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I'm optimizing a directx graphics application to take advantage of nVidia's SLI technology. I'm currently investigating some of the techniques mentioned in their 'Best Practices' web page, but wanted to know what advice/experience any of you have had with this?
Thanks!
This is not really an answer to you question, more of a comment on SLI.
My understanding is that SLI is only really a cost-effective means of gaining performance when you buy two cards right away, which few people actually do. Many people buy an SLI motherboard and card thinking it will give them a better upgrade path down the road, but the reality is that by the time you get to that point, it is going to be cheaper to buy a new, faster card, than it is to duplicate the one you already have just to get SLI going.
Just a thought before you pour too much energy into it. If you have a requirement to support SLI, then that's what you have to do. But personally, I would rather see optimization energy put towards non-SLI implementations.
The one thing SLI can do that having two non-SLIed graphics can't do is Nvidia Surround.
In some games this will allow you to play the game at 1080x(3x1920). So you can play the game on three monitors as if it was one.
The disadvantage that I have found to SLI is
A) It limits the number of monitors you can have running at once. Example:
I have two geforce 560 gtx ti's. When not using SLI I can have 4 independent monitors running. With SLI I can only have 2, or 3 monitors running in Surround.
B) Because when you run 3 monitors in Surround, it treats them as one large monitor, if you use the Window Dock left and right, the window will take up 1.5 monitors. Which is not only annoying but also makes the feature almost useless.
Right now what I do is turn on SLI when I am about to run my game, and when I am not gaming have it set to "Activate all Displays" in Nvidia Control Panel. Though you can't change back and forth with applications like Chrome open. So before I launch a game I have to close everything... Working for a better solution.
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One of my school project is to make a realtime multiplayers webpage game, I am currently having difficulty to decide if I should go Pixi.js or Phaser for the game graphic and control, could anyone talk a little bit about what they are good at and better that each other?
Phaser uses Pixi for rendering, albeit an older and heavily modified version of it. Current versions of Pixi may give you better performance, but you'll have to implement by hand what's readily available in Phaser.
They are different by that Pixi is a rendering engine and Phaser is a game framework.
I'll quote Rich, the creator of Phaser:
Off the top of my head, here is what Phaser adds onto Pixi:
Choice of physics systems (arcade or full body)
A Game World and a Camera which can pan around it
Tilemap support
A particle system
Sound support (both web audio and legacy audio)
More advanced input handling (input priority, drag and drop, etc)
Keyboard and Gamepad inputs
Scale Manager to handle game / scene resizing + full screen support
Tween Manager for tweening game objects, hooked into the core clock (so it pauses properly when your game does)
Asset loader (supporting all kinds of file types) and Cache
A State Manager to let you swap between game states easily
Game clock + custom timers + timer events
And probably lots more I forgot. As someone has commented though, it depends entirely on what you want to make. Lots of people use Pixi who don't make games at all. However as this is a game dev forum, I'm going to suspect you do :)
I guess just try it. If you don't like it put it down to experience and just use Pixi "raw".
Source: http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/12656-phaser-pixi/#comment-72893
Depending on how much you can wait, you may actually wait to try Phaser 3 (Lazer), which is currently in the works, and will have its own rendering engine. I think, however, that learning the current version of Phaser is a good starting point, and many things in Lazer will be the same.
Phaser gives you a full game framework. Pixi is a rendering engine as Kamen described above.
My idea, if you are a beginner on HTML5 game development, you can have two different approaches;
If you have a product ahead of you to complete, Phaser gives you more tools and therefore speed. It is the biggest sea to swim in for HTML5 game development. But it has its own limitations. Off course you can write your own tools but at the end it is a framework and like every framework it forces you to use its own flow and tools to run smoothly. It would require some time for a developer to understand its flaw, pinpoint their needs and if Phaser doesn't meet them, implement their own solutions. But many people use Phaser and most possibly, there is an answer to all of the problems for a beginner. At the beginning they were using Pixi.js as renderer but now they have their own.
