Was a little stir-crazy last weekend after the site update and I forgot about Weekend Reading since I had moved it to Sunday afternoon. I'm not good at getting into new habits but hopefully I have it down starting this week. Catch up time!

Here are your Journal Land entries from the period of 12/30 - 1/15

Featured GDNet+ Journal Entry

D Bits - Aldacron goes over some of the pitfalls D users should be aware of when they attempt binding to C libraries and also references an ongoing project to collect the various bindings being put out by developers

Featured Member Journal Entry

The Broken Mind - Azh321 is running a Kickstarter for his project to build 26 games in 26 weeks - games that are designed by others and built by him and the community.

Welcome to new journal authors cgpIce and ZBethel!

From the Staff

• GameDev.net Staff Journal - Gaiiden talks about the changes to the tagging system that have allowed us to open up tags to be entered as you wish rather than forcing you to select from a list of pre-defined tags, and how preset prefixes will be used in some forums to help popular topics stand out
  
• Under Development Law @ GDNet - forum moderator and game dev lawyer monalaw has some great posts about SOPA and why it's a bad idea to not have a written agreement when you become involved in a project with other people.
  
  Project Updates
  
  
  
  • One man show - ne0_kamen goes over updates to Robica, the most significant being the addition of frustrum culling. ne0_kamen cites the article he used to help him understand and implement this. Other updates include a level editor, storyline and schedule
    
  • LarryADaniel82's Journal - LarryADaniel82 lays out the general idea behind his first project, a Christian-based game.
    
  • UDKZone - Sorab explains his Unreal Development Kit project, a clone of the fighting game Evil Zone. He calls for anyone interested in working on it or seeing the source to contact him.
    
  • kseh's blog - kseh has been spending the past few works working on a basic side scroller and has a downloadable build as well as development notes for anyone who wants to check it out
    
  • Calculemus's Journal - calculemus1988 has decided to work on an RTS game in Unity for his thesis and has a build available for anyone to check out that features basic unit selection
    
  • Walking Towards The Sun - freeworld continues his "Ardens last four days" series of graphical notes
    
  • Mobile RPG - smo97 is back after an extended break and has some gameplay footage to show for his Marmalade project
    
  • et1337 makes games - et1337 has a quick update with some new screenshots showing off the voxel engine's increased performance and also reveals an alpha build will be landing in the near future
    
  • Black-Rook's Journal - Black-Rook has been spending the last week documenting the various tasks he's completed so far as he works on his classic RPG project
    
  • Meh Entertainment - meh.team set up the group with twitter, Facebook and website for anyone looking to follow along
    
  • WorldAlpha.com DevBlog - worldalpha has their first teaser trailer, which was produced through the site Fiverr. worldalpha also discusses some of the other $5 services he got out of Fiverr and more recently has some exciting news in relation to the beta testing they currently have underway plus the hiring of a lead artist
    
  • Journal of Lee Stripp - Lee Stripp has spent the past week working on numerous additions and revisions to VortxGE 2.0
    
  • Booleans spiffy development journal - boolean is looking for alpha testers to try out his pvp focused browser game S.H.I.P C.R.A.F.T.E.R.
    
    Game Dev Stuffs
    
    
    • Good Enough?.... Never! - MARS_999 is back after an extended absence and laments the lack of updates to various APIs since he last looked at them years ago. Check out his perspective and let him know if it's not really as bad as it looks from his point of view
      
    • Little Coding Fox's Journal Of Exotic Adventures - Little Coding Fox elaborates on the piracy issues he and his team were forced to deal with after releasing their game on the Android Market
      
    • Just Let It Trickle - adeyblue tells you how to pull a Windows user's account picture, something that turns out to be surprisingly obscure and not well-documented until recently
      
    • Adam Omega - adam4813 continues to share functionality code from his multi-threaded game engine, this time going over the message system that resides in its own thread and is charged with routing data packets (dubbed "envelopes") between various engine modules.
      
    • Beginnings of the Wayward Programmer - Alpha_ProgDes takes another stab at Scheme by going back to How To Develop Programs, 2nd Edition
      
    • Pixel ? Tile ? World - Servant of the Lord goes over the various elements he feels combine to create the overall atmosphere of a game world, the immersion factors that pull you in and make the world come alive. He rates some of his favorite immersive games and points out how focusing on these various elements can greatly overcome simple graphical prowess
      
    • Chronicles of the Hieroglyph - Jason Z continues to experiment with Kinect for PC and discusses what he's discovered about processing the data the Kinect makes available to you and how the various coordinate spaces the device uses to visualize that data can be manipulated
      
    • New Old Things - in his latest step towards making a Commodore 64 game, Endurion goes over adding a second player
      
    • AmzBee's Journal - AmzBee invites you to check out her team's project Phobius3D, an all-purpose game engine written in XNA
      
    • LoreHunter's Journal - after a heated discussion broke out around his original entry positing the future of gaming without providing any references, LoreHunter returns with several facts on which he based his previous conjectures
      
      Other Stuffs
      
      
      
      • Wavesonics Pseudo-Random Journal Generator - Wavesonics has a breakthrough in his Arduino project's pressure sensor that will prevent his alarm from shutting off completely until it senses that he has gotten out of bed.
        
      • Pixel ? Tile ? World - Servant of the Lord took the time to back up his digital game purchases to disc, going the extra mile of creating slip covers for the DVD cases. Very nice!
        
        Thanks for stopping by BeerNutts, Tape_Worm, RanBlade