Game Development Resources Library

I hate to be a broken record of the whole developer/journalist thing that I started last week but the "Sore Thumbs" blog that Dan Hsu and Crispin Boyer, both formerly of Electronic Gaming Monthly, have been writing over the course of the last couple of weeks is simply a gold mine of superb reading material.

I'm not in the United States of America, and I'm not in Canada (so, it's really a country?1) so my week is 5 days long. I'm jealous.

A new Unigine-powered "Tropics" demo is released and available for download now. Key features of the demo are dynamic sky with light scattering, live water with a surf zone and caustics, special materials for vegetation, and real-time ambient occlusion. It supports all modern graphical APIs: DirectX 9, DirectX 10, and OpenGL. Both Windows and Linux version are available.

The GameDeveloperTools.com Ratings & Reviews system is now live! Visitors are encouraged to stop by and rate their favorite books, engines, libraries, and other tools.

At the heart of the new system is the Total Score, which is calculated using both the average rating and product popularity. Read more about the Total Score here.

As of late there hasn't been very much to sink our teeth into as far as game industry news goes, but you already knew that and have heard it several times already, so at the risk of disappointing you, I'll just go ahead and summarize what is going on out there right now, albeit not much.

The 2008 Retro Remakes Big Competition is on!

Head over to http://www.retroremakes.com and get going!

Lyon, France. September 3rd 2008. PathEngine announces release 5.17.00 of their pathfinding and agent movement SDK, with the main focus being some very significant optimisations to the SDK preprocess save and load mechanisms.

So I come in today, like any other Monday, and set about doing some work, and generally feeling quite productive for the beginning of a week. Except...yesterday was in fact Labor Day, and a Monday, and thus today is Tuesday. You know, the day I write the Daily. Oops goddamnit. You all owe Trent for reminding me.

The Nvscene demo competition was held during the NVision 2008 conference. The results of the competition are available now online on pouet.net.

Ever wanted to actually affect the objects you shoot at, applying a bit of damage, maybe destroy it altogether in a ball of fire smoke and sparks, leaving only a smoking wreck behind?

Now you can.

Kaboom!Pack or Destroyable Objects for Torque will give you just that.