The Mail Owl Scrolls

MSDN Webcasts on Game Development coming soon

Hmmm, these MSDN webcasts on game development starting in January 2006 look very cool and I’m definitely going to try and attend them live.

“If you have always wanted to develop cutting-edge video games but are just getting started, tune in to our 11 free webcasts. Learn the concepts of 3-D video game production as instructors from DigiPen Institute of Technology demonstrate the key stages of developing a game engine using Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition, a new development environment for beginner programmers. Learn how to handle backgrounds, objects, and collisions. In addition, these webcasts provide a primer for handling artificial intelligence in your game, along with multiple levels and additional character functionality.”

They might not be for the established developer, especially the first few; but from Part 6 (Understanding and Handling Collisions) it should get interesting.

Article on what is VSYNC

I found this article called Unraveling the mystery of VSYNC very informative and a good read.

It explains, in simple terms, what VSYNC is; why you should enable it in your games and when you can disable it.

South Korea: A step towards a digital lifestyle

So in South Korea the justice system is taking a step towards engaging in people’s digital lifestyle by notifying its citizens of legal notices, fines and penalties via text messages.  You can read about it in this news article from IOL.

While the thought of receiving any legal notice (because they’re never good news) electronically doesn’t cause me to jump with glee, I am happy to see social services and governments move towards the new medium of engaging with people as it definitely makes everyone’s life easier.

We’re still far away from true interaction between social services and the general public.  You can’t pay your speeding fines online and only now can businesses submit their taxes over the internet.  Then there is: utilities management, registration of houses and cars, getting passports, etc, etc.

South Africa is in an interesting position (and I’m not talking about the strangle-hold by Telkom) in that a large portion of the population is still rural without access to or knowledge of the internet.  The government can barely provide services to these areas in their current form, let alone now provide 2 means of interaction.

Still… it’s nice to dream and I believe we’ll get there some day.

Irrlicht - Lighting Fast Realtime 3D Engine

Always the avid follower of the “Make games, not frameworks” philosophy, I’ve struggled to produce anything of game-quality substance using DirectX 9.  There is simply too much to learn and understand and while the help and tutorials out there are unbelievably great, I find myself spending time on how to render a scene rather than writing the mechanics of the game.

But recently I’ve found the Irrlicht Engine and my view on game development in code has completely turned around.

“The Irrlicht Engine is an open source high performance realtime 3D engine written and usable in C++ and also available for .NET languages. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderer, and has all of the state-of-the-art features which can be found in commercial 3d engines.
We've got a huge active community, and there are lots of projects in development that use the engine. You can find enhancements for Irrlicht all over the web, like alternative terrain renderers, portal renderers, exporters, world layers, tutorials, editors, language bindings for java, perl, ruby, basic, python, lua, and so on. And best of all: It's completely free.”

The .NET port is the primary reason I like the engine; but class structure is also very well laid out, intuitive and obvious.  Functions have been neatly encapsulated and overloaded with defaults so that coding can be kept to a minimum, but all the properties are still exposed allowing personal manipulation if desired.

I’d like everyone who’s interested in making games by writing code to check out this engine.  While the tutorials for C++ the .NET equivalents are available in the Irrlicht.NET forum on the website.  To give a brief example of how easy it makes your life; it take about 15 lines of code to render and run around in a Quake 3 map and only 2 lines extra to provide collision detection, stair climbing and gravity.

Gmail Mobile now available

Again and again, Google just keeps getting better.  This time it’s Gmail Mobile which works absolutely brilliantly on my i-mate JAM.

To get to the mobile version of Gmail, use http://m.gmail.com

Google already provides its search pages in mobile form if you need to look up something while away from your computer (I’ve already used it while trying to convince the barman what goes into a Flaming Lamborghini); and Gmail was the next much needed step.

I wonder when we’ll see other great sites provide their services through mobile pages.  Can you imagine searching MSDN through your PocketPC or buying stuff on Amazon from your phone?

Digital Gaming Hot Labs #7

When: 7th January 2006, 12:00 – 14:00
Venue: IT Intellect, Bryanston (map)
Presenter: Andre Odendaal
Topic: Introduction to Managed DirectX 3D
Level: Beginner
Language: C#
Platform: Direct X 9.0
Objective: In this hot lab attendees will learn how to use DirectX to render 3D objects, move them around and manage lighting.  This is a hands-on lab and prefect for someone who’s new or never used DirectX 3D.
RSVP: here

This is the first hot lab of 2006 and I’m very excited as I’m starting to revisit material which means an even slicker, smoother presentation with tried and tested demos and an interactive experience.

I really want to encourage all beginners and people interested in DirectX to come and see what we’re doing here.

Visual Studio 2005 Image Library

I don’t know if this is available in Visual Studio 2005 Express, Standard or Professional but with Team Suite installed check out C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\VS2005ImageLibrary

There you’ll find a ZIP file with a whole host of icons, BMPs and the animated GIFs you’re used to seeing in Windows XP and Visual Studios and you can use them now in your applications.

<Sarcastic>Why is all the cool stuff hidden?</Sarcastic>