Game Developer's Resources

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Note: Game developers who have a good opinion of themselves should be also interested in the section Gamer's Resources.

Game Development
Game Innovation Database (GIDb)
The goal of the GIDb ...

The goal of the GIDb is to classify and record every innovation in the entire history of computer and video games.

Magazines
/GameStar/dev
/GameStar/dev/ is ...

/GameStar/Dev was a German-speaking magazine for game development and business development. It covered development of computer games, console games, mobile games, and Web games.

The magazine was a quarterly published by the company IDG Entertainment Media GmbH. The first edition 01/2005 was available in September 2005. Since that time the print run had been increased by more than 82 percent.

For marketing purposes the magazine was renamed to Making Games Magazin with the release of the edition 03/2008. Citation from the editorial:

"... Wie auch immer, /GameStar/dev heißt ab dieser Ausgabe Making Games Magazine. Einfach so. Wir haben lange darüber nachgedacht – denn eigentlich finden wir den alten Namen ganz passend – aber unsere geschäftlichen Aktivitäten für Spiele-Entwickler ruhen derzeit auf den Säulen Making Games Conferences, makinggames.de und eben /GameStar/dev. Das hat zuweilen zu Irritationen geführt, außerdem zu einem erhöhten Kommunikationsaufwand. Jetzt vereinheitlichen wir alles - Konferenzen, Webseite, Magazin. Alles hört in Zukunft auf den gleichen Markennamen. Und neue Logos gibt es auch. Endlich. Wir hoffen, das stiftet weniger Verwirrung als es beseitigt. ..."

Making Games Magazin
Making Games Magazin is ...

Making Games Magazin was called /GameStar/dev up to and including edition 02/2008.

  • It is a German-speaking magazine for game development and business development.
  • It covers development of computer games, console games, mobile games, and Web games.
  • It is bimonthly published by the company IDG Entertainment Media GmbH.

Read more on the German edition of Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia.

Graphics
Engines
Crystal Space
Crystal Space is ...

Crystal Space is an Open Source and portable 3D engine framework for realtime 3D graphics which runs on GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS/X. It is fully featured with support for vertex and fragment shaders, dynamic lighting and lightmaps, skeletal animation, physics, 3D sound, terrain engine, python support and much more. Version 1.0 was released in January 2007 – after nearly 10 years of development.

DarkPlaces
The Darkplaces engine is ...

The Darkplaces engine is an advanced Quake I engine and being mainly developed by Forest "LordHavoc" Hale, who became familiar with the Quake I engine shortly after the engine was released under GPL by id Software in 1999. Behind the scenes the code has undergone a huge change because he was not content with the original QuakeC code, and he has greatly upgraded the engine while maintaining compatibility with normal quake modifications. A few of Darkplaces‘s main features are Quake III BSP support, realtime lighting and shadowing, new particle effects, advanced menu system, and Md3/Md2 model support.

The 3D deathmatch game NEXUIZ is based on the Darkplaces engine.

Tools & Utilities
CEL
CEL is ...

CEL is the abbreviation for Crystal Entity Layer.
It is a set of plugins and applications built on top of the Crystal Space SDK. CEL provides a set of commonly used abstractions to make it easier to develop games. CEL also comes with a lot of useful plugins for 3rd/first person camera handling, physics, movement system, quest system, and so on.

CEL is heavily oriented towards scripting (but also works in plain C++). Using CELstart it is not neccessary to use C++. This means that since the base code is C++, CEL is fast while being extremely easy to use from within Python and/or Xml.

CELstart
CELstart is ...

CELstart is a CEL-based environment for making games using scripts only. It eases the development process for those less proficient with C++. That is, you don't need a C++ compiler to make games for CELstart.
The games are distributed in self-contained packages (so-called celzips) and can be played by the user by simply opening them, independently from the underlying operating system Windows, Linux or MacOS/X.

NVPerfKit
NVPerfKit is ...

NVPerfKit is a comprehensive suite of performance tools provided by the GPU manufacturer NVIDIA Corporation to help debug and profile OpenGL and Direct3D applications. It gives access to low-level performance counters inside the driver and hardware counters inside the GPU itself. The counters can be used to determine exactly how an application is using the GPU, identify performance issues, and confirm that performance problems have been resolved.

