I've tried a few things but nothing solid enough to post. I'm trying to create a few bars (think mana and hp) that all grow at the same time but at different rates. Then when one has reach it's full size they would all stop and wait some sort of signal. After that it would reset back to zero and start again with all the other bars resuming their progress.
Even if I don't get code, concept is enough.
Since you said you're okay with a concept and didn't include your current code, I'll provide a concept answer. :)
One option:
Create variables to store current and maximum hp and mana (currentHP, maximumHp, currentMana, maximumMana).
In your state's update check if the current value of both hp and mana is less than the maximum. If they are you'll move onto step 3, otherwise you'll check to see if your signal is triggered. This could be as simple as just checking to see if a variable has been set.
Since neither the hp and mana values are at the maximum, you increase the current hp and mana values by whatever values are needed.
Related
I'm doing a competition that requires our device to pause and stop midway on a pole. The device carries an increasing load (chain). The midway point is marked with a slight score mark (which we don't believe will be that noticeable). The device is supposed to travel up on the outside of the pole without pausing, pause on the way down and again on the way up, not pause going down the second time and then stop midway going up again.
I don't have experience with programming sensors and motors so, while I have ideas about how to do this, I don't quite know how to actually program this. There's a cap on the top I can use to switch direction of travel but the end of the pipe is open. I'm thinking of using either height off the floor or the weight of the chain as a constant to mark position along the pole. I'm having trouble finding inexpensive sensors so I don't have specifics.
Right now, I'm toying with the idea of using the switch at the top as sort of an on/off for the pausing/not pausing code. Alternatively, I can use the constant measurement (height/weight) to count the cycles and switch on the code that way. Is this an effective way of doing this? I'm looking at a raspberry pi to control everything.
I have the following problem:
I want to do the statistics of data that need to be constantly increasing. For example, the number of visits to the link. After some time be restarted these visit and start again from the beginning. To have a continuous increase, want to do the statistics somewhere. For this purpose, use a site that does this. In his condition can be used to COUNTER, GAUGE, AVERAGE, ... a.. I want to use the COUNTER. The system is built on Nagios.
My question is how to use this COUNTER. I guess it is the same as that of the RRD. But I met some strange things in the creation of such a COUNTER.
I submit the values ' 1 ' then ' 2 ' and the chart to come up 3. When I do it doesn't work. After the restart, for example, and submit again 1 to become 4
Anyone dealt with these things tell me briefly how it works with this COUNTER.
I saw that the COUNTER is used for traffic on routers, etc, but I want to apply for a regular graph, which just increases.
The RRD data type COUNTER will convert the input data into a rate, by taking the difference between this sample and the last sample, and dividing by the time interval (note that data normalisation also takes place and this is dependent on the Interval setting of the RRD)
Thus, updating with a constantly increasing count will result in a rate-of-change value to be graphed.
If you want to see your graph actually constantly increasing, IE showing the actual count of packets transferred (for example) rather than the rate of transfer, you would need to use type GAUGE which assumes any rate conversion has already been done.
If you want to submit the rate values (EG, 2 in the last minute), but display the overall constantly increasing total (in other words, the inverse of how the COUNTER data type works), then you would need to store the values as GAUGE, and use a CDEF in your RRDgraph command of the form CDEF:x=y,PREV,+ to obtain the ongoing total. Of course you would only have this relative to the start of the graph time window; maybe a separate call would let you determine what base value to use.
As you use Nagios, you may like to investigate Nagios add-ons such as pnp4nagios which will handle much of the graphing for you.
Everyone knows that MRTG needs at least one value to be passed on it's input.
In per-target options MRTG has 'gauge', 'absolute' and default (with no options) behavior of 'what to do with incoming data'. Or, how to count it.
Lets look at the elementary, yet popular example :
We pass cumulative data from network interface statistics of 'how much packets were recieved by the interface'.
We take it from '/proc/net/dev' or look at 'ifconfig' output for certain network interface. The number of recieved bytes is increasing every time. Its cumulative.
So as i can imagine there could be two types of possible statistics:
1. How fast this value changes upon the time interval. In oher words - activity.
2. Simple, as-is growing graphic that just draw every new value per every minute (or any other time interwal)
First graphic will be saltatory (activity). Second will just grow up every time.
I read twice rrdtool's and MRTG's docs and can't understand which option mentioned above counts what.
I suppose (i am not sure) that 'gauge' draw values as is, without any differentiation calculations (good for measuring how much memory or cpu is used every 5 minutes). And default or 'absolute' behavior tryes to calculate the speed between nearby measures, but what's the differencr between last two?
Can you, guys, explain in a simple manner which behavior stands after which option of three options possible?
Thanks in advance.
MRTG assumes that everything is being measured as a rate (even if it isnt a rate)
Type 'gauge' assumes that you have already calculated the rate; thus, the provided value is stored as-is (after Data Normalisation). This is appropriate for things like CPU usage.
Type 'absolute' assumes the value passed is the count since the last update. Thus, the value is divided by the number of seconds since the last update to get a rate in thingies per second. This is rarely used, and only for certain unusual data sources that reset their value on being read - eg, a script that counts the number of lines in a log file, then truncates the log file.
Type 'counter' (the default) assumes the value passed is a constantly growing count, possibly that wraps around at 16 or 64 bits. The difference between the value and its previous value is divided by the number of seconds since the last update to get a rate in thingies per second. If it sees the value decrease, it will assume a counter wraparound at 16 or 64 bit. This is appropriate for something like network traffic counters, which is why it is the default behaviour (MRTG was originally written for network traffic graphs)
Type 'derive' is like 'counter', but will allow the counter to decrease (resulting in a negative rate). This is not possible directly in MRTG but you can manually create the necessary RRD if you want.
