Rick

oh, I thought it did this automatically. My bad.

I have to imagine it's not that cut and dry though. I would assume research has been done somewhere that says otherwise, or why would these companies bother to put so much into piracy for games. I have to imagine there is a certain % that would have normally purchased it but because they can get it for free they will. I just wonder what % that normally is and if it's that big of a % to validate jumping through hopes. I mean think of what Ubisoft had to do here. They had to spend money developing this connection site/process, and money maintaining. Is that cost really saving them from the % that would have stolen their game?

Still working on this. You wouldn't believe how deep the rabbit hole is with this in terms of open source libraries. Since I'm trying to compile all these as static into my 1 dll that will have everything, I have to recompile all the dependency libraries CEGUI has and there are a lot and they aren't all straight forward compiles. Once I'm finished though there will be 1 dll, 1 library, and 1 header file to include in your project to get CEGUI working. Plus I'll create a class that helps encapsulate things to make it easier.

Who doesn't pay to have an internet connection? Don't we all?

Someone forgot to tell Ubisoft then, because they felt the need to require an online connection.

I just want to make it clear that I'm not going to do this. I already purchased the game and will just deal with the requirement of being online. But it does raise an interesting issue.

So I just purchased Assassin's Creed 2 for the PC. As I was watching a review I notice that to prevent piracy you have to be connected to the internet to play this game. I don't particularly mind this myself, but I'm sure I will when my net is down and I can't play, but I was curious as to what everyone else thinks about that? I can see it being a trend for the single player PC games in the future. I think the interesting part about this is that eventually console games will be just as easy to pirate. With the way consoles are slowly becoming PC's, it won't be long before the ability to just as easily get downloads of games and use them on the console. There must be a better way to prevent this on the PC than requiring being online. [EDII] Also, think of a game like this. I notice there is already a crack that allows you to play without being logged into their site. So if I pay for this game, but use the crack am I really a pirate? I mean they are blurring the lines for their customers here. They are making their customers have a moral battle here and I think that's way worse than pirating. People who are paying for your goods almost have the right to use such a crack. They aren't stealing your game, but they also think it's not moral to require such measures.

f stands for float. It's the same thing, just a different way in passing the parameters. He should have just used the same name. Lua doesn't care if you use the same name with different parameters. It can figure it out.

So in these types of games they often have areas of the map that are just blacked out. In this screenshot you can see the sides are blacked out and the black out even overhangs on the right side. How would you go about getting this effect? On the left side you can see there is kind of a top to that wall, but then it fades away into black. How do you suppose one could get this effect in LE?

Here is a quick try with not having access to a compiler and my kid screaming. This would be the general idea anyway. class Plane { private: double blend, frame, frameend, framebegin; TVec3 meshrotation_old; public: Plane() { blend = 0.0; frame = 0.0; frameend = 0.0; framebegin = 0.0; meshrotation_old = Vec3(0); } void HowToFly (TMesh airplane) { TVec3 altitude = EntityPosition(airplane, 0); TVec3 meshrotation; // Turning animation meshrotation = EntityRotation (airplane,1); if ((meshrotation.Y > (meshrotation_old.Y+AppSpeed()*1.0)) && altitude.Y > 0.5) { // no banking when near the ground framebegin=80.0; // turning to left keyframes frameend=81.0; blend=blend+(AppSpeed()*0.05); } else if (((meshrotation.Y+AppSpeed()*1.0) < meshrotation_old.Y) && altitude.Y > 0.5) { // no banking when near the ground framebegin=60.0; // turning to right keyframes frameend=61.0; blend=blend+(AppSpeed()*0.05); } else { blend=blend-(AppSpeed()*0.025); } // level flight frame=AppTime()/10.0; frame=fmodf(frame,1.0-0.0)+0.0; Animate(airplane,frame,1.0,0,true); // blended animation frame=AppTime()/10.0; frame=fmodf(frame,frameend-framebegin)+framebegin; Animate(airplane,frame,blend,0,true); blend=max(blend,0.0); blend=min(blend,1.0); meshrotation_old = meshrotation; } }; // There are a number of better ways to create all of these, but this is the easiest to start learning Plane plane1, plane2, plane3;

Yeah, in this case it would basically act the same. Statics just retain their value from where they were defined. So if you define one in a function, every time that function gets called it'll be that same exact variable with the same value it had the last time it was called. I almost never use static variables inside functions because it's almost always a bad design idea. There are other uses for static variables though inside classes that make them useful. Like in a Singleton pattern. Let me know if you need any help with the C++ class. I love helping people learn C++

That won't work for multiple planes. They would all still be sharing the same variable, which I thought isn't what you were looking for? If you have 10 planes, you would need 10 different static variables in that method and know which one to use. Otherwise they would all share that 1 static. It's not really even an option in my view.

If you want to stick with just C, you would create structs for each plane that has the variables per plane that is needed. I would use C++ and a class for this though. Make a plane class that has all the variables/functions you need. class Plane { private: // variables for this plane go here public: void HowToFly() { } };

Did you skip crawling when you were a baby and went right to running? Learn the syntax for whatever language you want to use first. I know it sucks because you just want to dive right into your game, but you honestly won't come close to the complex game idea that I know you have in your head without learning a language first. Game programming is not ideal for learning syntax of a language. Google for a tutorial of the language you wish to use.

lol I had to look up what Noughts and Crosses was. You mean Tic Tac Toe Sadly, from what I know, there isn't a step by step game making tutorial. There are just tutorials that show the various concepts LE has. You are probably best going through those first. Then you use those concepts to make any game you want.

