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

Geometry Wars, new record

Remember Geometry Wars?
This is insane! I’m still unable to get to 500k and this guy got the 1st position in XboxLive with 16.6 millions!

Effective C++, Third Edition

Effective C++, Third Edition
Author: Scott Meyers
Pages: 297
Published: August, 2005

I had read the second edition of Effective C++ two times and when I discovered that the third edition of the book was out I though this would be a good oportunity to read the book again.

If you are a serious C++ programmer this book is a must read for you. If you haven’t read it stop wasting your time reading this blog and get a copy of the book. Effective C++ is the perfect book to accompany your main C++ book. Although intended to be your secondary book on C++, Effective C++ will learn you more that simple C++ tricks.

This third edition is not a mere revision of the second one. Most of the topics have been restructured including new Items (now expaded to 55) about subjects that were not present in the first and second edition (First edition was written in 1991 when C++ was almost a C plus classes, Second edition was a bug fixed First Edition). Now you can read about templates, metaprogramming and exceptions (with some ideas borrowed from Exceptional C++ by Herb Sutter).

The book is structured in nine blocks, going from items about initialization, resource management, inheritance… and finishing with the state of the C++ standard library (including TR1, to be included in C++0x) and the popular Boost library.

Conclusion: if you can only read a book about c++, choose this one.

Rating: 10 / 10

PGR3 photos

Why to have a photo mode if you can’t view them outside the console? I can’t understand why you are not allowed to copy PGR3 photos to USB storage devices in Xbox360.

But if you followed my last post you will know that this is possible know! You only have to follow this tutorial.

PGR3 is really really beautiful. It is undoubtly the best looking videoracing game made so far. Click the thumbnails to see the full images.

Hacking the Xbox360’s HDD

I was bored tonight, and after discovering the Xplorer360 I decided to plug the xbox360’s HDD I bought months ago into my PC.

Click to read the full article

PlayStation3 preview

Kikizo Games have published an article describing a first contact with a hardware that is close to what the PlayStation3 will be. Inside the article you can find interesting opinions of three anonymous PS3 developers:

“Even with [final hardware] in mind, reaching good frame rates at 1080p with next-gen graphics is almost impossible”

“Cell is weird and difficult to work with… coding has progressed with high speeds and paper specs in mind”

“Does PS3 really look like the Killzone trailer? No way”

Mayhem Win32

Recently, shash ported Mayhem to Win32. Mayhem is one of the production I did when I was a member of the demoscene spanish group called Incognita. We won EuskalParty97 with that production.

The port is not exactly the original but you can get a good idea of how one of the first productions to run almost entirely in SVGA and hicolor looked (when watching it, remember that it was done in 1997).

You can download it from here.

Thanks to Shash for this great port.

Guestbook

I’ve created a Guestbook section where you can write whatever you want. You can contact me writing there.

Carmack and Megatexture

Next game from Id Software will be released this year: Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. I’m writing about this because John Carmack seems to have implemented an interesting technology for terrain rendering. What I can deduce reading this interview and lot of forums in internet is that it is a similar algorithm as the one described by Arul Prakash and Hugues Hoppe in the last GDC: Geometry Clipmaps, an unique and huge texture that is smoothly interpolated (and may be proceduraly generated) in the GPU. The name given by ID Software is Megatexture (contributing to the MegaHype surrounding John Carmack, of course, a deserved one)