few engines/technologies until finding the one I am most comfortable with.
Good luck!
Links to both:
http://www.flashpunk.net
http://flixel.org
Related
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
Im thinking about starting a website project with a framework that will be also a study project for me. To be more exact a biologist kinda site with quite some filters and there is the question also if I should use separate database or flat file for 8 translations for the different species names (the site also has to be international, but just with 3-4 languages). Im thinking hard about which road to take... so I am asking for some constructive inputs please!
Im thinking of yii because of its simplicity, I tried it and it seems to be working smoothly.
Im thinking of symfony2 because it seems to be more advanced and some great websites were built with it, also drupal8 was constructed with it if Im not mistaken... and even if its harder to get going with it if its worth the effort I would do it.
Im thinking of spark, a java mini framework or Eclipse Link as later I plan to make an offline version of this webpage and I hope its not that hard to port it as a standalone java app. But I'm novice in java and hate the java documentations filled with acronyms all the time and supposing that I know those essential steps that are considered to be self evident by experienced java programmers.
I think there is no correct answer to your question. Chosing a framework is a matter of philosophy, and personal preferences. Some people will think that Yii is easier to use and some other will be amazed by symfony capabilities.
If you know a framework, I'll advise you to stick to this one and if you don't check out the basis of each ones and choose the one that seems to fit your need the most.
But at the end if you choose a popular framework (Yii, Symfony, Laravel, ...) you'll be able to achieve your goal.
Personally I like Yii, having never used the others :) For this exact reason I've flagged to close this as not constructive. There is no correct answer to this question.
I would start up a project in each, try and accomplish some common tasks, then decide. Ultimately you'll be able to acheive everything in all those frameworks. The deciding factor will be how fast and how comfortably you can use the frameworks, not how everyone else uses them.
Yii supports multiple databases very easy; Think about this;
All you have to do is create the database and the rest is, easy ...
Just create a simple blog app, and see wich one is the easyest and fastest when developing.
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
I am into learning some GUI API in C++, so I searched a lot to see which one was best. I ended up with either Qt or WinAPI. I read some people saying that Qt was easier to work with but with WinAPI you could control everything. The argument proceeded and someone said that it was a fair exchange, a small piece of control so it could become easier. Now I want to know, what exactly are you losing when you chose Qt? Is it the interaction with the system? What exactly can you do in WinAPI that you cannot do in Qt?
You are comparing apples and oranges here. Qt is a C++ class library designed to help you implement a GUI and is cross-platform, you can recompile your code to run on different operating systems. The winapi is the low-level C-based api to make operating system calls on Windows. You can create a GUI app using only the winapi, Charles Petzold shows you how, but it is quite a punishing approach to developing such an app. A "Hello world" app using only the winapi is an easy hundred lines of code.
Don't contemplate using only the winapi to implement a GUI, you'll deeply regret it after spending several months learning how to get it right. There are many tools to simplify that job, Qt is just one of them and it isn't limited to just the C++ language. Of course, the fact that Qt is cross-platform does mean that certain Windows' specific features are poorly or not at all directly supported in Qt. You do however have the option to fall back to the winapi if you need it. At the cost of giving up cross-platform support.
The most "heavy weight" things Qt looses are the Shell API, the DWM and the Ribbon UI. There are more, like the compression API.
However, it is fairly easy to write your own Qt style interfaces to those APIs.
Best regards
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 11 years ago.
I have just arrived at new company and have never worked with Qt before, but my task is to learn Qt in 2 weeks, so i can give training to others. So i got 2 weeks to learn Qt and prepare for 2 weeks long Qt teaching.
I am so dead!
Please point out some common mistakes, tricks, styles so i can make that training a bit better!
Thank you!
EDIT:
I used this book - C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 and it was very good. Examples were really good. Also I had some training materials from previos training. That was 2 week traning and we covered almost all Qt aspects! Nice one! ;)
Get C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4, (the official Qt book) and start reading!
At first you should understand the signal/slots concept, because that is used heavily in Qt. Then I would work through some simple examples, there are lots of them, so just pick the ones you like. If you use Qt Creator you have the context sensitive documentation always at hand, which helps a lot.
If you think you know the basics you can concentrate on the more complicated things like threading or network communication, depending on what your company focus is.
Remember the Qt is not only the GUI framework, but has a framework for a lot of lowlevel components, too. Have a look here to get an overview.
If you already know C++, start developing Qt applications using Qt. You can use the
examples, Qt- Assistant and also Qt classes for 4.6 site. IMHO, only by practicing you can learn Qt nicely. Read the books and links specified in the answers and start creating applications. Start with the simple one and move forward towards the complex. 2 weeks is quite enough time to learn Qt.
