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IndieDevAge: Help fill gaps? (lots o' links)
- Thread starter ElectricThunder
- Start date
ElectricThunder
Member
Edit: Damn it to hell I just lost a rather large new post due to a misclick X'ing my tab on Firefox....last 3 straight hours down the drain since I build these one link in my bookmarks at a time...
Arrgh, attempt at a re-post tomorrow---otherwise anybody know any handy ways to prevent this save gaining newfound dexterity and/or manually c+p'ing my posts in progress to a document or some such? Some kinda auto-stenographer program that mirrors my input or something? :lol
: (
Arrgh, attempt at a re-post tomorrow---otherwise anybody know any handy ways to prevent this save gaining newfound dexterity and/or manually c+p'ing my posts in progress to a document or some such? Some kinda auto-stenographer program that mirrors my input or something? :lol
: (
Teknopathetic
Member
"Arrgh, will edit this with an attempt at a re-post tomorrow---otherwise anybody know any handy ways to prevent this save gaining newfound dexterity and/or manually c+p'ing my posts in progress to a document or some such? Some kinda auto-stenographer program that mirrors my input or something?"
Type it into a word processor first, then c/p to your browser when you're done.
Type it into a word processor first, then c/p to your browser when you're done.
ElectricThunder
Member
Teknopathetic said:
That would save a step barring any formatting weirdness... :slaps forehead:
Well, I was about 75% of the way there after that many hours---so it would have been worse come hour 4...
Onward tomorrow, fresh post, lots of odd and hopefully useful goodness!
Yes lads and lasses, THIS is how you look competent in terms of PC use. :lol
ElectricThunder
Member
Right then, steps taken and I will make it this time if I don't fall asleep! :Fury:
Sound:
AudioMulch Software for live performance,
audio processing, sound synthesis and music composition. Full function for 60 days then license purchase needed for about the usual rates---seems meaty and developing at a good clip.
C#/XNA:
Shawn Hargreaves Blog Organized index of an ongoing blog highly relevant to the goings on of C# and XNA.
Graphics:
Vector Magic Auto-converts bitmap images to scalable vector art
DeleD Free 3D modeler and level-editor-friendly tool---source access and license free for any creations. Decently featured, intended for newcomers-veterans, and seems to play nice with other such tools.
Geomantics Right, this is a bit off the beaten path: Here be a suite of tools made freeware that used to be commercial---Genesis IV, Landformer Pro, and Landscape Explorer. The niche for all of these is Landscape/Terrain rendering and a bit of map showcasing not unlike the style seen in some wargames, historical shows, etc. Otherwise, they sell a Photoshop/PaintshopPro plugin that aims for woven fabric designs handy for tartans.
xNormal App to generate normal/ambient occlusion/displacement maps with a bit of texture-to-mesh as well---utterly free and rather meaty/high-end functioning with lively dev. Strikes me as a rather big deal for relevant doings.
Allegorithmic OK, this is an eerily texture-obsessed "Substance" oriented outfit with nifty free bits, rather costly bits, and a tad of middleground. Redux costs and is on texture compression, likewise with Designer for texture creation/customizing, and Air it out as a kind of next-gen thing aimed at online/MMO relevant concerns. Player is free and for rapid tinkering out variations to textures made in Designer or purchased from their TurboSquid online portal, as well as MapZone. a procedural texture generation tool for any type of texture. Lastly, there's imageSynth 2 which costs only a fraction of the paid offerings and is all about lifting data from low res images as fodder to create textures and high-res tiles.
Qoob Damn interesting 3D modeller and library for creating tiny 3D models---as in bytes big. Free for all save commercial doings that may need some manner of fee to be paid. Somewhat angling to shake things up in the Demoscene world, but I reckon there to be much potential in the likes of this indeed as the dev seems decently alive.
Euclideon/UnlimitedDetailTechnology Insanely ambitious new tech for making realtime 3D graphics---with a first commercial SDK allegedly something that may show up later this year. If their claim of a new way aside from ray tracing, polygons, and voxels pans out----then damn, that's gotta be a gamechanger right there.
Engine:
AGen 2D engine and framework specifically designed for the easy and rapid development of games, game prototypes or other visual applications---Lua scripted and no compiler needed. Free for non-commercial doings and aiming for Mac compatibility in the coming future while they steadily dev things up further.
Fashion Quest Interactive fiction framework that uses YAML for game element definition, Ruby for game logic, and Shoes for cross-platform GUI support.
ARToolkit Bleeding-edge software library for making Augmented Reality stuff. Free for non-commercial with an option for Pro licensing with extra support and deeper doings. I do believe this is the first, perhaps only, thing of this nature I've come across thus far period.
Propulsion JavaScript game development framework for the HTML5 canvas---specializes in 2D game affairs and is MIT licensed.
PixelLight Cross-platform open-source application framework for any kind of 3D applications like games, interactive simulations or visualizations. Seems meaty, modular construction, has been in dev for a good many years, and bounding towards 1.0 at a good clip.
KlayGE From seemingly nowhere, yet seemingly Japan, comes this thing. Open source, cross-platform game engine with plugin-based architecture. It provides a framework to make game development, testing, porting as simple as possible. GPL, C++ guts with Python scripting, high-end/next-gen modern engine orientation---yet apparently outstandingly primarily developed up to now by a single guy. Boggles my mind how challenging something like this has to be to rig together, to say nothing of the fact that the development looks to be extremely brisk on top of that going forward. I'm rather curious to see what's on the as of yet untranslated Wishlist page given the nature of this monstrosity...
Orx Open source, portable, lightweight, plugin-based, data-driven and extremely easy to use 2D-oriented game engine---specializing in rapid game dev/prototyping and being rather good at the whole 2.5D thing. Dev pace is good and it looks like a very substantial 1.3 release could arrive any day now.
PyroBASIC Perhaps the first real competitor PureBASIC has had in years, here we've got an upcoming attempt at a modern BASIC environ mixed with a lightweight IDE and 2D Engine. First public versions to poke with a stick could well arrive sometime here in January.
Next3D Fledgling game engine intent of livening things up for Lazarus/Free Pascal and modern Delphi folks. Dev doesn't appear to be very lively at present, but it seems like it is a fair bit of the way there for a one-man band.
Kambi VRML Free/open-source 3D (game) engine written in Open Pascal. Dev is ongoing and getting there, with some demo and sample game bits already onsite.
Asphyre Sphinx Quite possibly the Big Show in terms of a free game dev framework in Lazarus/Delphi for 2D and a bit of 3D doings. Dev is moving along, compatible with the head-shakingly robust/pricy Delphi XE, and pretty well the latest and greatest in a string of similar engines this outfit has been releasing for a fair bit of years now while developing the occasional game or so inhouse.
Tesla Engine A soon to perhaps-be C# XNA 4.0 engine with eventual aims of OpenTK/GL capabilities beget as the wrangling of some thesis work. C# continues to grow from different avenues, it'll be interesting to see what this would bring to the table alongside however many more manifest in the near'ish future.
Ambiera 2 particular things from this oufit: The free, but with a Pro version with source access and a few other perks, CopperLicht JavaScript 3D engine using WebGL and the commercial CopperCube 2 3D engine/editor that deals with Flash, Squirrel, WebGL, and JavaScript/HTML with an intent for little to no programming needed for a fair bit of it. Win/Mac and development seems active on both fronts.
GeexLab Tool/Engine for fast real time 3D prototyping and coding. It's based on widely used standards such as XML, Lua, Python or OpenGL. Free version for non-commercial ventures and a very cheap (20Euro at present) Pro version with a bit of extra meat on the bones. Dev looks pretty lively.
ZGameEditor Blows my mind on a different level versus some of the other relatively mind-blowing finds in this posting in general. Cross-platform(in an odd sense), open-source Pascal, free, rapid game development engine that aims for ultra-small games via procedural generation using OpenGL and a real time synthesizer for audio. 3D, midi, scripting support, that wacky Qoob thing integration en route alongside an sfxr port that'll play well internally, build/preview/test in the IDE---chock full of potential. Looks like they have a number of things cooking for a big 2.0 version to come in a near'ish future too, given the dev pace. They seem to be seeing the starting place as "arcade style" and going from there---though there is no 64lb limit as it depends what one gets up to.
FlatRedBall get a special nod too, as it appears to have been insanely active since it was first mentioned and improving rapidly on every facet---the likes of which now include Silverlight, soon to be Android, and bolstering their GLUE apparatus which is one the way to having visual editor capabilities on top of the rest. This may well be the biggest thing in 2.5D for the C#/XNA/more as they get to it with breakneck speed realm.
Misc:
Comparison of IDEs
The Escapist: Phenomenon 32 post-mortem: The Game that Ate the Earth
Illumination Software Creator Yeah...this is one of the stranger, yet perhaps more ambitious, things I've ever found. Essentially, you create software via arranging and/or creating colorful logic blocks in a visual array with an intent of not needing books nor having any real learning curve---a thing of madness. It costs $50, versus an apparent recent past where it was pay what you want, with bulk license discounting. The "guts" of the thing, where all this visual automagic happens, seems to make use of the lot of Python 2.X, Adobe Flex or Flash Builder, Android's Java, and soon to be more. See, they have a big 3.0 release cooking that just hit Beta 2 that'll add, among a ton of other aspects, iPhone/pad, Win Phone 7, and Maemo to the existing Win/Mac/Linux/Android/Flash Web/N900 party---all of this from a single platform in the grand scheme of things. The mind boggles...
Lava Experimental object-oriented rapid application development (RAD) language. Dev seems to be alive, and the thing is nearing 1.0 as a killer of Java and much else if all comes together as is reckoned by the project.
CoffeeScript A tool that appears to have a bright future ahead of it as it is a thing that compiles into a more readable, as fast or faster, JavaScript. Recently hit 1.0 and intends to draw out all the latent potential of JS with examples onsite of how it cleans up the sea of symbols and syntax.
Microsoft Small Basic Even I, with my fledgling knowledge, can see something as hilarious as it is bizarre that here we have a new BASIC dialect/platform that can only run on an WinXP and up machine with .NET 3.5. Still, it is being actively developed towards 1.0, and is close, being designed solely for the beginner programmer and up to 15 languages available for international flavour. Already capable of simple games.
Nimrod New crack at a programming language which intends to combine Lisp's power with Python's readability and C's performance. Release pace is decent and steadily closing in on 1.0.
Fantom Language aims to surpass Java and C# in various ways without trying to be on the bleeding edge of theory.
SharpEnviro Pretty cool open source shell replacement system for WinXP and up---written in Dephi with bits of C# and .NET 3.5 Just about everything can be configured, and made unobtrusive, multi-monitor support---pretty much just supplementing the daylights out of the general user experience. Edging towards a new .8 release and strikes me as cool, as it is rarely a bad idea to make something decent even better without screwing anything up. :lol
Sascha Willems blog Articles, Newton physics engine updates, and indie dev musings of the man that is perhaps the most prolific Delphi game developer that has yet to walk the earth. Is aiming at a magnum opus turn based global strategy game of sorts that may well release sometime in 2011, made via Delphi, OpenGL, and FMOD. He's also got a nifty bit on Dungeon Generation to think on.
Blaise Pascal Magazine Pretty much all things remotely Pascal/Delphi e-zines/hardcopies/books/cds/etc. Up to Volume 14.
Embarcadero RAD Studio XE THE kingly, commercial IDE apparatus for Delphi, 11 now to be precise. Massive cost in general, comparable to the high end Visual Studio stuff from Microsoft. Pretty much everything has free trials though, alongside videos and guides, so they must be pretty serious about serving their audiences.
Gamasutra: How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days
Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? e-Book Perhaps what will be the most comprehensive look at/guide to Parallel Programming yet devised and/or written for all to learn from.
3d-Test.com Interviews on up and coming technologies, engines, techniques Not all seem to have English translations though unless a proper onsite button for such is escaping me.
Gambas Free IDE that started as something of a Linux alternative/successor to the classic Visual Basic, but mutated and evolved into another, perhaps overall superior...thing. Dev moves at an average clip under the gentleman from France whom devised the project some years back, and it hasn't quite worked out to the step of working on Windows machines correctly just yet while it has grown strong in the wilds of Linux country. Available in several languages----perhaps of an odd nostalgic value for any old VB folk around here with an environ that can run it competently?
Phrogram A .NET based "learn to program things like games" tool, electing to focus on not hiding source code, making use of plain language, being concise, and so on versus other approaches that tack in from different directions. Trial period and paid packages available.
Yep, that'll do----an interesting and hopefully useful assortment for NeoGAF folk! Thanks for taking the time to skim and/or devour line by line in hopes of finding nifty bits.
Sound:
AudioMulch Software for live performance,
audio processing, sound synthesis and music composition. Full function for 60 days then license purchase needed for about the usual rates---seems meaty and developing at a good clip.
C#/XNA:
Shawn Hargreaves Blog Organized index of an ongoing blog highly relevant to the goings on of C# and XNA.
Graphics:
Vector Magic Auto-converts bitmap images to scalable vector art
DeleD Free 3D modeler and level-editor-friendly tool---source access and license free for any creations. Decently featured, intended for newcomers-veterans, and seems to play nice with other such tools.
Geomantics Right, this is a bit off the beaten path: Here be a suite of tools made freeware that used to be commercial---Genesis IV, Landformer Pro, and Landscape Explorer. The niche for all of these is Landscape/Terrain rendering and a bit of map showcasing not unlike the style seen in some wargames, historical shows, etc. Otherwise, they sell a Photoshop/PaintshopPro plugin that aims for woven fabric designs handy for tartans.
xNormal App to generate normal/ambient occlusion/displacement maps with a bit of texture-to-mesh as well---utterly free and rather meaty/high-end functioning with lively dev. Strikes me as a rather big deal for relevant doings.
Allegorithmic OK, this is an eerily texture-obsessed "Substance" oriented outfit with nifty free bits, rather costly bits, and a tad of middleground. Redux costs and is on texture compression, likewise with Designer for texture creation/customizing, and Air it out as a kind of next-gen thing aimed at online/MMO relevant concerns. Player is free and for rapid tinkering out variations to textures made in Designer or purchased from their TurboSquid online portal, as well as MapZone. a procedural texture generation tool for any type of texture. Lastly, there's imageSynth 2 which costs only a fraction of the paid offerings and is all about lifting data from low res images as fodder to create textures and high-res tiles.
Qoob Damn interesting 3D modeller and library for creating tiny 3D models---as in bytes big. Free for all save commercial doings that may need some manner of fee to be paid. Somewhat angling to shake things up in the Demoscene world, but I reckon there to be much potential in the likes of this indeed as the dev seems decently alive.
Euclideon/UnlimitedDetailTechnology Insanely ambitious new tech for making realtime 3D graphics---with a first commercial SDK allegedly something that may show up later this year. If their claim of a new way aside from ray tracing, polygons, and voxels pans out----then damn, that's gotta be a gamechanger right there.
Engine:
AGen 2D engine and framework specifically designed for the easy and rapid development of games, game prototypes or other visual applications---Lua scripted and no compiler needed. Free for non-commercial doings and aiming for Mac compatibility in the coming future while they steadily dev things up further.
Fashion Quest Interactive fiction framework that uses YAML for game element definition, Ruby for game logic, and Shoes for cross-platform GUI support.
ARToolkit Bleeding-edge software library for making Augmented Reality stuff. Free for non-commercial with an option for Pro licensing with extra support and deeper doings. I do believe this is the first, perhaps only, thing of this nature I've come across thus far period.
Propulsion JavaScript game development framework for the HTML5 canvas---specializes in 2D game affairs and is MIT licensed.
PixelLight Cross-platform open-source application framework for any kind of 3D applications like games, interactive simulations or visualizations. Seems meaty, modular construction, has been in dev for a good many years, and bounding towards 1.0 at a good clip.
KlayGE From seemingly nowhere, yet seemingly Japan, comes this thing. Open source, cross-platform game engine with plugin-based architecture. It provides a framework to make game development, testing, porting as simple as possible. GPL, C++ guts with Python scripting, high-end/next-gen modern engine orientation---yet apparently outstandingly primarily developed up to now by a single guy. Boggles my mind how challenging something like this has to be to rig together, to say nothing of the fact that the development looks to be extremely brisk on top of that going forward. I'm rather curious to see what's on the as of yet untranslated Wishlist page given the nature of this monstrosity...
Orx Open source, portable, lightweight, plugin-based, data-driven and extremely easy to use 2D-oriented game engine---specializing in rapid game dev/prototyping and being rather good at the whole 2.5D thing. Dev pace is good and it looks like a very substantial 1.3 release could arrive any day now.
PyroBASIC Perhaps the first real competitor PureBASIC has had in years, here we've got an upcoming attempt at a modern BASIC environ mixed with a lightweight IDE and 2D Engine. First public versions to poke with a stick could well arrive sometime here in January.
Next3D Fledgling game engine intent of livening things up for Lazarus/Free Pascal and modern Delphi folks. Dev doesn't appear to be very lively at present, but it seems like it is a fair bit of the way there for a one-man band.
