Blog for Drew -Gaiiden- Sikora at GarageGames.com

GDNet: Tales from Journal Land

Drew -Gaiiden- Sikora — 2008-10-10T19:35:31+00:00

Ha, this week I actually kept track of journal updates on a daily basis, so the final compilation was not an hours-long endeavor all clumped together on the one workday I like to be as lazy as possible. Therefore you all get to enjoy some reading before leaving your desks. Everyone have a great weekend!

Pick of the Week

mittentacular - mittens, founder of the GDNet Daily, kicks off a new column in his journal titled simply Mechanics where he will be "analyzing a game mechanic from a game that is popular now, popular eight years ago, or never popular" with the goal of making "game developers and gamers try to think more critically about the games they play." In his first episode, he talks about why randomness in Call of Duty creates a more strategic atmosphere of play.

From the Staff

* Continuous Refinement - if you were having webspace issues and wonder what the hell was up (now that it's fixed) superpig has answers for you

* Gaiiden's Scroll - GDC prep, IGF interviews and Webby Awards. Not to mention a few new resources and a slew of new events

Project Updates

* Journal of zedz - zedz's project is reminding me a lot of Darwinia with more realistic terrain and characters in terms of visual style - not that that's a bad thing!

* Journal of dbaumgart - dbaumgart shares some pixel work from the project Aragon Online, then waxes nostalgic over Quake 1 and old id games after downloading and playing the id Pack off Steam

* Merry Prankster Games - gdunbar adds a new level system to his RPG project

* Gauntlets of Recursion (+3) - HopeDagger ressurects Skirmish Online. Extra HP awarded for linking back to an old journal entry to remind us about the project

* Blue stain - alfith shows off a bunch of creatures in his game. That tentacly-eyed cyclops thing almost looks cuddly - but it has fangs.

* Oddgames development journal - O-san works out adding characters and locking to grids in his Nimrod editor

* Milkshake's Dev Diary - Milkshake lifts the hood off his AI system and goes through what's underneath

* Untitled - Tape_Worm releases beta v1.1.x (Ionian) of Gorgon, his 2D .NET graphics library. Also tagging along is a bit of rant regarding a certain thread over in the Game Programming forum

* Happenings with VBStrider and Crew - the latest "newsletter" on the team's progress, detailing a more accurate overall percentage of completion, font engine fixes, and the results from the latest playtest

* Rated N For Nerd - in a rather interesting update, nerd_boy uses a screencap of his CodeLite editor with text written in it to detail the changes and future additions to the lightweight .NET editor

Game Dev Stuffs

* Chronicles of the Hieroglyph - Jason Z articulates an alliterative addition to his engine - Recursive Reflection with Rasterized Rendering

* Promit's Ventspace - Promit gives his own argument for the reality of why people still use C, again thanks to the same thread that set off Tape_Worm (and many others). No, I'm not linking to it here.

* Journal of EasilyConfused - EasilyConfused gives thought to extending the font format that he discussed in last week's Reading entry

* There is no escape from the Washu - Washu likes Python, and he wants you all to know why

* DruinkJournal - Evil Steve pops in while sober to report a potential position for DS developers in Glasgow. This is where you PM him and then buy him drinks

* Indisputable Tales of Interest - Driv3MeFar is exploring the world of threads and posts up some code he's hacked together so far. Tip #12 on getting in the Weekend Reading: post code and ask for critiscm. Critiscm is good

Other Stuffs

* The Code Zone Bargain Basement Blog - John evangilizes XP for the OLPC

* Any Colour You Like - benryves continues the electronic wizardry by teaching his Z80 to draw lines, cubes and inverted text.

Though there are no new Journal Land citizens to welcome this week :( we can say welcome back to JWalsh, who hasn't been around in over a year.

