CoDe Magazine has published a rather large article about XNA games development, with a lot of input from professional developers like Jamie Fristrom and Raph Koster (both linked in the left sidebar). There’s a lot of repetition, but it does bring home the point that XNA and C# can be useful even for professional developers today, and will most certainly become more useful in the future. I have only done a couple of minor experiments with XNA 1.
09 Aug 2007, 20:37
08 Aug 2007, 00:18
By now I have finally accepted that I don’t like them. What’s a “smart shooter”? A First Person Shooter type of game where the emphasis is more on atmosphere and story (the environment in which you do things) than on raw gameplay (the things you actually do). The classic examples were System Shock 1 & 2… I tried SS1 and had zero fun with it. The story bits and character progression in SS2 kept me hooked for about 2 hours, but at that point the cruddy combat just got to me.
07 Aug 2007, 21:39
I just ran into this writeup of a presentation by Blizzard lead designers about their processes and criteria for creating instances and bosses. Short but very interesting.
28 Jul 2007, 01:54
Despite a number of oddities, Sunshine is the best Science-Fiction movie in many years. Visually stunning, excellent music, and a story with a lot of personality despite being essentially a mish-mash of sci-fi topics already used in previous movies.
The commercial success of this movie is doomed due to the strange way in which distributors have handled it, with late and staggered releases and a marketing campaign that tells too much.
24 Jul 2007, 00:45
The Darkness: it’s fun, it’s creepy, it’s quite good. The 360 version looks way better than what I remember of the short PS3 testdrive I did a few weeks ago. Cutscene animations are very stiff.
Tomb Raider Legend: I finally sat down to play it through to the end. Very good platforming and puzzles, simplistic combat, and weird bosses with pretty bad (accelerated?) animations. Quite nice overall, and great value at $19.
15 Jul 2007, 10:50
Voodoo Extreme has collected a fantastic index of coverage and trailers from E3. I suppose the new E3 format sucks for game fans and small/hobby game sites and bloggers, but looks much better and useful for developer and publishers doing actual work. As a visitor I’ll miss the old E3, as a developer I think I won’t.
The Transformers movie was exactly as expected: cheesy, long, boring and mostly irrelevant script, fast and erratic editing, saturated colors, and excellent CGI and explosions.
13 Jul 2007, 09:04
A week before E3, someone unveils a Circuit City ad with a PS3 announced for $100 less. People speculate of a PS3 price drop. Sony categorically denies. E3 arrives, and Sony formally announces a $100 price drop. Ok, the deny-then-confirm tactic is old and tired, but hey… the PS3 needs all the help they can get, because they are simply not selling like they should.
E3 goes well for Sony, with a number of interesting exclusive games, and the general impression is that PS3 is going to start taking off.
10 Jul 2007, 23:38
Call me a fanboy if you want, but I just came out of the movie theater feeling that Ratatouille is the best animated movie ever made, and one of the best movies of any kind in many years. Script, characters, visual design, animation, rendering technology, pacing, humour… I absolutely loved all of it. I spent the entire movie with an unmistakable feeling of pure joy in my chest.
It does many things against what we may consider “mainstream business sense”, from the rat theme, to the french accents and the adult themes in an animated movie… and it’s probably going to pay for it with a less than stellar box office.
02 Jul 2007, 23:28
July 1st is Canada Day, so there was lots of partying all over the city. At night they put out a neat fireworks show up over Canada Place. I took the Nikon and a tripod, and went over there with Sergio and Diego. You can see a little gallery here. This is just a sample:
22 Jun 2007, 01:32
I ran into this today with VS2005 SP1: if you define the body of a specialization of a template class’ member function in a separate cpp file, the linker will barf:
`template<class T> struct A { void f() {} };template<> void A::f(); // body in a separate cpp You have to define the body in all source files (or at least one) that actually use the specialization of that function, normally in the header file: