[H]ardNews 5th Edition

Making Games = Hard:

This article titled "Game Development: Harder Than You Think" is definitely a must read for everyone who has ever bitched about a game, game quality and delays. Take what you learn from this article and apply it to the handful of industry leaders ( examples like id Software, Epic, Valve and so on ) and this is magnified 10 times over. Very good reading.

The hardest part of making a game has always been the engineering. In times past, game engineering was mainly about low-level optimization—writing code that would run quickly on the target computer, leveraging clever little tricks whenever possible. But in the past ten years, games have ballooned in complexity. Now the primary technical challenge is simply getting the code to work to produce an end result that bears some semblance to the desired functionality.

Hitachi 3D Display:

Remember this post about Hitachi developing a 3D display? Well our man Rob “Madwacker” Watts found this link to an article that shows you the actual product and design drawings. Pretty schpankity even though it is just lasers beaming onto a spinning mirror. Now if they could just get the size of that spinning mirror up to about 21” you’d have a nice 3D desktop and wind tunnel all in one. Check it out.