My upload rate is 1.2KB/s.

Get this man a real internet connection, stat!

I've got a few beta testers and I'm pushing out updated versions of the exe and occasionally other files all the time.

Seems to me like it'd be more practical to bundle everything together in every release you make, rather than including only some of the files and running the risk of differently-versioned files getting jumbled up together. If your game is big and bandwidth is a concern, though, that might not be ideal...

There are a number of different problems you might be trying to solve here, each with their own set of concerns. Do you need a solution for end users to apply patches to your game and data, or just for testers for the moment? Are you worried about the game code and data getting out of sync because of content changes, or file format changes?

What I normally do is version both the executable, and the file format of my data. The executable knows what file format versions it can read, and bails out if it encounters one that's too new (or too old if I haven't included backward-compatible parsing). If I were doing a game with a large amount of content, I'd probably give each individual data file its own version number separate from the format version, but I haven't yet written a game that's content-heavy enough to need that.

My initial idea was that I would just move all characters using game logic, never anything controlled by animation, but it seemed like that would be very difficult here.

I'd think of it like this: Your animation contains data that relates to both visuals and game logic. Your renderer would deal with switching between sprite frames, but not do anything with logical movement; your game logic would do the movement, and not worry about sprite frames. So, in addition to the sequence of images, your animation would have a list of per-frame offsets that would get applied to the character's position by your simulation code. Assuming both the simulation and the visuals have a consistent concept of fixed-length frames, you can run the two independently using their respective data sets and everything will line up appropriately.

Edit: Exactly what BorisTheBrave said while I was typing!

Cracked explains how to poop correctly (#7): http://www.cracked.com/article_19121_7-basic-things-you-wont-believe-youre-all-doing-wrong.html

[7cm]

there's a huge(like 7cm, with legs) mosquito in my room that circles around my head.

I don't think that's a mosquito... If it is, that's incredibly terrifying.

I get along better with insects than most people, but mosquitos are my mortal enemy. Wouldn't complain if the whole species somehow went extinct.

For those who don't understand the long poop times, it's not so much that poop is coming out of the butt the entire time. It's just that some comes out, and you know there's more so you can't get up, but you can't force that kinda thing or you'll get hemorrhoids. So you just have to wait and be patient. It might be an age thing, too. Wait until you're in your mid 20s.

I'm in my late 20s already, and having no such problems. I do remember now that as a child it took me a fair bit longer, but that went away as I got older. No idea if it was a subtle diet change or what.

I never really understood people who were in and out of the bathroom to take a shit in under 2 minutes. For me, it's always been a relaxing time to draw or read or whatever, and I always averaged around 20 minutes. These days I bring my laptop in there with me (was actually taking a dump the first time I found this thread!) - It's fun and convenient to squeeze one out in the morning while checking your email, etc.

This is a completely foreign concept to me.

The smell doesn't make you want to get out of there as fast as possible?

This is a BM we're talking about. Popping a squat on the porcelain throne doesn't eat up very much of my mental resources. Pooping doesn't occupy my mind. I am able to rely on instinct for voiding my colon. This leaves me free to enjoy a little portable gaming while I'm on the pot.

It's not a matter of concentration, it's just that I spend less time sitting still than I do wiping and washing my hands afterward. You'll have to set down your game for that anyway, so getting an extra 20 seconds of play time just doesn't seem worth the effort of carrying your device to the bathroom (it's REALLY hard to play while walking, too), using it for a bit, finding a good place within reach to set it down where it won't get wet or dirty, then carrying it back to where you were playing it before.

If it somehow took me 15 minutes to do my business, maybe it'd be a different story...

I think this is the most in-depth discussion I've ever had about poop.

How does it choose to combine the rhs parameters as strings rather than ints to give the result 32 rather than 5?  Does it depend on the order the datatypes are combined or do certain datatypes always take precedence?

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/operators.html#addition

You wouldn't be able to pull that kind of stunt down there so why pull it up here?

It's important to understand how this stuff works even if you don't use it, so that you can debug it if you do it by accident or encounter it in someone else's code. Also, since ActionScript doesn't have sprintf/sscanf, you do kinda need this to perform equivalent string<->integer conversions. You could just sprinkle typecasts everywhere, sure, but why not understand it properly and use that knowledge instead of doing it blindly?