Kambi VRML Free/open-source 3D (game) engine written in Open Pascal. Dev is ongoing and getting there, with some demo and sample game bits already onsite.
Asphyre Sphinx Quite possibly the Big Show in terms of a free game dev framework in Lazarus/Delphi for 2D and a bit of 3D doings. Dev is moving along, compatible with the head-shakingly robust/pricy Delphi XE, and pretty well the latest and greatest in a string of similar engines this outfit has been releasing for a fair bit of years now while developing the occasional game or so inhouse.
Tesla Engine A soon to perhaps-be C# XNA 4.0 engine with eventual aims of OpenTK/GL capabilities beget as the wrangling of some thesis work. C# continues to grow from different avenues, it'll be interesting to see what this would bring to the table alongside however many more manifest in the near'ish future.
Ambiera 2 particular things from this oufit: The free, but with a Pro version with source access and a few other perks, CopperLicht JavaScript 3D engine using WebGL and the commercial CopperCube 2 3D engine/editor that deals with Flash, Squirrel, WebGL, and JavaScript/HTML with an intent for little to no programming needed for a fair bit of it. Win/Mac and development seems active on both fronts.
GeexLab Tool/Engine for fast real time 3D prototyping and coding. It's based on widely used standards such as XML, Lua, Python or OpenGL. Free version for non-commercial ventures and a very cheap (20Euro at present) Pro version with a bit of extra meat on the bones. Dev looks pretty lively.
ZGameEditor Blows my mind on a different level versus some of the other relatively mind-blowing finds in this posting in general. Cross-platform(in an odd sense), open-source Pascal, free, rapid game development engine that aims for ultra-small games via procedural generation using OpenGL and a real time synthesizer for audio. 3D, midi, scripting support, that wacky Qoob thing integration en route alongside an sfxr port that'll play well internally, build/preview/test in the IDE---chock full of potential. Looks like they have a number of things cooking for a big 2.0 version to come in a near'ish future too, given the dev pace. They seem to be seeing the starting place as "arcade style" and going from there---though there is no 64lb limit as it depends what one gets up to.
FlatRedBall get a special nod too, as it appears to have been insanely active since it was first mentioned and improving rapidly on every facet---the likes of which now include Silverlight, soon to be Android, and bolstering their GLUE apparatus which is one the way to having visual editor capabilities on top of the rest. This may well be the biggest thing in 2.5D for the C#/XNA/more as they get to it with breakneck speed realm.
Misc:
Comparison of IDEs
The Escapist: Phenomenon 32 post-mortem: The Game that Ate the Earth
Illumination Software Creator Yeah...this is one of the stranger, yet perhaps more ambitious, things I've ever found. Essentially, you create software via arranging and/or creating colorful logic blocks in a visual array with an intent of not needing books nor having any real learning curve---a thing of madness. It costs $50, versus an apparent recent past where it was pay what you want, with bulk license discounting. The "guts" of the thing, where all this visual automagic happens, seems to make use of the lot of Python 2.X, Adobe Flex or Flash Builder, Android's Java, and soon to be more. See, they have a big 3.0 release cooking that just hit Beta 2 that'll add, among a ton of other aspects, iPhone/pad, Win Phone 7, and Maemo to the existing Win/Mac/Linux/Android/Flash Web/N900 party---all of this from a single platform in the grand scheme of things. The mind boggles...
Lava Experimental object-oriented rapid application development (RAD) language. Dev seems to be alive, and the thing is nearing 1.0 as a killer of Java and much else if all comes together as is reckoned by the project.
CoffeeScript A tool that appears to have a bright future ahead of it as it is a thing that compiles into a more readable, as fast or faster, JavaScript. Recently hit 1.0 and intends to draw out all the latent potential of JS with examples onsite of how it cleans up the sea of symbols and syntax.
Microsoft Small Basic Even I, with my fledgling knowledge, can see something as hilarious as it is bizarre that here we have a new BASIC dialect/platform that can only run on an WinXP and up machine with .NET 3.5. Still, it is being actively developed towards 1.0, and is close, being designed solely for the beginner programmer and up to 15 languages available for international flavour. Already capable of simple games.
Nimrod New crack at a programming language which intends to combine Lisp's power with Python's readability and C's performance. Release pace is decent and steadily closing in on 1.0.
Fantom Language aims to surpass Java and C# in various ways without trying to be on the bleeding edge of theory.
SharpEnviro Pretty cool open source shell replacement system for WinXP and up---written in Dephi with bits of C# and .NET 3.5 Just about everything can be configured, and made unobtrusive, multi-monitor support---pretty much just supplementing the daylights out of the general user experience. Edging towards a new .8 release and strikes me as cool, as it is rarely a bad idea to make something decent even better without screwing anything up. :lol
Sascha Willems blog Articles, Newton physics engine updates, and indie dev musings of the man that is perhaps the most prolific Delphi game developer that has yet to walk the earth. Is aiming at a magnum opus turn based global strategy game of sorts that may well release sometime in 2011, made via Delphi, OpenGL, and FMOD. He's also got a nifty bit on Dungeon Generation to think on.
Blaise Pascal Magazine Pretty much all things remotely Pascal/Delphi e-zines/hardcopies/books/cds/etc. Up to Volume 14.
Embarcadero RAD Studio XE THE kingly, commercial IDE apparatus for Delphi, 11 now to be precise. Massive cost in general, comparable to the high end Visual Studio stuff from Microsoft. Pretty much everything has free trials though, alongside videos and guides, so they must be pretty serious about serving their audiences.
Gamasutra: How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days
Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? e-Book Perhaps what will be the most comprehensive look at/guide to Parallel Programming yet devised and/or written for all to learn from.
3d-Test.com Interviews on up and coming technologies, engines, techniques Not all seem to have English translations though unless a proper onsite button for such is escaping me.
Gambas Free IDE that started as something of a Linux alternative/successor to the classic Visual Basic, but mutated and evolved into another, perhaps overall superior...thing. Dev moves at an average clip under the gentleman from France whom devised the project some years back, and it hasn't quite worked out to the step of working on Windows machines correctly just yet while it has grown strong in the wilds of Linux country. Available in several languages----perhaps of an odd nostalgic value for any old VB folk around here with an environ that can run it competently?
Phrogram A .NET based "learn to program things like games" tool, electing to focus on not hiding source code, making use of plain language, being concise, and so on versus other approaches that tack in from different directions. Trial period and paid packages available.
Yep, that'll do----an interesting and hopefully useful assortment for NeoGAF folk! Thanks for taking the time to skim and/or devour line by line in hopes of finding nifty bits.
ElectricThunder
Member
Safeguards prepared and away we go again for more assorted things to consider and/or tinker around with:
Sound:
eSpeak Compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows.
Jamendo Yet another Creative Commons music site where free things can be found or commercial doings wrangled with a large amount of content to sift through.
Flash:
Flash Game License Site to connect and network between Devs, Customers, and Sponsors across the spectrum of relevant doings.
Scripting:
AngelScript Seemingly a robust and flexible cross-platform scripting library designed to allow applications to extend their functionality through external scripts. Biggest one I know to make heavy use of it is the grand Indie space 4X'ish Star Ruler.
GS9 Seemingly fringe procedural scripting language meant for C/C++ doings in games that appears to be pretty mature due to long development cycle and claims to be able to outperform LUA 5 on some metrics. Pretty much the work of a single dude and has a book available---could be right handy.
Graphics:
vSpect Free and fast image viewing and inspection tool.
GLEW cross-platform open-source C/C++ extension loading library for OpenGl concerns with lively dev.
Real-DRAW V Interesting art program essentially angling to marry bitmap-styled visual doings with vector ones. Free and not so expensive as it goes for an art program ($55) Pro version available. I know at least one game that is going to be making use of it somewhere in the next year or so, so that's something~
Text ASCII Art Generator Exactly what the name says.
TurboSquid Buy, Sell, and Commission 3D models, Textures, Plugins in a giant digital marketplace.
ngPlant Open source plant modeling software suite---3D oriented.
FxGen Procedural texture generation library and tool to let you implement high resolution textures that fit in kilobytes in your apps.
MeshLab Open source, portable, and extensible system for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes.
Harmony Online sketching and such program, HTML 5 IIRC. A somewhat different fork can be found in Harmony kMOD
IcoFX Quite possibly the most robust Icon editor and creator out there, freeware or otherwise? Dev seems to have stalled out though...
AniFX Exact same situation as the prior, except Cursor focused. Seemingly stalled out the same too...
Assimp Portable open source library to import various well-known 3D model formats in a uniform manner.
Pixel This! A pixel art tutorial.
Sketch Lets you wrangle some 3D sketches with animating capabilities in the browser.
Engine:
Antiryad Gx Free unified cross platform(Beyond the usual suspects to include the Wii, handhelds, etc) 2d/3d game engine. Dev seems lively, some games have used it, and donations are something they like. Next version due to land in September of 2011.
Delta3D Open source game and simulation engine.
G3D Innovation Engine Commercial-grade C++ 3D engine available as Open Source BSD. Seems to be fit to any number of tasks and the dev scene is fairly lively. Multi-platform as well in the "write once, run various places" style.
Lightfeather Open source 3D engine for Mac, Win, Linux. Heading towards a year since the last release but it has also been chugging along for a fair many years now while being intended for intermediate-advanced programmers and such.
angel-engine Cross-platform 2D game prototyping engine based on OpenGL and C++ spawned mainly from the 48 Hour Game Jam competitions. Been a bit o' time since the last update log though.
elf2d Roughly similar thing as the prior, with it being a simple framework for small 2D games for Windows OS. Dev appears to be more active and beginner oriented than angel-engine at this present junction though.
SPARK Particle Engine Free, open source and cross-platform particle engine. Zlib license and seemingly robust in terms of having a particular focus.
Game Develop Something of a darkhorse in the GameMaker, MMF, Construct race for a comprehensive game development environ reckoning for empowering people with no programming experience via visual doings to make various kinds of 2D games. Also seems to be the work of a single gentleman from France, which is rather impressive all things considered.
Stencyl Probably the most ambitious Flash engine/dev platform out there---long cooking in private beta and such but aiming to make everything as easy as possible and collaboration/private marketplace for sharing code snippets, art, sound, etc---everything needed to whip up a game with minimum reinventing of the proverbial wheel on all fronts.
(fluxus) A 3D game engine for livecoding worlds into existence. Fluxus is a rapid prototyping, playing and learning environment for 3D graphics, sound and games. Cross-platform, GPL, and generally pretty out there on the fringes/experimental line of things----yet with inherent great potential.
Torque3D Right, Garagegames died recently, then resurrected with a new investor, and is now striking out in a more Indie-centric direction as they once strived for----knocking the price down to $99 for the time being and scrapping some of their listless and/or doomed sideline projects. Given what a huge price reduction that is, and there seemingly genuine intent to strike it out boldly and better from here onward----could be well worth considering again.
CubeCreate A freshly forked free, open-source game engine which offers rapid prototyping with integrated Lua scripting and and easy in-game map editing. Also, an integrated tool by the name Haven that acts as a distribution platform for games and handles content management for developers and artists. It also manages user accounts and manages many of CubeCreate's social aspects. First version should be going live in the near future, and strikes me as one to keep tabs on that the least.
Corona Seems to be a big fish getting bigger in the iOS/Droid space---powered on Lua, OpenGL/AL with the goal for robust and speedy development. Subscription-based pricing model is kind of odd though, as most engines hew more towards and up front lump sum outside of some Premium support packages and whatnot. Free to work on with the cost to deploy though, so hey, if one can get something good going on it then it might be a good option.
Construct2 This update's award for the most "out from nowhere" Construct, an open-source'ish comrade of the likes of GameMaker and MMf2, has been languishing at a pre-1.0 state due to limited dev time and other assorted woes. So, obviously, the thing to do was begin Construct2 that rewrites the lot of it from scratch to be HTML5/Javascript powered, grant SVN access to the old Construct that may yet see more fixes and such legacy wise, and generally blaze forward from here with a new modular/modern design and a "donate what you want" model that may get more robust later....of if it fails to catch on....free/commercial versioning of some sort. The first public Alpha was release a few hours ago with a short demo project---they've aims for speedy doings to get this up to snuff and hope for much more outsider input than before since going from C++ to Javascript is kind of a leap away from the more tricky of doings in terms of more people perhaps being more agile with the latter.
Misc:
The League of Moveable Type Eclectic, and growing, community/collection of high quality open source fonts. Should be incredible handy as time rolls on so long as they too roll onwards with swagger and pomp.
The Changelog Decent little podcast that intends to cover the latest and, perhaps, fringe-dwelling of the open source world.
RocketHub Site for crowdfunding creative endeavors of a tech stripe and perhaps otherwise with a solid sounding virtual currency system and various quirks to motivate and connect, they hope, the right Creative folk with people that'd fund their endeavors.
Agar Modern open-source, cross-platform toolkit for graphical applications implemented in C, C++, Perl and Ada with more bindings in the works. Free, compact, able to build without dependencies in recent times---all about knocking out the proper GUI for the app in good fashion. They even somehow got a Gamecube port working from the looks of it!
Ignite Realtime Outift offer a couple tools centered around open source, realtime communication and collaboration server/client doings for teams, business, etc.
Online lesson course on development of 64-bit C/C++ Apps
MakeUseOf Random smattering of tips and tricks for all manner of programs, gadgets, and so on----decently organized with new content posted at a good clip.
Git Immersion Tutorial on making use of Git, a prominent distributed version control apparatus.
PlayOnLinux Program designed to get Windows apps, games, etc able to run decently on Linux. Open source and aiming for easy installs and proper running.
Lutris A similar thing to the prior, but game centric and somewhat reminds of me of a Steam/Impulse Reaction approach. Fledgling compared to the former, but intending to grow and gain features as best they can.
Situation Flow Editor and Simulator Visual editor to organize and plot transitions along the above, like for dialog and order of events.
Programmer's Notepad Another free, rather robustly featured, compatriot to the likes of Notepad++. Dev seems to be making good strides, extensions to get access to the likes of the meat of Python, etc.
Dev.Mag Risen from the relative dead, this game dev centric e-zine dealie draws mainly from the South African dev community but all is fair game. They seem to be back on a regular kick with game design articles, including some stuff by the lads behind the popular Desktop Dungeons---so there's almost certainly some sage advice to be found here.
Inspiration Pad Pro Free "stuff" generator with various customizable parameters as far as content goes for place names, treasures, encounters, etc---the kinds of things that would need to be figured out for the meat of an RPG or P&P endeavor.
LispWorks Pretty comprehensive suite of IDE'ish doings for CommonLisp---though costly as one might imagine.
CodeLite IDE Open-source, cross platform IDE for the C/C++ programming languages with a fairly brisk dev pace.
Valve's Cabal Process Articles piecing together Valve's development methods and theories so that others might also be able to find success in them.
ZenGL Up and coming cross-platform game development library of the FreePascal/Delphi persuasion making ample use of OpenGL/AL as well as Direct3D/DirectSound. Lacking on documentation thus far, but should that get along and the release pace be brisk and meaty in turn---could be rather handy.
8-Bit Funding It LIVES!~ Aiming the be the best in the funding of game development and game related ventures via global crowdfunding(Paypal for now, hopefully others methods later) and such, it went live recently with one project already reaching the funding goal and others decently well on their way at goals in the hundreds and in the thousands. If this can continue to grow at a good pace it WILL be a game changer, no doubt about it. They don't intend to limit themselves to Indie either, as apparently Industry inquiries have been made and things may well be coming down the pipe on that front as well.
VMLite a lightweight Virtual Machine for running multiple OSes in parallel and whatnot.
U.S. Small Business Administration Pretty sure this will be essential in making a go of it as a small business in the USA as far as information, resources, procedures, etc.
gource software version control visualization tool---results of which can be pretty trippy looking, yet useful to eyeball just how things are progressing in terms of access and efficacy over time.
Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK) Cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit that provides modern GUI functionality without the bloat and supports 3D graphics via OpenGL and its built-in GLUT emulation. Weekly builds released and the community seems pretty dedicated to getting all features and issues duly reckoned over time.
Qwiki Right...this is Alpha but kinda wild. Essentially, they seem to be going for an audio/video take on Wikipedia---as in you select a topic and then get a computer voice reading you facts while you watch a video/slideshow relevant to the topic at hand.
Airplay SDK Another big gun in the emerging market that is developing for IDevice/Droid/ARM/etc stuff beyond the usual desktop while on your desktop using C++ and such. Free and Indie pricing available alongside more robust Pro options, but like Corona, reckoning with a yearly fee model. I would presume this model is generally due to the rapidly moving targets in terms of the handheld hardware races and whatnot?
design3 Home to a ton of video and otherwise Unity3D tutorials, as well as for various other things like UDK and Maya---though the amount of content looks to be HEAVILY weighted towards Unity at present. Lots of free goodies and access to many more via the usual monthly/half year/yearly member subscription options.
Spoon Something of a bleeding edge platform that seems to be making at go at the whole cloud/virtualization of desktops thing as far as gaming/apps goes. Some indie devs outfits like Basilisk Games(Eschalon RPG series) already have their wares on it, which leaves me reckoning it must be decently well along despite being a relatively young site.