If you want to learn by digging deep into HTML5 renderers and game development, starting by using Pixi.js might be a better decision. As mentioned, Pixi.js is only the renderer. It has cool features but it needs more development upon it to make games. But it also gives you the freedom. You mostly won't have to deal with renderers(WebGL or Canvas) but rest is fully up to you. Personally, I started with Pixi.js, I knew about Phaser but I didn't look deeper into it and wrote my own framework. After my framework got into some point on development, I checked Phaser and I realized that what I had in mind was mostly already existed on Phaser. But still it gave me a deeper information about HTML5 game development.
I am making an awesome game using Cocos3D.
Right now i am just trying to improve performance, and i was hoping anyone out here has some good answers.
My main idea improve performance is to put the physics calculations done by Bullet Physics Engine on a separate thread.
I know this means that the physics calculations won't be in sync with the rendering, but that might just be the better option(the alternative being low performance).
Here are some screenshots of my game, so you guys can have an idea of what type of game i am making.
Please take a look at the frame rate on the bottom-left of the screenshots.
As you can see, the frame rate is not so impressive with 10 enemies in the scene.
I know putting all the interface controls (joystick,health bars, spell buttons) in a CCSpriteBatchNode will help performance, and i am going to do that later on.
This was tested on an iPhone 4.
I also tested it on Samsung Galaxy s4, and it was about twice as fast.
Anyway, the main question here is... will putting physics on a separate thread improve performance, or at least will it make the rendering smoother, because it's a bit laggy now.
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I´ve a question according sensor programming. I´m searching a sensor that tells me, for example, if a glass of water is more than half full. I´ve already googled that, but I can´t find anything.
So my questions are:
Where can I buy such a sensor?
What programming language do I need to control such a sensor?
Thanks for answers..
Update from comments below one of the answers
What I really need it for is a big container, in which is some corn. I
want to use the sensor to tell me, just as the corn is under a defined
point of the container. So that I can calculate, at which time I have
to refill the container.
Your sensor could be a level sensor. There are several principles on which level sensors work (see here). Some of them will work with granular solid material. (For example, an ultrasonic range sensor could shoot a pulse at the surface of corn mass, detect the reflection, measure round trip time of flight.)
... or it could be a proximity sensor, as somebody had suggested above.
... or it could be a weight sensor. Here's an application note on weighing vessels.
If you google "level sensor for grains", you may find something useful.
What language to use would depend on what you will connect connect the sensor to. If it will be connected to a microcontroller, the language would be C. If it will be connected to a PC, then it would depend a lot on the particular model of the sensor.
By the way, here's a web group dedicated to sensors.
I would imagine you could use a similar mechanism to a car's fuel tank. Have a mechanism that stays afloat in the container with an attached arm and a magnet on it, then using a Hall sensor you can observe the change in hall reading as the floating part rises or falls within the container.
"What I really need it for is a big container, in which is some corn."
Perhaps one of those sensors that are used to ensure garage entry ways are clear before an automatic garage door is allowed to close. It uses an optical beam of light.
Do you know the size of the glass in question? You could just get a scale and work out how heavy the glass would be when it is half full of water. My guess is that you could probably find a sensor that could do this and it would most likely need to be written in C.
This guy seems to be having the same problems:
http://forums.makezine.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=6052
Good luck.
Also check out Arduino for micro controller electronics.
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OK, so back before ice age, I recall having a Sinclair ZX80 PC (with TV as a display, and a cassette tape player as storage device).
Obviously, the programs on cassette tapes made a very distinct sound (er... noise) when playing the tape... I was wondering if someone still had those tapes?
The reason (and the reason this Q is programming related) is that IIRC different languages made somewhat different pitched noises, but I would like to run the tape and listen myself to confirm if that was really the case...
I have the tapes but they've been stored in the garage at my parents' house and the last thirty years hasn't been kind to them.