Network
FJM: A High Performance Java Message Library
The paper presents ...

The paper presents an IP-multicast-based Java Message Service implementation called FJM (Fast Java Messaging) Library. Its architecture, protocols, and implementation issues are discussed. For achieving better performance, the original design of the FJM was revised. The details of the refinement are also described. Then, the performance of the both versions of the FJM with the performance of other JMS implementations are compared. After the carefully design and tuning done by the authors of the paper, in most cases, the revised version of the FJM can offer the highest throughput among the well-known industrial or open source JMS implementations. Therefore, FJM can be used in many innovative or mission critical cluster applications, such as massively multiplayer virtual worlds or military simulators.

"Project Darkstar"
Darkstar: The Java Game Server
The O’Reilly “Short Cut” entitled ...

The O’Reilly “Short Cut” entitled Darkstar: The Java Game Server (PDF document) provides a beginner's introduction to developing a game using Darkstar Project:

Darkstar: The Java Game Server

Project Darkstar
Project Darkstar shall be ...

Project Darkstar shall be the game industry’s first open source, enterprise grade, highly scalable, online game server based on the JavaTM technology. The source code is released by the Project Darkstar team at Sun Microsystems.

More questions regarding the project are answered by the Project Darkstar FAQ residing on the Project Darkstar Community Portal.

Project Darkstar Community Portal
The Project Darkstar Community Portal is ...

The Project Darkstar Community Portal is the location where the community shall contribute examples and utilities to the Darkstar Project.

Projects
Games
CRYSTAL CORE
CRYSTAL CORE is ...

CRYSTAL CORE is the main Crystal Space demo game. It makes heavy use of CEL and CELstart. It is going to be a first person shooter (FPS) with many quest and puzzle elements.

NEXUIZ
NEXUIZ is ...

NEXUIZ is a 3D deathmatch game project handled by a team of developers called Alientrap. It was released the first time on May 31st, 2005 and is available as download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The maintenance and further development of the game is going on.

The team asserts the claim that the project is the first of its kind to develop a game under the GPL and by means of the Internet.

Studios & Teams
Alientrap
Alientrap is ...

Alientrap is a group of game developers initiated by Lee Vermeulen in 2002. The developers are spread over the entire world and organize their work on the base of the Web. Their goal is to create fun action games as NEXUIZ that shall compete with commercial game titles although published free of charge and most likely under a Open Source license.

EDEN GAMES
EDEN GAMES was ...

EDEN GAMES was created as EDEN Studios by Stéphane Baudet, Frédéric Jay and David Nadal in 1998. The company has been founded to design and develop video game software for Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft consoles.

BTW, EDEN GAMES uses one of my favorite SCM tools: Perforce.

Shopping
... focused on Hardware & Accessories
Notebook-TabletPC.de
Notebook-TabletPC.de is ...

Notebook-TabletPC.de is a German online shop that sells notebooks and tablet PCs of such vendors who are well-known, in particular, for their professional systems: Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Toshiba. But it must be emphasized that the shop offers a range of products addressed to private costumers as well as business costumers.

TigerPixel.DE recommends this shop:

  • The shop is conducted by the IT service provider Brünings + Sander EDV-Agentur GmbH.
  • Since 1991 Brünings + Sander has also a retail shop named Der Münchener COMPUTERTREFF in Munich.

    The retail shop provides a showroom where the notebooks can be tested.

  • The pricing for upgrades is more than fair: In contrast to Notebook-TabletPC.de many other online shops, e.g. notebook(dot)de, charge more than the double price for an 1 GByte system memory upgrade or for a guarantee, that the screen has no defective pixel.
  • Brünings + Sander EDV-Agentur's T&Cs (i.e. general terms and conditions, in Germany AGB called) are easily to understand and, in my humble opinion, without any pitfall at least for the end customer (e.g. transfer of risk, in Germany Gefahrübergang called).
  • In November 2008 I ordered a LENOVO ThinkPad T500 notebook without any problems.

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