The author takes readers on an in-depth walkthrough of the Torque Game Engine---one of the most popular, powerful, and easy to use game engines available today. With clear explanations of how to use Torque to create your own games and detailed discussions of the engine's inner workings, this book is a must read for any programmer interested in making games for fun or profit. It offers step-by-step examples, detailed system descriptions, in-depth references, practical tips, tricks, and more that provide readers all they need to understand the Torque Game Engine. See the Support page on the author's website for a revision of Chapter 15 (Torque Lighting). Downloadable resources are included with the book.

Node.js is the platform of choice for creating modern web services. This fast-paced book gets you up to speed on server-side programming with Node.js 8, as you develop real programs that are small, fast, low-profile, and useful. Take JavaScript beyond the browser, explore dynamic language features, and embrace evented programming.Harness the power of the event loop and non-blocking I/O to create highly parallel microservices and applications. This expanded and updated second edition showcases the latest ECMAScript features, current best practices, and modern development techniques. JavaScript is the backbone of the modern web, powering nearly every web app's user interface. Node.js is JavaScript for the server. This greatly expanded second edition introduces new language features while dramatically increasing coverage of core topics. Each hands-on chapter offers progressively more challenging topics and techniques, broadening your skill set and enabling you to think in Node. Write asynchronous, non-blocking code using Node's style and patterns. Cluster and load balance services with Node core features and third-party tools. Harness the power of databases like Elasticsearch and Redis. Work with many protocols, create RESTful web services, TCP socket clients and servers, and more. Test your code's functionality with Mocha, and manage its life cycle with NPM. Discover how Node pairs a server-side event loop with a JavaScript runtime to produce screaming fast, non-blocking concurrency. Through a series of practical programming domains, use the latest available ECMAScript features and harness key Node classes and popular modules. Create rich command-line tools and a web-based UI using modern web development techniques. Join the smart and diverse community that's rapidly advancing the state of the art in JavaScript development. What You Need: Node.js 8.xOperating system with bash-like shellOMQ (pronounced "Zero-M-Q") library, version 3.2 or higherElasticsearch version 5.0 or higherjq version 1.5 or higherRedis version 3.2 or higher

This book teaches beginners and aspiring game developers how to develop 2D games with Unity. Thousands of commercial games have been built with Unity. The reader will learn the complete process of 2D game development, step by step. The theory behind each step is fully explained. This book contains numerous color illustrations and access to all source code and companion videos. Key Features: Fully detailed game projects from scratch. Beginners can do the steps and create games right away. No coding experience is necessary. Numerous examples take a raw beginner toward professional coding proficiency in C# and Unity. Includes a thorough introduction to Unity 2020, including 2D game development, prefabs, cameras, animation, character controllers, lighting, and sound. Includes a step-by-step introduction to Unity 2019.3. Extensive coverage of GIMP, Audacity, and MuseScore for the creation of 2D graphics, sound effects, and music. All required software is free to use for any purpose including commercial applications and games. Franz Lanzinger is the owner and chief game developer of Lanzinger Studio, an independent game development and music studio in Sunnyvale, California. He started his career in game programming in 1982 at Atari Games, Inc., where he designed and programmed the classic arcade game Crystal Castles. In 1989, he joined Tengen, where he was a programmer and designer for Ms. Pac-Man and Toobin' on the NES. He co-founded Bitmasters, where he designed and coded games including Rampart and Championship Pool for the NES and SNES, and NCAA Final Four Basketball for the SNES and Sega Genesis. In 1996, he founded Actual Entertainment, publisher and developer of the Gubble video game series. He has a B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame and attended graduate school in mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a former world record holder on Centipede and Burgertime. He is a professional author, game developer, accompanist, and piano teacher. He is currently working on remaking the original Gubble game in Unity and Blender.

Deliver rich audio and video real-time communication and peer-to-peer data exchange right in the browser, without the need for proprietary plug-ins. This concise hands-on guide shows you how to use the emerging Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) technology to build a browser-to-browser application, piece by piece.