Well, that's about the shake of it for now. As always, thanks for perusing, hope some useful things jump out for folks, and please do post any cool/useful/etc things you've come across that I've missed for the good of all!
Sound:
eSpeak Compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows.
Jamendo Yet another Creative Commons music site where free things can be found or commercial doings wrangled with a large amount of content to sift through.
Flash:
Flash Game License Site to connect and network between Devs, Customers, and Sponsors across the spectrum of relevant doings.
Scripting:
AngelScript Seemingly a robust and flexible cross-platform scripting library designed to allow applications to extend their functionality through external scripts. Biggest one I know to make heavy use of it is the grand Indie space 4X'ish Star Ruler.
GS9 Seemingly fringe procedural scripting language meant for C/C++ doings in games that appears to be pretty mature due to long development cycle and claims to be able to outperform LUA 5 on some metrics. Pretty much the work of a single dude and has a book available---could be right handy.
Graphics:
vSpect Free and fast image viewing and inspection tool.
GLEW cross-platform open-source C/C++ extension loading library for OpenGl concerns with lively dev.
Real-DRAW V Interesting art program essentially angling to marry bitmap-styled visual doings with vector ones. Free and not so expensive as it goes for an art program ($55) Pro version available. I know at least one game that is going to be making use of it somewhere in the next year or so, so that's something~
Text ASCII Art Generator Exactly what the name says.
TurboSquid Buy, Sell, and Commission 3D models, Textures, Plugins in a giant digital marketplace.
ngPlant Open source plant modeling software suite---3D oriented.
FxGen Procedural texture generation library and tool to let you implement high resolution textures that fit in kilobytes in your apps.
MeshLab Open source, portable, and extensible system for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes.
Harmony Online sketching and such program, HTML 5 IIRC. A somewhat different fork can be found in Harmony kMOD
IcoFX Quite possibly the most robust Icon editor and creator out there, freeware or otherwise? Dev seems to have stalled out though...
AniFX Exact same situation as the prior, except Cursor focused. Seemingly stalled out the same too...
Assimp Portable open source library to import various well-known 3D model formats in a uniform manner.
Pixel This! A pixel art tutorial.
Sketch Lets you wrangle some 3D sketches with animating capabilities in the browser.
Engine:
Antiryad Gx Free unified cross platform(Beyond the usual suspects to include the Wii, handhelds, etc) 2d/3d game engine. Dev seems lively, some games have used it, and donations are something they like. Next version due to land in September of 2011.
Delta3D Open source game and simulation engine.
G3D Innovation Engine Commercial-grade C++ 3D engine available as Open Source BSD. Seems to be fit to any number of tasks and the dev scene is fairly lively. Multi-platform as well in the "write once, run various places" style.
Lightfeather Open source 3D engine for Mac, Win, Linux. Heading towards a year since the last release but it has also been chugging along for a fair many years now while being intended for intermediate-advanced programmers and such.
angel-engine Cross-platform 2D game prototyping engine based on OpenGL and C++ spawned mainly from the 48 Hour Game Jam competitions. Been a bit o' time since the last update log though.
elf2d Roughly similar thing as the prior, with it being a simple framework for small 2D games for Windows OS. Dev appears to be more active and beginner oriented than angel-engine at this present junction though.
SPARK Particle Engine Free, open source and cross-platform particle engine. Zlib license and seemingly robust in terms of having a particular focus.
Game Develop Something of a darkhorse in the GameMaker, MMF, Construct race for a comprehensive game development environ reckoning for empowering people with no programming experience via visual doings to make various kinds of 2D games. Also seems to be the work of a single gentleman from France, which is rather impressive all things considered.
Stencyl Probably the most ambitious Flash engine/dev platform out there---long cooking in private beta and such but aiming to make everything as easy as possible and collaboration/private marketplace for sharing code snippets, art, sound, etc---everything needed to whip up a game with minimum reinventing of the proverbial wheel on all fronts.
(fluxus) A 3D game engine for livecoding worlds into existence. Fluxus is a rapid prototyping, playing and learning environment for 3D graphics, sound and games. Cross-platform, GPL, and generally pretty out there on the fringes/experimental line of things----yet with inherent great potential.
Torque3D Right, Garagegames died recently, then resurrected with a new investor, and is now striking out in a more Indie-centric direction as they once strived for----knocking the price down to $99 for the time being and scrapping some of their listless and/or doomed sideline projects. Given what a huge price reduction that is, and there seemingly genuine intent to strike it out boldly and better from here onward----could be well worth considering again.
CubeCreate A freshly forked free, open-source game engine which offers rapid prototyping with integrated Lua scripting and and easy in-game map editing. Also, an integrated tool by the name Haven that acts as a distribution platform for games and handles content management for developers and artists. It also manages user accounts and manages many of CubeCreate's social aspects. First version should be going live in the near future, and strikes me as one to keep tabs on that the least.
Corona Seems to be a big fish getting bigger in the iOS/Droid space---powered on Lua, OpenGL/AL with the goal for robust and speedy development. Subscription-based pricing model is kind of odd though, as most engines hew more towards and up front lump sum outside of some Premium support packages and whatnot. Free to work on with the cost to deploy though, so hey, if one can get something good going on it then it might be a good option.
Construct2 This update's award for the most "out from nowhere" Construct, an open-source'ish comrade of the likes of GameMaker and MMf2, has been languishing at a pre-1.0 state due to limited dev time and other assorted woes. So, obviously, the thing to do was begin Construct2 that rewrites the lot of it from scratch to be HTML5/Javascript powered, grant SVN access to the old Construct that may yet see more fixes and such legacy wise, and generally blaze forward from here with a new modular/modern design and a "donate what you want" model that may get more robust later....of if it fails to catch on....free/commercial versioning of some sort. The first public Alpha was release a few hours ago with a short demo project---they've aims for speedy doings to get this up to snuff and hope for much more outsider input than before since going from C++ to Javascript is kind of a leap away from the more tricky of doings in terms of more people perhaps being more agile with the latter.
Misc:
The League of Moveable Type Eclectic, and growing, community/collection of high quality open source fonts. Should be incredible handy as time rolls on so long as they too roll onwards with swagger and pomp.
The Changelog Decent little podcast that intends to cover the latest and, perhaps, fringe-dwelling of the open source world.
RocketHub Site for crowdfunding creative endeavors of a tech stripe and perhaps otherwise with a solid sounding virtual currency system and various quirks to motivate and connect, they hope, the right Creative folk with people that'd fund their endeavors.
Agar Modern open-source, cross-platform toolkit for graphical applications implemented in C, C++, Perl and Ada with more bindings in the works. Free, compact, able to build without dependencies in recent times---all about knocking out the proper GUI for the app in good fashion. They even somehow got a Gamecube port working from the looks of it!
Ignite Realtime Outift offer a couple tools centered around open source, realtime communication and collaboration server/client doings for teams, business, etc.
Online lesson course on development of 64-bit C/C++ Apps
MakeUseOf Random smattering of tips and tricks for all manner of programs, gadgets, and so on----decently organized with new content posted at a good clip.
Git Immersion Tutorial on making use of Git, a prominent distributed version control apparatus.
PlayOnLinux Program designed to get Windows apps, games, etc able to run decently on Linux. Open source and aiming for easy installs and proper running.
Lutris A similar thing to the prior, but game centric and somewhat reminds of me of a Steam/Impulse Reaction approach. Fledgling compared to the former, but intending to grow and gain features as best they can.
Situation Flow Editor and Simulator Visual editor to organize and plot transitions along the above, like for dialog and order of events.
Programmer's Notepad Another free, rather robustly featured, compatriot to the likes of Notepad++. Dev seems to be making good strides, extensions to get access to the likes of the meat of Python, etc.
Dev.Mag Risen from the relative dead, this game dev centric e-zine dealie draws mainly from the South African dev community but all is fair game. They seem to be back on a regular kick with game design articles, including some stuff by the lads behind the popular Desktop Dungeons---so there's almost certainly some sage advice to be found here.
Inspiration Pad Pro Free "stuff" generator with various customizable parameters as far as content goes for place names, treasures, encounters, etc---the kinds of things that would need to be figured out for the meat of an RPG or P&P endeavor.
LispWorks Pretty comprehensive suite of IDE'ish doings for CommonLisp---though costly as one might imagine.
CodeLite IDE Open-source, cross platform IDE for the C/C++ programming languages with a fairly brisk dev pace.
Valve's Cabal Process Articles piecing together Valve's development methods and theories so that others might also be able to find success in them.
ZenGL Up and coming cross-platform game development library of the FreePascal/Delphi persuasion making ample use of OpenGL/AL as well as Direct3D/DirectSound. Lacking on documentation thus far, but should that get along and the release pace be brisk and meaty in turn---could be rather handy.
8-Bit Funding It LIVES!~ Aiming the be the best in the funding of game development and game related ventures via global crowdfunding(Paypal for now, hopefully others methods later) and such, it went live recently with one project already reaching the funding goal and others decently well on their way at goals in the hundreds and in the thousands. If this can continue to grow at a good pace it WILL be a game changer, no doubt about it. They don't intend to limit themselves to Indie either, as apparently Industry inquiries have been made and things may well be coming down the pipe on that front as well.
VMLite a lightweight Virtual Machine for running multiple OSes in parallel and whatnot.
U.S. Small Business Administration Pretty sure this will be essential in making a go of it as a small business in the USA as far as information, resources, procedures, etc.
gource software version control visualization tool---results of which can be pretty trippy looking, yet useful to eyeball just how things are progressing in terms of access and efficacy over time.
Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK) Cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit that provides modern GUI functionality without the bloat and supports 3D graphics via OpenGL and its built-in GLUT emulation. Weekly builds released and the community seems pretty dedicated to getting all features and issues duly reckoned over time.
Qwiki Right...this is Alpha but kinda wild. Essentially, they seem to be going for an audio/video take on Wikipedia---as in you select a topic and then get a computer voice reading you facts while you watch a video/slideshow relevant to the topic at hand.
Airplay SDK Another big gun in the emerging market that is developing for IDevice/Droid/ARM/etc stuff beyond the usual desktop while on your desktop using C++ and such. Free and Indie pricing available alongside more robust Pro options, but like Corona, reckoning with a yearly fee model. I would presume this model is generally due to the rapidly moving targets in terms of the handheld hardware races and whatnot?
design3 Home to a ton of video and otherwise Unity3D tutorials, as well as for various other things like UDK and Maya---though the amount of content looks to be HEAVILY weighted towards Unity at present. Lots of free goodies and access to many more via the usual monthly/half year/yearly member subscription options.
Spoon Something of a bleeding edge platform that seems to be making at go at the whole cloud/virtualization of desktops thing as far as gaming/apps goes. Some indie devs outfits like Basilisk Games(Eschalon RPG series) already have their wares on it, which leaves me reckoning it must be decently well along despite being a relatively young site.
Well, that's about the shake of it for now. As always, thanks for perusing, hope some useful things jump out for folks, and please do post any cool/useful/etc things you've come across that I've missed for the good of all!
ElectricThunder
Member
Pretty much a month of derailment and myriad distractions, but finally here's some additional things:
Sound:
as3sfxr-b An advancement for a sound effect creation program, with detail and deliberation here
Flash:
Flash Game Dojo Aims to be a beginner-expert source of info and tutorials for making Flash games.
Flash Player Incubator/Molehill The foundation for Adobe's incoming bit for hardware accelerated 3D API GPU doings so as to improve the high-end capabilities for Flash browser stuff and otherwise.
Graphics:
Poser 3D art/model and animation software---has beginner and Pro versions with pricing about what one would reckon for high-end capabilities.
Topaz Labs Assorted image enhancement offerings.
Nik Software Yet another company offering various programs for image enhancement.
e-on software Offerings of plug-ins and software centered around Natural/Environmental Scenery.
SMAK - Super Model Army Knife Simple tool for 3D artists that can preview models and render diffuse, ambient occlusion, and normal maps.
KillWhite Free Photoshop Filter that actively removes white from an image, perfectly leaving the rest of the image, whether the image is black-and-white or color.
Stykz Free, frame based multi-platform stick figure animation program---intending to usurp an older program called Pivot. Dev seems lively!
LazPaint Free Image editor, like PaintBrush or Paint.Net, written in Lazarus (Free Pascal). Dev pace on this has been especially brisk, with various binaries en route for those who'd sooner not build it all up thanks to a growing team of contributors and the lead dev being a machine!
The Rasterizer Java software that generates pdf files from images (jpeg, gif, png, tiff) by converting the image into a huge raster image spreading over many pages, an alternative to the Flash based "The Rasterbator".
Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming Through OpenGL Free and detailed online tutorial/reference resource, intended for those a bit comfortable in programming though a novice in graphics programming.
Px5 Image Exporter and Sprites Gaming sprites to make use of and an image extractor to deal with compression thereof into rather usable formats.
Engine:
Impact A young, but promising challenger in the HTML 5 Canvas & JavaScript space---low priced license, fairly lively dev, and includes a growingly robust level editor by the name of Weltmeister. Currently knocking through 1.xx en route to 2.x
Maratis In the "amazing effort" category, we have this 8 year+ in dev portable, simple and visual game development tool designed for artists and developers----pretty much entirely by one guy. Free and Open-source. Use a simple Lua scripting language or have access to the full Engine in C++. This looks to only get better from here now that it went public.
HTML5/JavaScript Game Engines Looks to be a comprehensive list and feature table of all the various entities scuttling about on this battlefield.
Thermite3D Experimental, but getting there, open source/Zlib Voxel-based game engine. The PolyVox tech powering the lot of it is meant to be capable of integration into existing other engines. It had a large surge in interest and dev recently as Minecraft became popular---go go tangential benefits!
Game Editor Open-source and cross-plat 2D game design software---though if one's game isn't GPL3'd, there's commercial license purchasing to do and such. It has been around awhile before going open source, and definitely seems to have some functionality, with a long awaited 1.5 update apparently in the works since the last one in mid-2010.
MV3D Open source virtual world simulation framework written in Python---intended to handle any sort of online game and just recently hit Beta quality after about 5 years of hard work. Certainly seems to be some ambition in this one, so should the release pace hold---could become a significant player indeed.
GameStart 2d & 3D engine based on a WYSIWYG Editor and an intent for quick prototyping. Next update looks to be due in mid-March to make it all that much more robust as it has already seen some retail use. Free, at least at the moment as I have yet to see anything on plans to go commercial outright.
Sauerbraten Open source/ZLib 3D engine with a showcase project, Cube 2.
The Render Engine Cross-browser, open source game engine written entirely in JavaScript. En route to a big v2.0 release should all targets be met, this one also definitely intends to be a contender in this arena.
GPE Project - Game Programming Engine Game engine from scratch in C++ and Lua using the OGRE, CEGUI, and OIS libraries. Dev is currently using it in a WIP RPG called Abaddon.
Misc:
DisplayFusion Multi-Monitor software aiming to make it especially easy and useful, free and cheap Pro version available.
UltraMon Same thing, in a general sense, as the above.
Font Squirrel Various commercial use free fonts, with a goal of good quality.
Project Horseshoe Think-tank style conference addressing the industry-wide challenges of modern game design. Reports from past years are up and the 2011 conference looms.
Unity3DStudent Assorted learning modules and challenges to propel one along on Unity3D.
Unity3D Training Video Series Many hours worth of Unity3D (3) centric video tutorials.
Fundry Yet another crowd-funding portal.
LibreList Big and growing centralized mailing list for FOSS projects of any stripe to discuss and deliberate pretty much everything.
opensource.com Spotlights and examines the effects said movement have on the world and in general, discussion, etc.
PSPad Freeware programmer's editor for Windows specializing in Unicode and doing pretty well on the internationalization front. Dev seems active with beta builds though it has been quite some time since the last major version release.
The Random Name Generator
Intel AppUp Center Allows for some mobile/tablet platform games to also run on netbooks/desktops---effectively creating another digital game distro portal of sorts.
BetterExplained Straightforward information and answers on a variety of subjects, like a visual guide to using version control software.
YAWMA An indie-centric digital distro portal of sorts, with the slant on social community creation.
GAMESbrief Articles and reckoning on the business side of gaming in blog form, resources available, books, etc.
Premake "Describe your software project just once, using Premake's simple and easy to read syntax, and build it everywhere. Generate project files for Visual Studio, GNU Make, Xcode, Code::Blocks, and more across Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Use the full featured Lua scripting engine to make build configuration tasks a breeze." BSD license and the last update for good support for Visual Studio 2010 going with apparently various other good features in trunk percolating until there are enough of them to commit another version update.
HiASM Bolt from the blue that it is, this Russian site is home to a new free visual programming apparatus that orients things in a somewhat circuit/block'ish manner to affect doings. The program itself has an English option and is young in the grand scheme of things, which one would hope an official English website translation forthcoming. RussianGAF, please do clarify upon nifty things noticed as I do reckon this has potential the same as the other visual attempts that have yet to quite explode into the limelight.
