This double-dose edition of Weekend Reading is dedicated to ZeeGee Games, whose office I'm currently squatting in as its owner Dustin Clingman took me out to see the last space shuttle launch today. Since I'm too lazy to get my laptop fixed I came down here with only an iPhone - not suitable for creating this feature. They had a spare workstation they let me take over for my short stay here. Thanks guys!

So, without further adieu, Here are your Journal Land entries from the period of 6/24 - 7/8.

Featured GDNet+ Journal Entry

OddGames development journal - O-san talks about the now-completed dialogue system in Medieval Story and has a nice video showing it in action as well as roof-hiding when you enter a building and also his previous work on pathfinding and object collision. Looking good!!

Featured Member Journal Entry

The Bag of Holding - ApochPiQ has pushed out Epoch release 11 to the masses and has uploaded some new tools to his Scribbles page, including one that allows "selectively enabling or disabling pieces of C++ code based on whether or not a type conversion is legal" and another that is "a small utility for monitoring the activity on a Windows file system, or any selected subset thereof"

Check out the latest journals from Sage Gerard and flatpyramid!

Welcome back, mikeman!

Project Updates

• OMG NUB! - Tape_Worm looks back on what he feels he did horribly wrong with his Gorgon graphics library, his plans for refactoring and where he is along in the process. Also a disclaimer that he doesn't promise to actually finish, but that's pretty much implied in any hobby project we do
• Disciple of Otanoj - CRYP7IK has an update on his Flash P2P program that now sports a chatroom and multiple connections. He also researches services he can use that will allow him to host the service and collect revenue for it like Red5, Amazon and OpenRTMFP
• Wilhelm's Journal - Wilhelm van Huyssteen has created a simple Go game clone using his engine that connects 2 players for a match so grab a friend and check it out
• The Realm of Trial - DecipherOne has some new images and gameplay updates for his project, now in alpha state
• The Animal Farm GameDev Blog - Nairb is proud to announce the release of his latest iOS game Cuddle Bears: Run from the Big Baddie Wolf through the land of Cuddle Bears. Cuddle Bears love to cuddle, but their little hugs slow you down. Luckily for you the wolf has a taste for bear. Bop the Cuddle Bears on the head to stun them and slow the wolf down while he devours the little guys. But watch out! Murdering Cuddle Bears may have consequences.
• Chronicles of the Hieroglyph - Jason Z details the new notification system in Hieroglyph 3 that will do a better job of letting the developer know there is a problem without having to dig through the debug log
• DruinkJournal - Evil Steve points to a preview video on IGN of the project he's working on (NFS:The Run 3DS) although he can't elaborate too much on it on right now
• Journal of Aardvajk - Aardvajk has been a busy bee working on his 3D modeler, Opus - adding some under-the-hood improvements, rotating, scaling, undo/redo, extruding...
  Game Dev Stuffs
  
  
  • Excursions into the Unknown - Mike.Popoloski has a great tutorial that was featured earlier last week covering SSE Move instructions, which as he puts it "the differences between some are so subtle and poorly documented that it can be hard to tell that there is even any difference at all, which makes choosing the right one for the job almost impossible." Impossible? Not any more!
  • Beals Software - Programmer16 rants about Blizzard's decision to remove a feature from WoW without having the feature that it is being replaced by immediately ready to roll out. Bad design decision?
  • Ramblings of a partialy sane programmer - blewisjr is saved by Linux command line options when he needs to edit a batch of files to get some OpenGL libraries to build. Why do it manually? Programmer are lazy! Linux to the rescue!
  • Kimmi's Blog - Kimmi points to the Open Asset Library's animation controller program which comes with source and demonstrates how to use the assimp animation format, as well as a forum post with information on the format in general
  • Just Let It Trickle - adeyblue has updated an old Windows tool of his: MsgHookLister is a tool that outputs information about windows and their threads, including details of pending messages such as what they are, who sent them, when, and by which method. And now, that's not all. In this jazzed up version 2.0, MsgLister has grown to love another Win32k/User object type, the simple hook. To further this new love, the ability to scan the system for any and all active global or per-thread Win32 hooks has been added
  • D Bits - Aldacron covers how D's default initializers can be used as "a convenient way to clear out a templated class/struct member for any given type" which will help to avoid some compile errors in something like a resource management system
  • New Old Things - Endurion continues his weekly updates on building a Commodore 64 game. Step 11 covers players dying and respawning and Step 12 covers giving the player the ability to fire back at the enemies
  • Computer food - Emmanuel Deloget is a very casual CRPG player and as such does not like it when the ability for him to do so is removed by the game's design. He's giving the evil eye to The Witcher 2 and specifies what caused him to uninstall the game. He also highlights a few other CRPGs he found difficult for the casual gamer and why he plays this way. Join in on the raging discussion!
  • Yckx's GameDev Journal - yckx is just getting started with SWIG for Lua binding and shares some links and resources that helped him get up and running if you too are looking to check out SWIG
  • Thoughts and Opinions - phantom tries to check out OpenCL but is annoyed to discover that a lot of the problems that turned him completely away from OpenGL are still popping up to haunt him
  • et1337 makes games - et1337 dives deep into details behind his component binding system: "This is a tale of intrigue, excitement, and wonder, in which I try to implement a component-entity system in C#, and stumble upon a remarkable paradigm that merges components with data binding"
  • Journal of Lethargic Programmers - cameni reviews the book 3D Engine Design for Virtual Globes, which is a topic that directly pertains to his work on planetary engine Outerra
  • Think Small / Digitanks Blog - BSVino put together his own games bundle - the "5 for 5 Indie Games Bundle" - and in the wake of the bundle's sale period (which pulled down 3,642 sales for a total of $18,094 in revenue) he has compiled a list of lessons he has learned in the process
    Other Stuffs
    
    
    • Wavesonics Pseudo-Random Journal Generator - Wavesonics is working on an Arduino-based wheeled robot he can control from a web page that will have a kitty toy attached to it so he can play with his cat while he's out of the house. Pretty cool!
    • The Bag of Holding - need something deep and thought provoking to ponder over your weekend? ApochPiQ has some brain food for you in the discussion of consciousness and time. What is time? What is consciousness? Why do we perceive time? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?? Well okay maybe it doesn't go quite that far but certainly the discussion can!
      Thanks for stopping by, InvisibleMan, Metron, Zethariel, r1ckparker, szecs, mixmaster.