Game Development
Combat Mission Design, Part 2
Games have a wide verity of missions that the players can do in order to obtain items or experience. Mission and Quest Types, Part 1 provides an overview of the major types of missions. However, it is important to examine different types of missions in more detail. The most straight forward mission type is the travel [...]
Mission and Quest Types, Part 1
One of the defining factors in a game is how Missions or Quests are handled. These tasks given to players provide several different aspects that drive the game. First they provide the story that the player is taking part in. They also provide experience, game knowledge, and items that will help the player out over [...]
Finite State Machines
There are many different kinds of AI used in modern games. In the previous post AI Basics, the generalities of how simple logic could be used to determine what the NPC could do was explained. However, AI’s are typically more involved than a simple explanation can provide. Not every AI needs to be a complex [...]
Software Design
Welcome to Software Design and Programming! In previous articles more complex concepts were examined in brief. However, this section of the game development process will be taken into specific areas required to produce a fully formed game concept. The software development process is long but through these pages it should be fairly easy to understand [...]
Conversion Functions
Conversion Functions are used to change from one data type to another. They can also be used to extract valuable information from a string or stringified array. The following is a list of the most common functions. It is important to know that SQL Server has several useful functions that are not available in other [...]
Data Types
There are different data types for the RDBMS and the following lists most of them. It is also important to understand that if a database does not have a specified type it will try to CAST it dynamically to the correct field time. Binary Datatypes Datetime Datatypes Enumerated Datatypes Numeric Datatypes String Datatypes
DROP Statement
The DROP statement will remove a table from the schema. Just like other table alterations, this needs to be handled with the greatest of care. The problem is once a table is dropped the data is lost. It is commonly used for temporary tables and should not be applied to permanent tables unless the DBA [...]
RENAME TABLE
The last option to MODIFY a table is the ability to rename the table. Like other modifications this requires FOREIGN KEY constraints to be removed prior to the action. After this has been done any constraints can be reapplied and the database will have no performance changes. However, it is important to understand that changing [...]