If learning by yourself in teaching doesn't cut it (quite ambitious if it is supposed to be more than first steps and an overview), you could attend a Qt training, offered by Nokia/Qt partners such as KDAB and ICS.
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/tutorials.html is the well known QT tutorial found in the web. You can also try this book http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Prentice-Source-Software-Development/dp/0132354160.
Book
Examples and Demos Launcher
Doing all advises from that links, will gave you the right direction to move.
PS: I think 2 weeks not the problem to start using Qt...
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 9 years ago.
So I'm currently doing some robotics research, and we have a custom built arm in the lab that we would like to simulate. I've done a little googling and wikipedia searching, and there seems to be a fair amount of open source and proprietary applications for doing just what I need, such as Gazebo, LpzRobots, Webots, RoboLogix, and others. Our primary research tools are in C++ and interface over network.
My question is, does anyone out there have any experience in dealing with robotics simulators? Can you recommend which if any of these I should jump for, or whether I should just pick up and start writing my own from scratch? My primary use for it will be motion planning testing (so I'd like to be able to control the position of the robot exactly without worrying about dynamics) and controller dynamics testing (just the opposite) for a custom kinematic chain robot.
Microsoft Robotics have the MS Robotics Studio which is a full set of tools for any type of robot... UAVs, UGVs, Manipulators, etc.
One of such tools is the VSE (Visual Simulation Environment) based on the AGEIA Physics engine that allows simulation of not only the kinematics of your robot, but also simulation of sensors and of the environment.
They might even have the 3D model of the arm you are using, I know that they have one for the KUKA LBR3 for example.
(source: microsoft.com)
I would never recommend writing your own simulator unless you are forced to. It is not a great learning experience, and it will never work as well as the ones that have been improved over many years by thousands of people.
With that said, the ones I have had positive experiences with are Gazebo and open dynamics engine (if you are using Matlab for your simulation). I would definitely recommend using Gazebo in combination with ROS. They are both becoming more standard and constantly improving. There are pre-existing simulations that you can base yours on like the erratic robot (for two wheeled differential drive platforms) and the PR2 (for humanoid type platforms). If you just want to do collision checking and kinematics, then I would recommend using rviz and the urdf format in ROS. Very easy to get started with and very well tested.
By the way, I have used Microsoft Robotics Developers Studio in the past, and it is not as good as ROS. I know they have a new version that fixes a lot of their previous issues, but there is no point because it does not have the extensive codebase or community that ROS does.
If you're familiar with C++ programming language, WEBOTS, ROBOWORKS, V-REP are at least three simulation software C++ compatible. A comprehensive list with robotic simulation software is here
I've been playing with SimSpark recently. It's the platform that's used for the RoboCup 3D Simulated Soccer League.
(source: google.com)
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
Which Computer-aided Software Engineering tools do you use and why? In what ways do they increase your productivity or help you design your programs? Or, in case you do not use CASE tools, what are your reasons for this?
The best CASE tool I had to work with is the Enterprise Architect from Sparx.
It's lightweight comparing to Rose (easier to buy and cheaper too) but extremely powerful. You could do great UML diagrams or database model or anything else you want but in a nice and organised way.
It greatly helps on the initial stages of the elaboration process as you could create domain model, do some preliminary use cases, map them to the requirements and present all of it in a nice way to the customer. It helps me thinking and I re-factor my design with it until I am satisfied enough to start proper documentation.
It is also very good for database models as it could reverse-engineer most databases very neatly.
The only (but quite serious) drawback it has in my eyes is that its documentation generator is, to put it mildly, crap. Getting a proper document from it is almost impossible unless you invest a significant amount of work in the templates and then it would be only OK.
I have used Rational Rose and a few other similar packages in the past. Mostly I have used them for the UML diagram elements and have not gone into the more detailed functionality such as code generation etc.
I mostly use them for aiding the design process and clarifying my own ideas. Often I find that, in trying to come up with a design for a componant, I end up needing to write down / draw what I want to happen so I can get a clear overview in my mind of what needs to happen and why. I have found that in a lot of cases, what I end up trying to draw is essentially the same as a predefined kind of diagram in UML, such as a Use Case Diagram etc. and by then adopting that style, it becomes easier to get my ideas on paper as I have some framework to work within.
So, I use CASE tools principally for thier UML / designing tools at a highish, semi-abstract level.
Oracle Designer
Not using any. No money for them.