The authors' learn-by-example approach is perfect for web programmers looking to understand real-time communication, and telecommunications architects unfamiliar with HTML5 and JavaScript-based client-server web programming. You'll use a ten-step recipe to create a complete WebRTC system, with exercises that you can apply to your own projects.Tour the WebRTC development cycle and trapezoid architectural modelUnderstand how and why VoIP is shifting from standalone functionality to a browser componentUse mechanisms that let client-side web apps interact with browsers through the WebRTC APITransfer streaming data between browser peers with the RTCPeerConnection APICreate a signaling channel between peers for setting up a WebRTC sessionPut everything together to create a basic WebRTC system from scratchLearn about conferencing, authorization, and other advanced WebRTC features

In this title, Graham Mayeda shows how Watsuji Tetsuro and Kuki Shuzo, two 20th-century Japanese philosophers, criticize and interpret Heideggerian philosophy in the process of articulating traditional Japanese ethics in a modern idiom.

Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) is a combination of computer graphics and computer vision that produces renderings in various artistic, expressive or stylized ways such as painting and drawing. This book focuses on image and video based NPR, where the input is a 2D photograph or a video rather than a 3D model. 2D NPR techniques have application in areas as diverse as consumer and professional digital photography and visual effects for TV and film production. The book covers the full range of the state of the art of NPR with every chapter authored by internationally renowned experts in the field, covering both classical and contemporary techniques. It will enable both graduate students in computer graphics, computer vision or image processing and professional developers alike to quickly become familiar with contemporary techniques, enabling them to apply 2D NPR algorithms in their own projects.

Build your own intelligent agent system...

Intelligent agent technology is a tool of modern computer science that can be used to engineer complex computer programmes that behave rationally in dynamic and changing environments. Applications range from small programmes that intelligently search the Web buying and selling goods via electronic commerce, to autonomous space probes.

This powerful technology is not widely used, however, as developing intelligent agent software requires high levels of training and skill. The authors of this book have developed and tested a methodology and tools for developing intelligent agent systems. With this methodology ("Prometheus") developers can start agent-oriented designs and implementations easily from scratch saving valuable time and resources.

"Developing Intelligent Agent Systems" not only answers the questions "what are agents?" and "why are they useful?" but also the crucial question: "how do I design and build intelligent agent systems?" The book covers everything a practitioner needs to know to begin to effectively use this technology - including an introduction to the notion of agents, a description of the concepts involved, and a software engineering methodology.

Read on for: a practical step-by-step introduction to designing and building intelligent agent systems.a full life-cycle methodology for developing intelligent agent systems covering specification, analysis, design and implementation of agents."PDT: Prometheus Design Tool" - software support for the "Prometheus" design process.the example of an electronic bookstore to illustrate the design process throughout the book.

Electronic resources including the Prometheus Design Tool (PDT), can be found at: "http: //www.cs.rmit.edu.au/agents/prometheus"

This book is aimed at industrial software developers, software engineers and at advanced undergraduate students. It assumes knowledge of basic software engineering but does not require knowledge of Artificial Intelligence or of mathematics. Familiarity with Java will help in reading the examples in chapter 10.

Explore functional programming and discover new ways of thinking about code. You know you need to master functional programming, but learning one functional language is only the start. In this book, through articles drawn from PragPub magazine and articles written specifically for this book, you'll explore functional thinking and functional style and idioms across languages. Led by expert guides, you'll discover the distinct strengths and approaches of Clojure, Elixir, Haskell, Scala, and Swift and learn which best suits your needs. Contributing authors: Rich Hickey, Stuart Halloway, Aaron Bedra, Michael Bevilacqua-Linn, Venkat Subramaniam, Paul Callaghan, Jose Valim, Dave Thomas, Natasha Murashev, Tony Hillerson, Josh Chisholm, and Bruce Tate. Functional programming is on the rise because it lets you write simpler, cleaner code, and its emphasis on immutability makes it ideal for maximizing the benefits of multiple cores and distributed solutions. So far nobody's invented the perfect functional language - each has its unique strengths. In Functional Programming: A PragPub Anthology, you'll investigate the philosophies, tools, and idioms of five different functional programming languages. See how Swift, the development language for iOS, encourages you to build highly scalable apps using functional techniques like map and reduce. Discover how Scala allows you to transition gently but deeply into functional programming without losing the benefits of the JVM, while with Lisp-based Clojure, you can plunge fully into the functional style. Learn about advanced functional concepts in Haskell, a pure functional language making powerful use of the type system with type inference and type classes. And see how functional programming is becoming more elegant and friendly with Elixir, a new functional language built on the powerful Erlang base.The industry has been embracing functional programming more and more, driven by the need for concurrency and parallelism. This collection of articles will lead you to mastering the functional approach to problem solving. So put on your explorer's hat and prepare to be surprised. The goal of exploration is always discovery.What You Need: Familiarity with one or more programming languages.

