Bullet 2.76

I read in Gamedev that Bullet has released version 2.76. Cant check the Bullet site right now, seems to be offline (at least for me). The good news are incoming support for OpenCL, but we have to wait for 3.x. So, no need to have an Nvidia to enjoy accelerated physics.

The RV870 story

AnandTech, as usual, has a very interesting and well written article about RV870, the chip powering ATI Evergreen cards, or HD 5000, in case you don't underestand. A must read.

Blender 2.5 alpha 1

The long awaited Blender 2.5 has announced the first official release: alpha 1! Please consider that this isnt even a beta, so, dont rush to migrate your work to it. You could suffer data lost, weird crashes, insanity, pregnancy (even if you are male, hey, thats the problem with alpha versions) and all sort of problems.

OpenGL 3.2 examples

Vía opengl.org I found that the nopper.tv set of OpenGL 3.2 examples has been updated for Linux (I think this is the direct link). Unfortunately I still dont have OpenGL 3.2 because of some bug with ATI drivers.

New forum for game programming

I copy and paste the announce from Sam's mail:

Due to popular demand, there is now a forum for general game
development discussion on the SDL site!


You have to register on the forums and become a member of the
Community group in order to post. Instructions are in the forum
welcome announcement:
http://forums.libsdl.org/viewtopic.php?t=5974


There are lots of other great game development forums out there, and
this is simply intended to supplement them for the SDL community.

Hardware tessellation with OpenGL in Radeon cards

Remember that old, unused tessellation unit in Radeon 2000, 3000 and 4000, inherited from Xbox 360 video card design? Well, this article explains how to use it. Warning, some knowledge about shaders is required.

Ca3d is now open source

I read in opengl.org that Ca3d, now known as Cafu Engine, is now open source. The feature list looks good. I copy and paste from their site: The Cafu Engine is an all-purpose, modern 3D graphics engine and game development kit, feature complete to get you started quickly. And it is crossplatform.

Crystal Space 1.4 released

Crystal Space and Crystal Entity Layer 1.4.0 have been released. Check the changes here. Crystal Space is a free cross-platform software development kit for realtime 3D graphics, with particular focus on games, and I have mentioned here a couple of times.

Oracle cancels Wonderland and Darkstar

It is everywhere now. After buying Sun, Oracle is dropping useless stuff, projects that do not generate income. So, Wonderland and Darkstar are now community projects. Is this good or bad? We will have to wait to see what happens.

Irrlich 1.7

Irrlicht is a  fast and easy to use 3D engine. Version 1.7 was released yesterday, with the following new features:

• Added Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
• Added support for geometry shaders (OpenGL)
• Added possibility to access texture mipmaps and to provide custom mipmaps
• Ogre .mesh format animations now supported, and Ogre 32bit indices as well
• NPK (Nebula device archive) support added
• New VertexManipulator interface for simple creation of vertex manipulation algorithms
• Added Separate TextureWrap modes for U and V coordinates and the option to mirror wrap
• Added Bzip2 and LZMA support and AES encryption
• Added options to 2D drawing like thickness, anti-aliasing and filtering.
• VBO Support for skydomes and similar
• Support for external windows in Mac OS X
• Lots of other improvements and bug fixes

The mysthical method for bug hunting

Lately I have faced a plague of weird bugs in my project: 4 in a row. First of all, I have to advice something: if a bug prevents you to test the project, do not add more code. Untested code is often source of bugs that will pop up later, and might be really hard to remember what changes you made that could break the code.
What to do if you don't have the adequate debugging tools? After randomly punching furniture or walls, stop coding for a while and some more, I found that a good mind state can help. Positive thinking, is the key element. Keep saying that you will find the bug. Also, just in case, avoid mistreating street dogs or cats and give a coin to the beggars (even when I need myself a coin), to keep the good karma and such.