FreeDOS Free DOS-compatible operating system for IBM-PC compatible systems. FreeDOS is made of up many different, separate programs that act as "packages" to the overall FreeDOS Project. There appear to actually be fresh programs being developed for this crazy thing, or at least made compatible. I would never have guessed a modern'ish DOS'ish platform to still be banging onward since it vanished from Windows those years ago...
Agena Free and easy-to-learn procedural programming language designed to be used in scientific, educational, linguistic, graphical, and many other applications, including scripting. Kind of like a cousin to Lua via ancient origin, this thing is actively updated and runs on a ton of stuff with no 3rd party dependencies apparently needed.
Experimental Game Dev Podcast Show
Immortal Machines podcast PC gaming centric with some excellent discussion with indie developers on both business and game design realities and current events.
fluenz Perhaps the biggest rival of Rosetta Stone when it comes to coming to grips with foreign languages. Only a few supported thus far though.
HTML 5 Contest Timely/monthly'ish contests for cash prizes for fresh HTML 5 game dev doings.
Lisp Cabinet Set of configuration files, tools and utilities bundled with automated installer to deliver full-fledged Emacs based Lisp development environment for Windows---free and decently updated on the dev pace.
PhiloGL WebGL Framework for Data Visualization, Creative Coding and Game Development. Open source MIT license. A fair amount of lessons also incorporated into the project onsite. Dev seems to intend to be fairly lively.
Plane9 Scene based music visualizer & screensaver, with the potential to create scenes and dictate how the audio interacts with the visuals. Bound to be some novel way to incorporate this in some aspect of game dev...
Cappuccino Open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser. LGPL and powered by Objective-J, a thing the devs claim might as well be JavaScript 2, and doing many things client-side instead. Dev pace is brisk and apparently much is planned for the 1.0 release in terms of further improvements and new features. The spirit of the project seems to be something like "web standards committees are too slow, things should be as good as they can be ASAP."
Substance Web-based document authoring and publishing platform. Young, but promising free/open, with real time collaboration and such being a near-future goal.
XGameStation Retro-inspired educational video game consoles designed specifically for both hardware and software hackers. Among the various ones, I believe, though could be wrong, the HYDRA project is the most powerful based on it using that Propeller chip, though there is apparently a new micro one brewing that may also be spiffy. As we hit closer towards the point of diminishing returns, projects like these hold ever more promise to me as each time they leap it becomes more dramatic and unfettered.
haXe The suspicious darkhorse of this update, or at least one of them, this is an open source multi-platform programming language. Notion being to use this and then easily translate it to needed platforms and native APIs. Thusly, it is game-dev capable/has been used for such while being active'ish in development. In fact, coming off the Molehill announcement, they wrangled HxSL, a high level shader language so you don't have to write any assembler that also plays nice with interacting with other shader languages of OpenGL and DirectX ties.
SoftKinetic 3D realtime gesture recognition middleware called iisu, with a Freemium version due out in the near future for non-commercial doings. For substantiated commercial entities, they've obviously got a paid model as well for games and such on that end. Essentially, they are banking on the likes of Kinect getting big and are trying to get in on the ground floor with their wares.
Gameduino A game adapter for Arduino, price starting at $53 on a production run on Kickstarter, with it apparently wildly exceeding the target total thus far.
Arduino Key comparable component to the above, seemingly the far more popular contemporary versus the XGameStation/Uzebox crowd somehow or another...
Monkey Something of an evolution of the Blitz clan of languages/compilers, it is similar to haXe in that one writes a game up in Monkey then converts to distro upon the various platforms/traditional languages. Demo to make non-commercial HTML 5 apps, full version $120 for absolutely everything including free lifetime updates and support---as opposed to some kinda subscription plan. A next-gen IDE of sorts for it specifically is in private beta as well. It is rather new, but given the Blitz history, I suspect this could easily become a thing indeed.
That's about all. I have a tiny, tiny chance at some relevant dev employment over the internet that'll become clear one way or another by about year's end, but otherwise I just need to keep at it to finally get some traction/ a game of my own going prototype-wise at least while keeping my eyes open.
Sound:
as3sfxr-b An advancement for a sound effect creation program, with detail and deliberation here
Flash:
Flash Game Dojo Aims to be a beginner-expert source of info and tutorials for making Flash games.
Flash Player Incubator/Molehill The foundation for Adobe's incoming bit for hardware accelerated 3D API GPU doings so as to improve the high-end capabilities for Flash browser stuff and otherwise.
Graphics:
Poser 3D art/model and animation software---has beginner and Pro versions with pricing about what one would reckon for high-end capabilities.
Topaz Labs Assorted image enhancement offerings.
Nik Software Yet another company offering various programs for image enhancement.
e-on software Offerings of plug-ins and software centered around Natural/Environmental Scenery.
SMAK - Super Model Army Knife Simple tool for 3D artists that can preview models and render diffuse, ambient occlusion, and normal maps.
KillWhite Free Photoshop Filter that actively removes white from an image, perfectly leaving the rest of the image, whether the image is black-and-white or color.
Stykz Free, frame based multi-platform stick figure animation program---intending to usurp an older program called Pivot. Dev seems lively!
LazPaint Free Image editor, like PaintBrush or Paint.Net, written in Lazarus (Free Pascal). Dev pace on this has been especially brisk, with various binaries en route for those who'd sooner not build it all up thanks to a growing team of contributors and the lead dev being a machine!
The Rasterizer Java software that generates pdf files from images (jpeg, gif, png, tiff) by converting the image into a huge raster image spreading over many pages, an alternative to the Flash based "The Rasterbator".
Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming Through OpenGL Free and detailed online tutorial/reference resource, intended for those a bit comfortable in programming though a novice in graphics programming.
Px5 Image Exporter and Sprites Gaming sprites to make use of and an image extractor to deal with compression thereof into rather usable formats.
Engine:
Impact A young, but promising challenger in the HTML 5 Canvas & JavaScript space---low priced license, fairly lively dev, and includes a growingly robust level editor by the name of Weltmeister. Currently knocking through 1.xx en route to 2.x
Maratis In the "amazing effort" category, we have this 8 year+ in dev portable, simple and visual game development tool designed for artists and developers----pretty much entirely by one guy. Free and Open-source. Use a simple Lua scripting language or have access to the full Engine in C++. This looks to only get better from here now that it went public.
HTML5/JavaScript Game Engines Looks to be a comprehensive list and feature table of all the various entities scuttling about on this battlefield.
Thermite3D Experimental, but getting there, open source/Zlib Voxel-based game engine. The PolyVox tech powering the lot of it is meant to be capable of integration into existing other engines. It had a large surge in interest and dev recently as Minecraft became popular---go go tangential benefits!
Game Editor Open-source and cross-plat 2D game design software---though if one's game isn't GPL3'd, there's commercial license purchasing to do and such. It has been around awhile before going open source, and definitely seems to have some functionality, with a long awaited 1.5 update apparently in the works since the last one in mid-2010.
MV3D Open source virtual world simulation framework written in Python---intended to handle any sort of online game and just recently hit Beta quality after about 5 years of hard work. Certainly seems to be some ambition in this one, so should the release pace hold---could become a significant player indeed.
GameStart 2d & 3D engine based on a WYSIWYG Editor and an intent for quick prototyping. Next update looks to be due in mid-March to make it all that much more robust as it has already seen some retail use. Free, at least at the moment as I have yet to see anything on plans to go commercial outright.
Sauerbraten Open source/ZLib 3D engine with a showcase project, Cube 2.
The Render Engine Cross-browser, open source game engine written entirely in JavaScript. En route to a big v2.0 release should all targets be met, this one also definitely intends to be a contender in this arena.
GPE Project - Game Programming Engine Game engine from scratch in C++ and Lua using the OGRE, CEGUI, and OIS libraries. Dev is currently using it in a WIP RPG called Abaddon.
Misc:
DisplayFusion Multi-Monitor software aiming to make it especially easy and useful, free and cheap Pro version available.
UltraMon Same thing, in a general sense, as the above.
Font Squirrel Various commercial use free fonts, with a goal of good quality.
Project Horseshoe Think-tank style conference addressing the industry-wide challenges of modern game design. Reports from past years are up and the 2011 conference looms.
Unity3DStudent Assorted learning modules and challenges to propel one along on Unity3D.
Unity3D Training Video Series Many hours worth of Unity3D (3) centric video tutorials.
Fundry Yet another crowd-funding portal.
LibreList Big and growing centralized mailing list for FOSS projects of any stripe to discuss and deliberate pretty much everything.
opensource.com Spotlights and examines the effects said movement have on the world and in general, discussion, etc.
PSPad Freeware programmer's editor for Windows specializing in Unicode and doing pretty well on the internationalization front. Dev seems active with beta builds though it has been quite some time since the last major version release.
The Random Name Generator
Intel AppUp Center Allows for some mobile/tablet platform games to also run on netbooks/desktops---effectively creating another digital game distro portal of sorts.
BetterExplained Straightforward information and answers on a variety of subjects, like a visual guide to using version control software.
YAWMA An indie-centric digital distro portal of sorts, with the slant on social community creation.
GAMESbrief Articles and reckoning on the business side of gaming in blog form, resources available, books, etc.
Premake "Describe your software project just once, using Premake's simple and easy to read syntax, and build it everywhere. Generate project files for Visual Studio, GNU Make, Xcode, Code::Blocks, and more across Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Use the full featured Lua scripting engine to make build configuration tasks a breeze." BSD license and the last update for good support for Visual Studio 2010 going with apparently various other good features in trunk percolating until there are enough of them to commit another version update.
HiASM Bolt from the blue that it is, this Russian site is home to a new free visual programming apparatus that orients things in a somewhat circuit/block'ish manner to affect doings. The program itself has an English option and is young in the grand scheme of things, which one would hope an official English website translation forthcoming. RussianGAF, please do clarify upon nifty things noticed as I do reckon this has potential the same as the other visual attempts that have yet to quite explode into the limelight.
FreeDOS Free DOS-compatible operating system for IBM-PC compatible systems. FreeDOS is made of up many different, separate programs that act as "packages" to the overall FreeDOS Project. There appear to actually be fresh programs being developed for this crazy thing, or at least made compatible. I would never have guessed a modern'ish DOS'ish platform to still be banging onward since it vanished from Windows those years ago...
Agena Free and easy-to-learn procedural programming language designed to be used in scientific, educational, linguistic, graphical, and many other applications, including scripting. Kind of like a cousin to Lua via ancient origin, this thing is actively updated and runs on a ton of stuff with no 3rd party dependencies apparently needed.
Experimental Game Dev Podcast Show
Immortal Machines podcast PC gaming centric with some excellent discussion with indie developers on both business and game design realities and current events.
fluenz Perhaps the biggest rival of Rosetta Stone when it comes to coming to grips with foreign languages. Only a few supported thus far though.
HTML 5 Contest Timely/monthly'ish contests for cash prizes for fresh HTML 5 game dev doings.
Lisp Cabinet Set of configuration files, tools and utilities bundled with automated installer to deliver full-fledged Emacs based Lisp development environment for Windows---free and decently updated on the dev pace.
PhiloGL WebGL Framework for Data Visualization, Creative Coding and Game Development. Open source MIT license. A fair amount of lessons also incorporated into the project onsite. Dev seems to intend to be fairly lively.
Plane9 Scene based music visualizer & screensaver, with the potential to create scenes and dictate how the audio interacts with the visuals. Bound to be some novel way to incorporate this in some aspect of game dev...
Cappuccino Open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser. LGPL and powered by Objective-J, a thing the devs claim might as well be JavaScript 2, and doing many things client-side instead. Dev pace is brisk and apparently much is planned for the 1.0 release in terms of further improvements and new features. The spirit of the project seems to be something like "web standards committees are too slow, things should be as good as they can be ASAP."
Substance Web-based document authoring and publishing platform. Young, but promising free/open, with real time collaboration and such being a near-future goal.
XGameStation Retro-inspired educational video game consoles designed specifically for both hardware and software hackers. Among the various ones, I believe, though could be wrong, the HYDRA project is the most powerful based on it using that Propeller chip, though there is apparently a new micro one brewing that may also be spiffy. As we hit closer towards the point of diminishing returns, projects like these hold ever more promise to me as each time they leap it becomes more dramatic and unfettered.
haXe The suspicious darkhorse of this update, or at least one of them, this is an open source multi-platform programming language. Notion being to use this and then easily translate it to needed platforms and native APIs. Thusly, it is game-dev capable/has been used for such while being active'ish in development. In fact, coming off the Molehill announcement, they wrangled HxSL, a high level shader language so you don't have to write any assembler that also plays nice with interacting with other shader languages of OpenGL and DirectX ties.
SoftKinetic 3D realtime gesture recognition middleware called iisu, with a Freemium version due out in the near future for non-commercial doings. For substantiated commercial entities, they've obviously got a paid model as well for games and such on that end. Essentially, they are banking on the likes of Kinect getting big and are trying to get in on the ground floor with their wares.
Gameduino A game adapter for Arduino, price starting at $53 on a production run on Kickstarter, with it apparently wildly exceeding the target total thus far.
Arduino Key comparable component to the above, seemingly the far more popular contemporary versus the XGameStation/Uzebox crowd somehow or another...
Monkey Something of an evolution of the Blitz clan of languages/compilers, it is similar to haXe in that one writes a game up in Monkey then converts to distro upon the various platforms/traditional languages. Demo to make non-commercial HTML 5 apps, full version $120 for absolutely everything including free lifetime updates and support---as opposed to some kinda subscription plan. A next-gen IDE of sorts for it specifically is in private beta as well. It is rather new, but given the Blitz history, I suspect this could easily become a thing indeed.
That's about all. I have a tiny, tiny chance at some relevant dev employment over the internet that'll become clear one way or another by about year's end, but otherwise I just need to keep at it to finally get some traction/ a game of my own going prototype-wise at least while keeping my eyes open.
ElectricThunder
Member
Oh wow BadSanta! I don't know what I posted that was specifically that helpful, but this makes my day in a big way---many, many thanks. Congrats on making a game!
I will try to edit in the latest odds and ends to have crossed my path later today in this post to celebrate.
I will try to edit in the latest odds and ends to have crossed my path later today in this post to celebrate.
ElectricThunder
Member
Oh...well right on regardless then as it is still a gracious gesture! Onward:
Sound:
Jewelbeat Free Royalty Free Music & Sound Effects
Analog-Box Open-source, circuit based, modular software synthesizer. You put sound objects on the screen, connect them together, listen and adjust. When you find something you like, you can record it to a wav file, or just save the circuit and play it again later. Seems to be rather powerful and has been around a long, long time prior to going open-source.
JFugue Open-source Java API for programming music without the complexities of MIDI and aims for being ideal for applications in which music is generated at run-time.
tmdas a simple Ruby livecoding environment and musical experimentation tool. It allows you to create and manipulate musical objects, schedule events and produce MIDI, all through Ruby code written in real time.
Overtone Open source audio environment being created to explore musical ideas from synthesis and sampling to instrument building, live-coding and collaborative jamming. Powered by SuperCollider and Clojure.
M.A.D A live programming language/environment based on Processing.org written in Clojure. It's something like SuperCollider or Chuck but aims to be easier to hack / experiment live.
Bfxr The ongoing improved and better named identity of the as3sfxr-b tool from last update.
Incompetech Royalty Free Music Solid variety aimed at fighting the woes of copyright complexities via simple/fair terms.
Java:
JavaGaming Perhaps the leading place for Java game developers to discuss and lament as needed---I believe Notch of Minecraft fame posts there.
Nifty-gui Very promising tool on the cusp of a fresh new version of 1.3. A Java Library that supports the building of interactive user interfaces for games or similar applications. It utilizes lwjgl for OpenGL rendering. The configuration of the GUI is stored in xml files with little supporting Java code. In short Nifty helps you to layout stuff, display it in a cool way and interact with it.
Graphics:
Dungeon Demon Full featured map editor for creating and editing RPG and table top game maps. $30 and some kinda free option with lots of royalty free art pieces and promises free upgrades forever, with the 1.1 update fairly recently being rather meaty indeed. Given that the developers latest game Dungeon Brawl is a Gauntlet'ish thing---it definitely strikes me as rather capable for the price. Should play rather nice with the immediately below, considering...
TimelineFX Particle Effects Editor A complete solution for creating a full range of particle effects for your games and applications. 30Euro if you buy it standalone, but they've a combo package going with the Rusty Axe Dungeon Demon folk that nets you the pair for $49.99, The Game Designers Toolkit They really do seem like a great deal for the price---I find myself fairly tempted. Though, I've a soft spot for teamwork among small outfits trying to do nifty things, heh.
meshmixer "A free tool for making crazy-ass 3D stuff without too much hassle. Or boring stuff too. You decide." Or, an experimental 3D modeling tool to make it easy to compose new 3D models from existing meshes. Version 4 released recently and it strikes me as heading in an interesting direction.
INFOGR: Graphics Large amount of videos and annotated slides from a lecture course.
Arbaro Free Java implementation for a tree generating algorithm aimed at realistic trees.
Falling Pixel International portal to buy and sell 3D models of seemingly all kinds---some textures and shaders too.
