Saturday, September 22, 2007

Extreme Tuxracer released

I'd like to announce that the Extreme Tuxracer project, which is trying to reanimate a innovative gem in the open source treasury, has published their initial release 0.35. Extreme Tuxracer is a fork of the abandoned projects Planet Penguin Racer respectively Tux Racer. Have fun!

Extreme Tuxracer Homepage

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

User Interface Brainstorm for the next generation of GIMP

Everyone knows the GNU Image Manipulation Program. And everyone has most likely some experience with GIMP. Either lots of experience - or bad experiences. The GIMP-Team is inviting you to participate in the GIMP UI Brainstorm. Everyone with some GIMP/PS skills can create a mockup or two which describe your idea.

http://gimp-brainstorm.blogspot.com/

Monday, September 17, 2007

New Blender book is comming

A new Blender book is in production - Bounce, Tumble, and Splash! Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D by Blender guru Tony Mullen - and presumably will be published in February 2008. As the title announce, it'll be about Blender's physics and dynamic tools.

And I just found out, yet another Blender book is available - The Official Blender 2.3 Guide: Free 3D Creation Suite for Modeling, Animation, and Rendering (2005) by Ton Roosendaal and Stefano Selleri.

Linux GameDev Part IV - Testing

Troy Hepfner's next tutorial about Linux game development was published at gamedev.net. This time it's about testing games on Linux, and how to treat problems: testing on multiple distributions, hardware accelerated video drivers, SELinux & 64 bit.

Friday, September 14, 2007

UNIXGAMEDEV Update

... I think it would be nice to give a short status report about the Unix Game Development project, as it almost exist 3 month and we get into the next quarter ...

Somehow, a lot has changed since the beginning, and this blog expanded by a board, wiki, and IRC - some other ideas are in the implementation - but somehow it also looks quite the same than in the beginning, 'cause those elements are easy to setup, but nothing without game developers. Principally this won't change my position, and I'll continue working on this project - you have my word - 'cause I really think it could become something cool. Nevertheless I have not unlimited time, and game development is a very complex topic. Therefore it may appear things are slow and cheesy, but you should consider this project was just an experiment out of curiosity, though it would be great if UNIXGAMEDEV will become something serious.

A basic infrastructure for communication and knowledge is ready to use, though it's still very silent there. Next I'll try to create a consistent style for the website(s), and some beautifications. Nevertheless, this project will continue to use free services, simply to make a constant presence beyond personal interests possible.

I really hope some more developers will join soon, 'cause this would be more fun for everybody, though this is not in my hand. But what I am currently working on - beside of beautification and filling with content - is to create a developer/project search.

At last I'll give you an overview about the services of UNIXGAMEDEV:
P.S.: I moved the old board to the new location at Tuxfamily, because they are hosting Unix/FOSS-like websites for free, and the functionality of a forum hosting service was to limited (no backups). Please contact me if you notice a problem with the new solution.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

AMD's New Open Source Strategy

In a press statement AMD announced better support for Linux in the future, and "also plans to accelerate efforts to address the needs of the open source community as well". The question is just, what are those efforts? At LWN a declaration to this statement is made, and announces AMD reported at the Kernel Summit, that they will open the graphic specs for their graphic processors from the R500 forward.

Well, if this is true then it's really good news, and just another great move toward full 3D for Linux.

Edit: The speculations about AMD's strategy about their obscure open source effort is finished, and gave a detailed statement, but in short: "AMD will be providing NDA specifications, an open-source library, and there is a new open-source graphics driver as a result."

Sunday, September 2, 2007

IRC Channel online!

Hello everyone!
I'd like to announce that we are officially having a IRC channel now. It's in the Tuxfamily IRC network (thanks guys!). Bots and other services are getting discussed - stay tuned. Join us at

#unixgamedev @ irc.tuxfamily.org

Please participate!

- Sindwiller