Game Development: Harder Than You Think: Ten or twenty years ago it was all fun and games. Now it’s blood, sweat, and code.
The hardest part of making a game has always been the engineering. In times past, game engineering was mainly about low-level optimization—writing code that would run quickly on the target computer, leveraging clever little tricks whenever possible. But ...
Massively Multiplayer Middleware: Building scaleable middleware for ultra-massive online games teaches a lesson we all can use: Big project, simple design.
Wish is a multiplayer, online, fantasy role-playing game being developed by Mutable Realms. It differs from similar online games in that it allows tens of thousands of players to participate in a single game world. Allowing such a large number of ...
Fun and Games: Multi-Language Development: Game development can teach us much about the common practice of combining multiple languages in a single project.
Computer games (or "electronic games" if you encompass those games played on console-class hardware) comprise one of the fastest-growing application markets in the world. Within the development community that creates these entertaining marvels, multi-...
AI in Computer Games: Smarter games are making for a better user experience. What does the future hold?
If you’ve been following the game development scene, you’ve probably heard many remarks such as: "The main role of graphics in computer games will soon be over; artificial intelligence is the next big thing!" Although you should hardly buy into such ...
The Scalability Problem: The coexistence of high-end systems and value PCs can make life hell for game developers.
Back in the mid-1990s, I worked for a company that developed multimedia kiosk demos. Our biggest client was Intel, and we often created demos that appeared in new PCs on the end-caps of major computer retailers such as CompUSA. At that time, performance ...
From the Editors: Fun and Games and Software Development: What you may not remember is that one of the key groups AMD was going after with its promotional blitz was gamers.
You may recall some of the hype last year as AMD announced and then released its 64-bit processor, the AMD Opteron. What you may not remember is that one of the key groups AMD was going after with its promotional blitz was gamers. You see, at the high-...
Letters: I was drawn to the article on sentient data.
I was drawn to the article “Sentient Data” (George W. Fitzmaurice, Azam Khan, William Buxton, Gordon Kurtenbach, and Ravin Balakrishnan, ACM Queue 1(8), November 2003), which I found very much in tune with the approach I took while the technical ...
News 2.0: Taking a second look at the news so you don’t have to.
Gates and crew have stepped forward and announced the Anti-Virus Reward Program, offering a quarter-million dollars for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the “saboteurs of cyberspace” behind the Blaster worm; a quarter-million dollars ...
The Demise of the Waterfall Model Is Imminent, and Other Urban Myths: Rumors of the demise of the Waterfall Life-cycle Model are greatly exaggerated.
We discovered this and other disappointing indicators about current software engineering practices in a recent survey of almost 200 software professionals. These discoveries raise questions about perception versus reality with respect to the nature of ...
Toolkit: Java is Jumpin’: There’s perception, and then there’s reality.
Even though the frenzied hype over Java has died down since the Internet bubble burst, Java is becoming hugely popular in the wireless space. Several events highlight its emergence. Most recently, in December, Texas Instruments opened a research ...
Book Reviews: Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets and Solutions, 4th ed.: Knowledge is power, and you’ll feel both knowledgeable and powerful after reading this book.
Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets and Solutions, 4th ed. Stuart McClure, Joel Scambray, and George Kurtz. McGraw-Hill, 2003, $49.99, ISBN: 0-072-22742-7. The first chapter of this latest edition of Hacking Exposed discusses footprinting, the ...
Calendar: 4-Feb
ETech (O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference) - February 9-12, 2004 - San Diego, California. Intel Developer Forum - February 17-19, 2004 - San Francisco, California
A Conversation with Will Harvey: In many ways online games are on the bleeding edge of software development.
That puts Will Harvey, founder and executive vice president of Menlo Park-based There, right at the front of the pack. There, which just launched its product in October, is a virtual 3D world designed for online socializing.
Sensible Authentication: According to the author of Beyond Fear, it’s not enough to know who you are; you’ve got to prove it.
The problem with securing assets and their functionality is that, by definition, you don’t want to protect them from everybody. It makes no sense to protect assets from their owners, or from other authorized individuals (including the trusted personnel ...
People in Our Software: A person-centric approach could make software come alive, but at what cost?
People are not well represented in today’s software. With the exception of IM (instant messaging) clients, today’s applications offer few clues that people are actually living beings. Static strings depict things associated with people like e-mail ...
When Bad People Happen to Good Games: OK, so I admit it - not only am I a total closet gamer geek, I admit that I actually care enough to be bitter about it. Yep, that’s right - this puts me in the “big-time nerd” category.
But I think I have a lot of company, which sort of makes me feel better. In fact, at any given moment there are hundreds of thousands of people online playing games. Sure, some of them are playing very simple games like Yahoo! Checkers, and others are ...
