Game programming news for newbies

SDL 1.2.15

2012-01-23T11:47:00.000-05:00

Shortly after the add-ons release, Sam surprises us with a a minor bugfix release for the old SDL 1.2 branch. Get it here and enjoy, or if you are brave enough, ignore it and go for the still unreleased 1.3. But be warned that all kind of weird effects can affect your life, like undesired pregnancy, black holes in your bathroom or alien abduction with rectal probing included.

SDL add-on libs released

2012-01-16T09:14:00.002-05:00

Has been a long time since the SDL add-on libs were updated and the work on SDL in general seems to be slowing down. Yesterday were released SDL_image 1.2.11, SDL_mixer 1.2.12, SDL_net 1.2.8 and SDL_ttf 2.0.11. Still no clue about when SDL 1.3 will be released, but some brave people are using it in its current state and the mailing list is quite active.

The project to follow

2012-01-05T10:35:00.001-05:00

Last year my project to follow was Blendelf game engine. In the second half of 2010 it looked promissing and had some nice features. The releases were getting slower, but considering the features implemented, it was aceptable. But during 2011 the project didnt received the attention I expected and the year finished without releases or even minimal code updates. The project I tagged as my "project to follow" died.
For this year I hope that my project to follow avoids such destiny. Lime engine (still doesnt has web page or even forum) is an interesting game engine in early development stage. If it lives enough to reach the end of 2012 at the current pace, we could have a new toy in 2013 or even before.

Radeon 7970 is here

2011-12-23T11:02:00.000-05:00

AMD strikes first again, with its new generation of video cards based on GCN architecture and 28nm building process. Currently the fastest single core video card, Radeon 7970 is also the first to support DirectX 11.1 for Windows 8, supports OpenGL 4.2 and thanks to the new manufacturing process, it is cooler and less power demanding than Nvidia's Geforce 580. AnandTech has a nice review you should read.

Lua 5.2

2011-12-16T14:42:00.002-05:00

After a long development process, Lua 5.2 was released an hour ago. Get it here: http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.2.0.tar.gz

Blender 2.61

2011-12-14T16:24:00.000-05:00

Long time without posting news about Blender releases, which are becoming so common that they are no longer news. We have another one, 2.61. Also, I have a tutorial: creating a platforme in Blender Game Engine. Never posted resources about BGE before, and it really deserves some attention. Good luck creating your own Super Mario.

More work with Unigine

2011-12-02T09:28:00.001-05:00

After a long inactivity period, I have restarted my work with Unigine. My plan is to share some good time with it and do a real effort to learn it. Not an easy task, considering that, unlike CryEngine, UDK and others, there not a community forum, tutorials, free assets, etc. Unigine Corp should take note about this and open their developer forum, besides some other measures to achieve a critical mas of experienced people. Definitely, no one is going to jump to spend thousands of dollars in a product that nobody knows how to use.
Would be nice to see the upcoming world editor, judging from the recruitment page in the official site, it should have some interesting features like cinematic sequences editor. Also I miss some tool to directly "paint" clutter masks over the terrain, instead of having to create the mask myself. Anyway, I have to say that I like the engine, they are doing a great job here, and I hope we can see more Unigine titles in the future.

8 core processors

2011-10-13T18:32:00.000-04:00

Got a mail from TigerDirect promoting the first 8 core CPUs: the AMD FX-8120 and FX-8150. They have a very competitive price, $219.99 USD for the first, $259.99 the second, which seems good, given the frequency, cache and cores. On the other side, Inte can offer only 4 cores plus hyperthreading for the same price. The lesser brother, with 6 CPUs, sales for just $189.99. Of course, Intel still has the perfomance crown (by a narrow margin in some cases), despite the number of cores.

Goodbye Ritchie

2011-10-13T08:29:00.002-04:00

His pointer has been cast to void *;
His process has terminated with exit code 0

That final longjmp() without knowing if setjmp() was called,
/* for Dennis Ritchie */
#include
main() { printf("GOODBYE WORLD"); }

The father of C and Unix has passed away. Black day for programmers.

ogldev: Basic tessellation

2011-10-12T08:57:00.000-04:00

A basic tessellation tutorial is available at ogldev. Dont know what tessellation is? Dont worry, the post explains in a very simple way what is it and how it is done in our video card. Dont miss it, it has illustrations.

Good bye Jobs

2011-10-06T15:14:00.002-04:00

The surprise hit me this morning and I couldnt believe it for a few seconds. Then the certainty came to me. Even when I dont share the Apple philosophy, I have to admit (and admire) the role played by Jobs in the development of the modern technology. Perhaps without Mac we wouldnt have had Windows. Perhaps without iPhone we wouldnt have had Android. How could have been the world without Steve Jobs?
One of our generation geniuses is gone, and regrettably too soon. I hope that in his place, the life, destiny, random, God or whatever, have brought to life another genius who will change in the future the forthcoming generations.