K-3D A free 3D modeling and animation software that combines flexible plugins with a visualization pipeline architecture. Aims to be easy and flexible while still having a bit of power---been about a year since the last major release but the forum seems lively enough so as to not reckon it burned out versus just slow cooking in the background.
DAME Editor A 100% free multi-platform (Windows/Mac/Linux) 2D map editor for indie game developers. It plays especially strongly with flixel-powered flash doings, given it was made with the flixel engine, but should work well with any number of things. Dev is robust and releases at a good pace with a sense of wild ambition towards Version 2 and beyond in the future. Very impressive rival to the likes of Tiled and whatnot methinks.
Armin Ronacher's Immersed Code Game and Graphic Development blog from a guy who had to learn various things the hard way that he'd sooner have been clued in on soon---now clueing folk in on said various things.
Dreamstime High quality Royalty Free images from low to no cost on up--stock images and the like. Also allows for users to sell to others via it and whatnot.
RPGNOW Sort of a catch-all resource site that has the likes of art tiles, P&P resources/books of all types, and all manner of "indie rpg" stuff---most things being fairly focused and low priced.
DriveThruRPG Pretty much exactly the same as the above...exactly.
Engine:
Farseer Physics Engine Free, powerful, and recently updated to version 3.3 physics engine that aims to be something quite a ways beyond the current Box2D that it is largely based upon. "A collision detection system with realistic physics responses." A slightly older version can be sampled in-browser after a plugin download.
ORK: Okashi RPG Kit Aims to be the all-purpose RPG creator facilitator in the fresh and flush with possibilities market of Unity3D's digital plugins-and-such store. Works with 3.3, the web player, Mac/Win deployment while being flexible and intending to keep on improving it over time. $100 for Indie license, much more for Professional outfits, and the usual bulk pricing discounts prevail. They've a very basic demo RPG showcase available for download or browser play. Time will tell if they get competition in the Unity store on this front, as that thing seems to me to be primed to explode with content as more and more people get into Unity3D.
papervision3d Open Source realtime 3D engine for Flash. Seems to be somewhat alive.
Ren'Py Probably the king of visual novel engines. Open source and free for commercial use. It supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Android. Dev seems solidly lively and the last major release in Feb of this year was meaty.
PushButton Engine Open Source, Flash game engine and framework aiming to bring together great existing libraries and components for building Flash games.
Pixie This has GOT to be handy to some degree else I just don't know. Public domain 2D C++ Engine, "easy-to-use but still powerful game technology, cleanly written to be easy to extend, modify and port to any platform, with good performance and high reliability.", a random person is working on an Android port(Windows only at present), and several games have been made with it----all also public domain with full source code available to all. Developer worked with 3D in the industry, but came to have a shine for 2D wranglings and thus this long wrought hobby of his came to be.
libgdx A free cross-platform game development library written in Java with some JNI code for performance hungry sections. It abstracts away the differences between writting desktop and Android games based on OpenGL. This allows you to prototype and develop your application entirely on the desktop and only needing 6 lines of code to make it run on Android. Dev pace is robust and they seem pretty ruthless in term of having things workable and performance capable.
Misc:
Hackvision A simple, retro gaming platform based on Arduino technology that you can assemble and connect to your TV. You can write your own games and make your own controllers. No color, fairly inexpensive, perhaps more "retro" than Gameduino---still a thing of some capabilities indeed though.
Horizon Easy-to-use rapid prototype framework for Blitzmax that comes with examples and a full game called Aiolos. Personal project of one of the people at GameForge, a browser-game portal with an eye towards the higher end in part.
ProcrastiTracker A time tracking tool that automatically tracks what applications and documents you use, and allows you to view statistics on your usage in great detail---written to be small and non-intrusive. Free, windows only, powerful, and potentially unsettling!
NVIDIA APEX A multi-platform, scalable dynamics framework. Rather than providing a low-level API that requires a physics programmer, APEX creates an environment where artists can create complex, high-level, dynamic systems without any programming.
GDR A forum where aspiring and active devs can chat/rant/hand-wring/etc---Game Developer's Refuge.
Eloquent Javascript A tutorial.
Get Localization Aims to help with translating apps via crowdsourcing mechanics and to connect prospective Translators with projects and vice versa.
Dice Calc Lets you visualize the result of rolling a bunch of dice. It supports a simple language to describe the dice you roll, based upon the common 'd' notation.
live-processing Processing clone with livecode capabilities---though it currently doesn't have access to all of the capabilities of Processing outright.
dglOpenGL.pas Seems to be the best way to incorporate the latest and greatest OpenGL functionality to FreePascal/Delphi doings as the official implementation is lacking in every respect---hence a German fan community got together and have been on top of it ever since.
Taksi Open source alternative to FRAPS whose dev has recently somewhat came back to life after a presumed hiatus.
Bytten Indie-centric site for news, reviews, articles, and the lot.
FreeGameDev Planet Rather comprehensive game/tool dev update newsfeed aggregator---I've not yet fully caught up with the thing for the shiniest of bits to mention here but it is on my todo list...lots to look at for sure.
#AltDevBlogADay Mega-blog with a high number of game dev contributors posting articles just about daily on the entire range of applicable subjects as befitting numerous people of various backgrounds.
DigiPen Student Games From the class of 2001 up to the present, here be all the various games that the folks knocking through the DigiPen program banged along on.
GOLD A free parsing system that you can use to develop your own programming languages, scripting languages and interpreters. It strives to be a development tool that can be used with numerous programming languages and on multiple platforms.
Game Prototype Challenge Exactly as you might suspect---regular timed and/or themed game prototyping events complete with post-mortems and links to the successful runners---5th one starting up relatively soon after an especially successful 4th event.
iDevGames Seems to be a goto place for Mac/iOS game dev news, discussions, etc
halfbakery Large collection of random game ideas and pretty much all manner of random ideas in general to perhaps serve as a fodder for skillful doings and/or inspirations.
Procedural Content Generation Wiki
Angel Code Bitmap Font Generator Allows you to generate bitmap fonts from TrueType fonts. The application generates both image files and character descriptions that can be read by a game for easy rendering of fonts.
Geany A text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. Works on lots of platforms and the dev should become fairly lively in the near future due to a growing team.
ack A tool like grep, designed for programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code. Perl-powered, aims to be very fast, works with a great number of languages, free, Windows-capable, etc.
Spark Lemon Fledgling game resources to buy/sell portal.
ChaiScript Powerful and lively looking scripting language designed especially for use in C++ from the ground up. An interesting quirk of their work ethic is that the latest release in the git master branch is actually stable in general versus 99% of other projects' "bleeding edge", because they don't actually incorporate anything without it passing unit testing beforehand.
MiniD Scripting language influenced by Lua, but more especially the D Programming language. Somewhat getting there on a 2.1 release to follow the last major one that got it to 2.0 proper.
Falcon An Open Source, simple, fast and powerful programming language, easy to learn and to feel comfortable with, and a scripting engine ready to empower mission-critical multithreaded applications. A distinguishing feature would probably be inherent support for a number of programming paradigms built into the thing---procedural, object oriented, prototype oriented, functional, tabular and message oriented. Currently doing a major engine rewrite in a bid to jump the thing several steps forward in performance and all else, including aims to add evolutionary programming to the supported paradigms. All modules have to be C/C++ for max performance concerns.
PL/1 Language Tools A collection of tools for learning about parsers, interpreters, compilers and virtual machines, designed from the ground up to be a minimal implementation of several common interpreter and compiler functions.
Mirah Another fledgling programming language aiming to utterly dwarf Java, this time via incorporating however many good "Ruby-like" ideas from Ruby, but not Ruby outright per se.
Physics Engines for Dummies Not an actual Dummies book, but rather a tutorial blog breaking things down in the above manner. The full source code to this set of lessons can be purchased direct from the dev for $3.99 as a catalyst for him to eat and post yet more.
MyGameFast tutorial Takes you a good ways onward on getting a game going from nothing and no experience using Panda3D and a smattering of other free tools.
Let's Build a Roguelike Final Edition Several months in the making, this free guide, with full included source code, will knock you through step-by-step into banging out a Roguelike in FreeBasic from nothing and no prior experience.
Thanks for reading all, and as always, here's hoping useful things pop up to help make things happen and get things done for folks!
Sound:
Jewelbeat Free Royalty Free Music & Sound Effects
Analog-Box Open-source, circuit based, modular software synthesizer. You put sound objects on the screen, connect them together, listen and adjust. When you find something you like, you can record it to a wav file, or just save the circuit and play it again later. Seems to be rather powerful and has been around a long, long time prior to going open-source.
JFugue Open-source Java API for programming music without the complexities of MIDI and aims for being ideal for applications in which music is generated at run-time.
tmdas a simple Ruby livecoding environment and musical experimentation tool. It allows you to create and manipulate musical objects, schedule events and produce MIDI, all through Ruby code written in real time.
Overtone Open source audio environment being created to explore musical ideas from synthesis and sampling to instrument building, live-coding and collaborative jamming. Powered by SuperCollider and Clojure.
M.A.D A live programming language/environment based on Processing.org written in Clojure. It's something like SuperCollider or Chuck but aims to be easier to hack / experiment live.
Bfxr The ongoing improved and better named identity of the as3sfxr-b tool from last update.
Incompetech Royalty Free Music Solid variety aimed at fighting the woes of copyright complexities via simple/fair terms.
Java:
JavaGaming Perhaps the leading place for Java game developers to discuss and lament as needed---I believe Notch of Minecraft fame posts there.
Nifty-gui Very promising tool on the cusp of a fresh new version of 1.3. A Java Library that supports the building of interactive user interfaces for games or similar applications. It utilizes lwjgl for OpenGL rendering. The configuration of the GUI is stored in xml files with little supporting Java code. In short Nifty helps you to layout stuff, display it in a cool way and interact with it.
Graphics:
Dungeon Demon Full featured map editor for creating and editing RPG and table top game maps. $30 and some kinda free option with lots of royalty free art pieces and promises free upgrades forever, with the 1.1 update fairly recently being rather meaty indeed. Given that the developers latest game Dungeon Brawl is a Gauntlet'ish thing---it definitely strikes me as rather capable for the price. Should play rather nice with the immediately below, considering...
TimelineFX Particle Effects Editor A complete solution for creating a full range of particle effects for your games and applications. 30Euro if you buy it standalone, but they've a combo package going with the Rusty Axe Dungeon Demon folk that nets you the pair for $49.99, The Game Designers Toolkit They really do seem like a great deal for the price---I find myself fairly tempted. Though, I've a soft spot for teamwork among small outfits trying to do nifty things, heh.
meshmixer "A free tool for making crazy-ass 3D stuff without too much hassle. Or boring stuff too. You decide." Or, an experimental 3D modeling tool to make it easy to compose new 3D models from existing meshes. Version 4 released recently and it strikes me as heading in an interesting direction.
INFOGR: Graphics Large amount of videos and annotated slides from a lecture course.
Arbaro Free Java implementation for a tree generating algorithm aimed at realistic trees.
Falling Pixel International portal to buy and sell 3D models of seemingly all kinds---some textures and shaders too.
K-3D A free 3D modeling and animation software that combines flexible plugins with a visualization pipeline architecture. Aims to be easy and flexible while still having a bit of power---been about a year since the last major release but the forum seems lively enough so as to not reckon it burned out versus just slow cooking in the background.
DAME Editor A 100% free multi-platform (Windows/Mac/Linux) 2D map editor for indie game developers. It plays especially strongly with flixel-powered flash doings, given it was made with the flixel engine, but should work well with any number of things. Dev is robust and releases at a good pace with a sense of wild ambition towards Version 2 and beyond in the future. Very impressive rival to the likes of Tiled and whatnot methinks.
Armin Ronacher's Immersed Code Game and Graphic Development blog from a guy who had to learn various things the hard way that he'd sooner have been clued in on soon---now clueing folk in on said various things.
Dreamstime High quality Royalty Free images from low to no cost on up--stock images and the like. Also allows for users to sell to others via it and whatnot.
RPGNOW Sort of a catch-all resource site that has the likes of art tiles, P&P resources/books of all types, and all manner of "indie rpg" stuff---most things being fairly focused and low priced.
DriveThruRPG Pretty much exactly the same as the above...exactly.
Engine:
Farseer Physics Engine Free, powerful, and recently updated to version 3.3 physics engine that aims to be something quite a ways beyond the current Box2D that it is largely based upon. "A collision detection system with realistic physics responses." A slightly older version can be sampled in-browser after a plugin download.
ORK: Okashi RPG Kit Aims to be the all-purpose RPG creator facilitator in the fresh and flush with possibilities market of Unity3D's digital plugins-and-such store. Works with 3.3, the web player, Mac/Win deployment while being flexible and intending to keep on improving it over time. $100 for Indie license, much more for Professional outfits, and the usual bulk pricing discounts prevail. They've a very basic demo RPG showcase available for download or browser play. Time will tell if they get competition in the Unity store on this front, as that thing seems to me to be primed to explode with content as more and more people get into Unity3D.
papervision3d Open Source realtime 3D engine for Flash. Seems to be somewhat alive.
Ren'Py Probably the king of visual novel engines. Open source and free for commercial use. It supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Android. Dev seems solidly lively and the last major release in Feb of this year was meaty.
PushButton Engine Open Source, Flash game engine and framework aiming to bring together great existing libraries and components for building Flash games.
Pixie This has GOT to be handy to some degree else I just don't know. Public domain 2D C++ Engine, "easy-to-use but still powerful game technology, cleanly written to be easy to extend, modify and port to any platform, with good performance and high reliability.", a random person is working on an Android port(Windows only at present), and several games have been made with it----all also public domain with full source code available to all. Developer worked with 3D in the industry, but came to have a shine for 2D wranglings and thus this long wrought hobby of his came to be.
libgdx A free cross-platform game development library written in Java with some JNI code for performance hungry sections. It abstracts away the differences between writting desktop and Android games based on OpenGL. This allows you to prototype and develop your application entirely on the desktop and only needing 6 lines of code to make it run on Android. Dev pace is robust and they seem pretty ruthless in term of having things workable and performance capable.
Misc:
Hackvision A simple, retro gaming platform based on Arduino technology that you can assemble and connect to your TV. You can write your own games and make your own controllers. No color, fairly inexpensive, perhaps more "retro" than Gameduino---still a thing of some capabilities indeed though.
Horizon Easy-to-use rapid prototype framework for Blitzmax that comes with examples and a full game called Aiolos. Personal project of one of the people at GameForge, a browser-game portal with an eye towards the higher end in part.
ProcrastiTracker A time tracking tool that automatically tracks what applications and documents you use, and allows you to view statistics on your usage in great detail---written to be small and non-intrusive. Free, windows only, powerful, and potentially unsettling!
NVIDIA APEX A multi-platform, scalable dynamics framework. Rather than providing a low-level API that requires a physics programmer, APEX creates an environment where artists can create complex, high-level, dynamic systems without any programming.
GDR A forum where aspiring and active devs can chat/rant/hand-wring/etc---Game Developer's Refuge.
Eloquent Javascript A tutorial.
Get Localization Aims to help with translating apps via crowdsourcing mechanics and to connect prospective Translators with projects and vice versa.
Dice Calc Lets you visualize the result of rolling a bunch of dice. It supports a simple language to describe the dice you roll, based upon the common 'd' notation.
live-processing Processing clone with livecode capabilities---though it currently doesn't have access to all of the capabilities of Processing outright.
dglOpenGL.pas Seems to be the best way to incorporate the latest and greatest OpenGL functionality to FreePascal/Delphi doings as the official implementation is lacking in every respect---hence a German fan community got together and have been on top of it ever since.
Taksi Open source alternative to FRAPS whose dev has recently somewhat came back to life after a presumed hiatus.
Bytten Indie-centric site for news, reviews, articles, and the lot.
FreeGameDev Planet Rather comprehensive game/tool dev update newsfeed aggregator---I've not yet fully caught up with the thing for the shiniest of bits to mention here but it is on my todo list...lots to look at for sure.
#AltDevBlogADay Mega-blog with a high number of game dev contributors posting articles just about daily on the entire range of applicable subjects as befitting numerous people of various backgrounds.
DigiPen Student Games From the class of 2001 up to the present, here be all the various games that the folks knocking through the DigiPen program banged along on.
GOLD A free parsing system that you can use to develop your own programming languages, scripting languages and interpreters. It strives to be a development tool that can be used with numerous programming languages and on multiple platforms.
Game Prototype Challenge Exactly as you might suspect---regular timed and/or themed game prototyping events complete with post-mortems and links to the successful runners---5th one starting up relatively soon after an especially successful 4th event.
iDevGames Seems to be a goto place for Mac/iOS game dev news, discussions, etc
halfbakery Large collection of random game ideas and pretty much all manner of random ideas in general to perhaps serve as a fodder for skillful doings and/or inspirations.
Procedural Content Generation Wiki
Angel Code Bitmap Font Generator Allows you to generate bitmap fonts from TrueType fonts. The application generates both image files and character descriptions that can be read by a game for easy rendering of fonts.
