GDNet: Weekend Reading
by Drew -Gaiiden- Sikora · 12/04/2009 (4:19 pm) · 5 comments
No I'm not switching this to bi-weekly, I simply took a real vacation last week for Thanksgiving. Which meant no work. Well. Almost. I tried really hard I swear.
Entries from 11/20 - 12/3
Journal Land Picks of the Week
Promit's Ventspace - Promit offers up some healthy advice on what you should really be thinking about should you want to startup and lead an online project in his journal article "Checklist to Lead an Online Game Project"
Any Colour You Like - benryves has outdone himself in his electronical wizardy with a HUGE tutorial on the STM8S-Discovery, an 8-bit microcontroller he proceeds to make sing and dance. If you're into electronics in any way at all you will read this post or die of electric shock the next time you touch a circuit board. Oh and if that's not enough, you can check out his work with ATmega168 - he created a tetris and snake clone with source/binaries available for download
Welcome back, or thanks for stopping by, blewisjr, sunandshadow, JTippetts, Knarkles and RanBlade!
Project Updates
* Robot, Ninja, Pirate, Monkey - Slather talks about the organization and deployment behind his project, and shares the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) script that he uses to install his project if you'd like something to base your own script off of.
* Tesseract's Game Development Journal - Tesseract is back with his neat-o web demos! In this one you get to place water particles on a heightmap and watch them "roll" downhill. It's cool when you drag your mouse cursor around but when you leave it still... well let's just say that Ian Malcolm would disapprove.
* IfThen Software LLC - IfThen Software is back online after a week of downtime. Not much news but there are two new iScribble sketches from the artist
* Journal of EDI - EDI updates on their projects, including the recently-completed STATIC: Investigator Training, the in-progress Selenite Engine and the in-progress Morning's Wrath 2. What's this about a return to The Lost City of Malathedra?
* OddGames development journal - O-san has updated the navigation mesh pathfinding in his Nimrod editor, it now generates a path along the mesh using an A* algorithm he learned from, surprise surprise, a GameDev.net article!
* Under a ShadowyTree - Black Knight doesn't have much to say, and usually I berate journal entries that are just images, but this one is a nice twist - he has a shot of his level editor compared to one from 2 years earlier. Big difference? Oh yea. I like this. More before/after shots plz (everyone)
* Journal of lucius - lucius returns to an older project, DaggerXL, which is a modern Daggerfall Engine recreation.
* Journal of Aardvajk - Among other things, like adding levers, Aardvajk hs also created some tunes for his game Squishy
* Radioactive-Software - dgreen02 is spoiling us all with the updates this month, but who's going to complain? More hi-def screens of Warbots online showcasing time of day and weather effects and film grain/brightness/contrast/saturation post processes. He also reveals a bit about Urban Empires in the comments.
* Journal of Lethargic Programmers - cameni updates on Outerra with more screens of it in flight simulator mode, with a more complete Cessna model. Simply as a flight simulator fan I must give this post two thumbs up for awesomeness. Let's not be forgetting the Google maps overlay!
Game Dev Stuffs
* DruinkJournal - How useful/important this really is don't entirely know but it incensed Evil Steve enough to make a short journal post about so... ATTN CodeWarrior users - "CodeWarrior is effing useless".
* Chronicles of the Hieroglyph - Jason Z shares a screen from his DX11 SSAO implementation and wonders if anyone has yet had a chance to do a performance test with the new crop of DX11 cards
* There is no escape from the Washu - Washu presents to you a SlimDX Direct3D10 X Loader, based off Jack Hoxley's C++ code from one of his journal posts
* Merry Prankster Games - gdunbar's link entry this week covers how to handle difficulty in games from jeff Vogel and Jay Barnson, and as he's working on texturing for his first project with the SENG engine, he came across a nice article called "The Ten Top Tips of Texturing"
* Reinvention and Further Development of the Wheel - Staffan E shares his thoughts on the entry gdunbar made (above) on difficulty levels in games
Other Stuffs
* The Code Zone Bargain Basement Blog - johnhattan swings by with a brief life update and also to recommend two books he read recently, one written by game industry veteran Greg Costikyan. Yea, I didn't know he had a novel published either.
Entries from 11/20 - 12/3
Journal Land Picks of the Week
Promit's Ventspace - Promit offers up some healthy advice on what you should really be thinking about should you want to startup and lead an online project in his journal article "Checklist to Lead an Online Game Project"
Any Colour You Like - benryves has outdone himself in his electronical wizardy with a HUGE tutorial on the STM8S-Discovery, an 8-bit microcontroller he proceeds to make sing and dance. If you're into electronics in any way at all you will read this post or die of electric shock the next time you touch a circuit board. Oh and if that's not enough, you can check out his work with ATmega168 - he created a tetris and snake clone with source/binaries available for download
Welcome back, or thanks for stopping by, blewisjr, sunandshadow, JTippetts, Knarkles and RanBlade!
