For the past 2 years at least, one of the major buzzwords around the gaming industry involves some type of networking. Whether it be a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG (such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft), or social networks disguised as games such as Linden Labs’ Second Life just getting computers to “talk” to each other is becoming increasingly important for game developers. This entry will focus more on some basic terminology and concepts which is meant for those who are just getting started with networking with a gaming focus.
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In many ways, the DirectX9.0c SDK is a radical migration of the DirectX game library than any of its previous versions. While the DirectX8.1 release marked some new refinements available to the developer (a marked improvement of the D3DX helper library for one thing, along with a re-tooled set of DirectPlay interfaces), DirectX9.0c takes things quite a bit further.

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What is XNA?

Although Microsoft has been providing a quality game development SDK through the DirectX family of libraries, the advent of the C# and .NET managed environment is providing you with the opportunity of accessing DirectX components through the .NET runtime. When it was first introduced in the DirectX9.0 SDK, it was known as “Managed DirectX” (or MDX) and quickly became a favorite set of libraries for .NET games.

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Welcome to the first tutorial on using the Lightweight Java Game Library created by these Java wizards.
A lot of work has gone into the library to effectively create an environment within the Java runtime capable of supporting high speed access to the display and input devices that games rely on.

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Welcome to the first tutorial on programming some OpenGL! Before we go into the specifics of drawing to our graphics device, we need to cover some quick ground in setting the system up to properly communicate with our game.
Due to the fact that OpenGL is a cross-platform library, meaning it can run under several different operating systems as well as different hardware architectures, it only makes a little more sense to try and take advantage of a cross-platform library to handle interaction with the player. Luckily such a technology is available and is known as the “Simple DirectMedia Layer” or just “SDL”.

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