You can get images here though: http://www.zx81.nl/dload if that's any use. Perhaps there is a tool out there for converting from the bytes back to the audio ;)
Edit: Perhaps here: http://ldesoras.free.fr/prod.html#src_ay3hacking
On the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, tape output is achieved by the CPU toggling the output line level between a high state and a low state. Input is achieved by having the CPU watch an input line level. The very low level of operation was one of Sir Clive's cost-saving measures; rival machines like the BBC Micro had dedicated hardware for serialisation and deserialisation of data, so the CPU would just say "output 0xfe" and then the hardware would make the relevant noises and raise an interrupt when it was ready for the next byte. The BBC Micro specifically implements the Kansas City Standard, whereas the Sinclair machines in every instance use whatever adhoc format best fitted the constraints of the machine.
The effect of that is that while almost every other machine that uses tape has tape output that sounds much the same from one program to the next by necessity, programs on a Sinclair machine could choose to use whatever encoding they wanted, which is the principle around which a thousand speed loaders were written. It's therefore not impossible that different programs would output distinctively different sounds. Some even used the symmetry between the tape input and output to do crude digital sampling, editing and playback, though they were never more than novelties for obvious reasons.
That being said, the base units of the ZX80 and ZX81 contained just 1kb RAM so it's quite likely that programmers would just use the ROM routines for reading and writing data, due to space constraints if nothing else. Then the sound differences would just be on account of characteristic data, as suggested by slugster.
I know these come up on auction sites like Ebay quite frequently - if you want to buy them yourself. If you get someone else who owns one to listen then you are going to get their subjective opinion :)
In any case, the language used to save it would be the secondary cause of the pitch changes - it will be related to the data. IOW you could probably create a straight binary data file that sounded very similar to a BASIC program (the BASIC would have been saved as text, as it is interpreted).
I know the threads old but... I was playing about with something similar last night and I've got a wav of an old zx81 game if you're still interested? pm me and I'll post it somewhere.
You can use something like http://www.wintzx.fr/ or pick something from http://www.worldofspectrum.org/utilities.html#tzxtools to convert an emulator file to an audio file and then you can just play it on your PC. Some tools also allow you to play the file directly. Emulator files can be found at http://www.zx81.nl/files.html and many other places.
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Where can I find free sound effects for a game?
http://www.freesound.org/
Also, archive.org may have some stuff.
sfxr is a great tool if you want to generate vintage arcade sounds. It can generate all sorts of cool laser, explosions & blip sounds. You can generate random sounds or adjust existing ones until you get just what your looking for. There is Mac port as well called cfxr
Happy tweaking :)
Free Sound Effects and Royalty Free Sound Effects
Tintagel's Free Sound File Archive (dead link)
Copyright and Public Domain Music (dead link)
Sounds Effects and Music
eHow - How to Find Public Domain Sound Effects
Essentially, you want to be searching for "public domain" sound effects - these are sound effects that are made for the intention of publicly sharing, i.e. they have no copyright and you can use them however you like. Those were just the top results for a Google search for "public domain game sound effects".
Sorry to piggyback off Google here, but that's really your best bet; just keep exploring til you find what you need!
I know that a lot of people use Flashkit for free sfx in Flash videos, at least.
When Soundsnap went pro, I started using:
freesfx.co.uk
It's Creative Commons based and all sounds are free to use plus there are somthing like 1,500 sounds in there too currently. I have used several pro sites in the past and I must say that everything on this site is just as high quality.
I suggest you also this very nice website : http://www.lasonotheque.org/en/
Lots of CC-licensed music and sound-effects on Kongregate Collabs.
Also, the free utility sfxr and its Mac version cfxr are terrific for quickly-generating game sounds.
My honest advice is buy a decent microphone and buy some cantelope
If you need voice acting for your game, the guy who voiced Serious Sam is in need of cash and will do lines for $1/word.
From his site:
Hey there. My name is John J. Dick. You may know me as the voice actor who portrays 'Serious Sam'. I'm also working in Dallas as a strip club DJ. Barely making enough to keep my head above water. In fact, I'm not even doing that.
Here's the skinny, I'm in debt... bad. $20,000 in credit card debt, bank overdrawn, behind on bills, etc. Got burglarized back in February, so I don't even have anything left to show for my debt. It's a long story how I got into this situation, if you're curious I'll tell you the details. Point being, though, I'm in a position where I'm desperate to pay my bills off in any way I can.
freesound
Soundsnap
Free Sound Effects - SFXsource.com