3 Motivators in One Day!

Somebody's trying to tell me something.

First off, everybody who's able must download and experience the Lost Coast map for Half-Life 2. Guess what? It's the first game level I've ever seen that has developer commentary audio built in. And I found it inspiring. Stuff like this makes me proud to be a gamer.

Gabe Newell and the rest of Valve Software have released the Lost Coast "tour" as an experiment to gauge the interest of the community in learning about Valve's production process. I encourage everyone reading this, whether you've played the map or not, to email gaben@valvesoftware.com and recommend that his team do indeed keep producing this kind of material. It's good for us, and it's good for a somewhat stagnant video game industry.

Why didn't anyone have this idea before? I'm sure as hell going to include commentary in Vyde where I can. And I predict now that Valve just slapped a "DUH!" moment on every video game maker out there, we'll start to see commentary tracks on more and more games. I can't wait.

Second, the Visual Studio 2005 RTM was released yesterday! Happy day! I'm absolutely in love with this IDE. I've been using it at work and have gauged a 400% productivity increase.

Third, ZMan posted a link to a whole page of Managed DirectX Tutorials at C-Unit.

I'm gonna go work on some OOA for Vyde now. Again, if anyone has any recommendations for blog hosts, please endure the CAPTCHA and post a comment about it.