#code examples

[stahlfest]

I want to try this out soon. I think i can fit perfectly when I’m building styleguides with code examples

[hbbisenieks]

A Slightly Smarter Minecraft Server Notifier

A Slightly Smarter Minecraft Server Notifier

So our initial notifier messaged us when players were on our Minecraft server, but it always messaged us, even if we already knew there were players online.  That’s not brilliant.  Instead, let’s have the script create a little file that says there are players online.  The pseudo-code then would be:

if the .players file exists and isn’t empty check if players are still online if they aren’t, clear…

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[guilelessmonk]

I've been told to use dropbox instead of mediafire so here is a link to it in dropbox that should work. Started worrying about this again in preparation for a completed first level of the 2D platformer I've been working on. It too will be made in C# and I will also give out the source code when the time comes

[rosthouse]

Engine Architecture

In this post, I'd like to talk a bit about the architecture and the various frameworks used to create our engine.

I mentioned in a previous post that I've read "Game Engine Architecture" (once again, highly recommended read). From that text, we took some ideas and applied them to our engine, mainly making the engine modular and implementing a component based entity system.

At first, let's look at a high-level diagram of the engine:

The topmost layer is the overarching engine. It handles initialization, entity-management (more on entities later) and manages the gameloop (to a certain degree, more about that later).

The second (organe) layer shows what modules we implemented. The modules are separate from each other, each implenting another library. This also adds the advantage that we could swap any library with another one, for example swap BULLET with Newt or something similar.  The only expection to this rule is Ogre3D, since that library handles more things than only graphics.

As promised, I'll talk a bit about each library. I'll talk about Ogre3D in a separate post, since that library is a bit deeper integrated in our engine.

Physics: Bullet

For simulating a marble in a maze, the player need to be able to accurately predict where the marble will go if he tilts the board. As such, we need a physics engine. Bullet is an open-source engine that is widely adapted by both the game- and the film-industry.  

Bullet was easy enough to get into the engine, but hard to acutally work with. Personally, I found it very unintuitive to program for, it seems to favour a more sequential programming style, rather than a object oriented one. You have to implement your very own callback methods and keep track of previous physic states yourself. This worked out in the end, but we weren't exactly happy with the end result.

Audio: SFML

Instead of using the raw OpenAL library, we decided to use SFML. While the SFML offer plenty of possibilities, the only thing we used out of it was the audio module. We implemented the whole system in one day, with fully working 3D sound. This was a blast to work with, SFML is one hell of an awesome software library. If you can USE IT!

GUI: Librocket

We searched relatively long for a suitable GUI library, going through CEGUI and several others. None of wich made us really happy. They were either to big or to "obfuscated" for us to learn, since we added the GUI near the end of the project.

When we first learned of Librocket, we were excited. A simple GUI library,  working on HTML and CSS? This was our chance. Looking back, we have mixed feelings. When we finally got it to work (took us about 3 days), it worked as promised, but it seemed like quite a hassle. Anyway, it payed of in the end, so I'm not complaining (that much).

Input: OIS

The object oriented input system was our day one choice for handeling input, since it pretty much comes bundled with Ogre. Not that this is something bad, this library is really solid and intuitive to work with. Overall, not much to say about this, I can recommend it.

Wrapping up

These are all the libraries we used. Well except the big one, Ogre3D. I want to dedicate a full blog post to that, so stay tuned.

[mattsnotes]

Finance::Quote example

#!/usr/bin/perl -w # # example script showing how to use the Quote perl module. # gets prices for some stocks, for some mutual funds # # This script was originally part of GnuCash. use lib '../lib'; use Finance::Quote; my $q = Finance::Quote->new(); # ----------------------------------- # get quotes for two stocks ... %quotes = $q->yahoo ("IBM", "SGI"); # print some selected values print "NYSE by Yahoo: ", $quotes {"IBM", "name"}, " last price: ", $quotes {"IBM", "last"}, "\n"; print "NYSE by Yahoo: ", $quotes {"SGI", "name"}, " last price: ", $quotes {"SGI", "last"}, "\n"; # loop over and print all values. # Notes that values are stored ion a multi-dimensional associative array foreach $k (sort (keys %quotes)) { ($sym, $attr) = split ($;, $k, 2); $val = $quotes {$sym, $attr}; # $val = $quotes {$k}; # this also works, if desired ... print "\t$sym $attr =\t $val\n"; } print "\n\n"; # ----------------------------------- # get quotes from Fidelity Investments @funds = ("FGRIX", "FNMIX", "FASGX", "FCONX"); %quotes = $q->fidelity (@funds); foreach $f (@funds) { $name = $quotes {$f, "name"}; $nav = $quotes {$f, "nav"}; print "Fidelity Fund $f $name \tNAV = $nav\n"; } print "\n\n"; # ----------------------------------- @funds = ("FGRXX"); %quotes = $q->fidelity (@funds); print "Not all funds have a NAV; some have Yeilds:\n"; foreach $f (@funds) { $name = $quotes {$f, "name"}; $yield = $quotes {$f, "yield"}; print "\tFidelity $f $name 30-day Yield = $yield percent\n"; } print "\n\n"; # ----------------------------------- # demo T. Rowe Price -- same as above @funds = ("PRFDX", "PRIDX"); %quotes = $q->troweprice (@funds); foreach $f (@funds) { $nav = $quotes {$f, "nav"}; $dayte = $quotes {$f, "date"}; print "T. Rowe Price $f NAV = $nav as of $dayte\n"; } print "\n\n"; # ----------------------------------- # demo for ASX. Grab the price of Coles-Myer and Telstra @funds = ("CML","TLS"); %quotes = $q->asx(@funds); foreach $f (@funds) { print "ASX Price of $f is ".$quotes{$f,"last"}." at ". $quotes{$f,"date"}."\n"; } print "\n\n"; # Demo for TIAA-CREF. @funds = qw/CREFstok BOGOname TIAAreal CREFmony/; %quotes = $q->tiaacref(@funds); foreach $f (@funds) { if ($quotes{$f,"success"} == 1) { print "TIAA-CREF Price of ".$quotes{$f,"name"}." is ".$quotes{$f,"nav"}. " at ".$quotes{$f,"date"}."\n"; } else { print "Error: ".$quotes{$f,"errormsg"}." for ".$f."\n"; } } print "\n\n";

[faryllinks-blog]

[faryllinks-blog]