GDNet: Weekly Sitrep

Drew -Gaiiden- Sikora — 2008-10-09T00:07:13+00:00

GDC prep

Somewhere's in between Oct and Dec (sometimes even as late as Jan - yikes!) the staff wakes up to the fact that GDC is around the bend. This year we're prepping early, starting this month, to make sure that all of our plans for world domination... err... the conference are complete come March. We'll be having a booth once more this year, which we didn't do last year but have done in years past. It'll be right across the way from the Course PTR booth chock full of wonderful books for purchase at discount - including the upcoming GDNet books (which still need their own special announcement I suppose, but it's not a big secret anymore now is it? [smile]). Oh and don't forget about the bag swag. Last year we did ping pong balls and this year we're planning on continuing the activities theme. I'll have more juicy GDC details as we get closer, of course

IGF Awards

Next month we'll be hearing about the 2009 IGF finalists and I'll be starting my rounds of IGF interviews once again. Much as I don't mind all the fame and fortune (ok, just fame), I'm always willing to let others lend a hand in the process, so if you're interested in talking to some developers about their game and most likely making some new friends in the process (I keep in touch with a lot of past finalists) then drop me an email. I'm also particularly keen on expanding our IGF coverage to the Student and Mobile sections as well, so be sure to mention your interest in those areas as well.

Webby Awards

We're finally stepping up to the plate and seeing if we can bat a home run in the form of a Webby Award. Gamasutra's been awarded two in the past - can we start to match up? While we know there's a lot of you out there who would vote for us for People's Choice, Gamespot seems to have that pretty nailed down, and they're a lot more main stream. So it looks to be up to the panel of IADAS judges that will determine our fate. Even if we don't win, hopefully coming back next year with a new look and fresh design and new services will win over the judging panel. Keep your fingers crossed for us and we'll let you know when to vote!

New Resources

* Writing the Right Email - Juuso Hietalahti, a game producer, has some sound and straight-forward advice for artists when they send emails for potential positions. Of course, the structure really applies to any position you're in!

* NY Games Conference 2008 - analyst industry data, console vs. PC debate, iPhone development insights, SOE's new titles, teen gamers, pro gaming and pictars!

New Events

Now that we're approaching the new year, I raided the event calendar archives for past Jan 08 events and added those that are returning in 09, along with a few new 08 events:

* Vienna Games Conference 2008. Future and Reality of Gaming (F.R.O.G) @ Vienna, Austria - October 17, 2008 to October 19, 2008

* Fall Spook-tacular LAN Party @ San Diego, CA, United States - October 17, 2008 to October 18, 2008

* Games 3.0 @ London, United Kingdom - October 27, 2008

* Eurogamer Expo @ London, United Kingdom - October 28, 2008 to October 29, 2008

* Gstar @ Seoul, Korea, Republic of - November 13, 2008 to November 16, 2008

* IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference @ Las Vegas, NV, United States - January 10, 2009 to January 13, 2009

* Carolina Games Summit @ Goldsboro, NC, United States - February 7, 2009

GDNet: Tales from Journal Land

Drew -Gaiiden- Sikora — 2008-10-04T06:02:03+00:00

So I missed announcing it last week but, Weekend Reading was conceived over 6 months ago now, back on March 24th. Wow, I had truly not realized how much time had gone by! Since the start, I've managed to miss posting two times (yes, mittens, you can rub it in how you haven't missed any Dailies in basically the same time span... yet) and the posts haven't really been all that regular. I'd like to change things up a little bit now that this has been going on for a while and everyone seems to enjoy it. Nothing too drastic, just the addition of a new Post of the Week that let's me highlight one particular Journal Land entry for reasons I shall expound upon - and of course it offers all Journal Land citizens the incentive to craft more substantial posts (Drilian where'd you go??). Then again, substance may not be all that is neccessary to earn a spot in this new high throne, as the first recipient demonstrates...

Journal Land Pick of the Week

Radioactive-Software by dgreen02 - not only is Danny almost done working on his major-scale title, which he largly created entirely on his own, now you too can experience the action, the drama, and the excitement of game development by tuning in to his live webcam, broadcasting straight from where all the magic happens (you know, his desk). Tune in and watch Danny coding from the comforts of his rocking leather armchair (with massage?), singing along to song lyrics, scratching his ear thoughtfully and... oh crap, he just looked at me. I feel wrong now.

From the Staff

* Gaiiden's Scroll - got any events that you don't see on the calendar? I'd sure like to know about em!

Project Updates

* Blue stain - alfith reboots development of his game project - I forget what it's all about. General tip: Link back to some background entry when re-introducing a project that hasn't been spoken up since March. Nice job on the pictures tho

* Journal of zedz - it appears that zedz has chosen the last of his listed game concepts (last week) for further development

* Stompy's Gamedev Journal - Fists of Justice now has blocking for the main character to turn aside enemy attacks and thrown objects.

