Game Dev School Video game design & development articles

Google has a sweet new search engine feature thingo called Google Code Search . If you didn't guess from the name, they've turned up the search mojo a bit to delve deeper into source code available on the 'net. I haven't played around with it too much yet, but it's really interesting. I'm sure there are plenty of coders out there who will love this feature for doing various research for sample code and such.

I'm a sample code glutton, so me likey mucho. Muy mucho. I just need to run into a problem or two and pull up Code Search instead of turning to the usual sources (books, known websites, Google proper, etc.) and see how it goes!

I'm not much of a modeller, so I'm not one to state how wonderful stuff like this is, but on their site, they make a pretty stout claim: "The easiest 3D modeling tool for creative professionals that utilizes cutting-edge freeform surface technology." Well... okay. That sounds nice, eh?

I can't vouch for that statement, since I am not available ATM to try it out, but the good thing is, you can! Go snag CB Model Pro during their beta program for free. Yay! Please drop me a note if you try it out and tell me how you like it. I've seen some good reports about it so far.

I have no reason to post this here other than to publicly state my appreciation for years of fantastic music and wonderful on-air companionship from the DJ's at WOXY.com . I'm very bummed about this stream going offline tomorrow, so I'm crying about it here for a bit.

All my work days are filled with the aural sweetness that is 97X The Future of Rock & Roll. Great, great stuff.

Well.. I'm just depressing myself here, so I'll shut up now.

Bring on the free goodies! This time, there's a free copy of Poser 5.0 to be had. Nice, eh? I'll just get out of the way and let you have your way with the free-software-getting. Be quick about it, it's only available until September 8th, (2006, in case you're waaay late,) at Content Paradise .

I haven't played with Poser much since the early days, but it's sure a nifty app. I really want to look into how various 3D engines might be able to use the exportations of Poser.. maybe the newer version 6 has better goodies on that front?

Oh, don't worry, I'm not answering any of these questions here. I'm just going to slap and run away. That's a thing I do on occasion.

I'm tired of server crap.  I hope the friggin' way-too-frequent server outages aren't annoying too many of you as much as they're annoying me.  I've had so much trouble with the server, all my updating has gotten postponed way too much.  I have a lot of sites to manage and clients that rely on me to make their sites go... my projects can tend to fall on the back burner what things go bad.

So... just a note to tell you "whoops" and say I'm working things out.  Do I really need to keep writing posts like this??  Well.. likely not.  It is slightly therapeutic, though.  :-P

Well, they're saying it's "on hold" for the year, but to me, that means it's cancelled.  The Indie Games Conference put on annually by the folks at Garage Games has been turned off for this year ... they're bummed.  I am, too, since I had been working hard to be able to attend.  I'm VERY (fricking) glad I didn't buy any plane tickets yet, even though several excellent deals rolled by!  That would have pissed me off.

Aaanyway... they're really swamped up at GG and they made the very difficult decision to pull the plug on this years' event.  They say it's on hold because they love putting on the conference and have intentions to restart it next year.  

Now, I get to figure out how to remove an item from my calendar... and I need to add other stuff since it's pretty bare!

This is a great opportunity for all you starving artist/students out there to get in on a little 3D landscape lovin'! Daz is giving away copies of Bryce 5.0 until Sept. 6th, 2006 by way of Download.com! Suhweet. I haven't used this killer app since roughly version 3 or so, but I've definitely enjoyed the program since the early days when Kai Krause was making those killer Kai's Power Tools goodies. Great stuff, that.

So, go snag a copy (Win or Mac) fast, so you don't miss out. You're welcome (for the heads-up, I mean.)

I'm really slacking right now.  Sorry about the lack of updates for those of you trying to visit regularly.  I had been preparing a large-ish list of schools with video game development curriculae and it turned out to be larger than I thought.  I wanted to roll out with most of them at once to avoid any apparent favoritism on my part... I'm not being paid by them or anything, but I didn't want to give a few schools a long head-start while I got around to adding more.

Aaanyway.. I'll work on rolling that list out as soon as I can, since there are many people visiting here who really want that info.  I'll get my other work in line this week and do my best to post more often.

Thanks for visiting! 

I'm not wholly informed on this subject other than periodically following posts on the Director 3D mailing list, but I'm seeing much more solid hope-generating news about the future of Macromedia (now Adobe) Director.

Years ago, I had it in my head that Director development was the way to go for online/CD delivery of games. These days, I've been searching for alternatives rabidly as I thought Director was going away. This gives a window into a possible future that includes an upgraded Director (there has been talk elsewhere, but I liked reading this.) Here's a response from Thomas Higgins in reply to a question about what the future holds for Director or regarding plans for an upgrade... (read more)

I've got a bit of research left before I get fully underway, but I've been reading through info about the AMFPHP open source Flash Remoting gateway . Cool beans. I don't want to pay for Flash Remoting stuff from Macrodobe since I'm generally not cash-filled and FR is huge-o expensivo to implement from what I've seen.

I have much research about other options that are less expensive than the real thing, but I'm not getting into that. This is my journal, after all, and I'm only up to AMFPHP right now. I'll get the others posted when I get to them, eh?

Here's a clip from their home page, in case you need more info before leaving here:

It’s fast, reliable, 100% free and open-source. Flash Remoting is a technology built into the Flash player core that enables sending data between the server and the client seemlessly. If you've built XML-based RIAs you know how much of a pain it can be to serialize the data, debug, and integrate into your application.With Flash Remoting, you can call remote methods from the Flash client and the arguments will end up in the native remote language, and will come back to Flash correctly typed, so there's no messing with serialization at all.

You also get to use the wonderful NetConnection debugger, which shows you exactly what's being sent between the client and server. Remoting uses AMF, a very lightweight binary format that cuts the bulk out of packets, meaning data exchange is a lot faster than with XML. All in all, Remoting is the way to go if you're looking to build robust, fast and secure Rich Internet Applications.

AMFPHP is a complete implementation of Remoting for PHP with tons of features built-in to make creating Remoting apps a whole lot simpler.

Here's a tutorial that I'm going through along with a few other docs and some books I already own with Remoting info in them:

• Connecting Macromedia Flash and PHP