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I see this headline in the latest ACM TechNews:
Educators Seek New Ways to Steer Kids Toward Technical Fields

I used to do serialization using all kinds of fancy templates and macros. You can create pretty elegant systems that way. However, at some point, simplicity should win out. Here's a system that might work just fine for you:

A simple packet class, which really is all you need:

class packet {
public:
  packet() : pos_(0) {}
  void append(void const *data, size_t size) {

Here's a new perfmon graph of the memory leak progress over half a day that I'm seeing on my computer. It's definitely *something* slowly eating my memory. But it doesn't show up in the process monitor.

For work, I'm using a Dell Inspiron 1340 laptop. It's a wonderful piece of machinery, with Windows 7 professional 64-bit, a Core 2 Duo with 6 MB of cache, 4 GB of 1066 MHz RAM, 128 GB SSD and (this is the key) an NVIDIA 9400M and a G210M working in tandem (SLI) to get me a 13" laptop that scores 5.8 on Windows Experience Index. Yay technology!

Included, please find two DLLs: A main Havok content tools wrapper, and a simple C# assembly that actually exposes a content importer for use with XNA Game Studio version 3.1. Drop these in your solution folder, and point your content project at the HavokImporter.dll assembly (add as a Reference to the Content project).

Politics. I often try to stay away from it in writing, because it'll come back to haunt you later. However, at this point, what I hear and read about healthcare reform makes me sad. But first, let me set the stage:

While I'm thinking about lighting, I'm dropping in a camera, and a player model based on kW Animation and kW X-port. This is mainly for proportion, and to get a feeling for what a unified scene will look like.

So, I'm generating a dungeon-like structure procedurally (in Rogue-like tradition).

Initially, I just lit it using a "sunlight" type directional light. However, that looks approximately like ass. Mainly because that's not how dungeons are actually lit, I guess :-)

Last week-end, I lost the boot disk for my Linux server. Mostly, that server just serves as a file server for MP3 files, photos and ripped DVDs these days, but not being able to listen to music or watch movies does cramp your style a little bit.

I recently have answered several questions about how to structure a networking library such that it can be easy to use for users of the library and/or when expanding the game you're writing. Here are some thoughts on that. (Code examples in C++)

Networking generally ends up needing to do three things:

1) Mirror state updates from one object to another.
2) Request remote services ("RPC").