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it'll be the first handheld to really take advantage of object-oriented development methodologies.

Could you elaborate? Does this sentence mean, "I read some hype about a C++ compiler for the PSP and I thought it was a new thing" (it's not), or does it mean "I want attention and think I can get modded up by dropping buzzwords"?

Disclaimer: it is my website. I'm not plugging my website's links collection; I just think it might be useful to starting developers. I have a pretty collection of websites useful for game programmers.

Click here and under 'Game Development'...

I highly recommend FlipCode and GameDev.net for game-programming-related content. They have tons of stuff for beginners.

With the information you provided, it is pretty hard to direct you to *the* website you need because we don't know if you wanna do 3D or 2D, Ogl or DX, game genre?

There are also some crappy 'game toolkits' but if you know how to write C++ code, I'd recommend you stay away from these things.

You should definitely get Python and Pygame. Python is both easy to learn and more powerful than most languages. Better yet, there are plenty of example games to study. If you want to do 3D, also get PyOpenGL, and get the started with the NeHe tutorials (Python code available).

The downside with Python is that it can be slow (a fact that can be remedied to some degree, but not entirely, by also installing Psyco). Fortunately, the slowness doesn't matter (unless your aim is to compete with the next id Software engine). I've written a simple engine for a 2D platformer in Python myself, and even with a game logic and collision detection, 90% of the processor time is spent blitting the graphics to the screen. Since Pygame (written in C) does the rendering, using C++ for your game code won't provide any big advantage.

Good luck!

This is a job fair with a cover charge. $45 advance/$60 at the door, and they are not even offering a lunch.

This 'conference' comes down to 3 hours to cover the most basic industry information ("Industry Overview", "Getting in at the Ground Floor", "Applying Transferable Skill Sets"), then 90 minutes to find your own lunch, and 90 minutes of "Resume Workshop".

What a scam. If you want industry info, try http://www.sloperama.com/advice.html or http://www.gamedev.net/reference/start_here/.

For a counter perspective, check out 1UP's look at the issue.

Long story short, the lead designer for The Playboy Mansion and the lead product developer for Bloodrayne are female, and the lead designer for Beyond Good and Evil is male. Many of the people listed in the article cross the line between the traditionally expected viewpoints. Many female designers and artists are comfortable with a larger degree of sexuality in their characters, and many male designers take a more respectful "kid's gloves" approach to the issue. The designer most directly responsible for the look of Laura Croft left the company after the first game because they wanted to sex her up too much (Legend has it she is based upon his niece).

This is not as black-and-white an issue as "men are sex-starved, women are victims." Quite frankly I find that reductionism insulting. The majority of the male gaming population does not act like 13 year old boys. Have you been around 13 year old boys recently? If the current statistics are correct, the percentage of 6 - 17 year old boys playing videogames is holding at about 20%. Which means 1 in 5. Which means that the obnoxious kid that you bump into on the Halo 2 server is probably in reality an obnoxious kid. And if he understands that the behavior is unacceptable, he will change. But if you shrug and make gross generalizations based on sex, that makes it OK for him to continue and insults the rest of us unproductively.

And please lose the stereotype of the lifeless piply male gamer. It's been debunked. Multiple times. over and over again.

clicky. The initial post has a great collection of what I believe to be all (or mostly all) royalty free, legal sprites, backgrounds, and tilesets.

I took on the Nehe Open Source Zelda project two years ago. We made much progress (portals from overworld to underworld, most all weapons implemented, etc...) and then we got a letter from Nintendo's lawyers about the graphics. We had lifted them from an emulator (screen shots and Photoshop-action) and so we needed to scrap them.

The project could have continued but that took a significant amount of air out of my sails. I gave the code to a friend at the BaltoLUG who added SDL to it and made it work on Linux. This new project is still up but not being actively developed: Openlynks. Sadely, the level editor was made in Visual Basic 6 and so unlike the C++/OpenGL game engine, it hasn't been ported over.

The remains of the project pages are here.

Terminology used when software is burned onto a "gold" cd that will be sent to the CD manufacturers to be reproduced. So named because of the CDR burnable CDs are gold backed normally. Also See Going Glass.

Taken from Gamedev.Net

Meanwhile I've had an errie feeling for the past few years that quantum tunnelling is numerical error in the universal collision detection algorithm... but, well... that's a bit weird to think about.

Yeah, I used to feel the same way about OpenGL, but I discovered that using SDL as a wrapper for OpenGL makes it a little more tolerable for those used to using standard C++. You know, like the kind that uses int main() and not int WinMain().

