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art book review technical artist

Art Books

Something a little different today, I’m having a look at more art related books. I feel like I always want to use “both sides” of my brain and enjoy the artistic aspects and results of the tools and games I create. For me, it was always important to get technical, so that when I had […]

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Agile book review team lead

Agile Retrospectives (inspect and adapt)

Well, I said I would try and minimize the leadership aspects of this blog, but have been focusing on trying to help my team more with deadlines looming. One thing I will be doing with the team is trying to get them to help me help them 😛 Also, I suspect that I will be […]

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book review Herding Cats team lead

Herding Cats… as a Team Lead

Been quite busy, herding cats 😛 I won’t be updating Game Programmer/Technical Artist to Team Lead/Game Programmer/Technical Artist, but will be mentioning a few new aspects as a new lead in a few blog posts. My main focus is still art and programming, but have been focusing on trying to run a good team as […]

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Book Review: Data Structures for Game Programmers

I finished reading Data Structures for Game Programmers by Ron Penton recently and while I enjoyed aspects of it, I felt that it was targeted more at beginner to intermediate programmers.

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Terragen 2 terrain

Terragen 2 (free version) Test

Finally got a chance to post some of the Terragen 2 tests I was looking into. I was very impressed with some of the quality that could be achieved with this program with minimal effort and intuitive interface. The image is from following the “First Scene” example in the Online Documentation. I thought the galleries […]

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Book Review: Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming

Just finished reading Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming: From Novice to Professional by Alexandre Santos Lobao, Bruno Pereira Evangelista, José Antonio Leal de Farias and Riemer Grootjans and would definitely recommend it for the beginner looking at learning XNA.

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pipeline UDK XNA

UDK vs XNA: Part 2

Continuing on my testing of the Unreal Development Kit and XNA I focus a bit more on the development process between these two packages, this is focusing on tutorial and community strength and some asset pipeline use.

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book review c++ refactoring

Book Review: Professional Refactoring in C#

I would recommend the book Professional Refactoring in C# & ASP.Net by Danijel Arsenovski for any developer interested in refactoring code. Arsenovski gives clear and documented refactoring improvements for a variety of common code structures, as well as some specific C# version 3.0 features. The book deals strongly with the concept of code “smells” which […]

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book review refactoring unit testing

Book Review: Foundations of Programming

I finished reading the ebook Foundations of Programming: Building Better Software by Karl Seguin which is available at the previous link. The book focuses on concepts of improving coding practice using some Agile methodologies and incorporating ideas from both the .NET (MSDN) and ALT.NET (abstract concepts with more specific implementations). Seguin brings up good elements […]

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c++ Visual Studio Template XNA

XNA C# Item Class Template

I thought I would share a simple class template for XNA classes that are not Game Components (for classes that do not require an update etc.). If you copy the code below to a new (empty class called Class1.cs) and then go to File->Export Template (choose Item Template in the wizard) and the class you […]