New indie licenes for Unigine

2011-10-05T11:22:00.000-04:00

Together with an update to its engine, Unigine Corp has announced new licenses targeting the indie segment. The three models are Indie SDK Starter, costing $1299 (with Windows only support), a full multi-platform Indie SDK (Widnows, Linux and Mac OS X) for $2995, or an Indie SDK for all PC platforms plus mobile targets for $3995.
The prices are not specially low or attractive, considering that you can get UDK for zero initial cost, and that you must hand over $3000 to get the main Unigine advantage: Linux support. So, lets wait to see how this move results.
Update: Now the Starter SDK supports Linux too.

WebGL lessons

2011-10-03T10:22:00.001-04:00

Want to get into WebGL? Here you have 16 lessons (even in japanese), covering the basics. Enjoy!

Gamer types

2011-09-20T16:22:00.000-04:00

Intel's Morphological Antialiasing source code

2011-09-19T14:31:00.000-04:00

Intel has released the source code for CPU based Morphological Antialiasing implementation, a new post-processing filter technique that identifies discontinuity patterns. Yes, yet another AA algorithm.
Sounds interesting, except that I dare to consider it useless (look at the system requirements, in the bottom of the page). But we all know that Intel bussiness are CPUs, not graphic cards. Also, the code makes use of Intel Threading Building Blocks, their threading library, to make this sample an almost complete Intel technology show.

GLEW updated to OpenGL 4.2

2011-09-15T16:30:00.000-04:00

GLEW is a widely used cross-platform library that provides efficient run-time mechanisms for determining which OpenGL extensions are supported on the target platform. Version 1.7 now adds support for the latest version of the OpenGL 4.specification.

UnigineScript gets faster

2011-09-15T09:29:00.000-04:00

Unigine Corp. has published the usual changelog for its engine, this time we have improved multimonitor support (introduced in the previous release), bug fixes and a hughe improvement to UnigineScript. They claim that now it is the faster script language, leaving behind Lua in several benchmarks.
Would be nice to have this technology licensed under a more indie-friendly terms, like UDK and CryEngine.

AMD showcases its new technology

2011-09-14T09:14:00.002-04:00

As I was expecting, AMD revealed its new Southern Islands technology in an event. But apart from seeing it, the details are scarce. We dont know the specs, the price range or even when it is going to be launched. I still have hope that we will see this new generation built with the 28nm process before the scheduled world reset next year.

Programmer's day

2011-09-13T11:47:00.000-04:00

Today is the day 256 (2⁸ o 11111111) of the year, Day of the Programmer, my congratulations to all programmers who are reading this. You can celebrate it dressing in white (FFFFFF, 11111111, 2⁸), developing or reading some programming book.

CryEngine is free

2011-09-01T10:55:00.002-04:00

I have just found that CryEngine is free since more than 2 weeks ago! As I previously mentioned, Crytek was studying the possibility to provide the SDK under some indie-friendly license. Thats a reality now, the powerful technology behind Crysis 2 it is now available for you to play and make your game developer dreams come true. A good point to start seems to be Crydev.net, the official developer's community, with lot of tutorials, resources and a forum. Read the official announcement here.

Radeon HD 6790

2011-08-31T10:28:00.013-04:00

Is your budget limited? Then welcome to the club!
If you are planning to upgrade your video card but your limit is $150, you should consider this upgrade to the 5770 technology (if you didnt know, the HD 6770 is the HD 5770 rebranded and improved with latest HDMI and Bluray). The Radeon HD 6790 is close in perfomance to HD 6850, but you save around $20.
But if you are not in a hurry, I would advice to wait for the next generation. Things have been quiet lately and I have a feeling that some announcement will hit us at some time before the end of the year.

Introduction to OpenGL 4

2011-08-29T15:23:00.000-04:00

A presentation covering the new features introduced in OpenGL 4.2 specification.

Tech preview available for Windows

2011-08-22T11:21:00.000-04:00

After a long delay, the project tech preview is available for Windows! Also, I had to release a small patch with some fixes. Also, I updated the Linux version. Please download here and use our Sourceforge trackers to submit bugs or feature requests.
If you want more recent code, get our SVN and compile your very own version! There are a few but interesting changes.

Interesting article about interpolation

2011-08-10T14:08:00.002-04:00

Feed your brain!

Base Ogre application

2011-08-04T12:11:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I have started small Ogre3D apps to test something and I have had to program the same code again and again, modifying the default wizard generated code. I decided to make a simple app with basic initialization (including RTShaderSystem) and rendering loop control that I can use as base to quickly have a project going on. It is now available for download. Includes a couple of projects for Code::Blocks and Visual C 2010 and I hope it could be useful. Donations are welcome (Im saving for a private jet)!