Also, a new article I wrote for the Game Career Guide went up yesterday.  It’s an introduction to game engines for those of you that are unsure what they are. The article is located here.
One thing I’d like to elaborate on is the lack of specific recommendations of which engines or game makers to use.  [...]

So, I read The Daily WTF. It’s a funny blog, and occasionally can give you insight into bad and good programming practices. Also, occasionally, the person who runs the site, Alex Papadimoulis, writes a rant about something in the computer industry. Now, Alex is a bright guy, but I frequently disagree with [...]

So, I’m kind of wondering if something like this exists. I currently have a set of tests that share common set up code which I only want to execute once for all of the tests, as well as some set up code that I want executed before each test. In addition, though, there [...]

This is a problem I think everyone has at some point when working with databases that can’t lose data, and specifically those that generated their database from another intermediary. The problem is this: when someone changes the source file from which the database is generated, how do you upgrade said database without losing any [...]

So, I never really worked in an environment where unit testing was the norm. I’ve been trying to pick it up on my own for a while now and, in some respects, I think I’m doing a good job. I get the basic idea, but I’m not in tune will all of the [...]

(Note: The whole point of this post is to get you to join the IGDA Tools SIG, but I don’t get to that until below the fold, so I’ve decided to just push it up front here for those of you that don’t feel like reading my long tools rant. So, instead, please just [...]

I found it interesting a few weeks back when Warren posted something about not wanting to use open source projects because of fear of legal retribution. I can kind of understand this when using anything distributed under the GPL license, and maybe LGPL if you figure you’re going to make lots of changes to [...]

So, over the past few months, I’ve been giving the same advice to lots of students concerning what they should do for their first games. They usually either ask this question directly, or I give them this advice after seeing what they’re trying to attempt as their first games, in clubs or individually. [...]

So, I’ve started development on multiple virtual servers and I’ve found that VMWare actually makes things easier than I thought it would have, at least for the structure I discussed at the end of the last post. Some things I’ve found that make this setup a bit easier:
First, you can set VMWare to setup [...]

The next big task at Orbus is to get our systems working with what I call “intermediary” servers: enterprise style message queues and things like that. Basically, they idea is that the game can sit and asynchronously pump metrics to the queue without sacrificing performance in the game, and the queue will catch up [...]