Also, a real good place to learn OpenGL is http://nehe.gamedev.net/. It has tutorials that cover everything from drawing your first polygon to using pixel shaders. Also, most of their examples are available in a wide variety of programming languages and platform-specific code.

NeHe is one of the best for tutorials. GameDev and FlipCode are also good general sites.

NeHe is one of the best for tutorials. GameDev and FlipCode are also good general sites.

Correct algorithm would be this one, which basically every programm supports, just gimp doesn't:

SUN has done an amazing job in extending Java even to include generics without breaking backwards compatability. Yes it did not lead to the solution that is technically and internally the most efficient (it would have required changes to the JVM), but the developer is not affected. Internally it is solved by typecasts, but who cares?

I care. To me, Java has two arguments in its favor vs Python: execution speed and jobs available.

The former is being eroded. Really, the only application I can think of where Python's execution speed worries me is for a 3D engine I'd like to do. But with psyco, I found that the Python version of lesson 10 of the nehe opengl tutorial gets 140 frames-per-second to Java's/LWJGL's 180 (though not 'out of the box', I had to level the playing field by turning on the same opengl features for both versions). I'm still leaning slightly towards Java for this project, as I wonder that the performance gap won't become more pronounced with a real game engine that does more than just feed polygons to my graphics card.

As for jobs, I'm deciding whether I would really want another Java job. Java's not fun for me, but I digress.

Getting back to Sun, they broke backward compatibility from 1.3 to 1.4 for assertions. Why did they not do the same for generics when it would have improved performance? You'd think they would have, since there have been stories circulating of .NET's superior performance (true or not). I think generics were rushed into Java to compete with C#. The JVM was left alone, not to preserve backward compatibility (which Sun has broken before), but because there was no time to add this feature and still ship Java 1.5 in a short enough time-frame to preserve Java's waning mind-share.

".NET is years behind and plans to bring similar features only in 2007 (generics)."

Incorrect. C# has generics right now.

Also, I like that C# can allocate stuff on the stack and allows 'unsafe' code to use pointer arithmetic. These are all boons to performance, and performance is why you use C# or Java (buzzword-compliance notwithstanding). If you want to innovate or be spookily productive you use something else.

Perhaps John Carmack would like to comment on that...

How else do you think he can afford to pay for his Ferrari?

Offtopic: What in the hell do I do with my game, assuming I do finish it?

Prior art from a talk on the technique


Reply Quoting This MessageEdit Message SimmerD Member since: 1/5/2003
Posted - 9/21/2003 6:50:03 PM

Don't worry about it fellas. I described this technique publicly a few months before they filed the patent - hence Prior Art. Ironically, it was at a Creative Labs developer's forum.

During my stencil buffer talk, I described doing shadow volumes the 'reverse' way. At the time, I didn't realize the major reason why the z fail method is better than the z pass method, although I did realize they were logically equivalent, which is why it's now known as 'Carmack's Reverse' and not 'Dietrich's Reverse'!

There's also a "printable version" if you don't care to click through multiple pages, or want to help save GameDev survive Slashdotting slightly longer.

Association for Computing Machinery on Mentifex artificial intelligence

Ben Goertzel, Ph.D., on Mentifex artificial intelligence

Comprehensive Perl Archive Network: Mentifex AI mind.txt gameplan

eGovOS Open-Source Government Reference Book includes Mentifex AI

Free Software Donation Directory: Mentifex AI Project

Nanomagazine interviews Mentifex on independent AI scholarship

Redpaper archive of Mentifex documents on artificial intelligence

AI has been solved.

Agents Portal selling Mentifex AI4U textbook of artificial intelligence

GameDev.net selling Mentifex AI4U textbook of artificial intelligence

GreatMindsWorking selling Mentifex AI4U: Mind-1.1 Programmer's Manual

Soon php will be used for all kinds of innapropriate uses!!

For a moment I thought of someone writing a PHP script to dynamically generate Perl scripts for web output... just for no real reason

But then I thought.... Naaaaaa.

;)

P.S. Anything on NeHe about this yet? I did a text search of the front page but nada (I haven't been to the site in months).

We're having a discussion about XNA over on the GameDev.net forums. It might be worth reading, even if you don't have an account there and can't post.

Whatever you do, DON'T buy the OpenGL Superbible. It is a terrible book, consisting of uninteresting examples accompanied by banal attempts at a light-hearted introduction to the library that provide no insight whatsoever.

I'd buy the Reference Manual reviewed here, and use the tutorials at nehe.gamedev.net for an entry point.