* Rixter by Rixter by Rixter by Rixter - Rixter reassess the development of SnakeEngine and showcases the games he's been devloping with each iteration of the engine

* Metaphorical Journeys of Happenstance - Ravuya details some ammo-handling aspects of Afterglow. I always wished games like Uncharted had ammo seperated from the weapons you pick up

* Happenings with VBStrider and Crew - the second project newsletter, detailing bug fixings and demo playing

* P16 Games - Programmer16 lays out the groundwork for his 7 Sins Tech, a game library with it's main components named after the 7 Deadly Sins. Certainly is one way to come up with code names.

* Sir Sapo... The Man ... The Legend - Sir Sapo reports back in from the Air Force Academy with updates on the latest space strategy game poject, and shares another great set of stories from his time at the Academy. Hopefully one day he'll be able to fly an F-305 in the Pegasus Galaxy

* Bennu - Demosthenes has an extended trailer up for Bennu, his DreamBuildPlay contest entry

* The Carrier2 papers - Aph3x is attempting to entice model artists with project imagery. Will it work?

Game Dev Stuffs

* The Code Zone Bargain Basement Blog - John talks about the trials and tribulations he has so far experienced working in packaging together a set of 48 games

* Journal of Promit - In his new blog Ventspace Promit talks at length on test driven development, focusing on unit testing

* Journal of EasilyConfused - EasilyConfused talks about the custom font format he uses and why, along with a solution to one of its quirks

* Readme.txt - Kevin highlights a blog entry by Matt Manela, who created a Snippet Designer to help encourage the use of snippets in VS 05/08

* DruinkJournal - EvilSteve pimps and interview Gamasutra ran with his team at Firebrand Games, working on a 3D DS racing title

* Adventures in Game Design - Similarly, zer0wolf pimps an interview he conducted with Jason Parks, Senior Technical Artist at Sony Online, over at Tech-Artists.org

* Journal of Drew_Benton - Drew_Benton discusses some thoughts on how to approach representing objects in classes, with conceptual code included

* mittentacular - mittens previews his new upcoming column on dissecting game mechanics and why they are (or are not) useful

* MJP's Last Stand - MJP has online the HDR rendering sample that has been circulating through this Reading the past two weeks (well, one I guess if you want to be technically correct)

* BrokenThorn Entertainment - Tutorial 17 released the in the OS Dev series covering development of a full physical memory manager

Other Stuffs

* Journal of dbaumgart - some paintings by dbaumgart to oogle over

* Fallen, oh dear : - diablo_tk gets a new setup. Too bad he has a 360 and I can't destroyplay him in Guitar Hero

Roll out the welcome mat this week for new Journal Land citizen matt_j!

GDNet: Weekly Sitrep

Drew -Gaiiden- Sikora — 2008-10-02T01:04:03+00:00

New Weekend Reading Feature?

So I was thinking of adding a Post of the Week feature to Weekend Reading, where I highlight the most awesomely astounding journal entry of the week and explain in (relatively) great detail why. Weekend Reading's been going on almost six months right now and I'd like to evolve it a bit more. Anyone against? Speak up now or forever hold your peace!

NY Games Conference

NYGC was interesting, although ultimately not very useful from a strict development standpoint (as in, the process of making a game). It was mainly a business/industry-oriented conference, but I still managed to take away a few things for my write up (which I still have to write up, and is due tomorrow). Pictures will also be uploaded to the Facebook group, and a select few will make it into the article gallery as well.

New Resources

* OpenGL Type Traits - Using C++ Type Traits to avoid pointer specific errors in OpenGL

* 2008 Austin GDC Coverage Part 2 - 5 more session coverage and the conference image gallery

Submit Events

Eventually I'm going to find time to go through all of this year's events and find out what their 09 dates are. In the meantime, if you know of an upcoming event to add to the calendar, please let me know! drew@gamedev.net

GDNet: Tales from Journal Land x2!

