matt’s

I didn’t talk to my girlfriend very much lately. I didn’t read many blogs. I didn’t watch any movies. I didn’t breathe much fresh air. I didn’t use my PC for anything more than listening to music or fetching mails. I didn’t sleep much more than four hours the last two weeks or so. I [...]

As an update on my article on 3D engines for the iPhone / iPod, Unity Technologies has announced the shipping of their 3D game development tool for iPhone starting on October 22nd, 2008. According to a heise news, prices will range from 400 to 1500 USD.

Apple has dropped the iPhone NDA for released software. I guess now I need to release something really quick in order to be able to discuss iPhone development in detail and publically, right? So, you get what that actually means? It seems now that they cannot protect their stuff as much as they wanted, they [...]

Yesterday, I digged deeper into the SIO2 3D engine which I mentioned in my last post. This is what I’ve thrown together in some hours of work. (Featuring a free model by Sven Daennart, one of my favorite 3D artists.)

The SIO2 API is very OpenGL-ish and features a bunch of C methods like “sio2ResourceGet”. It [...]

I recently evaluated the 3D engines available on iPhone. This is the list that I compiled, plus some commentary.

iTorque (commercial) is the well-known Torque game engine available for iPhone. It comes in three flavours (2D, 3D, Studio) and professional and indie license, although indie is not yet available (scheduled for October 15th). Since Torque is [...]

Plus MacBook Pro owner since Saturday. Plus soon to become an iPhone owner. Plus a bit confused by Objective-C syntax already.

Click here for more…

I am getting dumb of writing the same code over and over, so I am finally in the process of setting up a C++ framework with core functionality I use in almost every project: macros (e.g. assertions), helper functions (e.g. pattern matching), serialization, virtual file system, XML support,… Some of the stuff is extracted from [...]

I’ve been doing a bit XP at home lately.

I didn’t write for some time, and I have several good reasons not to do so in the future (beautiful blue eyes, long blonde hair and an amazing smile, for example). Still, I’d like to post about Timanfaya, a sightseeing adventure game located on the island Lanzarote written by Martin Lassahn.

Timanfaya is a beautifully animated [...]

Last year, I wrote several entries and a review on Glow, a diabolic Jump’n’Run created by my friends at Black Chronos.

Unfortunately, Glow did not bring the commercial success the folks behind Black Chronos had expected, so they eventually had to cease business. Fortunately, though, Glow will be released as freeware soon as stated on the [...]

I have released another publication, a short (German) review of the last Spieleentwicklertreff NRW (Game Developers Gathering North Rhine-Westphalia) which took place at the Mediadesignhochschule Düsseldorf. Have a look!

Over the last four months, one of my fellow #gamedev.ger residents, Friedrich “rip” Hanisch, and his girlfriend Jana Reinhardt have created a beautiful Irrlicht-based multiplayer game prototype called Omerta - Schweigen ist Gold. I eagerly followed the development and I was stunned by the quality they achieved in all regards. Remember, two people, four months, [...]

I bought my first Samsung SyncMaster 204b about one and a half years ago. Although I had some problems with it, I decided to complete my set and get a second one. As you might recognize, I did not get the colors to match exactly yet, but I’ll try twiddle with that later.
The wallpaper is [...]

Christopher sent word that entwickler-press.de offers 24 free German developer e-Books for download in a virtual Advent calendar. Here’s the full list:

I started several projects during the development time of DVW and eventually none of them came to an end (yet) in favor of DVW, so I thought I could share some of my findings. I wrote a little tutorial about how to electively serialize to and from XML or binary respectively. I would really appreciate [...]

Without further ado, here is our cut-together of Dusmania 9.0 scenes plus original ingame footage plus official soundtrack tunes. Enjoy.

After I finished the Windows integration, Christopher did the necessary work on the Linux version (basically editing CMake files) and Jan did the OS X version work tonight (messing around with an XCode project in this case).
Let me cite him to show how damn easy it was.
[00:31] <sheijk|6S> sound geht ohne absturz: check
(Sound works without [...]

Now that I’ve played around with irrKlang a bit, it’s time to write down a first resume. The first and best experience was how easy irrKlang was to integrate.

It’s funny to see how our requirements regarding sound support changed. When I started to incorporate sound into DVW (after our former teammate Anselm who wrote the very first audio device left us, that is) I went for Audiere. At that time, Audiere was a framework which fitted exactly our needs. We had a Windows-only [...]