Book recommendation (3D Engine)

I'm currently busy coding the 3D renderer interfaces and the object model (mainly serialization) at the moment. Due to my lack of 3D renderer coding knowledge, I searched for books covering that topic.

The book I found most interesting (and bough eventually) is
3D Game Engine Design 2nd Edition by David H. Eberly

It covers nearly every topic you need for implementing a modern 3D renderer.
The source code for Eberlys Engine "Wild Magic" comes with the book and is always worth a look if you want to know implementation details.

Server online - we're ready to roll

Our server is finally online.
We are currently busy configuring it.

We want to use it as a SVN-/, Web-/, Mail-/ and Buildserver (Probably Hudson).
Soon you can visit us at www.k15games.de (a .com domain will follow soon).

Once the website is online, I'll post again ;).

Everyone is very busy at the moment coding, designing and drawing.

I'm very happy with how things are doing right now and I hope that it'll stay that way.

We're getting bigger!

I'm happy to announce that "K15 Games" has 4 new members (5 in total now).
We now consists of 2 1/2 Programmer, 2 1/2 3D Artists, 1 Level Designer.

What that means and what you can expect from us will be "revealed" in later posts.

The next generation?

I just saw a video about the new Unreal Engine 4.
The video was about a technical artist showing what you can do with the
UED (Unreal Editor) 4.

Everything in the video looks very promising, but what caught me the most is what happens at the end of the video (at about 9:40). The guy showing the engine opens Visual Studio from within the UED and changes some c++ code (in the video he's manipulating the player's jump height).

When he returns to the game a little message appears saying "Compiling C++ Code...".
After a few seconds a new message appears saying "C++ Code successfully compiled".

After that he was jumping twice as high as before.
This is IMO one of the most astonishing things I've ever seen. In that way you could use C++ as a scripting language...A very powerful one.

I have absolutely no idea how they've implemented that, but that feature is just amazing and I'm eager to find out how that works ;).

Visual Studio 2011 Beta

I just downloaded the Visual Studio 2011 Beta.

I wonder how much they changed except the design. (I'm not a big fan of the new metro layout)

However, I look forward to some of the new C++11 features that have been implemented in VS11.

EDIT: Am I the only one having speed problems with VS2011? Yesterday I started a little project in VS2011 and when I wanted to debug it, it took like 2 minutes until the program even started. I wonder if any one else is having problems like that?

More C++11 features implemented in VS 11

Some features of C++11 that where missing in VS10 are now available in VS11. (e.g threads)

For a full overview check here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh852594.aspx

Most annoying error ever. (Visual Studio Watch Window)

Hi folks.

I just "fixed" the most annoying and strangest error I've faced so far.

I wanted to watch a GameObject object in Visual Studios Watch Window, to see if some attributes were set properly. The strange thing was, that the Watch window constantly showed me very strange result.

I had a function that was like that:

 //...Code  
 gameObject->setSize(32,32);  
 //..Code  
 GameObject::setSize(int w,int h){  
      this->size = Size(w,h);  
 }  

After the above function the watcher would show me something like
gameObject->size        Size -> w: 10000434     h: 10283848 (obviously totally wrong results)

It took me like 3 hours and a good bunch of nerves 'til I figured out that the header files of my engine were outdated in the project folder. I'm not sure how that exactly led to the above error but after I updated the engine header files in the project folder everything went properly again.


SO IF YOU'RE FACING STRANGE RESULTS IN THE WATCH WINDOW OF VISUAL STUDIO, MAKE SURE YOU UPDATE YOUR HEADER FILES OF 3RD PARTY LIBRARIES / FRAMEWORKS BEFORE YOU START WASTING 3 HOURS OF YOUR PRECIOUS LIFE!


Sincerely, the most annoyed person in the world.