Drew -Gaiiden- Sikora — 2008-09-27T03:15:31+00:00

Weekend Reading makes its epic return! I didn't think I was going to make it. Getting the AGDC coverage complete while prepping for and attending the NY Games Conference today and yesterday was rough. I got it all done though and I haven't gone insane (a little mentally unstable, but no more so than usual) so here's your weekly dose of Journal goodness.... TIMES TWO!! OMGWTFAAAHHHH *BOOM* (that was your head)

We're going to start with last week's entries and then move on to this past week's entries. Thank you to all the people who didn't post in their journals, because the ones that did nearly ran off the page - I was quite worried I'd have to actually dig through the forums (you know, the Journals really are just forum threads if you've never looked) to pull up posts from two weeks ago. Luckily the last two journals listed were still older than two weeks. Yea, the last two of 50 journals. You guys are busy!!

Oh and let me just say it here that I'm going to be inserting links into posts to connect them together. So if you see a link to a previous journal entry magically appear in a post - that was me. Or it could be a mischieveous fork, but 99.9% of the time it'll be me.

Okay enough babbling. On to the goods!

Okay I lied. Just wanted to say I injected a bit more fun into the listing - shouldn't be too hard to spot here and there =)

Last Week (9/12 - 9/18)

From the Staff

* Continuous Refinement - Richard continues to lay bare aspects of the new site design, the fifth iteration of GDNet and (from an engineering standpoint) the second iteration of the site as a whole

* Gaiiden's Scroll - Catch what went down for me and GDNet at the Austin Game Developer's Conference

* The Code Zone Bargain Basement Blog - if John's reports from Austin aren't as fulfilling, then compensate with learning how to get good, cheap WiFi at Starbucks

Project Updates

* Oddgames development journal - O-san's work on his isometric game editor Nimrod continues with the addition of placing sounds and Lua scripting

* Sir Sapo... The Man ... The Legend - Sir Sapo is back with some details on his new project and more behind-the-scenes stories from the air force academy. Stay alive, nugget!

* Mark the Artist Attacks! - don't stop there! If you liked what Sir Sapo was outlining, Prinz Eugn has even more juicy details, and juicy pics. No, not that juicy...

* Software Renderer in 28 days - Clapfoot implements frustum clipping in his SDL 3D software renderer, goes over the issues he had to overcome

* Tesseract's Game Development Journal - Tesseract changes up the background of his Gyruss clone and modifies the power ups. I can also no longer just shoot into the distance and destroy enemies before I even see them =( Ok ok, so that makes things a bit too easy... Don't forget you can click on the image to play!

* iLiNX - so fine, it's not a post with real substance but... the starry nebulae image is quite captivating

* Gauntlets of Recursion (+3) - HopeDagger project hops again but at least he's keeping things fresh. He divulges some details for his next 2D project, Assail

* MMX Project - sneakyrobot touches a bit on how he's implementing sprite animations and drafts up the story for his game for critique

* What doth life - Aiursrage hasn't been around since May but he's got a good excuse: being busy releasing his first game. Congrats!

* Ye Olde Ramblings - Tangent gets phrase declarations

* Journal of EasilyConfused - an update on EasilyConfused's swingin poke ball game, Pod. Just callin' em as I see em ;)

Game Dev Stuffs

* BrokenThorn Entertainment - tip #26 for getting in the Weekend Reading: post something I simply do not understand, but looks cool

* Compiling... - a_insomniac gives an example of what you can learn from studying game video clips

* MJP's Last Stand - MJP discusses (at length) using the LogLuv format to design an effective and performant HDR implementation for his game's engine under XNA

* Reinvention and Further Development of the Wheel - staaf thinks deep on the game design behind exploration and combat. Also, a tricky(?) math problem to solve, even if you missed out on the rating cookie that JasonZ ate

Other Stuffs

* Readme.txt - Kevin shares a great story on how the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. Yes, a horse's ass. Over 2,000 years ago. A horse's ass

* Any Colour You Like - tip #12 for getting in the Weekend Reading: do things no one else is even remotely close to doing

* The Realm of Trial - DecipherOne clues people in to a new gamer social site, gatheringofgamers.com

* On the path with a ramblin' man - jollyjeffers sadly admits defeat on getting a development environment set up with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V

* A horse's ass

A warm Journal Land welcome to smr and phear-!

