I was talking with Richard (superpig) the other day about GDC coverage this year as he is currently working on assembling the coverage portal. I really like the way we did things back in 2008, with blogging and highlight picture posting during the conference, and full reports and complete image galleries going up all throughout the following week. I think that struck a good balance of keeping you all up to date and informed on what was happening at the conference and then gave you plenty of juicy material to read up on afterwards.
This year we plan to do much the same thing, with a few enhancements. First of all there will be a better integration of blogs and micro-blogging (via twitter) to the main coverage portal during the conference. This will let us keep you all in the loop on cool stuff that we pick up from around the conference pretty much as it happens. Then we're also going to try our hand at live blogging certain popular sessions. These live blogs will let you follow along and pass to you the key topics of the session, so that hopefully you can then ask questions that we can deliver to the speaker for you. I have no idea how well this is going to work - so DISCLAIMER!! [smile] But we'll try our best.
Oh and we should have an uploader that lets us put up more than 5 images at a time, so getting pictures online should be quick and painless and any funny/cool moments we capture on camera can be shared hopefully same-day.
Are you ready to attend GDC vicariously through GDNet?
More IB excerpts on the way
John's article excerpt from How to Do Stuff Quickly and Cheaply from the Business and Production book still has yet to be published, and I'll be switching over to the Design and Content creation book next to read a bit of Mark "Prinz Eugn" Simpson's first article (of 2) on pixel art. I think the pixel art chapters in the book (written by Mark and fellow pixel artist Jeff Hangartner totaling a whopping 186 pages! [wow]) are the single most valuable aspect to this title. Pixel art is a great medium for retro-style or just basic/simple 2D games and it's surprising how little online resources there actually are on the subject.
We're really liking the exposure these audio articles are bringing to the books. A comment on my reading of my chapter Basic Team Building and Management from Business and Production says:
Quote:
Thank you! This article definitely confirms that I will be purchasing the book and was very informative. Having just finished a project on a student team that suffered some of the EXACT things mentioned at the end, I feel almost a touch of synchronicity from this being posted! That or this is far too common of a problem. Probably more a little of both, anyway great article and thanks for posting these!
It's also been downloaded 138 times so far. Rock on [smile]
Are the GDNet books gracing your shelves?
One thing I haven't heard much of is anything really from the community regarding the GDNet books. Have any of you felt compelled to buy them? Did you enjoy them? Are they a steaming pile of crap? I really want to know!
It may seem surprising but I realize these books aren't really targeted towards the GDNet community, ironically enough. A lot of the content in them is also available online, although a good portion of it has been updated/refined and there is a good deal of new content in each title (Design and Content, I think, sports the most). So really I'm not totally surprised I haven't heard from anyone around here. Still if you do decide to pick up one or two or all, let us know what you think by posting up a quick review and rating. Here are all 4 book pages in the GDNet Library:
Business and Production: A GameDev.net Collection
Design and Content Creation: A GameDev.net Collection
Beginning Game Programming: A GameDev.net Collection
Advanced Game Programming: A GameDev.net Collection
Give the reviews a few days to get approved before sending me a PM poke.
New Resources
- Musicshake - We review an interesting free music-composition tool coupled with a social song-sharing network.
- Visual Lint - Stefan Maton builds on his PC-Lint review by looking at its Visual Studio integrated brother.
- AMD64 (EM64T) architecture - The article briefly describes AMD64 architecture by AMD Company and its implementation EM64T by Intel Company. The architecture's peculiarities, advantages and disadvantages are described.
- Debugging and optimization of multi-thread OpenMP-programs - The task of familiarizing programmers with the sphere of developing parallel applications is getting more and more urgent. This article is a brief introduction into creation of multi-thread applications based on OpenMP technology. The approaches to debugging and optimization of parallel applications are described.
- Introduction into 64 bits for the beginners or where's again the 64-bit world? - There were 64-bit processors, the operational systems, some programs. However completely all users have passed to 64 bits still far not. In article the reasons of it are considered.
- Introduction into the problems of developing parallel programs - As developing parallel software is rather a difficult task at present, the questions of theoretical training of specialists and investigation of methodology of projecting such systems become very urgent. Within the framework of this article we provide historical and technical information preparing a programmer for gaining knowledge in the sphere of developing parallel computer systems.
- static analysis, a view from aside - The article is an interview with Konstantin Knizhnik taken by Andrey Karpov, "Program Verification Systems" company's worker. In this interview the issues of static code analysis, relevance of solutions made in this sphere and prospects of using static analysis while developing applications are discussed
New Events
- BAFTA Presents A Life In Video Games: Q&A with Nolan Bushnell @ London, United Kingdom - March 19, 2009
- Independent Game Conference East @ Boston, MA, United States - May 7, 2009 to May 8, 2009
- 2009 Game Education Summit @ Pittsburgh, PA, United States - June 16, 2009 to June 17, 2009
- SIGGRAPH 2009 @ New Orleans, LA, United States - August 3, 2009 to August 7, 2009
- Independent Game Conference West @ Long Beach, CA, United States - August 6, 2009 to August 7, 2009
That's the issue I had with one of the GameDev books. I was considering buying it, but when I read the table of contents I thought "hmm, read this article, read this article, got a copy of this article in HTML on my hard disk, read that...". It moved from my "books I need to buy now" category down to "buy sometime if you feel like" category.