Nuno Silva

Some facts about Video Games (in numbers)

According to ESA (Entertainment Software Association):

• 65% of the Americans play Video games
• 35 is the the Average age of a gamer
• 26% is the percentage of the gamers that are over 50 years old
• 60% is the percentage of Male gamers (which leaves the women with the other 40%)
• 13 is the average number of years that adult gamers have been playing games
• 59% is the percentage of gamers that plays with other gamers in person
• 38% of the houses in America have, at least, a video game console
• 10 out of the 20 most sold games of 2007 where Nintendo games
• 63% of parents believe games are a positive part of their children’s lives.
• 83% of the time children receive their parents’ permission before purchasing or renting a game.
• 88% of the Parents monotoring their childs games.

Note: All the above facts were taken from the ESA document at http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2008.pdf.

The document also have another facts about videos games, like the list of the 20 most sold games for consoles and pc (with World of Warcraft at the 2 top positions of the PC Games).

Prince of Persia IV

This is another of the games in my “must have” list. I’m currently playing the trilogy of Prince of Persia and i’m loving it. Although they are great, Prince of Persia IV promises to be even greater.

In a previous post i released some images of the new prince of persia. This time, here is a in game video. By the looks of it, the game is fantastic!!!!

After this 2 games (street fighter and Prince of persia) i only need God of War 3 and i’m happy for a long long time!

Street Fighter IV

This time i think they actually did it. Capcom finally brought street fighter to a new era. Without losing it’s personal mark (the 2D fighting system), they managed to insert 3D characters and animations in a game that i consider a “must have”.

About the gameplay, only when i get my hands on the game, i will know if it the has evolved for better or worse.

Meanwhile, where is a in game video (Excellent, by the way):

Recursive operator == because of a null

I came up with a simple error that can make lose some hours around something has simple has an operator.

imagine that you have the following operator definition:

public static bool operator ==(Player c1, Player c2) {
	if( c1 == null && c2 == null ) {
		return true;
	}
	if ( c1 == null || c2 != null ) {
		return false;
	}
	return c1.Id == c2.Id;
}

The above code should work in a normal situation. But not in a situation where we use the operator inside it’s own definition. The code will enter a recursive state and it will eventually generate a Stack Overflow Exception.

So, in order to avoid the usage of the operator == inside it’s definition, you can use the alternative:

the Equals Type method inherit from object.

The following code demonstrates the correct implementation of the operator ==:

public static bool operator ==(Player c1, Player c2) {
	if( Equals(c1,null) && Equals(c2,null) ) {
		return true;
	}
	if ( Equals(c1, null) || Equals(c2, null) ) {
		return false;
	}
	return c1.Id == c2.Id;
}

My 10 top posts of all time

And here they are:

• Wrapp a div around other div’s with float
• What you need to be a game designer
• Divs instead of tables
• And so, i changed
• I want one of these without reflection, please!
• Shuffle a Collection
• Msdn Event
• Moooo what?
• Only for fans
• Hard Weekend…

Getting an html element Attribute

To do this i use mootools, a very fast and handy JavaScript framework.

Imagine that you got an element as following:

<img id="image" src="..." aaa="true" />

To get the value attribute “aaa” using mootools you only need to do the following:

$("image").getAttribute("aaa");

This solution will work in all browsers.

My Wordpress Plugins

Wordpress is, since the beginning of 2008, my loyal companion in my blog. I not regret to have change from some ASP.NET platform available in the Portuguese community PontoNetPt to my own domain and my own blog.

Since i started to use wordpress the way i blog changed a lot. And because i have much control over my blog now, here some of the most important plugins i use:

• Theme tester: - Excellent plugin which allows a blog administrator to test a new theme while showing the old theme to regular visitors.
• Google XML Sitemaps - a nice plugin to generate sitemaps for your blog. It helps a lot the search engine crawlers to index your blog.
• Akismet - This already came with wordpress and i think all bloggers that use a wordpress blog have this plugin activated. Akismet is, in a few words, the best plugin to stop all the spam in your blog. Until today, flawless.
• Optimal Title - A very good plugin that let’s you configure the way the title of your post appears. Very good for SEO proposes.
• Share This - Excelent plugin to help your blog readers share the content all over the main networks (Reddit,Digg,Facebookm and many many more). A “Share this” link will also appear on your rss feed.
• Get recent Comments - This plugin actually i don’t use. But is very handy to you bloggers that want to show the last comments of your readers.
• WP Stats - this plugin let’s you see all the stats of your blog. your can see a example of it’s usage here.

And you? Do you have any plugin that you usually use and is not above? Share it with me.

Firefox 3 is not caching content

That what happened to me after the upgrade from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3. For some strange reason, cache was totally disable. To solve this problem you need to change 2 of your Firefox configuration settings:

1st Step

Open a new tab an type about:config

2sd Step

On the search bar that appears type browser.cache

3rd Step

Set the following atributes to true:

browser.cache.disk.enable and browser.cache.memory.enable

In my case, they were both set to false so in each browser request all the content was being downloaded… a little annoying.

i hope this helps

Red Alert 3

Red Alert was one of the games that marked my childhood. I remember when i first got a computer one of the first RTS games i played was red alert. And i loved it!

Now it’s time for Red Alert 3. New game design takes this game forward with the possibility to construct your bases in land or see. A lot of new units (one of my personal favorites is the tesla trooper and the vacuum bomb :D) that can be used both in land or see (yes, most units are amphibious ).

Nothing like seeing a gameplay demo in red alert 3 official site, here.

You can also see the promotion video here.

Defenatly a “must play” game!

4 Reasons not to use the out keyword

The out keyword causes arguments to be passed by reference. This is like the ref keyword, except that ref requires that the variable be initialized before it is passed

in: MSDN C# Development Center

This post objective is to point out 4 reasons why you shouldn’t use this keyword in your regular C# programming:

1st Reason

It obligates the programmer to make code around it’s usage. Example: if you want to call a method with an out keyword, you must declare a variable first.

2sd Reason

Now imagine you decide that the method should have 5 more parameters? And you think: “If i have one, i can have 5 more”. Now you have to declare 6 variables before the method, insert 6 variables into the method signature, and the obligation to set the variable before the end of the method.

it’s the diference between this:

int var1;
int var2;
int var3;
int var4;
int var5;
int var6;
Something(out var1,out var2,out var3,out var4,out var5,out var6);

and this,

MyObject obj = Something();

3rd Reason

Methods that have outs in the signature are more dificult to use than the ones that don’t use them(see the code above).

One of the things that i hate are signatures of methods that have 5 or 6 out parameters and, from those 5 or 6 i only want to use 2 of them (for example).

In those cases, i am always obligated to declare the 6 variables, because we really need to pass all of them to the method. If a return object/struct is used, this problem doesn’t apply.

4th Reason

It’s Syntax! Ugly until the end… Yes is easy to use, but it makes unreadable code… Especially because most of the programmers use and abuse of it.

“How will i return this values? humm, making a nested struct or class is so dificult!!!!! I’ll just use the out keyword”

In Resume…

There is always a way around. If you have more than one return value consider the usage of a struct or a class. The code will be cleaner, more readable and all of your methods will be easier to use by other programmers.