This Week (9/19 - 9/25)

From the Staff

* Gaiiden's Scroll - the Weekly sitrep also returns with an AGDC wrap up, new resources and new events

* Continuous Refinement - Richard continues to expose V5 by talking about how site errors will be handled in the new version

Project updates

* Journal of EasilyConfused - a short (short) story on why playtesting your game early is good

* Bennu - Bennu has been entrered into DreamBuildPlay - see the video submission

* iLiNX - continuing the quick and simple entries, urs informs us of his new website, link included of course.

* Ye Olde Ramblings - Telastyn creates a random maze generator with Tangent

* Chronicles of the Hieroglyph - Jason Z completes the 3D UI system for his engine - eyecandy included

* tip #7 on not getting into Weekend Reading: saying you'll "elaborate" or explain in "greater detail" next post... when that post happens to not be in time for this week's Reading

* How to finish a game in less than ten years - another DreamBuildPlay entrant shares video and screens

* MJP's Last Stand - MJP shows off the result of his HDR pipeline (mentioned in last week's Reading above)

* MMX Project - sneakyrobot goes in-depth as promised on his sprite rendering process

* Metaphorical Journeys of Happenstance - updates to Ravuya's project include UI relative positioning, HUD ammo indicator and weapon muzzle tracking. Obligatory ocular oogling included

* The Realm of Trial - DecipherOne is putting out the call for beta testers. Who will answer?

* The Carrier2 papers - Aph3x is also looking for help in the form of a 3D skinner/modeler

* Gauntlets of Recursion (+3) - HopeDagger settles back into game dev once more and continues working on Assail with a map editor

* Happenings with VBStrider and Crew - VBStrider collects info from each week into a "newsletter" update - this week sees a progress page for Loradon 3.0, update from the programmer and a report of the latest dev demo

* Mark the Artist Attacks! - more information and pixely (in a good way) pictures of space ships from Axis Shift. As Don LaFontaine would say (were he still alive) "this time - it's for real"

* tip #18 on not getting into Weekend Reading: having a video in which RPG-like projectiles are launched and nothing explodes

* The Bag of Holding - ApochPiQ answers all your questions about Epoch. What is it? Where can you use it? When can you use it? How will it take over the world? (oh, wait - he forgot that last one)

* Merry Prankster Games - gdunbar talks about fighting styles in his RPG, like wielding a sword, a sword + shield, a sword with two hands, and two weapons weilded at once

* Journal of zedz - zedz needs help deciding which of the 10 projects he's worked on in the past year (which all look awesome, BTW) should deserve his undivided attention

* Tesseract's Game Development Journal - the Gyruss clone now attempts to hypnotize you while you play. Listen to Admrial Ackbar. It's a trap!

* Untitled - Tape_Worm returns to his 2D graphics library for .NET and Managed DirectX, Gorgon

Game Dev Stuffs

* mittentacular - mittens talks at length about developing with XNA Games Studio, using his latest project Cubegasm as an example. He also reveals a new column starting next week!

* On the path with a ramblin' man - jollyjeffers shares a link to Mark Russinovich's blog on diagnosing windows performance problems

* Readme.txt - Kevin shares a blog link as well: to Clinton Keith's entry on managing Shared Infrastructure teams in an agile project

* epic.fail - evolutional cross-posts from his new blog on why you should use version control software

Other Stuffs

* The Code Zone Bargain Basement Blog - John discovers the Lifehacker Hive Five. It is indeed an awesome resource for top apps - I totally second the reccomendation. He also tries (with partial success) to create an analogy of the current financial crisis using McDonalds.

* Any Colour You Like - the electronics craziness continues! Current work is a 64KB RAM and a CHIP-8/SCHIP interpreter

How delighted I am to always be able to end these features with shouts out to new Journal Land citizens! Hello, hello and WTF took you so long to FeverGames, digitalerr0r and Drew_Benton =D

Donations are welcome in the form of comments

GDNet: Weekly Sitrep

Drew -Gaiiden- Sikora — 2008-09-25T04:23:18+00:00

AGDC wrap up

Had a great time down in Austin, as you can see if you read last week's entries from my time at the conference. Part 1 of the conference write ups is online, and Part 2 will be appearing sometime tomorrow (it's a dead link right now, obviously).