It's not a book per se, but I would highly recommend the OpenGL tutorials at NeHe Productions.

They've got a bunch of tutorials, starting with basic opengl stuff up to some very tricky effects.

Each tutorial goes step by step through downloadable C code examples, explaining everything.

I picked up most of what I know of OpenGL from it.

Kilgard is the author of GLUT.

Only if you believe that MS controls the gaming industry, and controls the graphics industry and controls....

opengl, is the standard that runs gamecube, ps2, many pc games, and is the standard that is used for anything non-microsoft.

Direct3D has more features, because they don't follow an industry standard, they are able to develop faster. You will also notice that Direct3d contains a very thin wrapper to OpenGL as well.

Take a look at NeHe productions to see what is possible with opengl.

I agree with the reviewer's sentiment that this is not the place to look as a beginner.
I would recommend, even before checking out the mentioned 'Bible', taking a look at NeHe Production's OpenGL tutorials (see the sidebar).

"Even though the video game industry makes profits in the billions."

Well, that statement ignores the number of companies that don't make a profit.

"Yes. Standardize the tools. No more graphics engines for 10 years. Period. Half of all development budgets should be spent on games that haven't EVER been developed yet (no sequels, no clones, no remakes, no licensed characters). One fourth of development budgets should be used to hire independent developers. One tenth of all development budgets should fund games written by one developer."

So, basically you want people to create innovative titles that no one has ever heard of, but using existing engines? Innovation is a great word, but in game development, if people aren't buying new, you give them what they want. People complain about the lack of innovation, but then everyone is excited about Doom 3, UT2004, Half-Life 2, Warcraft 3, etc. You want innovation, pay for it.

"The adventure genre should be re-invented from the ground up. Interactive fiction should be marketed again. Prices for games should be cut by 30% across the board. Electronic distribution should be standard for all games, including consoles."

Why should it? The adventure genre is a niche market now. Google for it, and you will find it.

Prices for games are supposedly justified. Whether they are or not is still up for debate, but charging a portion of the price to make up for "piracy" is shady in my eyes.

Electronic distribution of 3-7MB games is possible for dial-up users, and there is a large number of them still existing. 50MB is bad for them, and 650MB+ games are just not worth it. Why should electronic distribution be standard? It just doesn't make sense for some games, especially those with multiple CDs.

I don't quite get your arguments, since you want innovative titles, but you want standard art, engine, and other tools to be available to everyone. Won't that just flood the market with similar looking titles? Yeah, maybe they will differ by story or something, but I'm having trouble seeing how these goals you want to achieve will be achieved with your suggestions.

As for the theory and design documentation, I agree that would rock. Of course, I have books on the subject already. And tutorials are available online here among other places.

The thing is, the game industry is in it for profit. People buy certain kinds of games, so publishers publish them. People don't buy others, so publishers don't publish them. For certain games, they are in niche markets. You want to play them, you have to find them.

Want to find out what indie developers are making? Check out Game Tunnel and other review sites. Of course, last time it was on Slashdot people complained about the lack of innovation there too. I guess we can't win either way.

Seumas McNally defines indie game development, for myself, and obviously for the IGF. I don't know his background but from what I can gather it's like:

You've dropped out of school cuz you're so damn passionate about games.

Working out of your parents basement.

No financial backing, except savings from your part-time job and maybe love money from the parents.

Recruiting family/friends to do volunteer work until the game is done.

When the game is finally done, it's overlooked by investors/publishers because of your youth and inexperience, so you absolutely need something like an IGF award to turn heads.


It's absurd that an award in Seumas' name was handed to the Savage team.

http://www.gamedev.net/columns/events/gdc2004/view .asp?SectionID=4

Its more then 6 - 8, but yes you are more or less right. Theres a book called 36 Dramatic Sitautions which lists all the plot types, and all of their plot twists. You can read a synopsis here. Required reading for any writer.

Quote you: "the most you're going to get out of me is that there's an obfuscated Perl contest and no counterpart for Java."

[link mine for emphasis] Note, I'm not familliar with a programming language that lacks such a contest, and C was the first (IOCCC was famous before Perl existed).

Quote you: "operators often have side effects"

You don't actually program in Java, do you? This is just getting silly. Are you saying that Java operators have no side effects?! Let's try out "a=b" for starters....

"there are arcane variables like $["

One man's arcane is another man's "perfectly well documented and easily found via the table of contents, and no it doesn't affect the whole program, read the docs"... but to each his own.

That's beside the point though. You spoke not of variable names, but of syntax.

