SlickEdit’s biggest new feature for game developers has to be C++ refactoring, introduced in v9 and improved greatly in v10, SlickEdit is one of the few editors that offer the ability. There are so many improvements in this area it’s now actually usable functionality and no longer just a checkmark on a marketing brochure. Couple… Continue reading the rest of “Visual SlickEdit v10.”

VERY IMPORTANT! A version of this review was originally published in Game Developer Magazine at the end of 2004. The observations about certain parts of the Torque Game Engine I make in this review have been addressed to varying degrees which include new releases of the game engine, new patches, another book dedicated to Torque,… Yearning to read the rest of “Torque Game Engine?” Click here!

Large render farms of high-end workstations have long been the secret weapon of the artist and as a programmer I’ve looked on with jealousy at the software provider’s support, however minimal it has appeared, of providing distributed rendering systems for packages such as Maya, Kinetix’s 3D Studio Max and Pixar’s Renderman. This has been exacerbated… Continue reading the rest of “Xoreax Incredibuild.”

Recipe for Visual SlickEdit v8: Take one whole Microsoft Developer Studio, two Whole Tomato’s Visual Assist, an entire UltraEdit, one WndTabs, a fresh scripting language, and all the great features of every other editor and IDE you may have in your cupboards. Bake for several years through eight versions. Garnish with a steroid injection. FIRST… Craving to read the remainder of “Visual SlickEdit v8?” Click here!

Softimage XSI 4.0 is promoted as the most significant upgrade to their venerable graphics package since version 1.0. Having used Softimage for a number of years I would agree that version 4.0 has a number of very significant feature upgrades that apply directly to game developers. Where Softimage Stands Today Softimage XSI has always been… Yearning to get the rest of “Softimage XSI 4?” Click the link!

Remember when microcomputers shipped with BASIC? And you didn’t have to resort to pages of C++ code calling obscure API functions just to draw a colour rectangle on-screen? DarkBASIC Professional is a hidden gem often overlooked by commercial game developers – a modern, structured BASIC dialect with lots of commands specifically for handling games using… Continue reading the rest of the post

Does it do anything but driving games?” is a question that draws groans and smiles simultaneously from the Havok team, makers of their eponymous game physics middleware that recently received a major upgrade to version 2.0. In response to what must be an all-too-frequently asked question, Havok 2.0 broadens its scope to include character physics… Looking to get the rest of “Havok 2: All Rag-Dolled Up?” Click this link!

Non-native platform or embedded systems development is never a pleasant task. It is often fraught with coercing primitive tools to do your bidding and constant frustration at the pressures of non-programmers observing the target platform as a “simple system” not as complex as Microsoft Windows or UNIX. Palm Pilot, no different to any other non-host… Continue reading the rest of “Metrowerks CodeWarrior 9 for Palm OS.”