I had been experimenting with simulation of environment (water, forests, etc.), people (civilians, military), economics (supply/demand, business), and transportation (trucks, railroads, warehousing) in games. However I haven’t had the energy to work on a full game, so I mainly explore little things here and there. On this blog I post my game-related thoughts, even if they aren't related to the games I want to work on.
3D Game development
My game programming page contains information about platform-independent game programming topics, but when I actually write a game I need to combine that with platform-specific code. These days I use either PyGame, Java2D, or OpenGL. My favorite OpenGL resources over the last six months have been:
- CodeSampler, which contains lots of examples of OpenGL code to do various things like textures, shaders, transparency, and lighting.
- NeHe's Tutorials, which covers similar topics.
- Gamedev.net OpenGL Articles, which includes a few random topics. Unfortunately most of the Graphics articles on GameDev are old and obsolete; they teach you how to implement algorithms that are already implemented in hardware these days.
- FlipCode's Featured Articles cover many graphics-related topics but do not focus too much on OpenGL.
In addition, I've been reading Dave Eberley's Game Physics and Van Verth's Essential Mathematics for Games & Interactive Applications. These books are not primarily about graphics; they are about representing objects in 3D, manipulating them, etc. I also took a look at Stahler's Beginning Math and Physics for Game Programmers but didn't like it as much.
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