What it says. Amusing.

Update: Joystiq has done some research on this and there are reasons to believe it is not true (thanks, Steve Lee).

Joerg Plewe currently is a senior Java and GUI developer and has been in many areas of IT ranging from embedded programming to bioinformatics and games. Joerg has studied physics and used to work with languages like C/C++, Forth, Lisp, Assembly and others in all kinds of environments.

That may be so, but I know Joerg Plewe as the programmer I used to work with over 10 years ago at Blue Byte Software. He is a very serious programmer, and almost talked me into developing an interest in FORTH. The world might have been very different if he had succeeded.

He has a blog over at java.net where he mainly talks about Java (duh), but also about physics/dynamics stacks and cloud rendering.

He is also one of the key people behind Flying Guns, an open source distributed 3D simulation framework (aka 3D action flight sim). It is based on a framework for distributed simulations, all written in Java. Pretty impressive!

If by some chance you haven't yet heard of "Zero Punctuation", Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's video game review column over at The Escapist, well, go check it out. It's very entertaining.

Braid, one of the more interesting indie games I've noticed in the last few years, is coming to Xbox Live Arcade. Which means I will be able to play it, seeing as I don't own a PC.

There's a lot more I could say about Braid and indie games. And perhaps one day I will.

(Via Kim Pallister.)

Nerve.com has sex advice from video-game designers, and it's not a set-up for cheap joke. OK, it is part of a series which includes sex advice from surfers and dog walkers. Still, it features Heather Kelley and Randy Smith, so it can't be all bad.

(Via Alice.)

I've started reading Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' several times, but, while I appreciate the peculiar effect the book generates, I've never been able to get further than about one third. Luckily I won't have to try anymore, since R. Sikoryak has remade the book in the style of an old-school Batman comic. Behold the adventures of Raskol!

I notice that R. Sikoryak has adapted many other masterpieces of literature. Action Camus! Crypt of Brontë! Good news for people like me who lack the mental fortitude to read anything with more than ten pages. Soon I can impress women at cocktail parties with my knowledge of literachur.

(Forgot where I found the original link, sorry.)

Metaplace: open DIY virtual worlds for everyone. Finally we know what Areae, Raph Koster's company, has been working on. It sounds very much like what Brian Moriarty envisioned in his Listen! speech at the GDC in 1997.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Update: Alice has a lot more information, as she should since she is way more focused on this subject than I am.

Here is an interesting article about Vocaloid 2, a program developed by Yamaha that, given lyrics and a melody, generates anime-style singing.

The singing sounds like a normal human voice modified by digital effects, such as one can hear in some of the music kids listen to these days (and I am assuming here that those songs do not use synthesized singing). Apparently the software is a big hit in Japan (go go user-generated content - the Innovator's Dilemma at work again).

I wonder if singing is easier to synthesize than speech. I wonder if this is related to the fact that accents are harder to make out in singing than in speech. Further restraining the problem domain to the kind of singing one hears in anime-style songs probably makes things even easier.

Still, a promising step on the way to usable text-to-speech. I can easily imagine an anime-style game using this technology.

(Via Boing Boing.)

There are many sites about game development out there, but I bet there's not a lot with a list of recent articles like this:

• Watching Sunsets
• Bubble Sort and Merge Sort
• Seeking for God's will and guidance
• Basic XOR Encryption(c++)
• Romans and Computer Games
• Fun-factor

In fact, it is quite likely that the Christian Coders Network is unique. I'd heard of the Christian Game Developers Conference, but this was news to me.

(Thanks, Tobi!)

Read Intel's press release.

I wonder what that means for Havok on non-Intel platforms. Like all current consoles. Is it RenderWare all over again? Well, probably not, but it might have some amusing effects on the middleware market.

(Thanks, Tobi!)

Update: Since I just phrased it so nicely in an ICQ conversation about the similarities between this acquisition and EA buying Criterion: I don't think Intel will screw up Havok (at least, not in the way EA arguably screwed up the Renderware bits of Criterion). Intel doesn't need Havok for its own development. Intel needs other people to need Havok and Intel needs other people to buy the CPUs that Havok needs. Intel has a history of buying companies that produce software that requires heavy processing power. Still, I'd worry if I were in Havok's AMD optimization team.