Project Updates
* Robot, Ninja, Pirate, Monkey - Slather talks about the organization and deployment behind his project, and shares the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) script that he uses to install his project if you'd like something to base your own script off of.
* Tesseract's Game Development Journal - Tesseract is back with his neat-o web demos! In this one you get to place water particles on a heightmap and watch them "roll" downhill. It's cool when you drag your mouse cursor around but when you leave it still... well let's just say that Ian Malcolm would disapprove.
* IfThen Software LLC - IfThen Software is back online after a week of downtime. Not much news but there are two new iScribble sketches from the artist
* Journal of EDI - EDI updates on their projects, including the recently-completed STATIC: Investigator Training, the in-progress Selenite Engine and the in-progress Morning's Wrath 2. What's this about a return to The Lost City of Malathedra?
* OddGames development journal - O-san has updated the navigation mesh pathfinding in his Nimrod editor, it now generates a path along the mesh using an A* algorithm he learned from, surprise surprise, a GameDev.net article!
* Under a ShadowyTree - Black Knight doesn't have much to say, and usually I berate journal entries that are just images, but this one is a nice twist - he has a shot of his level editor compared to one from 2 years earlier. Big difference? Oh yea. I like this. More before/after shots plz (everyone)
* Journal of lucius - lucius returns to an older project, DaggerXL, which is a modern Daggerfall Engine recreation.
* Journal of Aardvajk - Among other things, like adding levers, Aardvajk hs also created some tunes for his game Squishy
* Radioactive-Software - dgreen02 is spoiling us all with the updates this month, but who's going to complain? More hi-def screens of Warbots online showcasing time of day and weather effects and film grain/brightness/contrast/saturation post processes. He also reveals a bit about Urban Empires in the comments.
* Journal of Lethargic Programmers - cameni updates on Outerra with more screens of it in flight simulator mode, with a more complete Cessna model. Simply as a flight simulator fan I must give this post two thumbs up for awesomeness. Let's not be forgetting the Google maps overlay!
Game Dev Stuffs
* DruinkJournal - How useful/important this really is don't entirely know but it incensed Evil Steve enough to make a short journal post about so... ATTN CodeWarrior users - "CodeWarrior is effing useless".
* Chronicles of the Hieroglyph - Jason Z shares a screen from his DX11 SSAO implementation and wonders if anyone has yet had a chance to do a performance test with the new crop of DX11 cards
* There is no escape from the Washu - Washu presents to you a SlimDX Direct3D10 X Loader, based off Jack Hoxley's C++ code from one of his journal posts
* Merry Prankster Games - gdunbar's link entry this week covers how to handle difficulty in games from jeff Vogel and Jay Barnson, and as he's working on texturing for his first project with the SENG engine, he came across a nice article called "The Ten Top Tips of Texturing"
* Reinvention and Further Development of the Wheel - Staffan E shares his thoughts on the entry gdunbar made (above) on difficulty levels in games
Other Stuffs
* The Code Zone Bargain Basement Blog - johnhattan swings by with a brief life update and also to recommend two books he read recently, one written by game industry veteran Greg Costikyan. Yea, I didn't know he had a novel published either.
About the author
#2
The GDNet and the Torque community has a significant overlap. I think posting interesting things the GDNet community is working on benefits the Torque community. We probably should be looking at what that 6th point about blogs is trying to accomplish here. I have a feeling GG would never want the Weekend Reading to cease because of a TOS that was not worded perfectly for court use. :)
12/04/2009 (8:51 pm)
For reference:Quote:
6. Blogs. Blogs on TorquePowered are meant to show off a user's Torque-related projects and other interesting things the community is working on. Posts about general industry news, questions, or bugs should be posted in the forums.
The GDNet and the Torque community has a significant overlap. I think posting interesting things the GDNet community is working on benefits the Torque community. We probably should be looking at what that 6th point about blogs is trying to accomplish here. I have a feeling GG would never want the Weekend Reading to cease because of a TOS that was not worded perfectly for court use. :)
#3
12/05/2009 (5:07 am)
I am sure that it doesn't violate the new TOS. I love reading over the content that Drew posts here, long may it continue! 
#5
12/10/2009 (12:22 am)
Don't worry guys! I'm good friends with a lot of GG staffers and plenty of them enjoying reading these posts as well :) Thanks for the support - we over at GDNet love working with the GG folks whenever possible. In fact I need to do a better job at holding up my end of the bargain by remembering to post the official Torque blog updates over on the GDNet News 
Torque 3D Owner Tony Richards