XNA Game Studio 2.0 Released, now with Newwork support, tutorials available
New Gamasutra section for XNA games, just starting.
Dream Build Play AI Warm-up Challenge, this contest is focused on Artificial Inteligence. The submission entry period is from December 20, 2007 to January 27, 2008

I've seen on www.gamecareerguide.com an article about the 10 Indie & student game competitions that anyone should consider. If you want to enter into the videogame industry, this is your chance.

More info here: http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/ 476/10_indie_student_game_.php

An easy to understand multilanguage tutorial, which describes the fundamentals of the A* (A-star) pathfinding algorithm.

More info here: http://www.policyalmanac.org/games/aStar Tutorial.htm

Transciption from the Will Wright speech at SXSW conference. Wright spoke about storytelling in games, compared to the one in cinema, and how to alter the linearity of story. He pointed Groundhog Day ('Atrapado en el tiempo' in spanish) as an example of a movie that is like a game, every day is a game restart.

More info here: http://www.3pointd.com/20070313/sxsw-xcr ipt-will-wright-keynote/

The Game Developers Conference continues its tradition of facilitating the sharing of ideas and information through out the development community
The sessions from the last GDC are available(most of them) following the next link.

More info here: https://www.cmpevents.com/GD07/a.asp?opt ion=C&V=1&SB=4

Dice Wars is a turn based strategy game. Your armies are made of dice, an when you attack you throw is compared to the one from your opponent. Of course, the more dice you have the greater is the chance to win. Be careful, or else you are gonna play it for hours.

More info here: http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/dice/dice .html

In this article, one button is the limitation on interaction. Very interesting for designers with a particular interest in the low-level mechanics of basic actions. A button has only two states, pressed and released, but unlimited possibilities.

More info here: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/200506 02/green_01.shtml

Procedural content is one of the key technologies for the next generation of gaming. Darwinia creators Introversion have been outlining the concept for neophytes, including exclusive screenshots from the company's new project, Subversion.

More info here: http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/ 336/procedural_content_.php?page=1

Sony Computer Entertainment's Martin Linklater (Wipeout: Pure) explains his process for utilizing dataports, a data structure which has has a unique global identity at runtime.

More info here: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/200611 16/linklater_01.shtml

Nero is an unique computer game that lets you play with adapting intelligent agents hands-on. Evolve your own robot army by tuning their artificial brains for challenging tasks, then pit them against your friend's teams in online competitions!

More info here: http://www.nerogame.org

Developers can download the tool from msdn.microsoft.com/xna to develop games for Windows XP and Windows Vista, at no charge (for now). The games built on Windows can be migrated to the Xbox 360 with the XNA Creators Club subscription for $99 a year, or a four-month trial cost of $49, opening up retail console game development to anyone for the first time.

More info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/xna

An introduction article about the Cell Processor, the one inside all Sony's playstation 3 consoles. It's an insanely complex chip with about 250 million transistors (Pentium 4 has 125 million) that runs at more than 4GHz. According to IBM it can complete 256 billion floating-point operations every second.

More info here: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/200607 13/turley_01.shtml

Interesting lecture about the approach to software programming. The problem is not bad planning or bad programming, it's the software approach based on Turing's machine. The author gives a solution based on how integrared circuits work

More info here: http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/Reliab ility.htm

To avoid shadow mapping aliasing errors Parallel-Split Shadow Maps (PSSMs) scheme splits the view frustum into different parts by using the planes parallel to the view plane and then generates multiple smaller shadow maps for the split parts.

More info here: http://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~fzhang/ps sm_vrcia/

FlOw is a game about piloting an aquatic organism through a surreal biosphere where players consume other organisms, evolve, and advance their organisms to the abyss. As part of Jenova Chen's thesis research, flOw inherits an embedded design of active DDA (dynamic difficulty adjustment), players with differing skill levels can intuitively customize their experiences in the zone and enjoy the game at their own pace. 'Addicting' is the most common word its fans use to describe it.

More info here: http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/fl owing.htm

Chat with the delelopers of the acclaimed PS2 game. Fumito Ueda master piece takes the PS2 hardware to its limits. In the interview the team explains how they archieved the complex shadow and motion blur routines that appear in the game.

More info here: http://edusworld.org/ew/ficheros/2006/pa ginasWeb/making_of_sotc.html

Slides (in Spanish) from a conference I assisted last month in Barcelona Informatic Faculty about Videogame Developing. Javier Arevalo is Jare^Iguana, and now is working for PyroStudios where he has taken part of the Commandos and Praetorians series

More info here: scene/down/UPC2006-DesarrolloDeVideojueg os.ppt

An article in Gamasutra about the Right Stuff for a Game Programmer:
Team Attitude: Selflessness and dedication to the team
Self-starters: Do not need constant supervision
Follow-through: The ability to see tasks through to the end
Communication: Communicating well with others
Responsibility: Taking responsibility for what you have done or what you are supposed to do

More info here: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/200604 07/mencher_01.shtml

A tutorial to implement displacement mapping with GLSL. Displacement mapping is a technique allowing to deform a polygonal mesh using a texture (displacement map) in order to add surface detail.

More info here: http://www.ozone3d.net/tutorials/vertex_ displacement_mapping.php

An interesting article about contracting many bad&cheap programmers or a few&outstanding programmers...

(English) Hitting the High Notes
(Spanish) Alcanzando las notas altas

More info here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com

From a gamedev article written by Jack Hoxley. Full article on the link below.
'With Direct3D 10 we have a new programmable unit – giving three in total: Vertex Shaders (VS), Geometry Shaders (GS) and Pixel Shaders (PS).[...]'
'The Direct3D 10 pipeline should allow for not only a wider class of algorithms (neural networks and physics on a GPU…) and improved performance (single pass cube map rendering) but it should allow application developers to offload more work.[...]'

More info here: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/program ming/features/d3d10overview/

AmiDevCpp is a Integrated Cross Platform Development Environment for Windows, that helps you to comfortable develop C/C++ Applications for the AmigaOS (m68k), AmigaOS4 (PPC), MorphOS(PPC) and for AROS (i686). In the best case, you can just select another Compilerset and compile the same program for different Platforms.

More info here: http://amidev.kilu.net/index.php

The AmigaOS4.0 memory architecture is based on the 'slab allocator' system or 'object cache'. In essence, the slab allocator only allocates objects of a single size, allocating these in larger batches (slabs) from the low-level page allocator. These slabs are then divided up into buffers of the required size, and kept within a list in the slab allocator.

More info here: http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/

Microsoft is giving away free one year licenses for some of their best development software including:

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition
Visual C# 2005 Express Edition
Visual C 2005 Express Edition
Visual J# 2005 Express Edition

More info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/

PHP Manual edited by Stig Sæther Bakken and Egon Schmid

You can download the tutorial here