Think You Can Do Better?

When cruising the on-line boards (see the left nav pane) looking for feedback on Flight Sim some of the most interersting posts are those by people who consider themselves an authority on the game, game development in general, DirectX, hardware, etc. The posts by people who really are knowledgable are often quite informative. The rest (and it's easy to pick these out) are just plain entertaining, albeit in a sad sort of way. And as much as I love to fill my life with entertaining things I think a dose of hard facts would benefit most of the people who read the messages, many of whom probably take every post as the truth.

 

So, when I saw that Microsoft was offering an 11 session web-cast on game development I had to take a closer look. I would recommend it to any of you who seek a better understand of what goes on under the metaphorical Flight Simualtor hood. The series focusses on game development in C# using managed DirectX. While FS is written in C++ with the unmanaged version the concepts and many of the code constructs are the same. What's more, the series begins with a good discussion of high-level concepts such as coordinate systems, projection matrices, view frustums, and so on. The instructor is Doug Heimer from DigiPen. Here's his bio:

Doug Heimer is a senior at DigiPen Institute of Technology. Doug is responsible for the game play and artificial intelligence (AI) in the strategy game “GeoWarfare,” and also the graphics engine in “Resonation.” He has taught many video game programming classes, including ones that focus on Microsoft Visual C# and exploring online environments.

The sessions are preseneted using LiveMeeting and they are posting past sessions as on-demand web-casts so you can watch them at your leisure. Go take a look. You'll be glad you did.