"as well as the community that uses Perl (there's sort of a celebration of difficult to read code going on)."

Nope. I highly disagree. There is humor and entertainment in whiddling down people's few-line RSA encryption algorithms into the minimum line-count so that it fits on a T-shirt for political reasons... there's command-line usage where how little you type matters, but I don't think anyone celebrates difficult-to-read code in the large... more to the point, those who upload such code to CPAN get the words "maintainable code" explained to them rather harshly.

Again, I was not talking about your feelings about the language or its developers. You said, "there's less obfuscation possible in java syntax". That is incorrect, as far as I know... but feel free to PROVE that wrong.

Association for Computing Machinery on Mentifex artificial intelligence

Ben Goertzel, Ph.D., on Mentifex artificial intelligence

Comprehensive Perl Archive Network: Mentifex AI mind.txt gameplan

Free Software Donation Directory: Mentifex AI Project

Nanomagazine interviews Mentifex on independent AI scholarship

Redpaper archive of Mentifex documents on artificial intelligence

Agents Portal selling Mentifex AI4U textbook of artificial intelligence

GameDev.net selling Mentifex AI4U textbook of artificial intelligence

GreatMindsWorking selling Mentifex AI4U: Mind-1.1 Programmer's Manual

Looks like there is a more optimized version here.

I just turned 14 and I'm learning C++ as my first language. I don't think it's overly hard, though pointers did take me a few weeks to get the hang of :/. My only gripe is that it's hard to make something that I'll actually use (and thus I sometimes lose interest), because I still don't know how to import/export/create files, and because I wanted to make a few simple games but after seeing some basic OpenGL code I know I'm not going to be doing that for a while (using the tutorials at NeHe I see that I need to write a few hundred lines of code just for a blank screen...).

another funny story about knights, swords and kingdoms... and mr. Gates is there too. Coincidentally, I visited these links a few days ago:

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article3 90.asp
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article3 91.asp

another funny story about knights, swords and kingdoms... and mr. Gates is there too. Coincidentally, I visited these links a few days ago:

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article3 90.asp
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article3 91.asp

I believe you do this(logged in as root, of course):

1. Read RedCrapHat docs.
2. Figure out how to uninstall X and anything that is related.
3. Figure out how to remove anything that has to do with RedHat, the RPM system included.
4. Uninstall the above two.
5. rm -Rf /
6. wget http://ftp.slackware.com/slackware-current.tar.bz2
7. Install Slackware
8. Install Swaret, http://www.swaret.org (?)
9. Sign the goatse petition
10. Install Apache httpd and put up hello.jpg as your index page.
11. Download, configure and compile the kernel.
12. Type this in the console: 'uninstall python'
13. Do it again, but without the quotes this time.
14. Get a life, nerd!
15. Join the communist GameDev community!

• GameDev, and in particular the How do I make games? and Game Programmer's Beginners Guide
• for the hardcore out there, a Win32 Assembly Tetris Clone how-to guide, with full source code and commentary...
• A programming language called Euphoria which is so unlike "real" programming languages, that it might just be easy enough for a kid to pick up and learn in a couple of days... (I got into it a few years ago, well after I learnt to program)
• XBasic - a decent BASIC for graphics support... (Win32 graphics... I got it because it was a step up from QuickBASIC!) There's a linux version, and it's all GPL these days...

That's all I can find in a quick scan of my bookmarks from way back when...

• GameDev, and in particular the How do I make games? and Game Programmer's Beginners Guide
• for the hardcore out there, a Win32 Assembly Tetris Clone how-to guide, with full source code and commentary...
• A programming language called Euphoria which is so unlike "real" programming languages, that it might just be easy enough for a kid to pick up and learn in a couple of days... (I got into it a few years ago, well after I learnt to program)
• XBasic - a decent BASIC for graphics support... (Win32 graphics... I got it because it was a step up from QuickBASIC!) There's a linux version, and it's all GPL these days...

That's all I can find in a quick scan of my bookmarks from way back when...

• GameDev, and in particular the How do I make games? and Game Programmer's Beginners Guide
• for the hardcore out there, a Win32 Assembly Tetris Clone how-to guide, with full source code and commentary...
• A programming language called Euphoria which is so unlike "real" programming languages, that it might just be easy enough for a kid to pick up and learn in a couple of days... (I got into it a few years ago, well after I learnt to program)
• XBasic - a decent BASIC for graphics support... (Win32 graphics... I got it because it was a step up from QuickBASIC!) There's a linux version, and it's all GPL these days...