Improve Every Retrospective! Real Solutions for Every Team Leader, Facilitator, and Participant ". . . Aino has shared a robust, curated list of antipatterns and how to avoid them. . . . And she has shared so much more than tips and techniques. You will find a gold mine--with precious nuggets, including her personal experiences, effective facilitation resources, and pointers for extracting yourself and your team when you're stuck." --From the Foreword by Diana Larsen, co-author, Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great Retrospectives are indispensable for continuous learning and improvement in Lean, Agile, DevOps, and other contexts, but most of us have suffered through at least one retrospective that was a waste of time, or worse. Now, leading agile coach Aino Vonge Corry identifies 24 reasons that retrospectives fail and shows how to overcome each of them. Using the familiar "patterns" approach, Retrospectives Antipatterns introduces antipatterns related to structure, planning, people, distributed teams, and more. Corry shares traps she's encountered and mistakes she's made over more than a decade of leading retrospectives and then presents proven solutions. With her insights and guidance, you can run enjoyable retrospectives that deliver concrete improvements and real value--or at the very least recognize when you are making the same mistake as the author! Create a common language, actionable solutions, and proven plans for solving the retrospective problems you'll encounter most often Recognize symptoms, assess tradeoffs, and refactor your current situation into something better Plan more effectively: decide who should attend and facilitate, when to schedule your retrospective, and how much time to set aside Handle "people" problems: deal with negativity, silence, distrust, disillusionment, loudmouths, and cultural differences Facilitate better "virtual" retrospectives, with tips for online retrospectives included in each antipattern Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Important elements of games, movies, and other computer-generated content, shadows are crucial for enhancing realism and providing important visual cues. In recent years, there have been notable improvements in visual quality and speed, making high-quality realistic real-time shadows a reachable goal. Real-Time Shadows is a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of real-time shadow techniques. It covers a large variety of different effects, including hard, soft, volumetric, and semi-transparent shadows. The book explains the basics as well as many advanced aspects related to the domain of shadow computation. It presents interactive solutions and practical details on shadow computation. The authors compare various algorithms for creating real-time shadows and illustrate how they are used in different situations. They explore the limitations and failure cases, advantages and disadvantages, and suitability of the algorithms in several applications. Source code, videos, tutorials, and more are available on the book's website www.realtimeshadows.com.

Based on course notes of SIGGRAPH course teaching techniques for real-time rendering of volumetric data and effects; covers both applications in scientific visualization and real-time rendering. Starts with the basics (texture-based ray casting) and then improves and expands the algorithms incrementally. Book includes source code, algorithms, diagrams, and rendered graphics.

An In-Depth, Practical Guide to GPGPU Programming Using Direct3D 11 GPGPU Programming for Games and Science demonstrates how to achieve the following requirements to tackle practical problems in computer science and software engineering: Robustness Accuracy Speed Quality source code that is easily maintained, reusable, and readable The book primarily addresses programming on a graphics processing unit (GPU) while covering some material also relevant to programming on a central processing unit (CPU). It discusses many concepts of general purpose GPU (GPGPU) programming and presents practical examples in game programming and scientific programming. The author first describes numerical issues that arise when computing with floating-point arithmetic, including making trade-offs among robustness, accuracy, and speed. He then shows how single instruction multiple data (SIMD) extensions work on CPUs since GPUs also use SIMD. The core of the book focuses on the GPU from the perspective of Direct3D 11 (D3D11) and the High Level Shading Language (HLSL). This chapter covers drawing 3D objects; vertex, geometry, pixel, and compute shaders; input and output resources for shaders; copying data between CPU and GPU; configuring two or more GPUs to act as one; and IEEE floating-point support on a GPU. The book goes on to explore practical matters of programming a GPU, including code sharing among applications and performing basic tasks on the GPU. Focusing on mathematics, it next discusses vector and matrix algebra, rotations and quaternions, and coordinate systems. The final chapter gives several sample GPGPU applications on relatively advanced topics. Web ResourceAvailable on a supporting website, the author's fully featured Geometric Tools Engine for computing and graphics saves you from having to write a large amount of infrastructure code necessary for even the simplest of applications involving shader programming. The engine provides robust and accurate source code with SIMD when appropriate and GPU versions of algorithms when possible.

