Announcement!
If you've had a journal entry Featured on the main page in the last few months, please read this thread. Thanks!

Here are your Journal Land entries from the period of 6/17 - 6/24.

Featured GDNet+ Journal Entry

Ramblings of a partialy sane programmer - blewisjr has a tutorial on tackling those confusing makefiles using MinGW GCC + Msys in case you are stubborn like him and don't like using traditional IDEs, or just want a more flexible and manual means of building your projects. Either way this is indeed a common beginner problem so if you haven't gotten the hang of makefiles yet then check it out - demo source is included! Of course, later in the week he then about faces and finally finds an IDE he can stand behind - check out why he feels Eclipse CDT 8 will draw him away from makefiles.

Featured Member Journal Entry

Pixel ? Tile ? World - Servant of the Lord has an excellent retrospective on the progress of his project over the last sixth months as he compares where in development he is today compared to where he thought he would be by now several months ago. I'm sure all of us can relate to this. If you can't then I suggest you learn from this entry to mitigate (you're not going to avoid it) this on your own projects

Check out the latest journals from Puciek and Arc Fusion Games!

Project Updates

• Rock, Paper, Glue - zarfius shows off the new project explorer for Glue Editor and lifts the hood to show some of the file formats that can be loaded with the new serialized XML interface
• BlueGlutton's Journal - looks like BlueGlutton is looking for a game designer
• Kimmi's Blog - Kimmi shares a couple of lessons he's learned while continuing work on his project and announces the project's newly-launched web page.
• GSoC '11 - Mono Runtime - Mike.Popoloski updates on his progress working on the Mono runtime, which is his task for the Google Summer of Code project and involves "modifying the x86 JIT to use SSE for floating point operations, as opposed to the x87 FP stack that it's using now." Have we got any other Summer of Coders hanging out here? Would love to read about your projects as well!
• et1337 makes games - et1337 stops by with an update on Parkour Ninja but first tells about his new job as an iPhone dev intern and how working on Macs is slowly killing him in every way. Well, sorry to hear about that but grats on the internship!
• tinyrocket - woah check out the screenshots of this space shooter game Johan Gustafsson has continued to toil away on these last 6 months using Unity and C#. Lookin good!
  Game Dev Stuffs
  
  
  • New Old Things - Endurion carries on with his Commodore64 development and in this step he details collision checking so you can find out when an enemy hurts your player
  • IfThen Software LLC - here's a good test to see if you know anything about math. Me? I just got the worst headache ever.
  • r1ckparker's Journal - making a tutorial level for your game? Check out this article r1ckparker found on Gamasutra to help you avoid doing it wrong
  • Writing Web Games - Battagline shares the basics of putting your web game up on the Chrome App Store as a way to grab some more traffic - although it can be seen negatively by App Store customers if you're not careful. He also lists the games he's included in the store for you to check out and rate.
  • /* Why you crying? */ - JTippetts is against the traditional 2D approaches to isometric games because of all the hacks you need to make the viewpoint work properly in 2D. It's so much easier with a 3D camera locked in place, but then again a lot of people (like me) find themselves intimidated by 3D. So he's found the middle ground, a library called SFML which creates a 2D front-end to OpenGL, and has a full-blown article on how to use it to make "2D" isometric games.
  • D Bits - Aldacron talks about binding D to C
  • Chronicles of the Hieroglyph - Jason Z has another Direct3D 11 Programming Tip, where he talks about Append and Consume Buffers, which are "perfect for use in many compute shader programs." However he admits they are a bit under-documented and so delves into how they are used.
  • Graphics & Games... or the other way around - Matias Goldberg continues his series on 3D character design with discussion on procedural animation, life-like eyes, and reusing animations
  • Journal of Aardvajk - Aardvajk admits to firing off some test code to a potential employer before he remembers that it might not be seen as test code but functional code. Sure enough, he gets comments back on the rather deplorable state of the code. Lesson learned - make sure people know if the code you send them is just a hack!
    Other Stuffs
    
    
    • Thoughts and Opinions - phantom finds a use for his ability to create a second journal to start up an opinion journal separate from his technical one. This option is also available to GDNet+ members
    • Blue stain - this made me chuckle. alfith has some worshipers to kow tow to his new i7 rig
    • DruinkJournal - Evil Steve shares the woes of home ownership (flat ownership - whatever ) and can finally announce he's working on Need For Speed: The Run on the 3DS! Congrats and good luck!
      Thanks for stopping by, Muzz5, MeowMeow, __Homer__, Metron, and mixmaster.