japro

I can't remember where I read that but there was some article about building a "safe environment for kids" in a online game by having a sentence construction toolkit that only consisted of "safe words". Apparently within minutes of playtesting with actual children someone had come up with something along the lines of: "I want to stick my ice cream into your fluffy bunny"... so no matter how you do it time-to-penis is always finite and usually really short

...I've been learning C# for awhile now, and from a developer standpoint, this is an investment. I don't have time or resources to doubt myself and reverse all the time I've spent on it now in favor of C++...

Luckily programming skill isn't language specific. There is no reason to "reverse all the time" to switch over from C#/XNA to C++/DX/OGL since most of the actual knowledge transfers over (protip: syntax and api aren't the hard part about programming ).

I'm too lazy to actually boot my laptop into windows and install that driver and install dev tools atm. But if anyone wants to try another example here is one: https://github.com/progschj/OpenGL-Examples/blob/master/13compute_shader_nbody.cpp It works fine on my nvidia desktop. It should work when changing it to use the ARB extension instead of the 4.3 context on amd I guess,

It shouldn't matter whether the texture was/is attached to a fbo at any point. Just don't render to a texture you are currently sampling from

For core profiles glew is kinda hit miss afaik. It doesn't support them cleanly. So it is usullay preferable to use a loader like gl3w or glxw.

In the pointer case you should initialize the pointer from your main (or a function called from there) and also delete it at the end of the program/deinitialization. The main advantage of the pointer solution is imho that you can control the lifetime of the object and obviously you can also use polymorphism (say if you have RendererOpenGL and RendererD3D or so). Both approaches are valid depending on what you want exactly.
Also if you are not using a pointer you don't actually need the "= Renderer()". Just "Renderer renderer();" is ok.

To avoid unnecessary updates one could also cache chunk data on the client side and essentially version the chunks. So before resending a whole new chunk (after the player walked away and back) you can first check if the "version" on the server has changed. Most of the other things like only sending deltas etc has already been said.

Well, numerical methods such as newtons method will also give reasonable solutions for most practical purposes.

Google for "glew" and/or "gl3w".

You simply use the data array directly. Also you don't really use VBOs in that java code ;). You just use draw arrays to draw array data.
example (lines 169 and following): https://github.com/progschj/OpenGL-Examples/blob/master/01shader_vbo1.cpp

I doubt that there is a lot of "Linux gamers" in the sense that they strictly use Linux... But there might be a significantly higher amount of "Gamers that mostly use Linux for non-gaming" which then just boot into Windows to play. So on the one hand you could argue they will buy the game anyway for windows, on the other hand having a linux version could make the game more attractive to them. Especially if its a more casual game you probably don't want to reboot the machine just to play a round of angry birds...

Im in Switzerland but I can still comment on some of the critique points of the Bachelor/Master thing. The problem with the bologna system is that it mostly fails at what it was designed to do and disrupts things that worked before. One of the central concepts for example is that the ECTS points should be transferrable and uniform across universities... but they aren't. If you go for a semester/year to study at a foreign university you still have to run all the stuff by your own administration and your university might "rate" the lectures you do there differently than the university you take them at does etc.. How much something is "worth" in terms of points might even be inconsistent within a university. We for example had the case that there was a "Numerics of Partial Differential Equations" lecture that was given for CSE students at the beginning and got you 10 points (which was still low given the amount of work you had to invest). Then this lecture also was added as a possibility to the CS curriculum. But because apparently 10 points would give CS students "too many points compared to their other lectures" they reduced it to 7 points, even though its still the exact same lecture and just as much work.
Then something especially the lecturers complain about is that the system requires some standards in regards to how and what can be used to asses performance. As a result some courses/lectures that worked before without an exam for example (typically this was the stuff you took out of interest an not because it was required) had to be changed and as a result got less popular/were dropped entierly.
This actually goes along with another concern which is that the point system encourages people to select lectures depending on point/work efficiency instead of interest.

But I also have to say that typically its not such a big deal in your day to day studying its still your responsibility to not fall into the trap of chosing lectures by points and figuring out your semester at a foreign university (which usually does work out). I also never heard that someone with a Masters is valued lower than someone with some other form of Diploma (in Switzerland we don't even have that option anymore).

What I was wondering myself though is how this all aligns with the US university system. You often hear, especially from games industry people, stuff like that they don't care about Masters degrees and there is also this "4-year degree" thing people keep talking about that flat out doesn't seem to exist over here (in some european countries). It's pretty much a given here that you get a masters degree. Leaving university after getting a bachelor degree in three years is fairly exotic as far as i can tell (with the possible exception of "Fachhochschulen"). Your goal is pretty much to get a masters degree and the bachelors is just an intermediate step. In the old system the equivalent of that was not really regarded as a degree on its own i think.

I really liked Ground Control back in the days. The unit balance was fairly broken (artillery is ridiculously overpowered in single player and multiplayer is mostly about deoploying special weapons first/from the right angle), but it does a really good job at not having these overly artificial gameplay mechanics like explicit cover locations, control/resource points etc. In single player you configure your units and get dropped in from orbit and that's all the units you get. No infinite reviving like in DoW2 or reinforcements.The multiplayer modes were also straight forward. It had game modes like last man stading (one drop), deathmatch (constant reinforcements and points for kills) and a siege mode also with reinforcements and the goal was for one player to destroy some structure in a given amount of time while the other defended. I would generally prefere to see such straight forward mechanics/modes well executed instead of some "innovative" contrived game mechanic.

Something I've used in the past was having something like
[source lang="java"]interface State {   void processInput(InputEvent event);   State getNextState();}[/source]

The gameloop then forwards all events it doesn't handle directly to the currently active state and at the end of the game loop queries the next state and sets that as active. That avoids this global switch construct which will get out of hand and unmaintainable pretty quickly.

For separable filters such as gauss or box filters you can get away with n+m fetches instead of n*m but that also requires two stages. Summed area tables might also be of interest. Also explicitly fetching from lower mip-map levels might be of use.