OpenGL 4.1

A couple of days ago The Khronos Group announced the release of the OpenGL 4.1 specification, bringing the very latest graphics functionality to the most advanced and widely adopted cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics API. Excuse me for being os late, but we had a couple of free days at office...

A* pathfinding in Ogre

Need a path finder for your Ogre3d project? I havent studied this code yet, but sounds like a good start to see how to implement A* path finding in an Ogre scene, one of the pending tasks for my game project.

Blender 2.53

No, I didnt took a time machine, 2.53 is the first beta of 2.5. Confusing, isnt it? But good news, anyway. We are getting closer to one of the biggest changes in the history of Blender, to its maturity I would dare to say. The bad side is that after the change we will have to rebuild everything for the new version, but well, changes often are hard.

IQM, new binary mesh format

Reading Freegamer, I found that a new mesh format is available: IQM. From their site:

The Inter-Quake Model (IQM) format is a binary skeletal-animation format designed for extensibility, efficiency, and ease of loading. It is intended to serve as a replacement for the aging and ill-maintained MD5 and SMD skeletal-animation formats used in Quake-derived and Quake-like 3D engines. It has a companion export-only format, Inter-Quake Export (IQE), which is an extremely easy to export ASCII format that compiles to IQM, while supporting all IQM features, and is inspired by the OBJ format. 

It is being used by some open source FPS projects and I really like the idea. For those familiar with open source game development, the name Cal3d will surely ring a bell. But no new version have been released in a long time. Lets hope that IQM becomes a replacement for Cal3d and dont follow the same path to oblivion.

Do we need more engines?

Yesterday I was reading Gamedev forums, when I found something that got my attention: one poster states that we have some good open source engines and making a new one is pointless. I strongly disagree with that. Indeed we have some good and mature engines, but just good. Not great. Like a friend told me, there is no such thing as an open source Unreal Engine.
Commercial engines have evolved. It is not just that they provide state-of-the-art rendering features, they also provide a set of tools to ease the work of the whole team: developers, artists, level designers... Open source engines lack a coherent set of support tools, often provided by third party developers trying to solve their own problem. Sometimes the developer moves on and the tool or add-on is abandoned.
In my opinion, how does a great open source engine looks? Well, first of all, it should be a game engine including multiple rendering backends, physics, network, etc and be modular. No need to carry the network component if your game is not multiplayer. It should be easy to learn and use, yet powerful, support recent and not so recent hardware, multithreaded, have scene editors, exporters for most popular tools and it own binary mesh and scene format (the second can be xml based). External dependencies must be minimal, common and well supported, to allow quick setup in all platforms.
Those are the features I have missed in current engines. Perhaps I forgot one, but the most important are there. Im quite sure that you will agree with me is many of them, and maybe disagree in a few (only a few) others. Unfortunately I dont foresee such engine becoming available in short term. Building an engine requires time, knowledge and it is not a single person work. We can just have hope that it will happen some day.

Blendelf 0.9 beta 2

Good news newbie developers! Blendelf 0.9 beta 2 has been released, with support for popular model formats (most important, Collada) and a new  scene editor.
I foresee a bright future for this engine if they keep the good pace and the current open source license (or some attractive commercial license). I just dislike that it requires too modern video hardware to run. Anyway, expect a more in depth review of this engine as soon as I get some free time.

The new GTX 460 is amazing

The $200 video card segment has a new king: the new Nvidia GTX 460. I have been reading the reviews and this product has left a quite good impression in the hardware sites. The GTX 460 is the direct competitor to the HD5830, and does a good job. Coming in two slightly different versions: 768Mb (with 192 bits memory bus) and 1Gb (with 256 bits memory bus) priced at $199 and $230, the card is a serious choice if you want perfomance without having to sell your family as slaves.
Even when the card doesnt surpasses the HD5830 by a wide margin and neither is clearly inferior, I wouldnt advice changing if you already have the 8530 or superior, or if you are an ATI fan, 3-4 frames is not a clear advantage
But the 5770 is left behind by 10 or more FPS in many tests by the 1Gb version, making me seriously think about trading my 5770 for a 460.

GLK version 0.1 released

GLK, OpenGL Toolkit is a simple C++, cross-platform framework for creating OpenGL applications. In the offial site I see that they even provide some basic threading, Lua and I/O support. Sounds like a good choice to consider if you want to avoid the heavy modern engines like Ogre3D.
I will follow this framework, Im curious to see how far they will go.

Indie fund

A couple of game development news sites have posted this in the last days. Not so sure, but I think this is a month old, at least I have the link in my history and I dont remember visiting any of the latest announces.
Indie fund is an interesting initiative, I copy and paste from the site:

Indie Fund aims to support the growth of games as a medium by helping indie developers get financially independent and stay financially independent.

So, if you have a game in playable state, with some original concept (not sure how much this weights during selection process), send your application now to get some funds. Even when the exat agreement  has not being published, the terms seems to be quite attractive (no milestones, you just have to return part of the investment).

Osmos Linux sales

Vía Linux Gamers I found this interesting article from Hemisphere Games, regarding the sales of its game Osmos for Linux. Even when the numbers are not precise, the Linux port produced benefits. Also, even when the article doesnt covers it in detail, I can see that the sales for Mac are significant too.
Another good reason to keep your development cross-platform.

SDL_ttf 2.0.10 released

Sam has announced the latest release of SDL_ttf, a sample library which allows you to use TrueType fonts in your SDL applications. There are some useful additions, like support for font outlining.
SDL_ttf is mostly used in SDL 2D apps and I havent seen it in other environments like  3D OpenGl games or engines, perhaps because of the perfomance (dont know if this is just a subjetive perception or a proven fact).

Making a game in your spare time

A twitt-like post just to share this good article.

The International Lisp Games Expo

The ILGE is a virtual event that invites programmers to publish a playable code made with some Lisp dialect (Common Lisp, Scheme, Arc, Clojure, etc.). You just have to announce it in the wiki, program and publish your game before july 30 and then send a post-mortem to the ILGE mailing list. Non participants are also invited to join the list or the IRC channel: irc.freenode.net#lispgames.

New unigine based game screenshots

The Unigine development blog has some news about their latest improvements and also a couple of screenshot of a new strategy game they are working on, for PC and PS3. I have to say that I am impressed with the graphic quality. Unigine seems a good engine, judging from their demos, but a different thing is to see it in action in an actual game.
I think that what this engine needs is some groundbreaking title that brings it to the Unreal Engine level, or maybe some better licensing system that gets them a wider user base. With UE, you pay after you sell the game, Crytek gives its CryEngine free for students and Unity3d has a free license for indie developers.