CryENGINE 3 Free To Educational Institutions

Hi Gamers,
Within a month another leading game engine is available for free, but at present only for educational institutions. Crytek is reaching out to the academic world in a big way, allowing the programmers and graphic designers of tomorrow to get an early head start on creating games powered by its latest cross-platform middleware — CryENGINE 3. As of today, the development solution is now available free of charge to any qualified educational institution.

More information about CryENGINE is available on the official website. It's glad to see tools like CryENGINE and Unreal being offered to game design students, as they're obviously key to the future of this industry.

Unity Indie and Unreal 3 Development Kit is free now

Hi Gamers,
Unity is a middle-range game engine which has been used for indie games like Dock’s Tumbledrop, Derek Yu’s Diabolika for iPhone, Tale of Tales’ Fatale, and many more.Unity Indie, previously around $200, has been renamed to just “Unity” and is now free. :-)

Gears of War and Unreal developer Epic Games today released its Unreal Engine 3 dev tools as a free download, aimed at providing noncommercial and educational use of the technology that powers many PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 games. :-)


So, Gamers get your hands on these really cool engines.

iPhone Game

Hi Gamers,
Drag me Home an iphone game developed by Zimmdot (LLC) is now available in Apple stores. I have worked as a gameplay programmer for it :-). Its really a simple and a cool game
to play.Couple of more games will also get published soon, so I am really very excited about it

Gaming Arena Updates

Hi Gamers,
Just been busy with my work but here are some information worth reading:
Nordic Game and Game Connection (www.game-connection.com) have set up a deal that offers an excellent opportunity for Nordic developers to attend one of the most intense business and networking events in the industry taking place 8-11 December

Øredev Developers Conference, 2-6 November 2009 at Malmömässan
What interests a Game Developer, is it the same things as an ‘Ordinary’ developer? The latter considers Øredev as being the best developers conference in Europe. The conference is running for its fifth consecutive year. Maybe it’s for you too.


Will be back with more information :-)

Game Funding

HI Gamers,
For Nordic game developers who are interested in applying for this year's development support funding, the time has come to start preparing your application materials.

A total of 6 million Danish crowns (DKK) have been granted for development support to Nordic game companies in 2009, and the available funds will be allocated over two application rounds. The Development Support Expert Group have decided that the application deadline for the first round is

1 April 2009

The projects that are granted funding in the first round will be presented at the Nordic Game 2009 conference in on the 19! -20 May.

Starting Game Programming-Part5

hi gamers,
Continuing where we left...
4)Painting and drawing is still handles by WM_PAINT

Case WM_PAINT:
{
//opengl command for drawing
RenderScene();

ValidateRect(hWnd , NULL);
}
break;

In order for OpenGL to draw in a window, the window must be created with the
WS_CLIPCHILDREN and WS_CLIPSIBLINGS styles set


5) Pixel Format sets a device context opengl properties such as color depth
and whether the window is double bufefred.You must set the pixel format for a

device context before it can be used to create a rendering context. Here are the

two functions you will need to use:


int ChoosePixelFormat(HDC hDC , PIXELFORMATDESCRIPTOR *ppfd)

BOOL SetPixelFormat(HDC hDC ,int iPixelFormat ,iXELFORMATDESCRIPTOR *ppfd)


setting of pixel format is 3 step process

a) First fill out the PIXELFORMATDESCRIPTOR structure
b)then pass this structure to ChooosePixelFormat function it returns a integer

index to available pixel fromat for specified device context.
c)this index is passed to SetPixelFormat function.

Starting Game Programming -Part 4

hi gamers,
Lets continue from where we left.....

Now taking the windows and opengl

opengl + win32 =wiggle

1) we will create handle for brush for filling and painting

HBRUSH hbluebrush , hredbrush;

then these are created in winmain

hbluebrush = CreateSolidBrush( RGB ( 0, 0 ,255 ) );
hredbrush = CreateSolidBrush( RGB (255, 0 ,0 ) );

eg use of it is to set the window background like:

wc.hbrBackground = hBlueBrush;



2) We used auxInitPosition for console but in windows we use

hWnd = CreateWindow(
lpszAppName,
lpszAppName,
WS_OVERLAPPED,
...
...

);

The actual painting is handled by WM_PAINT in WndProc function

opengl command -> opengl rendering context -> windows rendering context -> opengl output window.

The three most used
functions with regard to the rendering context are

HGLRC wglCreateContext(HDC hDC);
BOOL wglDeleteContext(HGLRC hrc);
BOOL wglMakeCurrent(HDC hDC, HGLRC hrc);


function wglCreateContext(HDC hDc ) takes a handle to a window GDI device context
and returns a handle to opengl rendering context.

function wglDeleteContext( HGLRC hrc ) takes rendering context as parameter

function wglMakeCurrent( HDC hDc , HGLRC hrc ) is used to make the rendering context suitable for that device context.Both device and

rendering context should
have the same characteristics such as pixel format..

3)Two message are involved in creating and destroying of rendering context

WM_CREATE
WM_DESTROY


LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND hWnd ,..)
{
static HGLRC hRC;
static HDRC hDC;

switch(msg)
{
case WM_CREATE:
hDeviceContext = GetWnd(hWnd);
hRenderContext =wglCreateContext(hDC);
wglMakeCurrrent = wglMakeCurrent(hDC ,hRC );

break;

case WM_DESTROY:

wglMakeCurrent(hDc,NULL);
wglDeleteContext(hRC);

PostQuitMessage(0);

break;

}