iDevGames

The Nintendo Revolution, the company’s upcoming new console, is moving closer to living up to its name. Nintendo unveiled the controller for the system at the Tokyo Game Show 2005. In a shocking change, the controller looks like a TV remote control, unlike the traditional game controller look Nintendo arguably pioneered. Held with one hand, it has a myriad of sensors to detect hand movements, allowing the player to control not only directions, but also pitch and yaw, in and out. A D-pad is still present, along with a small number of buttons. Nintendo believes developers will concentrate less on buttons and more on natural movements for game control.

Images available at CNN Money

CNN Money article

http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/15/commentary/game_over/revolution/index.htm

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nintendo,revolutionizes,its,controller

At the company’s Professional Developers Conference this week, Microsoft said it will allow programmers to use its latest front-end development tools to write applications that run on operating systems other than Windows Vista, the forthcoming edition of desktop Windows.

The company introduced Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere , or WPF/E, software to build applications using Microsoft’s XAML page layout language in conjunction with JavaScript.

Until this week, it was thought that Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly code-named Avalon, could be used only to build graphics-rich applications on Windows. But because JavaScript runs on many operating systems, developers could, in theory, use WPF/E tooling to target several operating systems.

Apple’s Mac OS will be one of the operating systems supported with WPF/E, as well as older versions of Windows and Microsoft Smartphone, according to Microsoft executives. And other operating systems are planned, said Forrest Key, group product manager in Microsoft’s developer tools division, without confirming plans for Linux support.

http://news.com.com/Microsoft+offers+development+tools+for+Mac%2C+Web/2100-1007_3-5867417.html

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microsoft,offers,development,tools,for,mac,web

A dangerously vague bill passed in the Michigan legislature this year is being attacked by the Entertainment Software Associated (ESA). The ESA claims, “This bill is an effort to substitute the government’s judgment for parental supervision and turn retailers into surrogate parents.”

Some of the text of the legislation in question, Michigan SB 416, have dubious qualities. From the bill:

“(a) drafted research overwhelmingly finds that ultra-violent explicit video games are harmful to minors because minors who play ultra-violent explicit video games are consistently more likely to exhibit violent, asocial, or aggressive behavior and have feelings of aggression.”

Full text of Michigan Senate Bill 416

http://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2005-2006/billenrolled/senate/htm/2005-SNB-0416.htm

ESA press release, WarCry Network

http://www.warcry.com/scripts/columns/view_sectionalt.phtml?site=15&id=108&colid=7945

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Apple has set up a page to help developers prepare their applications for the upcoming Intel-based Macs.

“Apple has announced that it is transitioning the Macintosh to an Intel-based architecture, and the resources here provide everything you need to make sure your applications are ready. Join the many Mac developers who have already migrated their code and are ready for the future of the Mac platform.”

Apple Developer Transition Resource Center

http://developer.apple.com/transition/index.html

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REALbasic 2005 for Macintosh Release 3 incorporates new features and functionality for improving developer productivity and product reliability, including:

• New 3D graphics capabilities enable graphics, charts, images and models to be generated without the use of third party software
• Over 100 reliability issues resolved since REALbasic for Macintosh was released less than 90 days ago.

REALbasic

http://www.realsoftware.com/

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realbasic,2005,for,macintosh,release,3,ships

Are today’s college computer science curriculum really what today’s programmers need? Assembly? Neural Networks? Numerical Analysis? Are colleges artificially bloating our schedules to make us pay more? What do you think is positively necessary for a person to be successful as a programmer? More often than not, too many programmers are not scientific aspect, but not the skills. Dan Zambonini writes a wonderful article on what he believes should drive software developer’s in today’s society. Further down in the article’s comments section, there’s an interesting exchange on a subject we all love — game development:

DaveCrist said: “Too often, though, kids enter a CS program because they ‘like computers’ and ‘want to create games’ and ‘love 3D modeling.’”

Malkin said: Wanting to create games is not necessarily a bad reason to go into Computer Science. Trust me, game companies need people with good theoretical fundamentals, too!

• Related Link: O’Reilly Medi

MSNBC.com is featuring an article that explores the novel idea of parents deciding what sort of games their children should be playing.

“The problem with video games is the name,’ explained Rechtschaffner. ‘The word ‘game’ implies that it’s just for kids.”

MSNBC.com: When Gamers Become Parents

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9042384/

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Cheetah3D is a lean, fast and elegant 3D modeling, rendering and animation tool for Mac OS X with an easy learning curve. It offers many tools from powerful polygon editing over advanced subdivision surface modeling to HDRI and radiosity renderings. Support for many common 3D file formats rounds up its feature set. Cheetah3D 2.4 contains many bug fixes but it also offers serious enhancements when it comes to texture filtering. Changes since the last version:

*added anisotropic texture filtering to reflected and transmitted textures
*added “stop rendering job” command to render manager
*added support for embedded textures in FBX files
*added import/export scale factor property to FBX loader
*added scale property to sweep creator object
*added batch mode
*updated QTVR Helper script (now images will be saved to disc automatically)
*expanded properties (position, scale, etc.) stay open in the properties editor
*new “Illustrator to Cheetah3D” tutorial
*ESC key can be used to delete rendering job
*fixed bug in symmetry modifier (iso parameter)
*fixed bug in create polygon tool
*fixed bug in extrude object
*fixed bug in polygon selection tool
*fixed bug in object selection
*fixed bug with ATI Radeon X850 boards
*fixed bug in scalpel tool
*many other small bug fixes and enhancements

In v2.4 reflected and transmitted textures will be anisotropically filtered too. This release also offers many small feature requests. And last but not least the documentation comes with a “Illustrator to Cheetah3D” tutorial which explains how to import 2D vector drawings from Illustrator.

• Cheetah3D

3d,modeler,cheetah3d,2,4,released

TWM is currently the only Mac OS X graphical editor for designing interface components for FutureBasic. TWM makes creating an application’s interface easier by allowing the FutureBasic programmer to visually build windows and controls. TWM produces clean FutureBasic user interface code in a fraction of the time it would take normally. What’s more, the generated code is fully editable.

TWM

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bernie.w/twm.htm

FutureBASIC

http://www.stazsoftware.com/futurebasic/index.php

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futurebasic,gui,editor,twm,2

DevLib is an object-oriented framework written in pure C++. It is designed to make multimedia productions (games, screen-savers, demos..) easier and more intuitive to write. Consequences are a complete abstraction of resources management (fonts, images, 3D meshes, files, zip-archives, sounds..) and rendering operations through 3D hardware. The goal of the library is to provide a set of routines used in almost all the projects. It doesn’t try to re-invent the wheel, does not implements everything possible into the huge programming-world, but makes use of the following well-known libraries: DevIL, FreeType 2, LUA, ODE, libjpeg, libmpeg2, libpng, TinyXML, unzip, ZLib, SDL, DirectX 9, FMOD, GLEW and finally STL. DevLib is fully compatible (and tested) with Bloodshed’s DevCpp, Microsoft’s Visual C++ 2003 and Apple’s XCode 1.5.

Devlib

http://www.devlib-central.org/

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