A bit of an off-topic post for any Dutch readers that may come across our little blog. MS decided to revamp their Dutch .NET Magazine and change the subscription to Opt-In, meaning you'll explicitly need to tell them you want to keep receiving the magazine after the next issue of September 22nd. You can find more details and re-subscribe over at this page:

http://www.microsoft.nl/netjesgeregeld

It's quite a risky step for them to take, but they want to make sure they're reaching their reader base and get a clearer picture of the interests of their readers. The magazine remains free and they've drummed up a full-blown redactional team for the revamp, so if you've enjoyed the magazine so far make sure you re-subscribe!

Since the stuff I'm working on for XNAInfo is taking forever to finish, I thought I'd post a link to this little gem here in the meantime. On my forum rounds I find myself linking to Tom's Excellent DirectX Faq at least once a week. Obviously it's DirectX specific, but that easily translates to tons of useful information on XNA development on Windows. It's a great resource that should prove useful for just about anyone.

(Sorry if this pops up twice in your RSS reader, something was off with the publishing) 

Some time ago a topic popped up on GameDev on how to stick a WebBrowser control on a D3D surface, or rather an XNA texture level. After some tinkering we got it to work (obviously Windows only), so it can be used to render any webpage to an XNA texture. The next step was to try and make it interactive, paving the way for HTML and Flash based GUIs. Unfortunately we ran into a strange bug here, which I haven't been able to solve. So I figured I'd post this out here, hoping anyone comes across this who can help out.

Here are the (messy) demo projects:

• Original browser-to-texture code (useful if you're just looking to draw HTML in XNA)
   
• Threaded interactive browser on texture
  

The bug surfaces in the 2nd project. Basically it works fine until the user left-clicks anywhere on the control (doesn't have to be a link), after which WebBrowser.DrawToBitmap fails silently and only an empty white bitmap gets rendered. The strange thing is that the WebBrowser control does load the new webpage. By uncommenting line 241, mouse moves are posted to the control and the window title will show the HREF of links on the (loaded but invisible) page as you hover over them.

Anyway, perhaps someone better versed in window messages can check this out, see if the code for posting mouse presses/releases is correct. While researching this problem, I also came across this MSDN page which states DrawToBitmap isn't supported for the WebBrowser control anyway, so it seems a miracle it works in the first place. If anyone cares to comment on that, please let's hear it.

Having just been badly upstaged by MJP's post, I reckon this might not be too interesting except for a few RTS/AI enthusiasts. Anyway...

In a recent discussion on RTS AI, Matias Goldberg pointed out the quite ancient text The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Since I've been fostering an RTS pet project for years now, I decided to get a copy and it turned out the best $4.95 I probably ever spent (ISBN10 0-486-42557-6).

Obviously it's not a cookbook for writing RTS strategies, but after a first read I can definitely see how various stratagems and axioms could be used to construct a clever AI. In fact, I'm amazed how many clear cut rules of thumb Sun Tzu puts forward that could be readily applied. These however may only serve to highlight the limited scale on which popular RTS games play out.

Food for thought at any rate.

On my favorite GameDev forum a lot of threads seem to be popping up from beginners worrying that getting started in game development, even as a hobby, is Hard. Lacking anything really useful to talk about at the moment, I thought I'd write up some points about this.

Get your feet wet

When you're just starting out everything seems hard and no amount of reading is going to do you much good until you sit down and just take a shot at it. Don't worry if you don't create an AAA game on your first try or even when you hit a wall and don't know how to continue (I'll get back on that). The key is, you've at the very least got some basics down and tried out various things that did or did not work. Congratulations, you've now learned something and are no longer a n00b.
 

The best language   

Please stop worrying about what would be the best programming language, please! If you even vaguely know how to code in some language, just stick with that unless you feel you absolutely need to move to another language since it offers something you really can't live without. Programming languages may all have their pros and cons (in no small part due to the libraries they'll allow you to use), but getting bogged down learning hard language X isn't going to help you create your game. Most coding skills you aquire carry over pretty well and should make it a lot easier to learn other languages anyway. And though it may be a fact that language X is the current industry standard,  should you really care about that now?
 

Getting into the industry

Or rather, do you really want to be in the industry right now or in the near future? It's a nice dream to create games for a living and certainly worth hanging on to, but when you're just getting started you really shouldn't be worrying about the industry too much. Just have a go at creating some games or at least coding some fancy things to get a feel for it. Then if coding games really turns out to be the carreer what you want, you will still have plenty of time to brush up on industry standards and how to actually get in there. In the meantime, you'll have a bit of a portfolio layed down which just might show off your experience and passion better than stating you know language X. Here's a little anecdote.

Getting stuck

So you went and started coding your game, but you've hit a wall. That's ok, it means you have something new to learn. Research the problem, ask around on forums and try to get it working. Even if it turns out you've created a monolithic unwieldly behemoth of a program or that something's deeply flawed in your approach, you'll at least know to avoid it in the future and you can start fresh with your newly gained knowledge. But chances are things aren't this bad and you'll have learned how to solve the (perhaps common) issue.
 

Well, that about covers it for now. I'm sure more ramblings will be forthcoming

I stumbled upon Tim Schafers development diary for Grim Fandango today on GameSpot. Obviously it's quite dated, but it's both interesting and fun to read that there are just some things that never seem to change.