http://www.udk.com/

It appears that Unreal Engine 3 has been released as a binary only version that is free for game developers! Royalties apply when you want to sell the game but that's still damn well amazing.

Looks like my dreams came true after all! 

Several in fact! But without further ado .. let's get back to the topic on hand ol' chaps.

We're in Christchurch.

Craiglist is mostly US isn't it? We're in New Zealand, and I'm not 100% sure how often New Zealanders check there.

Hey guys,

As some of you may recall, I was chatting about my geek event centre in IRC, and about setting up and generally debating whether the idea would even work or not. We're into our third month and things are still some what positive but the light at the end of the financial tunnel isn't quite visible yet.

Our main events are 6 weekly lans that we hold, which regularly get about 80 to 90 people attending every time. While these lans are our bread and butter as such, the revenue we make from it only really holds the rent and not much more.

The types of events I wanted to do were to have regular games like WarHammer40K, Magic The Gathering, other board games like Settlers of Catan and so forth. But getting into these sorts of events, especially WarHammer40K will throw us into even more debt.

It appears that smaller lans aren't getting any appeal at all and people simply aren't signing up on the website or people sign up but then don't turn up. This is probably a critical mass thing, and I guess it can be frustrating to bring your entire PC just for a 6 hour lan.

We still have about nine months on the lease, and we're tying to find other groups or events to hire the hall out from us, but I was wondering whether any of you may have some ideas that we could do.

The equipment that we already own are:

• Tables for a hundred people.
• Chairs for a hundred people.
• Wii & XBox360.
• Projector with projector screen.
• Networking for a hundred people.

Any ideas? Opinions? Thoughts?

a) I have Linux, Mac, and Windows in mind mainly. I have copies of all mentioned OS', and have the ability to test the engine on all of them.

Just be careful with that thought. Getting a project to successfully compile is one thing ... getting it to work is another. I'd advise to just pick a single platform and then to just stick with it and then transfer across at a later date. Thinking too much about cross platform is going to hinder your progress more than anything else ... particularly if you don't even know if people who use those OS's are going to even play / pay for your game.

My recommendations are:

a) Unless you actually use other platforms then you may want to consider cross platform support. Certainly you can make the decision to decide what libraries to use, but just remember that if you don't actually understand the platforms that you want to port to, then your own code is likely to contain code which won't be cross platform compatible any ways. Secondly, if you don't use those platforms how do you expect to test code on them? So for now, just concentrate on a single platform (Say Windows for the PC) and then either learn how to get it onto the other platforms later or pay someone to do it for you.

b) A lot of the things you have planned out are just basic necessities of graphics, sounds and input. But there doesn't seem to be much in the way of handling interactions between entities (physics).

c) Tool sets, will you have any?

The layout you have at the bottom is pretty simplistic, but it depends on the types of games you plan to support. At the moment, a simple arcade game could probably use that sort of layout.

As I've been told before, in order to make a good, decent game engine, there needs to be case examples, otherwise all you're really doing is making a tech demo.

At the end of the day, it depends on who is viewing the code. If you are the sole programmer or lead programmer then you decide what things to use and what things now to use. Everyone has a different style of programming.

Hungarian notation or not, is a very similar argument to what exactly is the true way to brace or indent.

That's a lot of cool maps there. Good stuff!

Made a really quick main menu. Development is so much faster when there is a tonne of stuff you simply don't have to do! Even pixel placement and alignment isn't even necessary.

So, some of you may remember that I was working on an another project called Hexlo, which was going to be a mix of Diablo and Hexen. But well, as things go, the project wasn't quite working out.

And since I've already gone through the process of asking Raven if I could use their IP (to which they said yes), I thought a Rogue Like could be just the ticket.

So I present to thee, HeresyRL which will use both the Heretic and Hexen universe. Should be fun to see how things go I think.

Looking really awesome there.

Congrats! Good to see some Aussie's winning them shiny trophies.

[development]

Reading this thread for quite some time now, and I don't actually understand how this is a game development company. Given that you're only really talking about the publishing side of things, do you plan to actually develop any of your own titles?

I'd recommend not to try to do both at the same time, as you probably don't have the staff or experience to handle two quite different businesses.

Given how indie game developers tend to be self sufficient, why would they choose an unknown publisher such as you vs someone that already has a stable audience such as Steam?

Then give it a week or so and if they're not ready to sort their sh*t out to persuade you to stay, you leave.

I wouldn't recommend this. Either leave or don't. Don't flip flop on a decision. Because more than likely, things will just slip back into the same situation again.

http://www.christopherhawkins.com/06-13-2005.htm#78

This is somewhat related.

I just bought the third edition of Space Hulk and I have to say it is extremely awesome. The board is very thick cardboard with great prints on top, and they've even embossed details in! The models are great. I'll upload pics when I finish painting or when I get to crack it out and play.

The board needs to be formed first, and from there the board needs to design the engine. Design in the way of specifications, requirements and code style documents need to be setup. We need to emphasize code style, otherwise you get weird components written by third parties and they operate and work completely differently making it hard in general to fit in. Code style isn't so much using tabs or spaces argument but rather how classes are organised, what standard practises are used for writing code systems and so forth. This becomes very important since we're dealing with C++.

Lastly, for this engine to be of any real use in my opinion, we need to consider tools. We have to appreciate that not everyone is going to want to compile it and set it up themselves, and most users probably won't even bother to modify the engine. If there are no decent tools for the engine, it'll be just like every other freeware engine out there. That is, a bunch of a cool tech that's completely unbearable to use.

My 2 cents for the day.

I don't believe anything has been written just yet, more just general thoughts and design considerations

Maybe you should be fixing level 3 instead of wasting your time posting on the internet?

Shhhh... it's much easier and cost effective to build the illusion of game development than it is to actually do it.