Friday, December 7, 2007

Game Developer's Open Source Handbook

Can't help, I just like books and by crawling on Amazon I found yet another interesting book - the Game Developer's Open Source Handbook by Steven Goodwin, Charles River Media (2006) - which is covering game development around Open Source - it's tools, strategies, the philosophy behind. This book seems to be a good introduction for game developer's to get an overview of the modern world of Open Source.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

GIMP 2.4 User Manual

Recently, the GIMP reached the next milestone with version 2.4, and now the new GIMP 2.4 User Manual is also finished.

UNIXGAMEDEV Update

Another quarter is over and time for me to write the next status report about the Unix Game Development project.

Indeed, a lot has changed. Most notably is the fusion of the UNIXGAMEDEV board, wiki, and IRC with the Free Game Development project. To the benefit of everybody we came to the conclusion both projects have similar aims and better work together, instead of having almost two identical project with a heavy focus on improving the FOSS gaming situation. Though we have slight differences in our vision - UGD is only Unix and open for every business model, FGD is OS agnostic and only FOSS - both are mainly about Unix & FOSS. In the end, the original idea of the UNIXGAMEDEV project to establish a Unix & FOSS game development community has been an experiment only. Somehow it failed, but in general lives on in the FreeGameDev project. This may sound a little sad, at least to me, but actually it is a very good thing pulling together when it's about improving the small and stagnating situation of the Unix & FOSS gamedev scene, and hopefully you share my mind on that point and will use & support the new infrastructure.
You may question what's about the UNIXGAMEDEV blog. Well, as far as I know there does not exist a FreeGameDev blog, only the Free Gamer blog about open source games, but maybe the FreeGameDev community someday will start one. Personally I want to keep this UNIXGAMEDEV blog to focus myself on Unix game development & the scene, but put any FOSS gaming effort into the FreeGameDev project.

Nevertheless, I am thinking about how to make use of the domain UNIXGAMEDEV.ORG now, at least I still owe it, 'cause for simple blogging I don't really need a top level domain. Maybe I start another experiment and redefine the vision - who knows, perhaps I'll use it as site for my devteam or something else. Anyway, unixgamedev.blogspot.com will remain in the case I have no plans.