Side scrolling Arena Cooking game about Girls, WWIII, Free running and Facism with Fractal art and a Funk soundtrack

...What? I can't even think of anything funny to say about that. It's just absurd.

That's not true -- you're going to need bounds regardless! For instance Little Big Planet's level editor definitely doesn't allow unlimited creation of objects -- if it did, physics/collision/graphics/etc might grind to a halt. So instead it introduces a "temperature/thermometer" to indicate how many more objects can be added to a level before it's "full". There's also a per-object max number of polygon edges, which IMHO indicates an "allocate max number of segs for each polygon" approach, similar to what Box2d does.

You do realize that Little Big Planet knows exactly what its bounds are because it's an Xbox game, right? It's a console; Everyone who plays it has the exact same system specs. This is not true with PC; Sure there's an average upper limit you can avoid going over like 1 gigabyte of RAM but the nice thing about PCs is that they evolve over time. If your game allocates too much memory for some people, next year, they might already have more.

[Team Fortress 2]

Some Team Fortress 2 if I feel like it, and right now I'm replaying Crash Bash again.

Waiting for updates to Dwarf Fortress, Left 4 Dead and OpenTTD...

Never got an answer from Ivan or Core XII, which I guess mean they were convinced by my post. Either that or they disconnected before losing so as not to ruin their stats

I just got bored of the discussion. If you want it so bad, sure. (by the way, if you look at my name, you can see that the i's are small, not capitalized. It's Xii, not XII)

Dynamic allocations in itself isn't evil. However, the normal pattern of allocating into naked pointers and deallocating "when done" or at scope end etc is dangerous and bug-prone. [...] the habit of using naked pointers will lead to memory leaks. Using naked pointers will lead to code not exception-safe. Also, storing new'd pointers in STL containers is a bad idea that generally exacerbate both these problems. Passing pointers as parameters will risk passing invalid or null pointers.

Looks to me like the reasons behind your argument are those of pure user error. Yeah, I completely agree, if you have no frigging idea what you're doing, you should probably play it safe and let the computer, which doesn't make mistakes, take care of it for you.

On the other hand, if you do know what you're doing, you'll save resources by doing it yourself.

It is also good habit of using static allocation as often as possible, since that will allow the compiler to pre-allocate space, determine memory use beforehand, and avoid the dynamic allocation overhead.

...And force you to recompile whenever you change something, kill the possibility for user-created content, etc.

[you]

I'm not sure what you mean you can do a much better job than smart pointers - they are reference counted not GCed, so assuming you haven't screwed up, they will de-allocate at exactly the correct opportunity?

And here is the problem. Who knows best what the exact, correct opportunity is, you or the computer? You're essentially delegating this task to your program at the cost of resources. When you know where to deallocate your stuff, no memory or CPU is wasted by the program trying to figure it out.

when programming C++ correctly you'll actually very seldom use dynamic memory allocation (new and delete). When studying C++ make a point of reading up on references and if you ever need to dynamically allocate an object with new, always store that pointer in a smart pointer or at least an auto_ptr.

What? I don't agree with any of this. Most if not all applications allocate objects dynamically - If they don't, you're doing it wrong. You're not supposed to know everything at compile time, you're supposed to load object definitions from scripts to have them easily editable without recompilation.

Also, what's with the smart pointers? If you have any idea what you're doing you can do a much better job manually deallocating your stuff.

I still think it's too broad a category. Most of my music falls within this criteria and I'm sure as hell not posting all of it. (incidentally, I should, but can't be assed to)

Yikes.

I understand now what you're saying, but my point still stands: Most game music is always atmospheric/moody as you described, and very rarely this movie-style cue music; So rare in fact that I cannot think of any other examples of it than what is present in cutscenes. Some games employ highly dynamic music that changes based on situation but for this discussion I think we're ignoring those since they're not really representable in static form.

As I said earlier, 90% of my music is like that. Perhaps we should post criteria, then each post our music based on it? Like someone says "jungle", we post jungle music.

It looks kind of boring, another physics-based gimmick game. Reminds me of Gish in many ways... it seems you can change the physical properties of the ball in a few ways, etc. only instead of a ball of goo, it's a ball of... glass, or something.

That's not to say it's going to be a bad game for sure, but I don't have high expectations at all.

I second the recommendation for vectors. The General Polygon Clipper can easily make holes for you.

If you're decided on pixels though, use a 1-bit array to save memory, don't need all 8 bits of an alpha mask.

[difference]

I think he probably means the difference between cues and background music with an emphasis on very minimalistic background music. Atmospheric music is also a broad term to loosely describe a form of soundscape created with music as opposed to a blaringly stark tune or theme describing the level/scene. In effect, it is summing up the 'feeling' of a moment and gently reminding the player or subtly deepening whatever emotion may be being portrayed by other media. It is also often about lending itself to a certain base emotion without being deep, meaningful, clever (or intricate although both these terms are a little wrong as it can be clever and often intricate but rarely at a virtuosically fast pace), in-your-face or brash.

Thanks for trying, but I'm still confused. What you said applies to all game music I'm aware of (that's based on an environment rather than a scene, as established).

Especially the underlined part is confusing... if he means the difference, that doesn't really say which one he means, only that there's supposedly a difference.

No-one would dare say any of this stuff to me in person for fear of getting a broken nose.

I was with you right up until this point. You would use violence on another person because of a disagreement? I don't believe you have a high IQ yourself because a smart person wouldn't make such threats, no matter how pissed off he was.

I think they're a bit boring, repetitive and chaotic. You should listen to the Warioland 2 soundtrack for great inspiration. Concentrate less on saturating the frequency band with sounds and focus on making catchy melodies. Production quality is important but doesn't make good music on its own and just comes out as messy, study music theory first. But don't get discouraged by my harsh criticism, you have a good start.

[is]

Today, I finally gave up trying to use PyGame for doing MP3s, and started using (compressed) WAVs instead.

MP3 is compressed WAV, so I wonder what you're using now.

Oh. Now I got it. Should've called it environmental music. Well that pretty much covers 90% of all my music ever made. Where would you like me to start? lol

Sorry hexageek but I never just "do" stuff if I don't understand them. I'm a perfectionist.

Incidentally, anyone who does a lot of programming should seriously consider using an editor that can map any operation across multiple lines. The easiest way in most editors is to use a macro. Go to the start of the first line, start recording, do whatever it is, move to the start of the next line, then stop recording. Now replaying the macro will get your task done. (Start, stop and replay should be bound to single keystrokes.)

Notepad++ does have macros, but I don't find any use for it. The only multi-line operation I usually have to do is indenting.

What about IndieLib ? Is it as reliable as SDL, Allegro and SFML ?

I've been mostly using SDL so far, but I was thinking about trying IndieLib for my next project.

Last I checked, IndieLib isn't cross-platform.

I think he means anything other than effect sounds,walking sounds etc... think of kyntt stories or aquaria soundtracks

That's an insane statement. "Any music other than sound effects." The hell? It's like saying... Any fruits other than vegetables. Makes no sense.

So by atmosphere/mood music you actually simply mean, game music?

Uh oh after years of tedious coding I only now found out Notepad++ can indent (and un-indent) as many lines of code as you have selected at once. I used to manually go line by line indenting when the nesting levels changed.

This will make future coding much easier!

[all]

Then sure. Environmental themes as well.

Damn, now I have absolutely no idea what kind of music you're talking about, because all game music is emotional and/or environmental.