i need to create an application that is capable of detecting a person entering and leaving the area in front of a big screen.
since sensors like infrared and ultrasound can easily be fooled by multiple persons i was thinking of using face / person recognition.
one option would be to use the kinekt sensor.
my questions: is this system reliable? is there another good option?
Thanks a bundle!
I've already used kinect for this kind of projects in actionscript and unity with c# and i can say that's your best and only solution to detect person and mantain a low cost.
You have 2 possibilities to use kinect with as3:
First is to use AIR with a ANE (adobe native extension) and interface c++/c# dll with your application.
Second one is to use the old trick of the socket communication. You have 2 application as3 and c#/c++ and you put them in communication with a tcp/udp connection on the loopback interface.
IMHO the best solution is the first one, you don't have to write a good protocol to communicate but you just call methods and receive events as a normal API.
Related
I'm creating a game with HTML5 and javascript, but am having trouble finding a way to get networking working.
What I want is for one instance of the game to listen on a Websockets/http stack, while the other instances connect to it.
So far, I'm yet to find any way of doing it that doesn't require additional plugins or online services. (ie: Flash or silver light opening the socket and pumping messages back - Something that isn't acceptable for mobile, or an online server like Player.IO, which while much better than Flash, wouldn't work for Wifi networks that are disconnected from the Internet)
While the latter option is a compromise I'm willing to make, I was wondering if it's one I need to make, or if I could survive without it.
Well, if I understand what you are trying to, hope to be right.
Client One:
Plays game, listens to incoming data from Client Two
Client Two:
Plays game, connects to Client One
I'm guessing it's a P2P game? If this is the case, I think you want to look at WebRTC.
Otherwise, peer-to-peer is not really possible unless you run a mediator service that both clients connect to and handle it as a dispatcher.
I am building a small cards game for Windows Store using HTML/JS as my programming languages. One of the features that I would like to add is multiplayer capability. My game it's based on a 1 versus 1 player (unlike Hearts where you need 4 players), so an ad-hoc peer-to-peer connection is enough. Also, keep in mind that I am only considering local network multiplayer, without internet support (meaning that "privateNetworkClientServer" capability is required on that app manifest).
So I am imagining, when a player want to start a multiplayer game, the app will periodically broadcast a message to find any candidates. Meanwhile he will also have to listen for those same messages (in case of another player is broadcasting them also). When they find which other we transmit the game state back and forward to perform the required games changes.
My question is, does WinRT provide any functionality out of the box to do something like this? If no, do you have any suggestion for my problem?
Thanks
Look at the documentation for the PeerFinder class. Proximity can use either NFC or by browsing on the same subnet. Note, in the case of WiFi, not all WiFI cards support the browsing model, so some older PCs may not be able to use this solution.
The proximity sample application on msdn should help you with this.
I've created a simple game where 2 players make a simultaneous choice in each round, and the winner of the round is determined by a set of rules specific to the game. Sort of like how Rock Paper Scissors works.
I'd like to be able to offer this game online where 2 players can find and play against each other. There would be some central server to arbitrate the game, and then each player would interact with the game using some game client of his choice that we would provide (i.e. web-based, mobile-based, Flash, etc).
Obviously, a player could also play against a computer opponent that we could provide. I'd also like to have the capability to allow programmers to submit computer programs that they've written to act as players and play against other programs in some sort of tournament.
I realize that the specifics of my game would certainly need to be written from scratch, but it seems that all of the work that the servers would have to do to communicate with the clients and maintain the state of the game has probably been done many times before. This is probably the bulk of the work.
Does anyone have any ideas for how this could be done quickly and easily? Are there servers available with some sort of standard interface to drop new games into? Is there some sort of open source game server? How would you go about doing this?
Seeing as the clients only communicate with the game server occasionally (as opposed to continuously), a web framework should be able to serve as your "basic game server". While web frameworks may be made for providing "web pages", they can certainly be (ab)used to serve as request handlers.
This certainly doesn't force you to make the game a browser game; standalone game clients can be made easily, and they can communicate with your game server using basic http. I also heard this thing called Ajax is pretty nifty for such things.
Not only will you find a lot of ready-made http-based servers, as an added bonus, there is a lot more documentation on how to work with Web 2.0®©™ than "game servers". You just need to know that you want a web framework that lets you easily manage sessions and receive/respond to requests and a client library that does likewise.
As an added aside, "maintaining the state of the game", as you put it, falls 100% within the domain of the actual game logic. But many web frameworks come with good database support, and will surely be useful for this kind of thing.
Over the years I've become an uber-nerd when it comes to flash game development. Now I'm thinking about looking into using my skills for helping other game-developers out there.
I want to develop an API in AS3 which will allow the developer to do (as a start) the following:
Display a dialogue which lets the user log into their "account" (hosted on my site).
Send a score/value to the website and attribute it to the logged in user.
Unlock an achievement (achievements will be set up by the developer in the web interface - which is where they will also get a key of some type to use with their API.
Display high scores, other players profiles in-game, etc (show basically any stats in-game).