Geany A text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. Works on lots of platforms and the dev should become fairly lively in the near future due to a growing team.
ack A tool like grep, designed for programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code. Perl-powered, aims to be very fast, works with a great number of languages, free, Windows-capable, etc.
Spark Lemon Fledgling game resources to buy/sell portal.
ChaiScript Powerful and lively looking scripting language designed especially for use in C++ from the ground up. An interesting quirk of their work ethic is that the latest release in the git master branch is actually stable in general versus 99% of other projects' "bleeding edge", because they don't actually incorporate anything without it passing unit testing beforehand.
MiniD Scripting language influenced by Lua, but more especially the D Programming language. Somewhat getting there on a 2.1 release to follow the last major one that got it to 2.0 proper.
Falcon An Open Source, simple, fast and powerful programming language, easy to learn and to feel comfortable with, and a scripting engine ready to empower mission-critical multithreaded applications. A distinguishing feature would probably be inherent support for a number of programming paradigms built into the thing---procedural, object oriented, prototype oriented, functional, tabular and message oriented. Currently doing a major engine rewrite in a bid to jump the thing several steps forward in performance and all else, including aims to add evolutionary programming to the supported paradigms. All modules have to be C/C++ for max performance concerns.
PL/1 Language Tools A collection of tools for learning about parsers, interpreters, compilers and virtual machines, designed from the ground up to be a minimal implementation of several common interpreter and compiler functions.
Mirah Another fledgling programming language aiming to utterly dwarf Java, this time via incorporating however many good "Ruby-like" ideas from Ruby, but not Ruby outright per se.
Physics Engines for Dummies Not an actual Dummies book, but rather a tutorial blog breaking things down in the above manner. The full source code to this set of lessons can be purchased direct from the dev for $3.99 as a catalyst for him to eat and post yet more.
MyGameFast tutorial Takes you a good ways onward on getting a game going from nothing and no experience using Panda3D and a smattering of other free tools.
Let's Build a Roguelike Final Edition Several months in the making, this free guide, with full included source code, will knock you through step-by-step into banging out a Roguelike in FreeBasic from nothing and no prior experience.
Thanks for reading all, and as always, here's hoping useful things pop up to help make things happen and get things done for folks!
ElectricThunder
Member
Now as good a time as any for a smattering of newfound points of interest and updates to earlier ones:
Sound:
IndieSFX Cornutopia offshoot that aims to provide the various sorts of "Quality" Sounds needed for the Audio side of a game project once purchased.
Otomata Free/experimental generative sequencer employing a manner of cellular automaton doings to do so.
SunVox Rather substantial looking! "SunVox is a small, fast and powerful music sequencer with modular synthesizers. It is a tool for those people who want to compose music anywhere. SunVox available for desktop PC (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), pocket computers (Windows Mobile, PalmOS, Maemo, iPhone/iPad) and netbooks." iDevice versions costs $4.99, otherwise free with dev still ongoing.
Sound Jay Yet another free and royalty free source of various sounds.
PacDV Ditto to the directly above, mention them as a source, etc.
cgMusic Another free/experimental music generating tool, aiming to perhaps hit a higher MIDI quality than other attempts, though it is possible to work it into more powerful traditional tools.
Graphics:
L3DT Windows application for generating terrain maps and textures. It is intended to help game developers and digital artists create large high-quality 3D worlds. Free and Pro editions available, Indie-friendly pricing. On the cusp of a big 3.0 release that has been cooking for a long while.
PUPP Simple, free image program---but designed specifically for game developers. Dev ongoing, but seems lively and with a solid set of targets. Tied in with the Angelcode lot.
Texture Generator Lets you write small scripts that generates images. Free, source available, seemingly a done deal as an older Angelcode project.
AsciiDraw Console application meant to serve as a replacement for standard text editors when prototyping a roguelike's interface. It provides access to all ascii characters and standard colors. Got Lua scripting support in the last update, so it should be fairly versatile going forward.
Dave Johnston's Royalty Free Textures/Images Pretty much what it says, pack of textures and their reference photos. Free to boot.
ANIMAX Assortment of free textures.
Kave Wall Stock Free Stock Photos, Images and Textures.
Iconfinder An Icon oriented search engine.
Procedural World Blog Pretty much what it says aiming to cover all the topics in turn.
Blender 3D Design Course 2.5X Free set of lessons on this topic, videos, etc.
Dave's Mapper Rather nifty looking free web-based RPG Map Generator/Editor. Recently got a rewrite/cleanup to open the door for yet more substantial potential doings in the future!
PabloDraw Text editor for Windows, designed for creating ANSI and ASCII art. Also, integrated multi-user editing support, making it the first groupware ANSI/ASCII editor in existence. Dev has been long wrought and lively, with a v3.0.9 ALPHA release currently kicking around getting situated proper. Win/Mac/Linux, .NET 4 on Win.
Radi In beta, but aiming to be a do-it-all visual web solution for Mac-folk and pushing hard on HTML5.
Pixothello A free pixelling program used to make tilesets quickly and enjoyably---also has animation features to easily make and test spritesheets for flashpunk games.
FXPression Particle Universe Aims to be a high quality particle solution for OGRE3D folks---10Euro price.
Pixexix Draw onto your 3D models using any 2D image editor---a projection texturing tool. Free and Pro versions, dev ongoing, rather cheap cost.
P-XCEL A free simple texture editor that allows you to paint and adjust the textures directly on the model. Seemingly stalled, but still.
GeoBrush: Interactive Mesh Geometry Cloning A method for interactive cloning of 3D surface geometry using a paintbrush interface, similar to the continuous cloning brush popular in image editing. Paper/video/demo/source included.
TheDesignSpace's Flame Painter Intro Tutorials First tutorials out there on this nifty thing as far as I've found thus far.
Texture Atlas Generator Free, focused, Java tool to make 'em with less tedium.
Animated SVO's "Animated Sparse Voxel Octrees. It is the first voxel animation technique of this kind. It is part of this guy, Mr. Bautembach's, bachelor's thesis. Needs OpenGl, CUDA, C#, and XNA. Documentation and such needs extending as the next targets on his to-do list.
Voxatron Upcoming voxel rendering and modeling tools with a game in tow to showcase the lot of it. Likely a game that'll draw much attention here on GAF!
ZBrush A big deal in terms of digital sculpting and painting programs---currently at ZBrush 4. Rather high end with a cost to match for professional doings.
JLMoondog's Vault Experienced freelance artist offering a varied assortment of media for other indie developers and such to make use of for free.
Dungeoneering.net Essentially a competitor of sorts to Dundjinni, with the catch that the stuff can't be used for Commercial doings. Still, lots of tiles and maps abound. Mainly just the one guy running the site providing all.
TextureLib Free texture library
Reiner's Free Graphics Large haul of Tile Sets and one GUI Set that are declared free to use so long as the pair of gentlemen the page mentions are credited proper.
Ani Pro AKA Autodesk Animator, is a 256 color paint and animation package for MSDOS. This Breton fellow here is aiming to document/resurrect the thing from the dead and shoot for further use in modern times.
qLab Ongoing video lecture series, currently at part 2, on cellular simulation and other weighty topics. Project source download packages available--the "teacher", IIRC, has been in the relevant game for a looong time.
Depixelizing Pixel Art Paper and notions towards a way to greatly tweak image resolutions in a way so as to not degrade them---certainly an important historical footnote in the Raster/Vector line of things moving forward right alongside some of the advances in Filters in MAME and such.
Backyard Ninja Design Free Stuff Yet more various free assets so long as proper credit is given in turn.
Sprite Sheet Packer Fully featured tool for combining multiple individual images into a single, efficiently laid out image. Free and powerful sounding with multi-threading support and everything.
Wood Workshop A free seamless texture editor that specializes in the creation of seamless wood textures. .NET, older but done---older project of the Genetica outfit.
Runtime World Promising generic, engine-agnostic brush-based 3D world editor written to assist game developers on creating 3D world for their games. Alpha at present, Win only for now with Mac/Linux being targets.
HasGraphics Aggregate site of various Free Graphical resources as they come up for Indie devs and such.
Art of Illusion "A free, open source 3D modelling and rendering studio. Many of its capabilities rival those found in commercial programs." Dev continues to hum along, with a 2.9 version kicking around getting the kinks worked out. Already has some pretty spiffy looking stuff like a procedural texture editor.
Virtual Mat Right...this is a bit odd. A pair of things thus far, the currently available being a Java 6 dependent 3D Dice Designing standalone app. The other bit, Virtual Mat, is aiming to be a 2.5D-3D Virtual Tabletop RPG Grid Program....thing! Currently place holdin' it up with NWN models, the writeups and teaser video clip should get a gist across. Given the general nature of it, I can see some pretty substantial applications of this going forward to bring more Tabletop and P&P doings into the PC game realm...
FlipBook Seemingly a King among animation programs, with versions and pricings from inexpensive to several hundred bucks. I mean, Don Bluth likes the thing so it MUST animate damn well when you learn how to wrangle it.
Sproxel "3d interface designed to let the user quickly create and edit voxel-based 3d models. The creation process and resulting geometry can be thought of as an extension to 2d pixel art." Free, open-source, Win/Mac/Linux, and young 'n hungry! Certainly seems like one to keep tabs on as it matures...
c64 Yourself In beta, web based, but you essentially drag n' drop a proper image according to the guidelines into the box and in return you get a C64'ized conversion.
Dynamic Dummy Image Generator
Realm of the Mad God Art Maker Spiffy little pixel art asset creator from the recently full-tilt-release on Chrome App place game. Huge TOS and could do with some better info on such, but all that is probably forthcoming and if nothing else should make for a nice pixel doodler of sorts to brainstorm.
DAME Editor There was an unspecificed, veiled threat of at least a 2.x generation after the 1.x one for this free map editor tool----that threat was carried out recently as it gained a worthy large host of new capabilities and fixes for a full numeric jump. The dev has continued to be lively as well, leaving this definitely a think to tinker with if there's even a remote chance of using anything it does, particularly in the Flash realm of doings! Hilariously, despite all this, they've not thought to update right above the massive changelog where 2.x is still a mysterious coming attraction and 1.x is the order of the day, heh.
Python:
PGU A collection of useful modules for writing games with PyGame.
Invent with Python Blog Continued lessons and sample games complete with source code.
Simpson College Computer Science Python & PyGame Examples Fairly comprehensive summary of starting issues/game examples and has a .pdf that goes into detail on the lot of it.
Learn Python the Hard Way A new site to go along with the brand new and improved 2nd edition book aimed at total beginners---Free HTML version, rather cheap .PDF, and reasonable hard copy as it shakes out. Also has a 4 week crash course program available for $250.
Just lost the final 2, large sections(Engine/Misc) nigh halfway through----damn my being a step behind on proper backups...again! I'm too drained to repeat the last couple hours via my idiocy today, so here's this much of this update at least in the meantime to hopefully be useful to folk.
If I'd just clicked the damn save icon at any one point in the last while...why oh why did I reckon "Nearly done, do it then for archival's sake"...
Don't wind up like me prospective Indies---wrecking your Sunday afternoon/night. SAVE EARLY AND OFTEN...INCREDIBLY OFTEN!
Sound:
IndieSFX Cornutopia offshoot that aims to provide the various sorts of "Quality" Sounds needed for the Audio side of a game project once purchased.
Otomata Free/experimental generative sequencer employing a manner of cellular automaton doings to do so.
SunVox Rather substantial looking! "SunVox is a small, fast and powerful music sequencer with modular synthesizers. It is a tool for those people who want to compose music anywhere. SunVox available for desktop PC (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), pocket computers (Windows Mobile, PalmOS, Maemo, iPhone/iPad) and netbooks." iDevice versions costs $4.99, otherwise free with dev still ongoing.
Sound Jay Yet another free and royalty free source of various sounds.
PacDV Ditto to the directly above, mention them as a source, etc.
cgMusic Another free/experimental music generating tool, aiming to perhaps hit a higher MIDI quality than other attempts, though it is possible to work it into more powerful traditional tools.
Graphics:
L3DT Windows application for generating terrain maps and textures. It is intended to help game developers and digital artists create large high-quality 3D worlds. Free and Pro editions available, Indie-friendly pricing. On the cusp of a big 3.0 release that has been cooking for a long while.
PUPP Simple, free image program---but designed specifically for game developers. Dev ongoing, but seems lively and with a solid set of targets. Tied in with the Angelcode lot.
Texture Generator Lets you write small scripts that generates images. Free, source available, seemingly a done deal as an older Angelcode project.
AsciiDraw Console application meant to serve as a replacement for standard text editors when prototyping a roguelike's interface. It provides access to all ascii characters and standard colors. Got Lua scripting support in the last update, so it should be fairly versatile going forward.
Dave Johnston's Royalty Free Textures/Images Pretty much what it says, pack of textures and their reference photos. Free to boot.
ANIMAX Assortment of free textures.
Kave Wall Stock Free Stock Photos, Images and Textures.
Iconfinder An Icon oriented search engine.
Procedural World Blog Pretty much what it says aiming to cover all the topics in turn.
Blender 3D Design Course 2.5X Free set of lessons on this topic, videos, etc.
Dave's Mapper Rather nifty looking free web-based RPG Map Generator/Editor. Recently got a rewrite/cleanup to open the door for yet more substantial potential doings in the future!
PabloDraw Text editor for Windows, designed for creating ANSI and ASCII art. Also, integrated multi-user editing support, making it the first groupware ANSI/ASCII editor in existence. Dev has been long wrought and lively, with a v3.0.9 ALPHA release currently kicking around getting situated proper. Win/Mac/Linux, .NET 4 on Win.
Radi In beta, but aiming to be a do-it-all visual web solution for Mac-folk and pushing hard on HTML5.
Pixothello A free pixelling program used to make tilesets quickly and enjoyably---also has animation features to easily make and test spritesheets for flashpunk games.
FXPression Particle Universe Aims to be a high quality particle solution for OGRE3D folks---10Euro price.
Pixexix Draw onto your 3D models using any 2D image editor---a projection texturing tool. Free and Pro versions, dev ongoing, rather cheap cost.
P-XCEL A free simple texture editor that allows you to paint and adjust the textures directly on the model. Seemingly stalled, but still.
GeoBrush: Interactive Mesh Geometry Cloning A method for interactive cloning of 3D surface geometry using a paintbrush interface, similar to the continuous cloning brush popular in image editing. Paper/video/demo/source included.
TheDesignSpace's Flame Painter Intro Tutorials First tutorials out there on this nifty thing as far as I've found thus far.
Texture Atlas Generator Free, focused, Java tool to make 'em with less tedium.
Animated SVO's "Animated Sparse Voxel Octrees. It is the first voxel animation technique of this kind. It is part of this guy, Mr. Bautembach's, bachelor's thesis. Needs OpenGl, CUDA, C#, and XNA. Documentation and such needs extending as the next targets on his to-do list.
Voxatron Upcoming voxel rendering and modeling tools with a game in tow to showcase the lot of it. Likely a game that'll draw much attention here on GAF!
ZBrush A big deal in terms of digital sculpting and painting programs---currently at ZBrush 4. Rather high end with a cost to match for professional doings.
JLMoondog's Vault Experienced freelance artist offering a varied assortment of media for other indie developers and such to make use of for free.
Dungeoneering.net Essentially a competitor of sorts to Dundjinni, with the catch that the stuff can't be used for Commercial doings. Still, lots of tiles and maps abound. Mainly just the one guy running the site providing all.
TextureLib Free texture library
Reiner's Free Graphics Large haul of Tile Sets and one GUI Set that are declared free to use so long as the pair of gentlemen the page mentions are credited proper.
Ani Pro AKA Autodesk Animator, is a 256 color paint and animation package for MSDOS. This Breton fellow here is aiming to document/resurrect the thing from the dead and shoot for further use in modern times.
qLab Ongoing video lecture series, currently at part 2, on cellular simulation and other weighty topics. Project source download packages available--the "teacher", IIRC, has been in the relevant game for a looong time.
Depixelizing Pixel Art Paper and notions towards a way to greatly tweak image resolutions in a way so as to not degrade them---certainly an important historical footnote in the Raster/Vector line of things moving forward right alongside some of the advances in Filters in MAME and such.
Backyard Ninja Design Free Stuff Yet more various free assets so long as proper credit is given in turn.
Sprite Sheet Packer Fully featured tool for combining multiple individual images into a single, efficiently laid out image. Free and powerful sounding with multi-threading support and everything.
Wood Workshop A free seamless texture editor that specializes in the creation of seamless wood textures. .NET, older but done---older project of the Genetica outfit.
Runtime World Promising generic, engine-agnostic brush-based 3D world editor written to assist game developers on creating 3D world for their games. Alpha at present, Win only for now with Mac/Linux being targets.
HasGraphics Aggregate site of various Free Graphical resources as they come up for Indie devs and such.
Art of Illusion "A free, open source 3D modelling and rendering studio. Many of its capabilities rival those found in commercial programs." Dev continues to hum along, with a 2.9 version kicking around getting the kinks worked out. Already has some pretty spiffy looking stuff like a procedural texture editor.
