DeveloperZen.com - Development|Game

Now that's pretty cool...  A .NET port of the Quake 3 Arena source code.

One of the things you rarely get to see, unless you're working in the games industry, are design documents for commercial games.
Of course, people publish design documents templates and write books and articles about game design.

Al Lowe, who designed and development some of the best adventure games ever made (Leisure Suit Larry, Freddy Pharkas, ...), has posted a series of game design documents for several of the adventure games he worked on at Sierra.
It's pretty cool to go over these documents and compare them with the actual shipped game, plus it gives some real good insight to game design...

Its already all over the news, Microsoft is releasing an express edition of its XNA toolkit targeted at the hobbyist game developers.
Here's a collection of news posts about the topic:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/aug06/08-13XNAGameStudioPR.mspx
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6155590.html?tag=latestnews;title;1
http://editorials.teamxbox.com/xbox/1688/XNA-Game-Studio-Express-Power-to-the-Gamers/p1/
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10458
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2006-08-14T054006Z_01_N13196180_RTRUKOC_0_US-MEDIA-MICROSOFT.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-technologyNews-3
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/281098_software14.html
http://news.digitaltrends.com/talkback138.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/14/AR2006081400002.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/technology/14game.html?ref=business
http://news.com.com/Play+your+own+Xbox+game/2100-1043_3-6104939.html
http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0806/352510.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060813-7490.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/08/13/national/a210122D44.DTL
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/breaking_news/15267974.htm

You can also sign-up for the beta here: https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=226

Technorati : DirectX, Microsoft, XBox, XNA
Del.icio.us : DirectX, Microsoft, XBox, XNA
Ice Rocket : DirectX, Microsoft, XBox, XNA

MDXInfo is a new site created by DirectX enthusiasts containing articles, tutorials and resources about Microsoft's Managed DirectX. From the site's main page:

"...Managed DirectX needs some more momentum so we figured to contribute a bit to this by providing these resources for working with it.

Our aim for MDX info is to make it a one-stop resource for all things MDX."

I think its a blessed intiative. Go there and check it out...

A graphics engine written in C# and OpenGL which uses Sharp3D.Math can be found at http://www.jordodesigns.com/jpgl.html.

From the web site:

JPGL is a graphics engine coded in C# using the OpenGL graphics API. The engine is partially based off the CSS450/451 graphics library, which is written in C++ and uses Direct3D. There are some major structural diversions from the CSS450/451 library, mainly to accommodate a more modular design - allowing for transparent interchangeability in three layers within the graphics engine.

The default implementation of JPGL provides an OpenGL graphics API layer. Included features are:

• scene graph/node object
• 2D and 3D shape primitives
• camera object
• light objects
• a GLSL shader implementation
• textures
• materials (with ability to load from Wavefront .MTL file)
• transformation object
• Wavefront .OBJ model importer
• screenshot support
• support for multiple OpenGL contexts
• OpenGL display list caching for selected drawing
• geometry data is shared between all shape primitives of same type
• dynamically deformable mesh object
• loft object (lofts from one profile line to another)
• particle system object with OpenGL PointSprite extension support
• vector, matrix, and quaternion wrappers (using Sharp3D.Math underneath)

A new update for the Wild Magic library has been recently released. The library a commercial-quality game engine and is the companion source code to the book 3D Game Engine Architecture: Engineering Real-Time Applications written by David Eberly.
The source code is available publically and contains numerous 3D real-time graphics algorithms, including collision-detection, distance calculations, numerical analysis, and image processing, in addition to a comprehensive mathematics library. The book is highly recommended and is an excellent opportunity to support the author for providing such high-quality code.

You can watch the release notes here.

After a long period of inactivity the announcement finally came:

"After more than six and a half years of game development goodness, flipCode is closing its doors. We are no longer accepting submissions of articles, images, news, etc."

I guess this marks the end of an era... flipcode.Com has always been my favorite resource when it came to game development and it even used to be my homepage host not so long ago (http://tentacle.flipcode.com). You can read the full announcement at flipCode.com.

Kurt did not supply any reason for closing down the site but I guess he just doesn't have the time for it anymore... All there is left to do is wish him luck in his future endeavors... Good luck Kurt

John Carmack announced at his Quakecon 2005 keynote that the Quake 3 Arena source code would soon be released.
Today it was released (under GPL license)! And it is availble here...

Just notices on MSDN's DirectX developers center that the Meltdown2005 presentation are availble for download.

You can download them directly from this link.

Although not technical, be sure to check out "Publisher Business Track" presentations which are quite interesting...

A group of indie game developers worried about the future of gaming has launched GamesAreArt.com.

Welcome to this brand new site. Here it's your home to discuss games as a cultural movement, games as an artistic revolution, games as your creative obsession or games just as games.
Developers and Gamers of the World, Unite! GamesAreArt.com is born.

Extremetech.com features an article about the Windows Vista presentation for game developers given at Microsoft's Meltdown convention.

DirectX 10, the Vista Game Explorer and Vista's WinSAT tools are discussed...

In brief:

• Windows Game Explorer allows easy brwosing through installed games (Media Player style) rather than going through the usual Programs->Some Publisher->SomeGame...
• WinSAT (Windows System Assessment Tool) is a function that analyzes your PC's performance and stores the data in a protected system file, so that the OS and applications can enable or disable features appropriately. This can be used by game developers set the game's performance and details level etc. according to the performance test results performed by WinSAT.
• DirectX 10
• Revised API. Almost completelly rewritten.
• Strict hardware requirements
• New "geometry shaders" which operates on entire primitives (dots, lines, triangles...) rather than single vertices.

Bottom line is that Microsoft is not ditching the PC as a gaming platform because of Xbox 360...

The Game Programming Wiki just turned one year of age today!

Visit the anniversary page  to see some usage statistics...

designinteract.com  features a very interesting article about the UI design process of Microsoft's Xbox 360.

"Taking two years to design an interface may sound like a long time, but not when it’s for a media product. For the iPods and Tivos of the world, the difference between success and failure often lies in how quickly a person can learn the interface and begin using the device. As a result, such projects have lengthy timelines and budgets that would astonish the average Web designer..."

Read the full article here...

Jacco Bikker started a new tutorials series at flipcode.org.
Check it out:

• Raytracing Topics & Techniques Part 1: Introduction
• Raytracing Topics & Techniques Part 2: Phong, Mirrors and Shadows
• Raytracing Topics & Techniques Part 3: Refractions and Beer's Law
• Raytracing Topics & Techniques Part 4: Spatial Subdivision

I've been thinking about starting a tutorials series about 3D math. I could use Sharp3D.Math for code samples etc...
Anyway, I hope I'll have an update about that soon.