Thursday, July 16, 2009

Quick Random Update

So, Gamasutra is on Twitter too. You may recognize them, or at least you should if you have any business as a video game developer/designer. Gamasutra is one of the most popular game-oriented websites with full-featured articles and commentaries on the state of the industry, game reviews, yadda yadda yadda. So now you can check out not only the website, but also the Twitter feed. Oops, sorry if that last link didn't work; I suppose I should have linked it the proper way: @Gamasutra!

Enough hype, this post is mostly me checking in for a quick progress update. I blasted through reading about lighting, textures, blending, and stenciling in my Direct3D book and then found out the exercises required a fair deal of re-reading. Lesson learned, I have to work through chapter exercises before moving on to more difficult chapters! The same applies to the Game Design Concepts course I'm taking -- it's much easier to keep up with the readings than work through the exercises, some of which I have to skip. FYI, you can follow discussion for the course on Twitter too; just search for #GDCU!

The topic of my next post will be the power of sine waves. Yep, I'm talking about those tricky oscillating waves you learned about way back in high school. I've found some interesting applications and want to show off some of the cool stuff you can do with them. And now that I'm finally understanding the basics of HLSL (High Level Shader Language) shaders, the part that tripped me up big time in the last book I read, you can expect some posts on that stuff too.

Just curious, when was the last time you used something from high school you never thought you would need again? What's the trickiest math you've used in game development, and does calculus ever figure into the equation (pun... fully... intended!)?

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