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Code, 3D, Games, Linux and much more...

RPG60ToolKit

The engine used by my brothers to make Cebolleto en el espacio sideral (it won the first prize in a competition organized by Nokia) have been released. Visit the rpg60 webpage to know about it.

DirectX SDK - December 2005

A new bimonthly release of DirectX SDK is available for download. Apart from some bugfixes, little D3DX API improvements, some new technical articles (you are using minidumps aren’t you? Soonly I’ll describe how good can be for you and your team a good infrastructure for debugging and error reporting using Debugging Tools and an internal SymbolServer) and a new iteration of the nice PIX there is something new in this release: a Direct3D 10 Technology Preview!

You can play with this new toy only in Windows Vista (currently in beta) and as there is not currently hardware supporting all the new features you will have to use a reference rasterizer provided by Microsoft.

I have no run the examples, but reading the documentation I get some good impresions:

• Caps are dead. If you have a card supporting D3D10 it will support all the capabilities! This move (not without its controversy) is a good move to me. We lost hardware specific capabilities, but I think that this will be a positive decission in an open platform like Pc
• As previously noted, batches will be a lot more faster than now. How much? We will have to wait for the real hardware.

Remember that D3D10 will not deprecate D3D9 in WindowsVista. Both will be used.

RSS revolution

Without a doubt RSS is making a revolution in internet. Previously to discovering this, I spent a precious time navigating through my daily tour of webpages. Now, in the same time I can get more information (or the same information than before in a few seconds )

Everybody seems to be contributing to this revolution. Being a feature of blogs in the past now you can get rss feed from a lot of popular pages. Even Microsoft is proposing its own extension. You know, it’s Microsoft.

If you are curious, these are my currents feeds.

Currently I’m using BlogLines. It is a web reader, so you can safely read your news at work, home, travelling… Other popular web readers are Feedster and Google Reader (in beta).

So, what are you waiting to start feeding from here?

XBOX360 arrives to Europe. First impressions

Finally, the last friday I got my xbox360. I decided to apply my 50% discount to PGR3. I loved PGR2 and now I loving this latest version. It is the same game concept but with better graphics and better online integration. The new live system is fascinating, you can compete with other players with your same skill (TrueSkill), you can see your friends in the GothamTV event and you can continue talking with people even when changing to other game. Technically I think this is the best game for xbox360 now. The implementation of HDRI (10bits per component) and MotionBlur (though I missed the motion blur used in the replays of the previous version) is a must see for everybody. Obviously I expect more from this generation of games.

I specially like how all your xbox activities are recorded and kept visibile to other people (you can disable this if you want). People can watch the games you have played and the achievements you have got. This facts, that seem to be irritating some people are one of the things that made me buy this console.

On the wrong side, the distribution of the console in Europe have been a disaster. I can’t understand why VGACables won’t arrive until next week. And the console is pretty noisy. Add to this that it hung up three times this weekend. It’s winter here in Spain, what will happen when the summer comes?