I’m going to be taking a break from blogging until the new year now, so I’d just like to thank you for all your support this year, and I hope to see you again in 2012! In the meantime, here’s a great Flash game for programmers. The game requires you to test robots by adding [...]Section 8: Prejudice is a first person shooter that uses the Unreal Engine 3 and was made available for download only on PC, Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. In a fascinating case study, TimeGate Studios invites you to see how they optimised the performance of the game and increased it from 24FPS to 28FPS [...]Intel’s Level Up 2011 Game Demo contest has recently gone live. So if you fancy your chances and want to show off your games skills – and pwn your rivals then here’s the chance. Not only will you have the opportunity to shine, but this year Valve Software has teamed up with Intel as sponsor. [...]I know I’ve had the experience of having a particular technical problem and having to try lots of different tools to find one that can solve it for me. It can be frustrating, because a lot of the time you’re experimenting to get to know the tool, rather than actually putting it to work to [...]I’ve heard a lot of people advocating task-based parallelism over the last couple of years, the idea that the code should be abstracted away from cores and threads and packaged into tasks which can be run across the available resources. Shannon Cepeda has written a short but interesting blog post on Intel Software Network, outlining [...]I don’t know much about the multicore architecture of games consoles, so I was interested to read an article by Katrina Archer, a software engineer for Radical Entertainment, an Activision/Blizzard studio. In her article ‘Practical Game Architecture for Multicore Systems’, she outlines the main differences between the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC platforms, from [...]If you’re a programmer, you might have the right mindset and skills for a career in the secret service. That’s why GCHQ, one of the three UK Intelligence and Security Agencies, has set up an online puzzle called ‘Can you crack it?’, inviting people to crack the code they’ve created. It’s a screenful of hex [...]You might remember I blogged previously about the Multicore Communication API (MCAPI), an API for multicore communication providing source level portability, and targeting closely distributed computing which means multiple cores on a chip and/or multiple processors on a board. The gentlemen from the Multicore Association whom I interviewed for that post, Sven Brehmer and Markus Levy, [...]There’s a line that’s usually attributed to Goethe: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!” Leaving aside the fact that the Goethe Society of North America reportedly spent two years trying to find out if it really does come from Goethe and couldn’t [...]