DeveloperZen » Game Development

Managed Quake 3 Arena

admin — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 07:00:31 +0000

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

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Game Design Documents – Real Industry Examples

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:52:35 +0000

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…

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XNA Express – Microsoft to Enable User-Created Games on XBox360

admin — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 08:55:14 +0000

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

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MDXInfo

admin — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 23:13:46 +0000

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…

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JPGL Graphics Engine

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 19:43:25 +0000

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)

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New WildMagic Version

admin — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 11:56:15 +0000

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.

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DirectX 9 To Get a Significant Upgrade

admin — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 00:50:21 +0000

Another interesting post at the inquirer…

I didn’t expect any significant change to DirectX before DirectX10\WGF (Vista).
It seemed the DirectX team’s main focus in the DirectX9 updates was on tools etc. but according to this article, DirectX9 will get a significant core upgrade featuring Shader Model 4.0 support.

Should be interesting… I wonder if they’ll invite me to the beta program (if there will be one)…

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flipCode has Closed its Doors

admin — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 20:34:26 +0000

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

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Quake 3 Arena sources released!

admin — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 09:46:08 +0000

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…

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Meltdown 2005 Presentations

admin — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 21:31:52 +0000

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…

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GameArtArt.com

admin — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 22:39:12 +0000

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.

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Windows Vista for Gamers

admin — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 23:00:48 +0000

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…

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The Game Programming Wiki Celebrates Its One Year Anniversary!

admin — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 22:35:17 +0000

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

Visit the anniversary page to see some usage statistics…

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Xbox 360 – The Making of A Video Game Console Interface

admin — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 21:50:38 +0000

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…

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Microsoft DirectX Slides from the Game Developers Conference 2005

admin — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 12:24:04 +0000

Get them here:

Game Developers Conference 2005
This download includes presentations given by the Windows gaming and graphics team at the Game Developers Conference 2005. Included is the Microsoft DirectX Developer Day content and the High-Level Shader Language (HLSL) Workshop content.

Besides the HLSL Workshop content mentioned above it also contains an introduction to Visual Studio 2005 features (especially C++ compiler optimizations), Advanced PTR, Best Practices and more….

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New DirectX Developers Center on MSDN

admin — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 07:10:39 +0000

Microsoft’s MSDN site features the new DirectX developers center which now looks and feels like the other developers center on the site.

Check it out at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/

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DirectX February 2005 release

admin — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 10:39:27 +0000

Microsoft have announced the latest update to the DirectX SDK.
You can download the it from here.

From the microsoft’s web :

The DirectX® Team is pleased to announce the final release of DirectX 9.0 SDK Update (February 2005)!
This SDK release contains the first release of D3DX as a Dynamic Link Library, new graphics samples, new\updated technical articles, enhanced tools and updated documentation. Below are highlights of what is new in this SDK release. For a complete list of updates, please refer to the SDK Documentation “What’s News” sections.

SDK:
• Windows 2000 is no longer a supported platform for the SDK.
• All of the DirectShow components (Header, Libs, Utilities, Tools, and Samples) were moved to the extras folder.

New Samples and Technical Articles:
• New “Top Issues for Windows Titles” article
• New PRTCmdLine sample
• New Managed HDRFormat sample
• Updated “Install-on-Demand for Games” and “Gaming with Least-Privileged User Accounts” with information about patching

Tool Updates
Enhancements to PIX have been made:
• You can now capture the Microsoft Direct3D calls made by a single frame of your application and play them back within PIX.
• When grabbing screenshots:
    – You can append an incrementing number, or the current frame number, to the screenshot filename.
    – You can specify whether to overwrite existing image files with the same filename.
    – You can specify whether to show or hide the mouse cursor in the screenshot.
• New command-line options are available to:
    – Convert a .PIXRun file to a .csv format that can be read by Microsoft.
    – Save an exclusive-or comparison of two images to a file.

D3DX:
Precomputed Radiance Transfer
The precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) system has been enhanced:
• New fast raytracing methods have been added for direct computation of ray/mesh intersections against a simulation scene.
• GPU-accelerated direct-lighting computation now supports normal maps.

Math Library
• D3DX math functions on X64 have been heavily optimized for 64-bit processors in this release.

HLSL Compiler
• A series of improvements and bug fixes have been made to the HLSL compiler

Effects Framework
• New functions have been added to allow a developer to specify parameters to be ignored by the effects system and managed directly by the application.

D3DX as a Dynamic-Link Library
• Starting with this SDK release, D3DX is being released as a dynamic-link library (DLL). Updates to D3DX in the future will continue to ship as uniquely-named DLLs that exist side-by-side on the system. This allows for continued improvements to the library without imposing regression risk. D3DX9.lib is still provided as the import library for the DLL which your application can statically link against. See documentation for details.
• The D3DX DLL included in the SDK is automatically installed as part of Installing DirectX with DirectSetup. If your application does not use D3DX, you can remove D3DX from the redistributable (see Directx redist.txt for details).
• The statically-linked debug library (D3DX9dt.lib) has been removed; use D3DX9d.lib instead.

Other
• D3DX for DirectX8 was removed from the SDK in December. This was not mentioned in the release notes for the December SDK.

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The Future of Israel’s High-Tech Industry is in Gaming

admin — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 14:52:46 +0000

“העתיד של ההיי טק הישראלי הוא בתעשיית הקולנוע ומשחקי המחשב” – כך נאמר באחת הכתבות ב-TheMarker היום.
הייתי רוצה להאמין שזה נכון אבל למיטב ידעתי אין חברות רציניות בשוק המתמחות בתחומים הנ”ל.
אני באמת מקווה שמגמה זו תשתנה… הייתי שמח לעבוד בחברה שכזו…

למאמר ב-TheMarker

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DirectX 9.0 SDK October Update

admin — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 10:51:03 +0000

The DirectX 9.0 SDK – (October 2004) contains the FINAL release of the DirectX 9.0c Runtime and all DirectX software required to create DirectX 9.0 compliant applications in C/C++, and C#.

Primary areas of concentration for this Summer Update have been with the Direct3D Extension Library (D3DX), Graphics Samples, Tools and documentation. The included developer runtimes and the DirectX Redistributable have also been updated to include the latest updates (DirectX 9.0c).

Here are the download links: Release Notes, SDK, Extras, Symbols.

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Ray tracing tutorials on flipcode.org

admin — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 09:13:21 +0000

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

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Math for 3D Game Programming & Computer Graphics

admin — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 22:06:24 +0000

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.

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The future of Microsoft’s 3D API

admin — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 19:34:40 +0000

There is an interesting article at extremetech.com about Microsoft’s plans for its next generation 3D graphics API.
Basically, according to the article, Microsoft plans to merge its DirectX with GDI+ for its longhorn platform (which relies heavily on 3D graphics).
One of the main shortcommings of DirectX at the moment is vector graphics (In GDI+ you can draw arrows, arcs etc. which is a complex task in DirectX). Hopefully this new platform will bring the advantages of GDI+ to DirectX…

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