This book provides a deep understanding of state-of-art methods for simulation of heterogeneous crowds in computer graphics. It will cover different aspects that are necessary to achieve plausible crowd behaviors. The book will be a review of the most recent literature in this field that can help professionals and graduate students interested in this field to get up to date with the latest contributions, and open problems for their possible future research. The chapter contributors are well known researchers and practitioners in the field and they include their latest contributions in the different topics required to achieve believable heterogeneous crowd simulation. Provides crowd simulation methodology to populate virtual environments, for video games or any kind of applications that requires believable multi-agent behavior Presents the latest contributions on crowd simulation, animation, planning, rendering and evaluation with detailed algorithms for implementation purposes Includes perspectives of both academic researchers and industrial practitioners with reference to open source solutions and commercial applications, where appropriate

Full coverage of functional programming and all OCA Java Programmer exam objectives OCA, Oracle Certified Associate Java SE 8 Programmer I Study Guide, Exam 1Z0-808 is a comprehensive study guide for those taking the Oracle Certified Associate Java SE 8 Programmer I exam (1Z0-808). With complete coverage of 100% of the exam objectives, this book provides everything you need to know to confidently take the exam. The release of Java 8 brought the language's biggest changes to date, and for the first time, candidates are required to learn functional programming to pass the exam. This study guide has you covered, with thorough functional programming explanation and information on all key topic areas Java programmers need to know. You'll cover Java inside and out, and learn how to apply it efficiently and effectively to create solutions applicable to real-world scenarios. * Work confidently with operators, conditionals, and loops * Understand object-oriented design principles and patterns * Master functional programming fundamentals

With a new generation of services and frameworks, frontend and mobile developers can use their existing skill set to build full stack applications by leveraging the cloud. Developers can build robust applications with production-ready features such as authentication, APIs, data layers, machine learning, chatbots, and AR scenes more easily than ever by taking advantage of these new serverless and cloud technologies. This practical guide explains how. Nader Dabit, developer advocate at Amazon Web Services, shows developers how to build full stack applications using React, AWS, GraphQL, and the Amplify Framework. You'll learn how to create and incorporate services into your client applications while exploring general best practices, deployment strategies, continuous integration and delivery, and rich media management along the way. Learn how to build applications that solve real problems Understand what is (and isn't) possible when using these technologies Examine how authentication works-and learn the difference between authentication and authorization Discover how serverless functions work and why they're important Use GraphQL in your application-and learn why it's important Learn how to build full stack applications on AWS

Architecture for the Commons dives into an analysis of how the tectonics of a building is fundamentally linked to the economic organizations that allow them to exist. By tracing the origins and promises of current technological practices in design, the book provides an alternative path, one that reconsiders the means of achieving complexity through combinatorial strategies. This move requires reconsidering serial production with crowdsourcing and user content in mind. The ideas presented will be explored through the design research developed within Plethora Project, a design practice that explores the use of video game interfaces as a mechanism for participation and user design. The research work presented throughout the book seeks to align with a larger project that is currently taking place in many different fields: The Construction of the Commons. By developing both the ideological and physical infrastructure, the project of the Commons has become an antidote to current economic practices that perpetuate inequality. The mechanisms of the production and governance of the Commons are discussed, inviting the reader to get involved and participate in the discussion. The current political and economic landscape calls for a reformulation of our current economic practices and alternative value systems that challenge the current market monopolies. This book will be of great interest not only to architects and designers studying the impact of digital technologies in the field of design but also to researchers studying novel techniques for social participation and cooperating of communities through digital networks. The book connects principles of architecture, economics and social sciences to provide alternatives to the current production trends.