Also, you can view the full image gallery on GDNet's Facebook page, though I'll also be posting all the pictures at the end of Part 2's coverage.

Looking ahead to next year, it seems the AGDC has booked a full week of conference time. Many people at the conference were talking about how nice and laid back it all still was, and that it was still small and fairly focused. I kept saying that any conference that starts nowadays (especially those backed by Think Services) are going to just keep getting bigger. I have to admit though that even I didn't think AGDC was going to expand to a week-long format this soon, so here's hoping they still manage to keep the conference focused and informative - I don't want to go to AGDC next year and just see a whole bunch of repeats from GDC (San Francisco). I think 5 months is enough time for people to come up with some new talks.

New York Games Conference tomorrow

Tomorrow I'll be attending the first annual New York Games Conference, and again on Friday. The agenda is mixed and varied, so it should make for some interesting tidbits. I don't plan on doing any coverage on individual sessions - I'll come back with a report next Thursday on the event as a whole, and include the various takeaways that were presented throughout.

Besides the conference agenda itself is of course the chance to re-connect with some of the NYC crowd, who I don't get to see very often thanks to the NYC IGDA chapter having drink nights during the week when I can't travel up to the city in time. Plus, I get to sit down with Oluseyi for lunch tomorrow to go over some GDNet business stuff.

Weekend Reading took a week off

I had hoped to keep track of journal entries during the week while at AGDC, but I just didn't have the time. When I got back on Friday, by the time I was all unpacked, had set my work desk back up, and had logged in and gone through email I neglected over the week as well, I just wanted to crash. I thought about pushing out a Saturday release but then I got word that one of my close friends was shipping out to Iraq on Monday, so a group of us got together to spend the day on Saturday. After that I just figured to wait until next week. So, sorry Weekend Reading fans! Things just didn't work out for last week.

New resources

* Blaine Christine - BioWare Austin Producer Blaine Christine talks about his classic story going from QA to Producer and how it led him to his life at BioWare

* Dane Olds - Ready for a Retro-Future with customizable characters and a wide range of new creative "homemade weapons" to blast away your nuclear waste enemies? In this Notes on Game Dev interview we feature character artist Dane Olds, who is responsible for weapons as a character artist for Bethesda's much anticipated Fallout 3

* 2008 Austin GDC Coverage Part 1 - 7 session summaries from the AGDC

* The Elusive Demo Portfolio - After spending years looking over applicants and stressing about his portfolio at one point in his career as well, Lee gives pointers on making your programming portfolio as strong as possible, and reviews existing portfolios as examples

New events

* NetGames 2008 @ Worcester, MA, United States - October 21, 2008 to October 22, 2008

* Global Game Jam - January 30, 2009 to February 1, 2009

* Austin Game Developers Conference @ Austin, TX, United States - September 14, 2009 to September 18, 2009

* GC Asia @ Singapore City, Singapore - September 17, 2009 to September 20, 2009

GDNet: Weekly Sitrep

Drew -Gaiiden- Sikora — 2008-09-18T04:11:15+00:00

Austin GDC

I was at AGDC this year, and got to hang out with Deborah and Matt and Brett - Ben Garney was there as well and I also got to hang with Adrian Wright and Justin Mette. Good times were had by all, it was great seeing everyone. Full AGDC coverage is coming next week on Tues and Thurs.

Over at my GDNet journal I blogged thrice daily on my adventures at AGDC. You can read it all in full right here.

I'm understandably BEAT, so... gunna go lie down now. bye bye.

GDNet: Tales from Journal Land

Drew -Gaiiden- Sikora — 2008-09-13T00:18:21+00:00

Howdy folks, hope you've all had a nice week, and that everyone who had their nice summer vacation routine disrupted over the last few weeks (*grumble, mutter, gripe*) is settling back in. My computer is once again straining under the massive memory load that FF creates when it has 27 tabs opened at the same time, all pointing to various journal updates of the past week - 430MB FTW baby. Maybe I can get GDNet to foot the bill for my RAM upgrade so I can continue to do this column without danger of crashing my computer. Or I guess I could use Google Chrome instead. Naahhhh - I want more memory ;)

From the Staff

* Continuous Refinement - Come learn some more about the up-coming V5 site version. It's a whole new world people. Superpig begins by introducing you to the Windows Common Foundation V5 is built around

* Gaiiden's Scroll - In case anyone needed a reminder, GDNet is almost 10 years old. Also, let me know if you want an AGDC session in particular to be covered, and check out some new resources and event updates.