Virtual Mat Right...this is a bit odd. A pair of things thus far, the currently available being a Java 6 dependent 3D Dice Designing standalone app. The other bit, Virtual Mat, is aiming to be a 2.5D-3D Virtual Tabletop RPG Grid Program....thing! Currently place holdin' it up with NWN models, the writeups and teaser video clip should get a gist across. Given the general nature of it, I can see some pretty substantial applications of this going forward to bring more Tabletop and P&P doings into the PC game realm...
FlipBook Seemingly a King among animation programs, with versions and pricings from inexpensive to several hundred bucks. I mean, Don Bluth likes the thing so it MUST animate damn well when you learn how to wrangle it.
Sproxel "3d interface designed to let the user quickly create and edit voxel-based 3d models. The creation process and resulting geometry can be thought of as an extension to 2d pixel art." Free, open-source, Win/Mac/Linux, and young 'n hungry! Certainly seems like one to keep tabs on as it matures...
c64 Yourself In beta, web based, but you essentially drag n' drop a proper image according to the guidelines into the box and in return you get a C64'ized conversion.
Dynamic Dummy Image Generator
Realm of the Mad God Art Maker Spiffy little pixel art asset creator from the recently full-tilt-release on Chrome App place game. Huge TOS and could do with some better info on such, but all that is probably forthcoming and if nothing else should make for a nice pixel doodler of sorts to brainstorm.
DAME Editor There was an unspecificed, veiled threat of at least a 2.x generation after the 1.x one for this free map editor tool----that threat was carried out recently as it gained a worthy large host of new capabilities and fixes for a full numeric jump. The dev has continued to be lively as well, leaving this definitely a think to tinker with if there's even a remote chance of using anything it does, particularly in the Flash realm of doings! Hilariously, despite all this, they've not thought to update right above the massive changelog where 2.x is still a mysterious coming attraction and 1.x is the order of the day, heh.
Python:
PGU A collection of useful modules for writing games with PyGame.
Invent with Python Blog Continued lessons and sample games complete with source code.
Simpson College Computer Science Python & PyGame Examples Fairly comprehensive summary of starting issues/game examples and has a .pdf that goes into detail on the lot of it.
Learn Python the Hard Way A new site to go along with the brand new and improved 2nd edition book aimed at total beginners---Free HTML version, rather cheap .PDF, and reasonable hard copy as it shakes out. Also has a 4 week crash course program available for $250.
Just lost the final 2, large sections(Engine/Misc) nigh halfway through----damn my being a step behind on proper backups...again!
I'm too drained to repeat the last couple hours via my idiocy today, so here's this much of this update at least in the meantime to hopefully be useful to folk.If I'd just clicked the damn save icon at any one point in the last while...why oh why did I reckon "Nearly done, do it then for archival's sake"...
Don't wind up like me prospective Indies---wrecking your Sunday afternoon/night. SAVE EARLY AND OFTEN...INCREDIBLY OFTEN!
kinoki
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
Just started exploring XNA with Learning XNA 4.0 and I've been having a great time so far 60-70 pages in. This thread will come in handy. Thanks for the thread. It's subscribed.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Yeah, I've been looking into doing some indie development as a hobby. I'm currently trying to put together a simple platformer engine with SFML, with the eventual goal of making games on the same level of complexity as say...Kid Chameleon.
ThatObviousUser
ὠαἴÏÏιÏÏÎ¿Ï Ïαá¿Ï εἶ
The_Technomancer said:
I would start a lot simpler... It's taken me over a year to make a simple 15 level platformer. :/
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Well I'm treating this as a learning experience as well. Over the last two weeks I produced three different versions of Breakout, each time focusing not on adding more features but on producing cleaner, more modular code. I'm just beginning to work out how to handle the very very basics of platformer interaction. I've got input working pretty well and a decent if simple "jump" function as well as gravity. The current hurdle is collision detection. Its easy enough to take the bounding boxes of two sprites and check if they do overlap (SFML has a fantastic sprite class) the problem is directionality. I'm working on criteria in the collision detection to see if the immobile object is say...below the mobile object, so that it can adjust velocity accordingly.Andrex said:
Or in simpler terms: you shouldn't lose all y velocity if you collide with an object horizontally.
(And I'm fine with this taking a while as well. By the end of August I just want to be able to jump, fall, and land on a solid object)
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
I can't afford that version but I bet I can find one online that's meant only for sale in Africa and parts of India for half price! That's how I've been affording textbooks lately...Kalnos said:
Cool thread, I should start to mess around with game development again myself. My last college project using Unity 3D was a great succes.
As for other GAF members trying to build a game the best advice I can give is... 'finish what you start!'. Write a simple game design document and go from there.
As for other GAF members trying to build a game the best advice I can give is... 'finish what you start!'. Write a simple game design document and go from there.
Wwise > FMODKiriku said:
Also this is the scripting language the Q-Games guys use
http://www.somedude.net/gamemonkey/
The_Technomancer said:
If I may add a suggestion to your code regarding collision detection:
Throw the direction you are doing along with the boundrary check, and you will know which side the problem is.
I mean... if I am moving from left to right, for example.
Then I have an object that wants to position itself into the new position that is at the right (+x, 0 diff y-wise), and if the check returns that there is some object on the way, then the problem is with the left side of the colliding object as there was no problem with getting to the initial position already. If you try to jump, the direction you pass along is the "up", so any collision problems will return that problem was with the down size of the boxes.
I did a Tetris-like game after breakout/pong games, and it made me use the grid "properly", so if you can afford to create miniature grids in the game, then you can just compare two grids (n*m sized tables), one only containing the character, one containing all the background (having 1 if the space is occupied, 0 if empty), and if the addition of the two grid returns a 2 anywhere, that means you are trying to move to a space already occupied. And then you get the colliding area EXACTLY, without any borders and boxes being present.
charlemagne
Member
...this thread is the greatest.
ElectricThunder
Member
Apologies for this being so late, new plan is to split this into Engine and Misc, with Misc coming ASAP be that some days or some weeks or even longer. Times have been rough, BUT, here on Sunday morning, I have randomly gotten the biggest chance I've ever had after so many things have fallen through and am hoping to finally break on through on a nigh full-tilt Commercial Indie RPG project----fingers crossed on the, hopefully brief and successful, negotiations!
Engine:
Shoot 'Em Up Kit Promising, inexpensive means to create a variety of different shmups for modern Windows machines via Direct X tech seemingly very nearly out of beta, which is freely testable by all at the moment.
Bonzai Java OpenGL cross platform 3D engine designed to also play nicely in terms of 3D in the major browsers.
NXEngine A nearly-complete open-source clone/engine-rewrite of the classic Cave Story!
PathEngine Advanced pathfinding library with a high price to match aimed at the high end of everything.
CryEngine3 SDK Hardly breaking news here, but the next big entrant in the SDK wars with UDK and whatnot that has powered a Crysis game among others and continued to update after going public like this at a decent clip.
Fabien Sanglard's SHMUP 3D shoot 'em up engine derived from opening the source to his above titled game of an Ikaruga'ish nature that is GPL and readily situated to be used on iOS or Windows projects.
Construder Open source "Minecraft'ish" sort of 3D game---only this time written in C and especially Perl to prove it could be done. Multi-plat and the creator is occupied at the moment, but the videos and such show some solid potential.
NinevehGL Forthcoming free and open source 3D engine for iOS written as purely with Objective-C as they can wrangle---currently in late beta.
CAST II It seems to have stalled out early this year, but it IS a free open source crack an an overall 3D game engine for Delphi/Free Pascal that seems to be quite well on the way to being "there".
Laboratory2D Free-intentioned, multi-plat, likely to go open-source, easy to use 2D game engine with handy features that helps you quickly prototype and complete games that is in late Beta and looks promising---C++ and JavaScript working in concert. A few sample games made prior to this latest beta stage available.
OpenSpace3D A free and Open Source development platform for interactive real time 3D projects. OGRE powers much of it, Newton for physics, and it is aiming to hit a broad range of things on the augmented reality front such as already having some Kinect support and Wii device as well. Dev pace seems ok and it is intentioned to be as approachable as they can wrangle.
Engine:
Shoot 'Em Up Kit Promising, inexpensive means to create a variety of different shmups for modern Windows machines via Direct X tech seemingly very nearly out of beta, which is freely testable by all at the moment.
Bonzai Java OpenGL cross platform 3D engine designed to also play nicely in terms of 3D in the major browsers.
NXEngine A nearly-complete open-source clone/engine-rewrite of the classic Cave Story!
PathEngine Advanced pathfinding library with a high price to match aimed at the high end of everything.
CryEngine3 SDK Hardly breaking news here, but the next big entrant in the SDK wars with UDK and whatnot that has powered a Crysis game among others and continued to update after going public like this at a decent clip.
Fabien Sanglard's SHMUP 3D shoot 'em up engine derived from opening the source to his above titled game of an Ikaruga'ish nature that is GPL and readily situated to be used on iOS or Windows projects.
Construder Open source "Minecraft'ish" sort of 3D game---only this time written in C and especially Perl to prove it could be done. Multi-plat and the creator is occupied at the moment, but the videos and such show some solid potential.
NinevehGL Forthcoming free and open source 3D engine for iOS written as purely with Objective-C as they can wrangle---currently in late beta.
CAST II It seems to have stalled out early this year, but it IS a free open source crack an an overall 3D game engine for Delphi/Free Pascal that seems to be quite well on the way to being "there".
Laboratory2D Free-intentioned, multi-plat, likely to go open-source, easy to use 2D game engine with handy features that helps you quickly prototype and complete games that is in late Beta and looks promising---C++ and JavaScript working in concert. A few sample games made prior to this latest beta stage available.
OpenSpace3D A free and Open Source development platform for interactive real time 3D projects. OGRE powers much of it, Newton for physics, and it is aiming to hit a broad range of things on the augmented reality front such as already having some Kinect support and Wii device as well. Dev pace seems ok and it is intentioned to be as approachable as they can wrangle.
No. Don't apologize. Ever. This is the single greatest collection point of indie dev resources I have seen outside of Google itself. You have done an amazing job with this.
DownLikeBCPowder
Member
Thanks, this is a great resource for me and what I'm working on right now. Thanks a million good sire and please let me know if I can ever return such in kind! Nice.
boutrosinit
Street Fighter IV World Champion
Hi folks. I've started an "Official" Unity thread which I hope to build into quite a comprehensive pile of info.
Very work in progress. Please contribute where you can and I'll beef and pretty up the main post:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=36599093#post36599093
Very work in progress. Please contribute where you can and I'll beef and pretty up the main post:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=36599093#post36599093
ElectricThunder
Member
That Unity thread looks to be off to a good start---keep at it!
I've not forgotten this thread either, just a matter of some time and circumstance until I can make that last update I was due to make...
I've not forgotten this thread either, just a matter of some time and circumstance until I can make that last update I was due to make...
ElectricThunder
Member
Well folks, here we are again. Since last time, negotiations utterly fell through, I've not been able to find a spot with anything else since, and am generally in quite the rut/dry spell/writer's block/burn out/etc. However, I'm still paying attention as to what's out there and intend to keep at it despite it all trying to get some manner of traction. It is a bit odd becoming more informed and aware on a broad spectrum of things while still having yet to find a niche for skill growth, but what are you gonna do?
Misc:
Indie Proofing Outfit aimed at helping to proof and edit English in games, particularly for ESL folks.
Gobby Free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.
Dev-HQ Free tutorials on a variety of languages and such.
Strawberry Perl Behold, all the majesty of UNIX Perl environs and such reckoned unto a purely Windows experience!
Bennu A fork of Fenix, a high level open source game development suite which focuses on modularity and portability, making it a perfect choice for cross-platform game development. Our good chum Streets of Rage Remake is a fair metric of a partial sample of what it is capable of, as it has been further developed since those days.
NaaLaa Extra potent, free, BASIC-like language/environ with support of libraries and use of a VM instead of Machine code---explicitly game focused in terms of ease of creation. The 6th generation is brewing for OpenGL support alongside the existing custom software rendering---strikes me as one to watch.
LinuxGames Solid portal for keeping track of the goings on in the Land of Penguins.
Ludum Dare Frequent assortment of game dev compos and a supportive community.
GLBasic Yet another powerful, "living" take on BASIC wranglings----a full tilt cross platform capable package at v10 that is free for non-commercial development with a v11 seemingly due out in the not distant future as it is recently in public beta.
GAMESTORM Grand collection of doodles, sketches, and scrap-paper designs by game developers around the world, rather cool.
PGD Annual Showcase for all the Pascal Game Dev compos.
wubi Handy Ubuntu installer for Windows folks
Greenshot Spiffy lightweight screenshot tool for Windows that recently hit a big v1.0 release after some years of development---free and open source to boot.
Indie Game Mag Daily Slick and not so little e-zine doing their best to keep the pulse on the Indie scene and foster it period.
Indie Games Channel Video centric news portal on the indie slate of it.
The New Boston Deluge of tutorials across the spectrum of programming and otherwise--engines, languages, scripting, etc.
Ryzom Core Open source "all the code" aspect of the Ryzom project centered on MMORPG dev---seems to have stalled a bit, but was in Google's Summer of Code 2012 so hopefully they'll clear the hump.
Quote Unquote Interviews and quotes via indie game devs.
Primary Pad web-based word processor meant for schools and such with a free and commercial version---looks pretty well featured for group collaborating and whatnot.
AI Wisdom Grand hub of game AI centric research, articles, interviews.
FreeGameDev Wiki Aimed primarily at those develop entirely along the free/open source style on all fronts.
Polycode Been tracking this for awhile, but they shifted gears and went internal awhile back as well, now due to be some manner of powerful/spiffy new IDE that will unveil itself come Dec 1, 2012. We shall see...
Synergy Lets you easily share your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers, FOSS, cross-plat, and clipboards can be shared across a network. Free and "Premium", with the latter just being a donation vector since their last sponsor left them---they are still hard at it though!
Moonlight Ongoing effort by the Mono community to salvage and improve upon Microsoft's now foolishly abandoned Silverlight technology that once jousted with Flash...and was rather good at it...for Linux.
TeraCopy Free Windows utility designed to copy files faster and more securely, providing the user with many features--Pro version needed for Commercial use, but it is cheap.
Equalizer middleware to create and deploy parallel OpenGL-based applications---lively dev and seemingly quite on the bleeding edge side of things, suite of tools inherent to it, etc. Free and multi-platform.
Ohloh Portal aimed at the finding and stalking of open source programs alongside involvement.
.kkapture Nifty demo tool from on the the masters, produces video+audio captures of fullscreen apps, source available as well.
The Big Monk Games Daily Yet another indie news centric e-zine.
Labyrinth Abandoned, but nifty, tool for an integrated development environment for developing and recording storylines and plots. For Windows and maybe Mono users as it is .NET based.
Video Game Name Generator Yep.
Dia Free cross-plat tool to draw structured diagrams.
openFrameworks an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding--pretty sizable effort behind it too.
Red The wouldbe successor to REBOL returns with an initial public Alpha release since opening up for community involvement---they are looking to rapidly gain ground in this bid to be a futuristic, potent language, in the near future.
Pathfinder Random Treasure Generator Surely applicable otherwise as well.
Scheme Bricks A way to livecode scheme visually, by plugging in and tearing off bits of code---has a V2 incoming and is by the dev behind Fluxus who has also been hitting up an enormous amount of recent events to do with livecoding and has quite a number of writeups and pics on his dev blog tied into his main site on here.
Inno Setup Long running and lively developed free installer for Windows programs---looks and aims to be quite robust.
Epoch Language Fresh off a Release 13, a modern, full-featured programming language designed to offer rich first-class support for both symmetric and asymmetric multiprocessing. Has a ways to go yet, but parallel processing and whatnot is only going to ramp up further.
Bloom Editor It was fated to be: a 3D, highly visual centric, text editor. Yes, that's right. Currently cross-plat Beta available with a full tilt Premium edition being worked on in the shadows.
Learn Code the Hard Way Now featuring the formative edition of Zed Shaw's guide to modern C programming to join the rest.
BergZergArcade Large amount of Unity tutorials.
GamePrefabs Portal to buy and sell said aspects.
Pixel Prospector's Indie Guide Helpful array of info and links for new indies and existing as well.
Itemizer A small application that lets you define attribute sets for (C)RPG items, create item catalogs from these sets and edit the item data in the catalogs. Itemizer can also be used to manage character and other game entity data in (C)RPGs.
Moonscript Dynamic scripting language that compiles into, and generally lets you harvest the benefits of, Lua.
Code Academy Free online learning resource for a variety of subjects, Python and Ruby among them.
Displayhack Site for participating in or enjoying real-time graphics, visual arts, motion graphics and the demoscene.
Sublime Text 2 Powerful, modern commercial text editor that saw a big release this past Summer after a long beta period.
MorphOS Something of a woudbe successor to the spirit of the classic Amiga OS, this long running project gives a new purpose to discarded Apple PPC macs and whatnot.
Icaros Desktop Pre-configured AROS desktop environment for the PC platform, distributed on a bootable live media. The AROS Research Operating System is a open source lightweight, efficient and flexible desktop operating system, aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS 3.1 at the API level, while improving on it in many areas. Has a big v1.5 release likely due out by the year's end.
