Wednesday, May 02, 2007 7:26:43 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

My new books arrived today, ShaderX4 and Games Programming Gems 6.

Normally I avoid any book with the word "Game" in the title because they tend to cater for the 14 year old who doesn't understand software dev but thinks it would be cool to make games for a living.

I am pleasantly surprised therefore that the articles in GPG6 are actually very interesting, with topics ranging from how to structure resources for efficient loading, implementing various scripting systems within an engine, component oriented systems (woohoo, no more silly diamonds!) and even a random chapter on NAT hole punching for those wanting to implement a p2p system for dummies :)

ShaderX4 is very technical and I'm beginning to wish I'd grabbed ShaderX2 at the same time to complete my collection. It doesn't dally about like ShaderX1 with masses of introductions and while I can see why, it would have been nice to have a basic HLSL reference on paper. ShaderX2 probably has something like that, being that it came out when HLSL was finally taking hold of the graphics programmers who realised that once you started pushing your pixel shaders past a hundred assembly instructions they were getting a bit unwieldy :p [And don't claim otherwise, you KNOW it's true!).

So I've got a bit of reading to do and then I might be able to pluck up some motivation to carry on working on my project. It reached a bit of a dead end this weekend and since the breakup (yarr, if you're entitled to that info, you can see it, if not, then you can't) I've been feeling too queasy to write any code :)

Now to listen to crazy Icelandic woman and Medulla, what a quirky album.