A great book for anyone new to game programming or wanting to start using DirectX.  What I love about this book is its a “step-by-step” book.  What’s a “step-by-step” book?  To me, its a book where each chapter builds upon the previous to create the complex application you bought the book for!  Too many times [...]

If you’re like me you love to learn new things, especially how it relates to the game development world.  Generally I get my information from tubes that make up the inter-web, tutorials, and books.  Game development books, in case you never priced them, can be absolutely expensive (especially paying the cover price!!!).  One of my [...]

ZGameEditor is an open source application used to develop small arcade style games, demos, and screensavers.  Its written in Pascal (seriously!) and uses OpenGL.  The editor is Windows based only but the applications you create can be ran on Mac & Linux.  Features listed from the website: Integrated developer environment where you build, preview and [...]

This little device will allow you to bring uTorrent with you on the go!  It comes in 8GB ($40) and 16GB ($80) versions with pre-installed software so you don’t have to install anything on the computer you’re using it on.  Currently its PC only and can only be used as a very expensive thumb drive [...]

Over the passed couple of days of looking through some new applications I found a couple that really stood out.  Today I’ll be introducing a 3D engine called “Neoaxis.”  This 3D engine can be used to develop games and simulations.  Here are some of the features listed from their site: Framework for creation of new [...]

Image: Programming a Multiplayer FPS in DirectX In the previous article “Building a 3D engine: Rendering” I wrote about different culling methods and defined how they’re used.  We cull to protect the GPU’s pipeline from cluttering which would result in a bottleneck but what about the CPU?  Having the engine cull too much would cause [...]

One major optimization of rendering is culling.  Culling is the process of filtering unwanted faces/polygons from a scene.  Rendering every polygon in a scene would not only bottleneck our GPU but its also inefficient.  What I would like to do is to first filter out everything that’s not in view.  To do this we need [...]

After completing Black Saturday, I wanted to return to the world of 3D.  The last 3D project I worked on was with the Torque Engine.  For the next project its looking like I’m might go with the Unity3D engine however for now I’d like to put in a little study time with development of a [...]

On Tuesday, March 16, I was searching the internet for a game developer’s group and stumbled upon a few.  Unfortunately the first two were inactive since 2006 but the third one was not only active but had lots of members!  After joining the Bay Area Video Game Development Meetup Group I realized their monthly meeting [...]

Jonathan Harbour, the author of “Beginning Game Programming” has weekly contests for games produced based of off his book.  Black Saturday was entered and won 1st place!  Unfortunately the lack of competition (zero other submitters, doh!)  gave us the win by default :P.  Oh well, I think we would have faired well anyways.  Through the [...]