Project Updates

* Milkshake's Dev Diary - Milkshake highlights a problem with custom Maya exporters, shares a video of his in-game character animation.

* Ye Olde Ramblings - work on Tangent continues as always, with entries on Type Parameterization, Indexers, and Explicit Identifier Arguments throughout the week. Do not assume I know what any of that means.

* Journal of EasilyConfused - be introduced to Pod in this post, and then continue to check out the week as EasilyConfused continues updates, culminating with particle effects eyecandy on the 11th

* Metaphorical Journeys of Happenstance - the character in Ravuya's latest project can now carry weapons

* Under a ShadowyTree - Black Knight shares his code to the object-oriented bounding box collision he implemented, as well as a link to the helpful "N" (as in the game) tutorials on the subject

* The Bag of Holding - ApochPiQ's weekly work on Epoch ends with some Visual Studio integration, but be sure to check back earlier in the week for more Epoch goodness which I have no grasp on, yet which I know is still good.

* Sir Sapo... The Man ... The Legend - Sir Sapo returns, relieving his stress by working on a new game project. Why is he stressed? Cause he's a cadet in the USAF Academy, which means hopefully one day I can ask him to fly a fighter jet over my house at 500 feet with the afterburners lit and doing a barrel roll. He has my permission to buzz the tower.

* Gauntlets of Recursion (+3) - if one returning Journal Land Citizen wasn't enough (and it isn't, I say!) we can also welcome back HopeDagger from his long quasi-absence - as he's really been just moonlighting over on his own blog. Check out his latest project, a 3D FPS in a futuristic cyberpunk world

* Oddgames development journal - check out O-san's integration of OpenAL into the Nimrod editor

* Rated N For Nerd - nerd_boy is working on a lite weight editor control for the .NET platform named CodeLite. Sound cool to you? Check the latest and bug him for more updates

* Raptor's Den - Raptor85 shares a video showing off his PSP game engine in action.

* Radioactive-Software - dgreen02 has two Urban Empire updates this week: video of a car on the test track being used to tweak the Ageia car physics; the last 2 renders of the 51 weapons available in the game: a chainsaw and a drum-mag M4

* Disshackled Transanity - Daerax continues work on his generic RPG project, learning more about the wonders of OOP in conjunction with functional programming. Code follows.

Game Dev Stuffs

* Adventures in Game Design - zer0wolf would like you to know about tech-artists.org, a community for professional technical artists

* Journal of EnemyBoss - EnemyBoss, for reasons unknown even to him, is working hard at coding a simple sprite enging in C only

* Working late past midnight... - capn_midnight fleshes out some of his design document for a story-driven game framework

* Compiling... - a_insomniac shares a link to a presentation from GDC 04: "An anatomy of a 2D Side Scroller" in his research for his next project

* Merry Prankster Games - gdunbar takes a good look at the new D&D 4 rules and how he plans to apply them to his own RPG project

Other Stuffs

* Any Colour You Like - benryves' home-built Z80 cmputer is up and running - it also needs a name.

* Not dead... - phantom warns about solid-state drives based on an AnandTech article that cites horrible latency and bad buffering in certain drives.

* On the path with a ramblin' man - jollyjeffers runs some memory tests and apologizes to Firefox for blaming it for his memory woes, and redirects his ire at FF extensions

* The Code Zone Bargain Basement Blog - John posts up some additional items to his Google Chrome mini-review of last week

* mittentacular - mittens gives his in-depth impression of Spore after being sucked in for many hours upon release

Let's close with a big welcome to new Journal Land citizen linternet.

