Saw a short news snippet over at The Register about growth in the UK games industry, despite slipping hardware sales. For those of you interested in the facts and figures, check it out here Read more »

For those of you familiar with the first two books in this series, ShaderX3 requires no introduction. If you've never heard of the series, i suggest you check out shaderx.com and shaderx2.com. The third installment of the series is being put together right now and authors are being asked to Read more »

Just spotted a new article at GameDev.net entitled Designing Great Games. Here's a clip: "Games need to be designed in a manner that gives players the feeling that they are achieving something or progressing, making steps forward, are just about to solve their gaming dilemma, that there... Read more »

TweakTown Gamer has an interesting article comparing the gaming industry with the movie industry. It mentions many of the similarities between the relatively young gaming industry and the film industry of the 1920's, including the introduction of new technologies and how they shaped and are ... Read more »

AMD have today announced the release of a new desktop, and several notebook processors, based on the Athlon 64 chip. Here's a clip of the press release: "SUNNYVALE, CA -- January 6, 2004 --AMD (NYSE: AMD) kicked off 2004 with today’s introduction of the new Mobile AMD Athlon™ 64 processors Read more »

Jan Vlietinck has recently updated his displacement mapping project to incorporates DirectX 9 and HLSL. A demo and source code are available from his website. This news item has been sat here for about 10 days waiting for me to get round to posting it... You really need to click Read more »

Beyond3D has conducted an interview with Chris Donahue who is Microsoft's Games Developer Windows Evengelist. He was asked variety of questions, ranging from what he actually does, to DirectX and its importance, to companies (e.g. NVIDIA and ATI), to the next major Microsoft operating system... Read more »

Eugene, OR – GarageGames announced today the launch of its partner site Gamebeavers.org and the demo version of the content now available for independent game developers who want to contribute to gain membership in the nonprofit organization. Established in order to lower the barriers for 3D vide... Read more »

Tokyopia.com has an article where the author argues that music is more important than graphics in games. He argues: " In going back to look at a few rare games that still fly, it struck me that the graphics have almost always dated horribly, but the music - almost without Read more »

Saw this over at CFXweb.net: "I wrote a C# tutorial on playing music (MP3, WMA, etc) and audio files (WAV) via DirectX9 SDK. The tutorial is meant for newbie C# game programmers with a bit knowledge of building a C# application." Click here for more details. Read more »

GameDev.net has posted a chapter from Game Programming With Python, Lua, and Ruby for those of you interested in the book. Click here for more information. Read more »

Just got word of this: "Siemens mobile, smac and Sun Microsystems actively encourage the development and widespread use of Mobile Java Technology (J2ME). For this purpose we are organizing the second "Java Masters" contest, giving students and pre-market start-up companies the poss... Read more »

Just spotted an interesting article on GameDev.net about two dimensional soft shadowing. Here's a clip: " The aim of this document is to describe an accurate method of generating soft shadows in a 2D environment. The shadows are created on the fly via geometry as opposed to traditional ... Read more »

Some of you might already have noticed this, but Emil Persson has released the source code to his OpenGL cloth simulation. You can find the files, and alot of other usefull stuff on his website Read more »

Here are two articles relating to the future of games (ergo, their development). The first, from BBC News, is a short chat with Yves Guillemot,the boss of French game studio Ubisoft about where he sees games progressing to in the future. The second is an editorial on GameSpy about whether Read more »

Gamasutra has a short article discussing how to avoid getting too enthusiastic towards a project and remain focussed on the final goal. Here's a clip: " We need to rein ourselves in. We could tell everyone on the team that they suck and their ideas are valueless, but that may Read more »