That's all I can find in a quick scan of my bookmarks from way back when...

• GameDev, and in particular the How do I make games? and Game Programmer's Beginners Guide
• for the hardcore out there, a Win32 Assembly Tetris Clone how-to guide, with full source code and commentary...
• A programming language called Euphoria which is so unlike "real" programming languages, that it might just be easy enough for a kid to pick up and learn in a couple of days... (I got into it a few years ago, well after I learnt to program)
• XBasic - a decent BASIC for graphics support... (Win32 graphics... I got it because it was a step up from QuickBASIC!) There's a linux version, and it's all GPL these days...

That's all I can find in a quick scan of my bookmarks from way back when...

Association for Computing Machinery on Mentifex artificial intelligence

Ben Goertzel, Ph.D., on Mentifex artificial intelligence

Comprehensive Perl Archive Network: Mentifex AI mind.txt gameplan

Free Software Donation Directory: Mentifex AI Project

Nanomagazine interviews Mentifex on independent AI scholarship

Redpaper archive of Mentifex documents on artificial intelligence

AI has been solved.

Agents Portal selling Mentifex AI4U textbook of artificial intelligence

GameDev.net selling Mentifex AI4U textbook of artificial intelligence

GreatMindsWorking selling Mentifex AI4U: Mind-1.1 Programmer's Manual

SourceForge Mentifex Donations Page

Above post is stolen from another site, specifically from a comment made by me. Last Post [gamedev.net] on the page. Posted 9:12AM (9AM when you take into account that GD.net clock is fast)

NeHe's site has lots of good tutorials.

Gamedev.net has a TON of resources relating to game development, including a giant reference section which points to a lot of information about anything game-related.

Related to your question, a good compromise between low-level OpenGL and a full game engine (or even a commercial one here) would be GLUT. Instead of giving a piss-poor explanation of what the GLUT library is all about, I'll just point you to their FAQ. For sound there is OpenAL or the ubiquitous FMOD.

Depending on what you're looking for, a library probably is out there just waiting for you to find it. Instead of asking very general questions like this, I highly recommend you check out a little search engine called Google to find libraries or engines that suit your specific needs. Cheers!

Gamedev.net has a TON of resources relating to game development, including a giant reference section which points to a lot of information about anything game-related.

Related to your question, a good compromise between low-level OpenGL and a full game engine (or even a commercial one here) would be GLUT. Instead of giving a piss-poor explanation of what the GLUT library is all about, I'll just point you to their FAQ. For sound there is OpenAL or the ubiquitous FMOD.

Depending on what you're looking for, a library probably is out there just waiting for you to find it. Instead of asking very general questions like this, I highly recommend you check out a little search engine called Google to find libraries or engines that suit your specific needs. Cheers!

2 of 3 people in this image are booth babes.

Try GameDev.net, you can't swing a dead cat without bowling over a ton of indie games.

The Irony of Indy Games

Outside of the handheld ( PalmOS, PocketPC ) markets, or cell phones... many indy games are either crap... or sales pitches to publishers! Im not saying all... there are probrably dozens of exceptions, but on the whole this remains true. Its funny though, when you look at "past" indy games...

HomeWorld
Doom
FlashPoint

Really... by definition, an indy game is self financed, without a publisher in site. Its funny that that moment you have success in the indy market, you tend to get picked up by a publisher... then your no longer indy! ;) Than again, there are a few companies that are going from commerical projects to more of an indy style. Once you see the amount that publishers take... you start to see the value in online distro's!

For anyone really interested in learning more, check out:
Garage Games Misc resources, plus a licensable engine
FlipCode Great gaming related site
Gamedev.net Like flipcode, but less mature ( you'll see! )
Gamasutra The site for game developers! Must see
CrystalSpace LGPL 3d Engine. Very impressive
WildTangent Cheap game engine (web based), plus online publishing
Auran Jet Affordable 3d engine, flexible licensing
OpenGl The site for OpenGL info. Lots of useful links

From the above list, you should easily be able to find anything else your looking for! ;) Enjoy the world of game development for zero cash!

There's plenty of free game engines out there, some are open source. An example is Genesis3D, an engine I've dabbled with. Lots of the 3D engines are in various stages of development, and some of the ones I've tried do not seem quite powerful or flexible enough for the game concepts I'm trying to implement, but depending on what you're looking for, there are plenty of resources avaiable.

Don't forget to check out useful websites like NeHe's OpenGL page (here) or GameDev.net. There are literally tons of resources out there for someone looking to get into indie game development.