TIPS: "SOFTWARE EFFICIENCY AND OPTIMIZATION - PART 2"

The awaited second part of the series is now available on "Advice From the Swamp" blog.

This time Thomas explains the initial How To's for benchmarking your algorithms and methods -and includes two source code samples.

From Thomas post: "... If benchmarking shows your algorithm has problems without implementation optimizations, you are probably better off with a different algorithm. Which isn't to say that these sorts of optimizations aren't still useful. But it's better to do these selectively, once you have your code implemented and have profiled it to find specific problem areas. We'll look at how to use a profiler to find these problem areas next week, in Part 3 ...".

Cannot wait for part 3 ... :)

VISUAL3D.NET PRODUCT DEMO VIDEO

Continuing the news of upcoming amazing frameworks for rapid game creation, a new video showing off the features of Visual3D.Net has been released:

Nice ... now, licenses and prices?

"XNA WEEKLY ROUNDUP 18-03-07 TO 26-03-07"

Mykres has published his "Weekly Roundup" which covers source codes, projects, games, new blogs/sites, tutorials and game releases from March 18, 2007 to March 26, 2007.

From Mykres' post: "... It has been a relatively quite week in the world of XNA; this must be due to the April Update coming soon. But through the week we have seen some discussions on Performance. I remember with Managed DirectX everyone seemed to be talking about the Perfect Game Loop, but with XNA it seems to be Performance and the Foreach functions, this month cornflower Blue gives us some thoughts on the Foreach loop.

We also got to see the release of some more applications including Sky burner and Realms of Keldar, both of these are games ported from another code base.

This week David Weller gives us an introduction into Source control with the express products, as well as giving some praise to Sharky on his Air Legends Game (Which now includes Multi Player Split Screen). But most of All David tells us that the XNA Teams are Hiring, note that you do not send your information to David please follow the correct path for any applications or Questions.

Also George from XNADevelopment has posted a brief game design spec for his Dream Build Play entry. ...".

Find the whole news update here ...

BLADE3D PRICES HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED!

Along with the latest build of this amazing framework (that is, build 1595), the guys behind its development have finally announced both licenses and prices.

From GameDev.net's announcing post: "... Pricing for Blade3D 1.x will be $99 for non-commercial use, and $249 for commercial use. The open and free Beta 1 of Blade3D can be downloaded from the product website at http://www.blade3d.com ..."

Let's the games begin ...