Wednesday, March 28, 2007

"INTERVIEW WITH MICROSOFT GAME STUDIO'S SHANE KIM" - PART 2

Do you remember this post? If you don't follow the link and read it but if you do just go ahead and read part 2 published by Gamasutra.

This second part of the interview to Shane Kim and Dave Mitchell covers "... their feelings toward Nintendo as competition, Microsoft's strategy of funding game development in Japan, the upcoming episodic Halo content, Peter Jackson, and more ...".

And yes, XNA GSE is mentioned throughout the interview. Take for instance: "... we've got over eighty universities from eight countries that are teaching, including Japan. In Japan, we've got Iwatani-san, the creator of Pac-Man, extremely excited about getting into the possibilities of Express. As a result, when he retires, he is going to be teaching at Tokyo Polytechnic University, using Game Studio Express to teach game design to future game developers ... ".

The creator of Pac-Man ... impressive, ugh?

Ok, please all repeat after me: "XNA rules!" ... ;)

Monday, March 26, 2007

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?