A uniquely cross-disciplinary and cross-experience book written as an accessible guide for people new to storytelling in games, new to games as a practice, and those eager to develop their existing practices & knowledge around storytelling in games. Offers careful, clear, and practical advice for understanding creative writing, in the context of games, and in discovering and developing your own games writing practice. Focuses on writing, not narrative design, as an area underdeveloped in the context of games storytelling.

- This second edition features revisions that support the latest version of the author's popular operating system and book, MicroC/OS-II - Complete and ready-to-use modules in C Get a clear explanation of functional code modules and microcontroller theory

Introduction to Visual Computing: Core Concepts in Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing covers the fundamental concepts of visual computing. Whereas past books have treated these concepts within the context of specific fields such as computer graphics, computer vision or image processing, this book offers a unified view of these core concepts, thereby providing a unified treatment of computational and mathematical methods for creating, capturing, analyzing and manipulating visual data (e.g. 2D images, 3D models). Fundamentals covered in the book include convolution, Fourier transform, filters, geometric transformations, epipolar geometry, 3D reconstruction, color and the image synthesis pipeline. The book is organized in four parts. The first part provides an exposure to different kinds of visual data (e.g. 2D images, videos and 3D geometry) and the core mathematical techniques that are required for their processing (e.g. interpolation and linear regression.) The second part of the book on Image Based Visual Computing deals with several fundamental techniques to process 2D images (e.g. convolution, spectral analysis and feature detection) and corresponds to the low level retinal image processing that happens in the eye in the human visual system pathway. The next part of the book on Geometric Visual Computing deals with the fundamental techniques used to combine the geometric information from multiple eyes creating a 3D interpretation of the object and world around us (e.g. transformations, projective and epipolar geometry, and 3D reconstruction). This corresponds to the higher level processing that happens in the brain combining information from both the eyes thereby helping us to navigate through the 3D world around us. The last two parts of the book cover Radiometric Visual Computing and Visual Content Synthesis. These parts focus on the fundamental techniques for processing information arising from the interaction of light with objects around us, as well as the fundamentals of creating virtual computer generated worlds that mimic all the processing presented in the prior sections. The book is written for a 16 week long semester course and can be used for both undergraduate and graduate teaching, as well as a reference for professionals.

Internet of Things: Challenges, Advances, and Applications provides a comprehensive introduction to IoT, related technologies, and common issues in the adoption of IoT on a large scale. It surveys recent technological advances and novel solutions for challenges in the IoT environment. Moreover, it provides detailed discussion of the utilization of IoT and its underlying technologies in critical application areas, such as smart grids, healthcare, insurance, and the automotive industry. The chapters of this book are authored by several international researchers and industry experts. This book is composed of 18 self-contained chapters that can be read, based on interest. Features: Introduces IoT, including its history, common definitions, underlying technologies, and challenges Discusses technological advances in IoT and implementation considerations Proposes novel solutions for common implementation issues Explores critical application domains, including large-scale electric power distribution networks, smart water and gas grids, healthcare and e-Health applications, and the insurance and automotive industries The book is an excellent reference for researchers and post-graduate students working in the area of IoT, or related areas. It also targets IT professionals interested in gaining deeper knowledge of IoT, its challenges, and application areas.

This accessible text covers the techniques of parallel programming in a practical manner that enables readers to write and evaluate their parallel programs. Supported by the National Science Foundation and exhaustively class-tested, it is the first text of its kind that does not require access to a special multiprocessor system, concentrating instead on parallel programs that can be executed on networked computers using freely available parallel software tools. The book covers the timely topic of cluster programming, interesting to many programmers due to the recent availability of low-cost computers. Uses MPI pseudocodes to describe algorithms and allows different programming tools to be implemented, and provides readers with thorough coverage of shared memory programming, including Pthreads and OpenMP. Useful as a professional reference for programmers and system administrators.