Many years ago, I didn't understand how arithmetic operator precedence worked, and I'd put parentheses around absolutely every mathematical expression in my code. Once I learned how it worked and stopped using parentheses except where necessary, my code became far more readable, and I was able to work with other people's code much better.

Wow these kinda high level managed languages can be really error prone when you're used to low level languages which usualy throw errors or warnings at you when you try and do silly things like adding an integer to a string :p

For reals. Debugging XML parsing in AS3 is pretty nightmarish.

I'd have thought you'd need to to levelXml.Entities[0].EnemySpawn instead of levelXml.Entities.EnemySpawn, though. It works without the array subscript?

(WTF forum, how do I write \[0\] on its own without it turning into

• ?)

It doesn't have quite the depth you imagined, but it exists.
http://www.donutgames.com/play/sunday_lawn
But then again you can search for pretty much any game concept, and there's a casual flash version somewhere...

Neat! Yeah, not quite like what I was imagining, but close enough I guess. It's a simple enough concept that I'd have been surprised if it didn't already exist in some form.

I wrote a bit of code that can save an image as a gif. I just now got it to work with an example single-frame image, let's see how it handles animated ones.

[...]

Neat!

I like how that entire post is a roller coaster ride between happy and grumpy.

You all must poop differently than I do somehow. Doing something else at the same time has never seemed remotely practical to me.

Yep, that sounds about right.

For me, an event listener is a way to keep two pieces of code decoupled. An event dispatching system allows the module which is dispatching events not to know of the module which is receiving them. The real-world problem this solves is one of maintainability; the more coupled your code is, the more it'll turn into a big ball of mud and become impossible to change after a while.

It can also be a performance benefit. Here's an example: I have a gamepad library, which includes an event dispatcher object to which you can attach listeners to be notified when a gamepad is connected or disconnected. Multiple parts of the calling code may want to be notified when either of these things happens. The alternative would be to poll the library frequently, which adds up to unnecessary work when the event dispatcher implementation can just call each listener function once when an interesting event happens.

It is something to be used sparingly, but it has its place.

so I was wondering why my code kept getting stuck

Code:

Function padbefore$(str$,char$,length%)
Local ret$=str
While str.length<length
ret=char+ret
Wend
Return ret
End Function

What an odd-looking language. What is it?

GLUT is a good choice for learning, as long as you're OK with ditching it and moving on to something else when you want to write an app to release to other people.

I'm completely confused at ThemsAllTook rolling out his own object-oriented system in C. He's only setting himself up for code that is harder to read, less flexibility than the C++ implementation, and likely less performance. If you don't want to use certain C++ features, don't use them. Write your same C code and use C++ specific features where you need them. There is no penalty for not using a feature in C++.

You're right about the drawbacks of my system. I've considered switching to C++ many times. It's mostly a lot of little annoyances stopping me. The biggest thing is that I use automatic typecasts to and from void * absolutely everywhere. I'd have to either clutter up my code with a huge number of explicit typecasts to get it to compile as C++, or fundamentally change paradigms in a lot of places. The C++ mentality is "if you're using void *, you're doing it wrong", which directly clashes with my way of coding. From what I understand, compilation and linking is also much slower with C++, so I theoretically get quicker modify/run turnaround times with C.

Shaders are so awesome that it might be worth dropping GL 1.x support, even if there are a few people who wouldn't be able to play your game without getting new hardware.

You mean object oriented in C++?

Nope. Here's what my object system looks like:
http://sacredsoftware.net/svn/misc/StemLibProjects/stemobject/trunk/source/stemobject/StemObject.h
http://sacredsoftware.net/svn/misc/StemLibProjects/stemobject/trunk/ReadMe.txt

C is far more elegant and uncluttered than C++

C99 and C11 also have quite a few really neat features that C++ lacks.

Exactly. I just find it to be a much nicer and more expressive language. C++ is OK, but just doesn't feel pleasant to use in the way that C does.

I once planned out a game about mowing lawns. Your score would depend on speed, how many times you overlapped the same section of grass, time taken, etc. You'd have to watch how full your grass bag is and empty it occasionally, watch your gas so you don't run out, and things like that. I still think it could be made into an interesting game, but I'm probably never going to come back to the idea.