EJH

Yeah either MonoGame or Unity imho. XNA may be doomed and I think it is a huge mistake by MS.

You should learn IDEs if you want to get a job. At most interviews if you said "i don't use IDEs" your resume would probably go in the trash as soon as you leave. Also, when working with non-trivial projects, debugging with cout and file writes doesn't even remotely compare to an IDE debugger.

Real time Neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (RtNEAT)

Where can I find a simple example of RtNEAT algorithms being applied?


Additional Information:
I'm interested in researching real time genetic algorithms and RtNeat has seemed to be the best one out there (at least the most promising) since its has been applied to a real game. Anyways so far, I've been doing some research merely looking at research papers, which has been all and good but understanding exactly how the algorithm is applied has proved to be a challenge.

Once I practically understand it, looking at its advantages and disadvantages, I was going to create to create a version of my own and then use it for my dissertation. Anyway from my final year research I wanted to find out why it had been so difficult/slow to get real time genetic algorithms working in games.

Have you already seen Ken Stanley's NEAT users page? It has a bunch of implementations in various languages and lots of applications:

http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~kstanley/neat.html

For game applications there are at least two that I know of that use rtNEAT or a variant:

Neuro Evolving Robotic Operatives (free game): http://nerogame.org/

Galactic Arms Race (will be on Steam soon): http://gar.eecs.ucf.edu/

If you have any questions that aren't answered on there, you can email Ken and he will most likely try to help you out.

Pretty sure both the Nvidia and ATI control panels can override a game's preference for Vsync. You can't always count on it being on.

Also, 30hz is good for physics but you absolutely want mouse, keyboard, and GUI updated at 60hz or more. Those are mainly what makes games feel sluggish at low FPS.

Are there any others?

Yes.

Such as?

Battle.net does all of that.

Bungie.net has Halo stats and matchmaking.

There's also EA's Origin which is a Steam clone. Not sure if they do stats and matchmaking though.

What's needed to recreate farmville?

A large supply of bored house wives.

After you get the file name. however you want, then do:

Texture2D tex = ContentManager.Load<Texture2D>(fileName);

Can you just make your history list of type "List<Object>"? You can store anything there. Then when someone hits Undo or Redo you just look at the most recent item's type:

if(item is TileMemento)

 {    

    // handle tile undo

}

else if (item is LightMemento)

{

    // handle light intensity undo

}

else if(item is EntityMemento)

{

   // handle entity undo

}               

// etc...

That's about as simple way to do it as possible.

This way is much cleaner. I will apply this strategy to TextureManager, SoundManager and LevelManager. Not sure if I should have only one BulletManager and only one EffectsManager.

Two options:

1. One BulletManager/EffectsManager which means before each level I will have to create new lists for bullets/effects.
2. BulletManager/EffectsManager per level. This way each time a new level begins, a new bullet manager/effects manager for that level is created.

Personally, I used only 1 GameObject manager which held lists of all currently active objects in the game. You might also separate Effects from Bullets (or other game objects). Bullets are interactive and collidable and can affect other game objects. Effects like sparks, explosions, and impacts are (usually) transient and cosmetic only.

The main reason I separate effects is for optimzation reasons. Depending on the type of game, if effects are triggered far from the player you don't even have to spawn the effect. For example, if a rocket lands on the other side of the map from the player, you can calculate damage to nearby units but never have to spawn the explosion effect (nor play the sound either). The player would never see/hear it anyway.

Others might disagree, but I think a centralized renderer is a good thing for small projects with only a few programmers. I used a static Render class in my relatively small (69k SLOC, 166 .cs files in the Client) indie XNA game. Worked fine for me.

Due to some copyright reasons, the gamers shouldn't have access to the contents in the package from outside the game.

What is the best way to package the contents to achieve the above goals? Any encryption method maybe?

You can encrypt to keep casual meddlers out of your game files. But it is impossible to keep anyone skilled from getting your assets out of a file on their hard drive. If your game is popular just assume all the art and music assets will eventually be on the internet somewhere.

Uhh you forgot to test Gnome Sort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnome_sort

Threads like this really make me question whether GD.net has the most subtle trolls in history:

- OP: "How do I get emails of AAA developers to use my algorithm despite the fact than I cannot show a demo, video, screenshot, or a even provide single numerical comparison. Oh and they have to sign an NDA."

- Guy later in thread: "My engine is superior to Crysis 2 yet I have never released a single game with it nor can I provide a demo. To prove my engine's superiority here is screenshot of some buttons and text rendered on a couple of planes."

Can't say this isn't entertaining though.

Here's a C# simple static timer class I used on a game server. Uses a C# StopWatch to calculate the time elapsed since the previous frame in milliseconds.

//----------------------------------------------------------------
// TimeMgr.cs - time elapsed since previous update 
//
// to use:
// - call TimeMgr.Initialize() on game start
// - at the start of every game update call TimeMgr.Update()
// - public field TimeMgr.timeElapsed is the elapsed 
//   milliseconds since the previous update
//----------------------------------------------------------------
using System.Diagnostics;

public static class TimeMgr
{

    // stop watch and private vars
    private static Stopwatch stopWatch;
    private static float currentTime = 0f;
    private static float oldTime = 0f;


    // time elapsed since the previous tick
    public static float timeElapsed = 0f;


    //----------------------------------------------------------------
    // Initialize() - init stopwatch
    //----------------------------------------------------------------
    public static void Initialize()
    {
        stopWatch = new Stopwatch();
        stopWatch.Reset();
        stopWatch.Start();
    }


    //----------------------------------------------------------------
    // Update() - save previous time elapsed
    //          - update current time elapsed
    //----------------------------------------------------------------
    public static void Update()
    {
        oldTime = currentTime;
        currentTime = (float)stopWatch.ElapsedMilliseconds;
        timeElapsed = currentTime - oldTime;
    }


}

Unless you need 64-bit compilation, the Express versions are free. So I'd say yeah, totally worth it. ;)