GDNet: Weekly Sitrep

Drew -Gaiiden- Sikora — 2008-09-11T01:51:45+00:00

whoops! I forgot to cross-post my GDNet journal entries over here last week... hrm probably shouldn't have said anything because now you all know. Oh well :P

Austin GDC next week

John Hattan and I will both be in attendance at AGDC next week, so if you'll be at the conference as well, drop me a line via any some form of communication and I'll be sure to look for you. Or, if you have a GDNet "I Make Games" shirt, that's a great way to be spotted as well. I'll be wearing mine on Monday, then a GG shirt on Tues (since they're having their Not-IGC party that night) and a Game Institute shirt on Wed. If anyone has a session or few they'd like covered, you can list them in the comments - I only attend sessions along my own tracks of knowledge, which are mostly business and production, with design and basic programming thrown in for good measure. So if it's not something I can understand, I won't cover it. But I'll try my best! Coverage will be posted the following week.

Almost 10 years

Have you guys thought lately about the fact that the site will be a whopping 10 years old early next year? That's like 50 in web-years! Well, rest assured that we on the staff all know about it and we're planning lots of cool things for 2009. Wheee!

New Resources

* Your Portfolio Repels Jobs - Jon Jones, an Outsourced Art Production Manager, warns "I look at game artists' portfolios on a regular basis. These websites are usually designed so poorly that I close my browser out of disgust. They're even bad enough to turn away potential employers, regardless of the quality of the artwork. Tragic!" How can artists avoid this pitfall? Jones gives web design advice sure to make landing jobs successful on Notes on Game Dev.

* How Can We Make People Play Less? - Programmer Circo Continisio believes that MMORPGs are addictive, and not only should they not be, but that game designers are obligated to live by a code of ethics and design games that are profitable for the company but not harmful to players.

New Events

* GameON: Finance 2.0 @ Toronto, Canada - October 28, 2008 to October 29, 2008

* GameCity 3 @ Nottingham, United Kingdom - October 30, 2008 to November 1, 2008

* Game Connection Europe @ Lyon, France - November 5, 2008 to November 7, 2008

* International Digital Entertainment Festival @ Melbourne, Australia - November 13, 2008 to November 16, 2008

* Game Industry Summit Russia 2008 @ Petersburg, Russian Federation - November 21, 2008 to November 23, 2008

* DIG London Game Conference @ November 27, 2008 to November 28, 2008

* 2K Bot Prize @ Perth, Australia - December 15, 2008 to December 18, 2008

* Game Connection America @ San Francisco, CA, United States - March 24, 2009 to March 26, 2009

GDNet: Tales from Journal Land

Drew -Gaiiden- Sikora — 2008-08-29T16:46:49+00:00

It's a tight schedule for me today, so I was a bit picky on choosing entries for this week's Weekend Reading. There wasn't a whole lot of entries this past week, so you can easily find all the recent updated on the main Journal Land page.

From the Staff

* Gaiiden's Scroll - weekly sitrep: 7 new events and I ask for your status report on GDNet

Project Updates

* Merry Prankster Games - gdunbar redoes his UI to move away from MFC and make it look less like Windows

* Milkshake's Dev Diary - more work on his cow platformer game, including the completion of killing the cow: Game Over

* Ye Olde Ramblings - Telastyn works to add Properties to his language Tangent

* Metaphorical Journeys of Happenstance - I saw people asking Rav for an update, and apparently he saw them too

* The Bag of Holding - ApochPiQ has a new release of his language Epoch ready for your consumption - plus many more notable entries the rest of the week

* Journal of Lethargic Programmers - cameni and team continue with their planetary engine, getting further along with their flora by placing trees and rendering a nice video for your watching pleasure

Game Dev Stuffs

* Untitled - Tape_Worm figures he might as well use his still-existing journal to ask for help in optimizing a memory buffer object in .NET, sharing a bit of code he wrote for benchmarking the buffer

* Journal of EasilyConfused - ever think about whether to letterbox or 4:3 your resolutions? Mix/match? EasilyConfused goes over the options

* Tesseract's Game Development Journal - more code and a playable version of the maze generator posted last week

Other Stuffs

* Any Colour You Like - the Z80 madness continues!

* FREE AOL FOR THE MILLIONTH READER! - The Senshi says "I don't think people that play MMORPGs actually enjoy them -- but they think they do" and then goes on to answer the question "how does someone believe they're having fun when they're not?" (GDNet Surgeon Generals Health Notice: The journal readership is nowhere near the million count yet - it is safe to view without fear of contracting the horrible disease AOL)

And let's cap it all off with a welcome to Clapfoot.