GDNet: Weekend Reading

Entries from 6/4 - 6/11

Hey wow this is my 200th blog post here, and most likely about 90% of them are these journal land updates. Thanks to everyone who's sent support in the past about these, and thanks again to the Torque folks for letting me re-post this here.

We didn't make a big stink about it (kinda embarrassed the new site isn't up yet, won't lie - it's coming!!) but GameDev had its 11th birthday yesterday so - hooray! :)

Journal Land Pick of the Week

Digitanks Development Journal - is your idea too big? It's the common mistake people make when developing a game - aiming way higher than they can achieve. But that doesn't always mean what you set out to do was impossible, perhaps you just didn't consider some things that could have made the whole process a lot smaller and easier to achieve. BSVino points out some of these things

Say hello to new Journal Land citizen Mathucub and namar777!

Project Updates

* Journal of dbaumgart - dbaumgart leverages the weird-perspective level design of the old 2D Zelda games to help solve a problem in Dungeons of Dredmor involving objects being hidden by walls

* Radioactive-Software - *Yawn* Screenshots. Same old, same old. Oh wait, no - it's still cool. Half the fun of developing something like this is no doubt playing around with it. C'mon dgreen02, admit it. You just spend hours flying/driving around.

* You Gotta Squeeze Every Pixel - Staffan E has the full source uploaded for the dynamic properties container he is using with his project for anyone interested in checking it out/integrating it with theirs.

* Journal of Lethargic Programmers - cameni shows off another road type in Outerra, dirt roads. What I find especially cool is the dynamic setting for the ruts in the road that can even differ from node to node - you can be sure that'll jounce around your vehicle if they're deep enough!

* Journal of Trefall - Lots of source listing as Trefall describes and details his XML loading of component-based objects. I'm really just equating substantialness to usefulness here :P

Gamedev Stuffs

* The Bag of Holding - working on a space game? Working on getting your AI craft from point A to point B amongst myriad-sized vessels moving all over the place? Then you might want to check out ApochPiQ's "Method for Connecting Navigation Meshes for Six-Degrees-of-Freedom Movement Systems". Now that's a mouthful.

* Dungeon Fortress - Darkness is not your friend - when Ashaman73 switched over his engine to deferred rendering from forward rendering he lost his ability to render transparent surfaces. He's recently regained that functionality and describes what he's done to get it back, using stipple transparency and a simple shader

* The Code Zone Bargain Basement Blog - johnhattan invites you to leave properly asinine and disparaging YouTube comments for his latest Lazy Programmer episode (brought to you by BEER), in which he describes "productive laziness" or, his way of living cheap to afford to live lazy. It all makes sense, I swear.

Other Stuffs

* Any Colour You Like - So benryves has a dilemma, and like all dilemmas with an electronic solution, he simply builds what he needs. This time it's a remote control for PowerDVD on his computer in an adjacent room while he lounges in better comfort to watch movies. He's provided the source code and schematics.

Thanks for dropping by evolutional, alfith, JTippetts, Saruman, ozak, Jason Z, phantom