All easy enough to develop straight off the bat. However; where it becomes frustrating is security. I'm not expecting an indestructible solution that I'm fully aware isn't possible, but what would be the most defensive way to approach this?
Here are the issues that I can think up on the spot:
The big one - people stealing the API key via man-in-the-middle attack.
Highscore injection, false achievement unlocks.
Decompiling the SWF and stealing the API key.
Using the API key to create a dummy flash application and send random data like highscores.
Altering the API itself so you don't need to be logged in, etc.
One thought I've had was converting my API to a component so there's no access to the code (unless you decompile). The problem here is it's just not friendly to the developers, though it would allow me to create my own graphics for the UI (rather than coding many, many sprites).
Private/public keys won't work unless there is very good protection against decompiling.
I'm beginning to wonder if this idea is a dead end.
Any advice on securing this (or parts of it) would be great.
Look at this thread first if you haven't done so already: What is the best way to stop people hacking the PHP-based highscore table of a Flash game
Against man-in-the-middle HTTPS seems the only option. It may have its vulnerabilities, but it's way better than any home-made solution. The problem that you'll need actual certificate from authorized center, because ActiveX-based Flash plugin will not trust self-signed certificate.
Should not be possible without decompilation
SecureSWF with reasonably high settings (code execution path obfuscation and encrypted strings) should beat most decompilers. Sure, SWF can be examined with hex editor, but this will require very determined hacker.
Should not be possible without decompilation
API should be on server and any API function would require user context (loaded by HTTPS)
Also add encryption to flash shared objects\cookies. I had successfully altered some savegames using simple hex editor, because they were just objects in AMF format. Encryption will depend on SWF decompilation, but since we are using SecureSWF... Or move savegames on server.
client side is never secure enough, so i'd suggest to take all the logic to the server, reducing client to just UI.
If it's impossible due to network timeouts - send scores/achievements only with the log of pairs "user_action - game_state" and verify it on the server.
What is a good framework to build a multiplayer game in Actionscript?
I want to create a multiplayer 2D shooter like Asteroids on the Blackberry Playbook; my main concern is latency - a shooter wouldn't be fun if the bullets are super-jerky and unexpectedly hit people.
I'm guessing that a UDP-based framework would be the best. Can anyone point me to the right direction?
There are many things you can use off the shelf but the basic setup is very simple but you have a few options.
The most common is server push, things like Flash Media Server, LiveCycle Data Services from Adobe or other tools like SmartFoxServer can do this. With this setup the server saves the connections to everyone that connects to the server and passes or "pushes" applications state to the people connected every time the data changes in the application.
Another option is called long pulling, this can be done with any web server really. How this works is the data stores the state of the application, when the application starts it calls the server, when it responds the client calls the server again.
There are a few other ways to do it but these are the most common. But this has nothing to do with protocol like HTTP, UDP, AMF, XMPP, or whatever else. The protocol is the format that the data is sent. With these out of the box servers they normally output a few of these but the fastest formats are binary like AMF but not always the best, there are advantages to each, because each gives you different features for keeping track of things.
If you are talking about have a game that takes over the world that has millions of users then you need to think about scaling and what happens when you need two or 100 servers and how do they talk to each other. But for now keep in mind that the more the server does the slower it will get, if you are sending small amounts of data it will be able to handle more users. Stick with making one efficient server and worry about that later if you get there.
You also need to thing about what server side programming language you want to mess with if any. Some services don't let you do anything, these normally cost money and don't do as much. Adobe likes Java but there are servers that output all of these protocols in most every language. My favorit lately has been Node.js a super fast way to run JavaScript on the server. Node.js has a built in HTTP server but it is just as easy to create a simple server that sends basic text through a Socket or XMLSocket. A server like this will easily handle many thousands of users. There are many games that use Socket.IO and if you want to see a simple example of what I'm talking about you can check out this.
Assuming you want to use Flash/Flex and not Java (Blackberry/Android) or native SDKs for Playbook -
There is a book as an inspiration: http://www.packtpub.com/flash-10-multiplayer-game-essentials/book it uses Pulse SDK at the server side. But you could use an own sockets-program on the server side. I use Perl as TCP-sockets server (sends gzipped XML around) in a small card game but this wouldn't work for your shooter.
Flash does not support UDP out of the box
But there is peer-to-peer networking protocol RTMFP in the upcoming Flash Media Server Enterprise 4 (price is out of reach for mere mortals)
So your best bet is to buy an Amazon-service for RTMFP then you can pay-per-use and stay scalable...
You can either do a constant post/get request with the server to get data for the game, but for a multiplayer shooter i'd surgest SmartFoxServer: http://www.smartfoxserver.com/
Out of the box, Adobe AIR supports UDP through datagram packets.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/reference/html/flash/net/DatagramSocket.html
I couldn't find a particular networking API for flash, but perhaps you can build one. Libgren is open source and you can use that for reference.
You can also look into RTMFP though it's focus is on transmitting audio/video and some messages (through TCP I think).