Amiga OS4 "Official" successor to the classic Amiga OS helmed by Hyperion Entertainment---also fights MorphOS for those old PPC machines though it does have an experimental "high end" X-1000 machine available.
ACP Atari ColdFire---a community attempt at a new and more powerful Atari clone using the above chip and FPGA sorcery. Exists, costs hundreds of dollars, and generally works with the vast array of Atari software that people actually kept writing all these years. Amazing that this exists in the slightest.
OSNews Excellent site for keeping up with the goings on in the OS world, fringe or otherwise.
Linux Mint Rapidly gaining different take on Ubuntu as far as Linux environs go, good pace of substantial release updates.
TimeCult A simple yet powerful task management and time tracking application. Supports a hierarchy of projects and tasks, multiple taks timers, data export to a comma-separated file, detailed time log, dynamically computed summaries of used time per each project.
pouet Ultimate hub of the demoscene and archival thereof.
SFGUI Fast, simple and native C++ GUI library for SFML. It provides a rich set of widgets and is highly customizable via themes.
Genode Experimental, alternative OS with lively dev pace aimed at a better order of operations when it comes to everything an OS contends with and a stable environ---has made a great deal of progress here in 2012 and at this rate may draw much attention come 2013.
Razor-qt FOSS lightweight desktop environment based on Qt technologies. It has been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and an intuitive interface. Unlike most desktop environments, Razor-qt also works fine with weak machines---handy in the arsenal of Linux devs I'd think.
Fantasy Name Generator Indeed.
Dreckig-OS Madness in the form of Assembly. OS for the x86 chip architecture. It is written in all assembly language. With a 10 kilobyte kernel, it is one of the smallest operating systems out there. Dreckig uses a megalithic kernel architecture, so everything is in the kernel, this makes it very fast. A megalithic kernel basically takes the UNIX feature 'everything is a file' to an extreme, in Dreckig 'everything is one file'. Dev pace is semi-lively and some wonderful person made a text-based adventure game OS fork of it already.
CompoHub Grand collector of all the game dev compo events globally.
ANX Alpha, yet growing, platform independent game framework which is compatible with Microsoft's XNA Framework---handy since last I saw the future of XNA is looking grim not unlike Silverlight before it.
AspireOS Another in the AROS stable of operating systems, this Amiga-inspired take on it aimed at giving new/better life to a fair range of i386 machines on top of being super-lightweight and fast booting---fairly lively dev.
64 Digits Game dev portal and community site of sorts, has compos, tutorials, and games they host.
Commodore Free Very nice e-zine that keeps tabs on all the goings on past and present in the C64 world---which is quite lively!
Tiggit A desktop app that installs and launches games with one click. It is sort of like an open source Steam clone, but much simpler and currently with only freeware games and demos. Substantial Beta off a big rewrite landed not long ago, so the future looks bright for them if they can keep it up and pursue quality.
Fossil Yet another open-source version control system vying for use while having some robust features to it---cross-plat and in lively dev it seems.
Dxtory A movie capture tool only for DirextX/OpenGL application, potentially more powerful than FRAPS and the like.
Indie Marketing 101: The Right and Wrong Ways..
Programming, Motherfucker The palpable hate and rage of Zed Shaw became a site with links to a variety of resources to help people on along to get on it the lot of it without dancing around.
National Game Development Month Compo and resource site for the June competition, this year's inaugural assortment available.
Beginner's Guide to Roguelike Dev in C/C++ Incomplete, but seemingly progressing.
donjon RPG tools generator Hits a wide variety of areas, quite cool.
Zorin-OS Scrappy OS aiming to be an ideal bridge to Linux from Windows---dev pace kicking up nicely and they've a deal with a PC solution outright with locked in compatibility.
BASIC Gaming Nice e-zine keeping tabs on the FreeBasic scene and those on a similar level---fair bit of game dev going on out of the spotlight.
Critical Path Project Tons of interviews across the spectrum with game developers of various stripes.
Gamedev tuts+ Range of relevant tutorials and such.
HelenOS Another promising micro-kernel OS on the cusp of more general audience capabilities, this time out of a Uni in Prague---dev pace is good and bodes well for next year.
Parallella Crowdfunded $99 Parallel-Processing centric "Super Computer" due out next year by and large---much of it open and hoping to be a real shot in the arm for learning, progress, and such on this front.
Articyraft The first professional tool for story and game design as well as content creation. It is the all-in-one-place solution for your design documentation, delivering specialised views tailored to deliver a specialised tool for designers of interactive software. Trial and expensive commercial edition available, though it does appear pretty robust on the features list and screens---fairly surprised that only now is something like this vying to be..well..viable.
Indie Game Design Do's and Don'ts Manifesto by Edmund McMillen
Procedural World Blog of one talented guy trying to wrestle down the whole of procedural doings and claim victory--may well do it!
MindCandy 3 discs worth of some of the very best of the Demoscene these past several years--many a technical marvel and artsy doing.
Cliffski's 2012 Guide to Advertising your Indie PC game online
Complete roguelike tutorial using C++ and libtcod
gwen C++ GUI system aimed at game development and such---MIT license and packing some features.
Wiki on Disk magazines A subject well worth reading on to better understand computer history, NSFW content being something likely to encounter though in a more "Visual Arts" sense---Hugi has a vast trove of informative issues going back years in English available free to all!
Well, that's the lot pretty much and now I can cycle back once more...eventually. Thanks for reading, presuming any of it was at all helpful as that's the plan and all, and please feel free to point out gaps or just general feedback as per usual. Maybe I can hit another assortment of the areas by year's end~
Misc:
Indie Proofing Outfit aimed at helping to proof and edit English in games, particularly for ESL folks.
Gobby Free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.
Dev-HQ Free tutorials on a variety of languages and such.
Strawberry Perl Behold, all the majesty of UNIX Perl environs and such reckoned unto a purely Windows experience!
Bennu A fork of Fenix, a high level open source game development suite which focuses on modularity and portability, making it a perfect choice for cross-platform game development. Our good chum Streets of Rage Remake is a fair metric of a partial sample of what it is capable of, as it has been further developed since those days.
NaaLaa Extra potent, free, BASIC-like language/environ with support of libraries and use of a VM instead of Machine code---explicitly game focused in terms of ease of creation. The 6th generation is brewing for OpenGL support alongside the existing custom software rendering---strikes me as one to watch.
LinuxGames Solid portal for keeping track of the goings on in the Land of Penguins.
Ludum Dare Frequent assortment of game dev compos and a supportive community.
GLBasic Yet another powerful, "living" take on BASIC wranglings----a full tilt cross platform capable package at v10 that is free for non-commercial development with a v11 seemingly due out in the not distant future as it is recently in public beta.
GAMESTORM Grand collection of doodles, sketches, and scrap-paper designs by game developers around the world, rather cool.
PGD Annual Showcase for all the Pascal Game Dev compos.
wubi Handy Ubuntu installer for Windows folks
Greenshot Spiffy lightweight screenshot tool for Windows that recently hit a big v1.0 release after some years of development---free and open source to boot.
Indie Game Mag Daily Slick and not so little e-zine doing their best to keep the pulse on the Indie scene and foster it period.
Indie Games Channel Video centric news portal on the indie slate of it.
The New Boston Deluge of tutorials across the spectrum of programming and otherwise--engines, languages, scripting, etc.
Ryzom Core Open source "all the code" aspect of the Ryzom project centered on MMORPG dev---seems to have stalled a bit, but was in Google's Summer of Code 2012 so hopefully they'll clear the hump.
Quote Unquote Interviews and quotes via indie game devs.
Primary Pad web-based word processor meant for schools and such with a free and commercial version---looks pretty well featured for group collaborating and whatnot.
AI Wisdom Grand hub of game AI centric research, articles, interviews.
FreeGameDev Wiki Aimed primarily at those develop entirely along the free/open source style on all fronts.
Polycode Been tracking this for awhile, but they shifted gears and went internal awhile back as well, now due to be some manner of powerful/spiffy new IDE that will unveil itself come Dec 1, 2012. We shall see...
Synergy Lets you easily share your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers, FOSS, cross-plat, and clipboards can be shared across a network. Free and "Premium", with the latter just being a donation vector since their last sponsor left them---they are still hard at it though!
Moonlight Ongoing effort by the Mono community to salvage and improve upon Microsoft's now foolishly abandoned Silverlight technology that once jousted with Flash...and was rather good at it...for Linux.
TeraCopy Free Windows utility designed to copy files faster and more securely, providing the user with many features--Pro version needed for Commercial use, but it is cheap.
Equalizer middleware to create and deploy parallel OpenGL-based applications---lively dev and seemingly quite on the bleeding edge side of things, suite of tools inherent to it, etc. Free and multi-platform.
Ohloh Portal aimed at the finding and stalking of open source programs alongside involvement.
.kkapture Nifty demo tool from on the the masters, produces video+audio captures of fullscreen apps, source available as well.
The Big Monk Games Daily Yet another indie news centric e-zine.
Labyrinth Abandoned, but nifty, tool for an integrated development environment for developing and recording storylines and plots. For Windows and maybe Mono users as it is .NET based.
Video Game Name Generator Yep.
Dia Free cross-plat tool to draw structured diagrams.
openFrameworks an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding--pretty sizable effort behind it too.
Red The wouldbe successor to REBOL returns with an initial public Alpha release since opening up for community involvement---they are looking to rapidly gain ground in this bid to be a futuristic, potent language, in the near future.
Pathfinder Random Treasure Generator Surely applicable otherwise as well.
Scheme Bricks A way to livecode scheme visually, by plugging in and tearing off bits of code---has a V2 incoming and is by the dev behind Fluxus who has also been hitting up an enormous amount of recent events to do with livecoding and has quite a number of writeups and pics on his dev blog tied into his main site on here.
Inno Setup Long running and lively developed free installer for Windows programs---looks and aims to be quite robust.
Epoch Language Fresh off a Release 13, a modern, full-featured programming language designed to offer rich first-class support for both symmetric and asymmetric multiprocessing. Has a ways to go yet, but parallel processing and whatnot is only going to ramp up further.
Bloom Editor It was fated to be: a 3D, highly visual centric, text editor. Yes, that's right. Currently cross-plat Beta available with a full tilt Premium edition being worked on in the shadows.
Learn Code the Hard Way Now featuring the formative edition of Zed Shaw's guide to modern C programming to join the rest.
BergZergArcade Large amount of Unity tutorials.
GamePrefabs Portal to buy and sell said aspects.
Pixel Prospector's Indie Guide Helpful array of info and links for new indies and existing as well.
Itemizer A small application that lets you define attribute sets for (C)RPG items, create item catalogs from these sets and edit the item data in the catalogs. Itemizer can also be used to manage character and other game entity data in (C)RPGs.
Moonscript Dynamic scripting language that compiles into, and generally lets you harvest the benefits of, Lua.
Code Academy Free online learning resource for a variety of subjects, Python and Ruby among them.
Displayhack Site for participating in or enjoying real-time graphics, visual arts, motion graphics and the demoscene.
Sublime Text 2 Powerful, modern commercial text editor that saw a big release this past Summer after a long beta period.
MorphOS Something of a woudbe successor to the spirit of the classic Amiga OS, this long running project gives a new purpose to discarded Apple PPC macs and whatnot.
Icaros Desktop Pre-configured AROS desktop environment for the PC platform, distributed on a bootable live media. The AROS Research Operating System is a open source lightweight, efficient and flexible desktop operating system, aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS 3.1 at the API level, while improving on it in many areas. Has a big v1.5 release likely due out by the year's end.
Amiga OS4 "Official" successor to the classic Amiga OS helmed by Hyperion Entertainment---also fights MorphOS for those old PPC machines though it does have an experimental "high end" X-1000 machine available.
ACP Atari ColdFire---a community attempt at a new and more powerful Atari clone using the above chip and FPGA sorcery. Exists, costs hundreds of dollars, and generally works with the vast array of Atari software that people actually kept writing all these years. Amazing that this exists in the slightest.
OSNews Excellent site for keeping up with the goings on in the OS world, fringe or otherwise.
Linux Mint Rapidly gaining different take on Ubuntu as far as Linux environs go, good pace of substantial release updates.
TimeCult A simple yet powerful task management and time tracking application. Supports a hierarchy of projects and tasks, multiple taks timers, data export to a comma-separated file, detailed time log, dynamically computed summaries of used time per each project.
pouet Ultimate hub of the demoscene and archival thereof.
SFGUI Fast, simple and native C++ GUI library for SFML. It provides a rich set of widgets and is highly customizable via themes.
Genode Experimental, alternative OS with lively dev pace aimed at a better order of operations when it comes to everything an OS contends with and a stable environ---has made a great deal of progress here in 2012 and at this rate may draw much attention come 2013.
Razor-qt FOSS lightweight desktop environment based on Qt technologies. It has been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and an intuitive interface. Unlike most desktop environments, Razor-qt also works fine with weak machines---handy in the arsenal of Linux devs I'd think.
Fantasy Name Generator Indeed.
Dreckig-OS Madness in the form of Assembly. OS for the x86 chip architecture. It is written in all assembly language. With a 10 kilobyte kernel, it is one of the smallest operating systems out there. Dreckig uses a megalithic kernel architecture, so everything is in the kernel, this makes it very fast. A megalithic kernel basically takes the UNIX feature 'everything is a file' to an extreme, in Dreckig 'everything is one file'. Dev pace is semi-lively and some wonderful person made a text-based adventure game OS fork of it already.
CompoHub Grand collector of all the game dev compo events globally.
ANX Alpha, yet growing, platform independent game framework which is compatible with Microsoft's XNA Framework---handy since last I saw the future of XNA is looking grim not unlike Silverlight before it.
AspireOS Another in the AROS stable of operating systems, this Amiga-inspired take on it aimed at giving new/better life to a fair range of i386 machines on top of being super-lightweight and fast booting---fairly lively dev.
64 Digits Game dev portal and community site of sorts, has compos, tutorials, and games they host.
Commodore Free Very nice e-zine that keeps tabs on all the goings on past and present in the C64 world---which is quite lively!
Tiggit A desktop app that installs and launches games with one click. It is sort of like an open source Steam clone, but much simpler and currently with only freeware games and demos. Substantial Beta off a big rewrite landed not long ago, so the future looks bright for them if they can keep it up and pursue quality.
Fossil Yet another open-source version control system vying for use while having some robust features to it---cross-plat and in lively dev it seems.
Dxtory A movie capture tool only for DirextX/OpenGL application, potentially more powerful than FRAPS and the like.
Indie Marketing 101: The Right and Wrong Ways..
Programming, Motherfucker The palpable hate and rage of Zed Shaw became a site with links to a variety of resources to help people on along to get on it the lot of it without dancing around.
National Game Development Month Compo and resource site for the June competition, this year's inaugural assortment available.
Beginner's Guide to Roguelike Dev in C/C++ Incomplete, but seemingly progressing.
donjon RPG tools generator Hits a wide variety of areas, quite cool.
Zorin-OS Scrappy OS aiming to be an ideal bridge to Linux from Windows---dev pace kicking up nicely and they've a deal with a PC solution outright with locked in compatibility.
BASIC Gaming Nice e-zine keeping tabs on the FreeBasic scene and those on a similar level---fair bit of game dev going on out of the spotlight.
Critical Path Project Tons of interviews across the spectrum with game developers of various stripes.
Gamedev tuts+ Range of relevant tutorials and such.
HelenOS Another promising micro-kernel OS on the cusp of more general audience capabilities, this time out of a Uni in Prague---dev pace is good and bodes well for next year.
Parallella Crowdfunded $99 Parallel-Processing centric "Super Computer" due out next year by and large---much of it open and hoping to be a real shot in the arm for learning, progress, and such on this front.
Articy
raft The first professional tool for story and game design as well as content creation. It is the all-in-one-place solution for your design documentation, delivering specialised views tailored to deliver a specialised tool for designers of interactive software. Trial and expensive commercial edition available, though it does appear pretty robust on the features list and screens---fairly surprised that only now is something like this vying to be..well..viable.Indie Game Design Do's and Don'ts Manifesto by Edmund McMillen
Procedural World Blog of one talented guy trying to wrestle down the whole of procedural doings and claim victory--may well do it!
MindCandy 3 discs worth of some of the very best of the Demoscene these past several years--many a technical marvel and artsy doing.
Cliffski's 2012 Guide to Advertising your Indie PC game online
Complete roguelike tutorial using C++ and libtcod
gwen C++ GUI system aimed at game development and such---MIT license and packing some features.
Wiki on Disk magazines A subject well worth reading on to better understand computer history, NSFW content being something likely to encounter though in a more "Visual Arts" sense---Hugi has a vast trove of informative issues going back years in English available free to all!
Well, that's the lot pretty much and now I can cycle back once more...eventually. Thanks for reading, presuming any of it was at all helpful as that's the plan and all, and please feel free to point out gaps or just general feedback as per usual. Maybe I can hit another assortment of the areas by year's end~
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