Sunday reading #3

• Preview of Lucidity looks appealing - kind of reminds me of Tangrams.
• Yoshiyuki Tomino disagrees with us, although he's kind of on track to something... it's just that they only have to **appear** to enrich our lives.
• Quite.
• Relatively simple tips on game usability from Gamasutra. Some of it patronising, some of it mildly thought provoking. Or you could think more widely.
• static char buffer[1024*1024*2]; and other dirty coding tricks lessons from seasoned devs, also from Gamasutra.
• Go watch CO-OP and then donate a little to the Area 5 guys, they need and deserve it.
  

Sunday reading #2

Okay, it's Monday. I've had all these in tabs since yesterday though, so I'm saying it counts.

• Absolutely fascinated by Avatar anyway, but the new HD teaser on the Apple site has now really got me hooked.
• Alex has an excellent summary of the GDC '09 conference sessions. Interesing food for thought on rubber banding in racing games (I thought Pure was a little bit too "fair").
• Great summary/look at the WOW:Cataclysm demo and starting areas offered at Blizzcon '09 on Project Lore's site. Interested in tech behind flying mounts across Azeroth.
• A useful look at the rendering pipeline beyond OpenGL - "In depth analysis of iPhone 2G/3G rendering pipeline - not at the level of OpenGL ES, but looking deeper. Understanding what driver actually does, how communication between CPU and GPU is implemented and what data is sent."

Sunday reading #1

• Challenge avoidence - Tobold's MMORG Blog on Why do we play? - an excellent comparison of the skills demanded by the higher levels of Tetris and the perceived challenge and lack of skill required by WOW and other MMORGs.
• More gamers on the way... China must open doors to publishers via gamepolitics.com. Probably not much of a material change, but it's a hell of a lot of people on the way at some point.
• Offworld / The Games Factory images - a couple of these are so good it takes a moment to get it.
• Interesting, but not necessarily useful article on Gamasutra on visualising game mechanics. Useful for inferring mechanics and inter-relationship of game state, but not necessarily "visualization" in the illustrative sense.