All types subsequently perform Data Normalisation to adjust the timestamp to a multiple of the Interval. This will be more noticeable for Gauge types where the value is small than for counter types where the value is large.
For information on this, see Alex van der Bogaerdt's excellent tutorial
I'm developing an app (XNA Game) for the XBOX, which is a pretty simple app. The startpage contains tiles with moving gif images. Those gif images are actually all png images, which gets loaded once by every tile, and put in an array. Then, using a defined delay, these images are played (using a counter which increases every time a delay passes).
This all works well, however, I noticed some small lag every x seconds in the movement of the GIF images. I then started to add some benchmarking stuff:
http://gyazo.com/f5fe0da3ff81bd45c0c52d963feb91d8
As you can see, the FPS is pretty low for such a simple program (This is in debug, when running the app from the Xbox itself, I get an avg of 62fps).
2 important settings:
Graphics.SynchronizeWithVerticalRetrace = false;
IsFixedTimeStep = false;
Changing isFixedTimeStep to true increases the lag. The settings tile has wheels which rotate, and you can see the wheels go back a little every x seconds. The same counts for SynchronizeWVR, also increases lag.
I noticed a connection between the lag and the moment the garbage collector kicks in, every time it kicks in, there is a lag...
Don't mind the MAX HMU(Heap memory usage), as this is takes the amount of the start, the avg is more realistic.
Here is another screen from the performance monitor, however I don't understand much from this tool, first time I'm using it... Hope it helps:
http://gyazo.com/f70a3d400657ac61e6e9f2caaaf17587
After a little research I found the culprit.
I have custom components that all derive from GameComponent, and who get added to the Component list of the main Game class.
This was one (of a total of 2) major problem, causing to update everything that wasn't needing an update. (The draw method was the only one who kept the page state in mind, and only drew if needed).
I fixed this by using different "screens" (or pages as I called them), wich are the only components who derive from GameComponent.
Then I only update the page wich is active, and the custom components on that page also get updated. Problem fixed.
The second big problem, is the following;
I made a class which helps me on positioning stuff on the screen, relative that is, with percentages and stuff like that. Parent containers, aligns & v-aligns etc etc.
That class had properties, for size & vectors, but instead of saving the calculated value in a backing field, I recalculated them everytime I accessed a property. But calculating complex stuff like that uses references (to parent & child containers for example) wich made it very hard for the CLR, because it had alot of work to do.
I now rebuilt the whole positioning class to a fully functional optimized class, with different flags for recalculating when necessairy, and instead of drops of 20fps, I now get an average of 170+fps!
I have some serial code that I have started to parallelize using Intel's TBB. My first aim was to parallelize almost all the for loops in the code (I have even parallelized for within for loop)and right now having done that I get some speedup.I am looking for more places/ideas/options to parallelize...I know this might sound a bit vague without having much reference to the problem but I am looking for generic ideas here which I can explore in my code.
Overview of algo( the following algo is run over all levels of the image starting with shortest and increasing width and height by 2 each time till you reach actual height and width).
For all image pairs starting with the smallest pair
For height = 2 to image_height - 2
Create a 5 by image_width ROI of both left and right images.
For width = 2 to image_width - 2
Create a 5 by 5 window of the left ROI centered around width and find best match in the right ROI using NCC
Create a 5 by 5 window of the right ROI centered around width and find best match in the left ROI using NCC
Disparity = current_width - best match
The edge pixels that did not receive a disparity gets the disparity of its neighbors
For height = 0 to image_height
For width = 0 to image_width
Check smoothness, uniqueness and order constraints*(parallelized separately)
For height = 0 to image_height
For width = 0 to image_width
For disparity that failed constraints, use the average disparity of
neighbors that passed the constraints
Normalize all disparity and output to screen
Just for some perspective, it may not always be worthwhile to parallelize something.
Just because you have a for loop where each iteration can be done independently of each other, doesn't always mean you should.
TBB has some overhead for starting those parallel_for loops, so unless you're looping a large number of times, you probably shouldn't parallelize it.
But, if each loop is extremely expensive (Like in CirrusFlyer's example) then feel free to parallelize it.
More specifically, look for times where the overhead of the parallel computation is small relative to the cost of having it parallelized.
Also, be careful about doing nested parallel_for loops, as this can get expensive. You may want to just stick with paralellizing the outer for loop.
The silly answer is anything that is time consuming or iterative. I use Microsoft's .NET v4.0 Task Parallel Library and one of the interesting things about their setup is its "expressed parallelism." An interesting term to describe "attempted parallelism." Though, your coding statements may say "use the TPL here" if the host platform doesn't have the necessary cores it will simply invoke the old fashion serial code in its place.
I have begun to use the TPL on all my projects. Any place there are loops especially (this requires that I design my classes and methods such that there are no dependencies between the loop iterations). But any place that might have been just good old fashion multithreaded code I look to see if it's something I can place on different cores now.
My favorite so far has been an application I have that downloads ~7,800 different URL's to analyze the contents of the pages, and if it finds information that it's looking for does some additional processing .... this used to take between 26 - 29 minutes to complete. My Dell T7500 workstation with dual quad core Xeon 3GHz processors, with 24GB of RAM, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit edition now crunches the entire thing in about 5 minutes. A huge difference for me.
I also have a publish / subscribe communication engine that I have been refactoring to take advantage of TPL (especially on "push" data from the Server to Clients ... you may have 10,000 client computers who have stated their interest in specific things, that once that event occurs, I need to push data to all of them). I don't have this done yet but I'm REALLY LOOKING FORWARD to seeing the results on this one.
Food for thought ...