The biggest one that I can think of, and am trying to get working, is a GUI. Being able to create a GUI via drop and drag and have it have the actual code right there in the real project would be nice. But now that you mention it, there could be far more functionality in terms of widgets/controls. Like in .NET there are controls that have no UI (database controls, timer, etc). This could also be the case with LE. It basically becomes an easier way to share code. Much like how a "Thingoid" is used today. This feature started with VS 2008 and I just got it this weekend, so I'll be hitting it hard. I already have CEGUI working with LE, and am in the process of compiling it into 1 DLL and 1 lib so it's easier for people to use. Once I get that working I'm going to work on this ide idea and see where it goes.

Try rebooting your PC. I know sometimes this happens to me and a reboot fixes it.

I was about to say Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the .NET platform. I used it every single day of my life. It's by far the most easiest language to get any UI tool or even stuff like web service, ftp, database. All that stuff is where it excels.

You have realize that at the core of these visual tools and engines things will still be using C/C++. So even while what you are seeing at the surface is a high level visual tool, and maybe some day that will be the norm, at the core there are still C/C++ programmers making these because it's the most efficient and quickest language that is human readable. It also gives you access to raw things that other higher level languages don't give. It will always be slower (because of the nature of how an interpreted language works), and so for anything wanting to push things to the limit these won't be used. The funny thing about the C# topic is that is someone refuses to use C++ and instead uses C#. That's insane. The syntax is so close that it's only logical to move to C++. I use both VB.NET & C# at work so I love .NET. If you are making anything but a high performance game I'm all about .NET (basically any Windowed UI system .NET rules). I'm just saying if raw speed is what you are after then if you know C#, it would be wise to just use C++. It's basically the same anyway. And C++ can do it all. To in my view if you are a 1 man indie company, C++ is the thing to learn and use. Knowing C++ solves all your problems. That's why it's wise to learn it. [EDIT] A thing to note is that .NET is eventually being resolved to a C method call. It's a wrapper around the Win 32 API, which is stored in dll's and was written in C. So you can see that C/C++ will not go away for a very very long time, if ever, because it has basically become the lowest level of most all high level language use. If I derive from the Form class in C#, it's being converted to the correct Win32 API calls from the dlls. It's a giant wrapper and without the gooey stuff in the middle (C/C++), .NET doesn't exist.

Again, I think you are confusing language with library. That few lines of Basic to do something complex is a library at work, which behind it has the 2 pages of code. That's like saying in .NET I can make a form simply by deriving from the Form class. In C using Win32 API it's 100 lines of code to get the same. That has nothing to do with the language. That's the library. The .NET Form class has hundreds of lines of code behind the scene that was setup already for you. That's what a library is. The equivalent C++ library would be the exact same. In fact it is. You can use .NET with C++ and the difference is basically nothing. When you first learn something, many times you find yourself questioning why it's done in what would seem to be an illogical manner. Yet as you get more and more into it, you realize that it's more efficient and that's why it's done that way. Do you enjoy typing the word function and end that much? Why do that when you can just use {}. That's obviously less typing, and if you are making a game it will have thousands of lines of code and all the white space on the screen is valuable. Why clutter it up with full words like 'function', 'end', or 'then'. Sure they are logical but they are not very efficient. In short C++ is the past, present, and future. It's been around for a long time and isn't going anywhere soon. That's like saying desktop computers will be extinct and laptops will rule the world. No they wont, because the desktop computer will always have the performance boost over a laptop. This is what C++ has. It's the perfect mix of human readability and performance. The games that are pushing the boundaries will always use C++.

I find Lua much harder to program in simply because the lack of debugging tools. I can step through a C++ program line by line to find logic errors and runtime errors. I can't do that with Lua. I can't stand messing my code up with Print/Notify to find bugs. It's so crappy and inefficient. It sounded like you already knew BASIC. If you do then go the next step.

My first assumption is that you aren't setting the right entity to receive the message. Check into model entity vs mesh entities. Your target might be the mesh and in your BMax code you might be assigning the callback to the model. Play around with that once.

Yeah, that's old (but really doesn't effect the language much). Go download Visual Studio 8 C++ Express Edition. The amount of code? You are confusing libraries with languages. C++ is far more compact than BMax (ie. less typing, less code). As far as LE is concerned it's the same amount of code (note C++ will be less characters because of it's syntax). The concept people coming from .NET or BMax need to learn is the difference between a language and a library/framework. C++ doesn't come with a library itself, but there are tons of libraries out there you can use with it (like LE for instance). I can see how this might be overwhelming at first and I know that when I wanted to create a window in C++ on my Windows machine I was floored that you couldn't and it required a library. You needed these other libraries. The more you learn about this stuff the better off you are. Anyway, I'm a big C++ guy and don't feel you can go wrong with it

I think we'd need to see some code or a more detailed description of what you setup. I have gotten this working before in C++, so I know it can be done.

I don't understand the fear that follows C++ from beginner programmers. C/C++ was the first language I taught myself because it's the premiere language used in video games. In my book, if you shy away from learning C/C++ because it's "hard" then you'll probably shy away from actually finishing a game because that's even harder. I say don't shy away from learning C/C++. Learn it. It's so flexible and has so many free libraries out there for it that it's basically required. Even all these engines you see that are script based, at the core they are C/C++ running those scripts. If you understand programming concepts already learning the syntax of C/C++ isn't that bad. It will present you with so much more freedom in other programming aspects that you are missing out by not learning it really.