Blog feeds for Gamers and Developers in the GarageGames community. http://www.garagegames.com/ 2008-11-21T14:27:23+00:00 text/html 2004-05-22T06:03:28+00:00 Dan Pereira http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/36296/5712 Free Visual C++ &quot;Optimizing&quot; Compiler...<br /><br />I just posted to a thread regarding the &quot;cheap&quot; non-optimizing standard version VC++ that some of you are using. You can visit: http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/ and download the full-blown optimizing compiler directly from Microsoft. When you buy Visual Studio, you are actually paying for the IDE not the compiler. All of Microsoft's compilers are actually free! If this is old news to everyone, please ignore!<br><br>\m/ rock on...<br>DP text/html 2004-05-06T20:34:51+00:00 Dan Pereira http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/36296/5655 A bundle of joy!<br /><br />Last night at 10:40 p.m. my wife gave birth to my second daughter Skye. She's a cutie-pie!<br><br>DP text/html 2004-05-04T02:54:31+00:00 Dan Pereira http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/36296/5646 Being unemployed rules. Until my wife speaks. I'm having a hard time convincing her that goofing off with Torque is in some way helping me find a job!<br /><br />So here I sit. Tired because I spent the whole past 24 hours fooling around with my shiny new purchase: The Torque Engine. What fun! I fired up Max and exported some simple shapes which loaded in the engine straight away, collisions and all. Tonight will be animation night I think, if my brain doesn't give out too early. I'm really happy to be fooling around with entertainment software after a much-too-long vacation from the art. I used to work for a major game publisher in the mid to late nineties as an in-house tools programmer, but I never got to touch game design which is really what interests me. Now with Torque I can design my heart out. I guess I'll start cooking up a basic game of some type. Wish me luck.<br><br>I've noticed lately that programmers are an endangered species in the U.S. Me and most of my programmer friends are out of work and fed up with the industry. The ones who are working hate their jobs and the people they work with. No fun. In a way I hope computing goes underground (like it used to be in the 70s and 80s) where talent and imagination had value in the industry. Sites like GarageGames.com are a great start towards this indeed. I can see that with Torque an individual or a small team can create a game worth playing without breaking the bank. My hat is off to the team and the community.