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Gabriel Gambetta - Fast-Paced Multiplayer (Part I): Introduction. Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV - Live Demo Introduction This is the first in a series of articles exploring the techniques and algorithms that make fast-paced multiplayer games possible. If you’re familiar with the concepts behind multiplayer games, you can safely skip to the next article – what follows is an introductory discussion. Developing any kind of game is itself challenging; multiplayer games, however, add a completely new set of problems to be dealt with. Interestingly enough, the core problems are human nature and physics! The problem of cheating It all starts with cheating. As a game developer, you usually don’t care whether a player cheats in your single-player game – his actions don’t affect anyone but him. Multiplayer games are different, though. There are many things that can be done to prevent cheating, but the most important one (and probably the only really meaningful one) is simple : don’t trust the player.

Authoritative servers and dumb clients Let’s talk physics. Code Architecture. Game Programming Patterns. Accumulating Dopamine | Pete Michaud's Game Development Portfolio & Blog. If I contort the definition of "game" almost unrecognizably, I might call an Accumulator a type of game in which the only mechanic is accumulating some currency.

At some point you can use the currency to buy upgrades which allow you to accumulate currency more quickly. Accumulators were on my mind after I followed a link to a game called CookieClicker (warning: industrial-grade addiction). It's pretty, but basically you just click the cookie to get 1 cookie. You buy things with cookies that allow you get more cookies. Just to give you an idea, there is an achievement for accumulating 10 trillion cookies. It reminded me of Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker.

But... Instead of triggering high-minded debate about the direction of the industry, Cow Clicker went viral, and had about 50,000 players in less than two months. Wondering about the popularity of these "games" led me to hypothesize about how different game genres stimulate different brain regions. I am the one who clicks I fucking love cookies. Deciphering the Business Card Raytracer. No, that's not it at all. What you just mentioned is actually really easy (if it worked): factoring n where n is up to 10 megapixels. Factoring up to a few megapixels (e.g. 3648 x 2736) isn't hard at all!

At most there are 3159 guesses (square root of number of pixels) before you hit one of the factors - and that's starting at 1, rather than starting at sane minimum aspect ratio. (It's only when you start trying to factor really large numbers that the problem becomes intractable. For example, the same trick just doesn't apply to a composite number that's 600 digits long. We're talking 6-9 digits, which a tight loop can crunch through faster than a disk read.) The harder issue is after you do factor it into primes, you still have to combine those primes into a width and height. For example, 640 x 480 is 307200. There's obviously quite a few ways to combine those into two groups (two factors)... so you're really not done.

Three Hundred :: Three Hundred Mechanics.