The first MATLAB (R) programming book written specifically for clinical radiotherapy medical physicists and medical physics trainees, this much-needed book teaches users how to create their own clinical applications using MATLAB (R), as a complement to commercial software particularly when the latter does not cover specific local clinical needs. Chapters explore key radiotherapy areas such as handling volumes, 3D dose calculation, comparing dose distributions, reconstructing treatment plans and their summations, and automated tests for machine quality assurance. Readers will learn to independently analyse and process images, doses, structures, and other radiotherapy clinical data to deal with standard and non-standard situations in radiotherapy. This book will also significantly improve understanding of areas such as data nature, information content, DICOM RT standard, and data flow. It will be an invaluable reference for students of medical physics, in addition to clinical radiotherapy physicists and researchers working in radiotherapy. Features: Includes real clinical medical physics applications derived from actual clinical problems Provides commented MATLAB (R) scripts working with sample data and/or own data matching input requirements Promotes critical thinking and practical problem solving skills

From the Foreword: "While large-scale machine learning and data mining have greatly impacted a range of commercial applications, their use in the field of Earth sciences is still in the early stages. This book, edited by Ashok Srivastava, Ramakrishna Nemani, and Karsten Steinhaeuser, serves as an outstanding resource for anyone interested in the opportunities and challenges for the machine learning community in analyzing these data sets to answer questions of urgent societal interest...I hope that this book will inspire more computer scientists to focus on environmental applications, and Earth scientists to seek collaborations with researchers in machine learning and data mining to advance the frontiers in Earth sciences." --Vipin Kumar, University of Minnesota Large-Scale Machine Learning in the Earth Sciences provides researchers and practitioners with a broad overview of some of the key challenges in the intersection of Earth science, computer science, statistics, and related fields. It explores a wide range of topics and provides a compilation of recent research in the application of machine learning in the field of Earth Science. Making predictions based on observational data is a theme of the book, and the book includes chapters on the use of network science to understand and discover teleconnections in extreme climate and weather events, as well as using structured estimation in high dimensions. The use of ensemble machine learning models to combine predictions of global climate models using information from spatial and temporal patterns is also explored. The second part of the book features a discussion on statistical downscaling in climate with state-of-the-art scalable machine learning, as well as an overview of methods to understand and predict the proliferation of biological species due to changes in environmental conditions. The problem of using large-scale machine learning to study the formation of tornadoes is also explored in depth. The last part of the book covers the use of deep learning algorithms to classify images that have very high resolution, as well as the unmixing of spectral signals in remote sensing images of land cover. The authors also apply long-tail distributions to geoscience resources, in the final chapter of the book.

Software engineering and computer science students need a resource that explains how to apply design patterns at the enterprise level, allowing them to design and implement systems of high stability and quality. Software Architecture Design Patterns in Java is a detailed explanation of how to apply design patterns and develop software architectures. It provides in-depth examples in Java, and guides students by detailing when, why, and how to use specific patterns. This textbook presents 42 design patterns, including 23 GoF patterns. Categories include: Basic, Creational, Collectional, Structural, Behavioral, and Concurrency, with multiple examples for each. The discussion of each pattern includes an example implemented in Java. The source code for all examples is found on a companion Web site. The author explains the content so that it is easy to understand, and each pattern discussion includes Practice Questions to aid instructors. The textbook concludes with a case study that pulls several patterns together to demonstrate how patterns are not applied in isolation, but collaborate within domains to solve complicated problems.

This book covers the features of HTML5 Canvas, CSS3 graphics, and shows how you can extend the power of CSS3 with SVG. The material in this book is accessible to people who have limited knowledge of HTML and JavaScript. Companion DVD with source code and graphics. While the material is accessible to those with limited knowledge of HTML and JavaScript, but more advanced users will benefit from numerous graphics techniques. The book also includes illustrative code samples and illustrations that are useful for Web developers and SVG/Flash/Silverlight developers. You'll see examples that help you learn to do the following in HTML5 Canvas, CSS3, and SVG: render Bezier curves, apply colors and gradients, transform 2D shapes and JPG files, perform animation effects, create 2D/3D bar charts and line graphs, handle mouse events, render HTML5/CSS3/SVG pages in Android, and learn the mechanics of a Tic-tac-toe game. A companion DVD contains all the source code and color graphics from the book.