Audiosurf is doing really well, you could say it’s steaming, you may must have spotted it on sites like IGF, youtube, Gamasutra, and Gamespot! And as from the 15th of February available from the steam network, for just $9.95!

A review from Voodoo Extreme concluding with a 4.5 out of 5 rating!

The Conclusion

The Good:

+ Addictive, score-based gameplay
+ Excellent visuals and beat-matching
+ Worldwide leaderboards with friend integration
+ Achievements
+ Cheat reporting system

The Bad:

- Menu music that cannot be muted
- Windowed mode fussy about resolutions (manually drag to circumvent issue)
- Website services currently offline
- Dull gameplay on slow songs
- No Mono-only scoreboards
- Your eyes will melt on Elite difficulty

Have a look at these two fine resources. Rhys posted these great tutorials on the forum a few days back, one about shaders and one about matrices. I thought I’d mention them here as well.

Original posts: Shader tutorial , Matrix tutorial.

Thanks Rhys!

From gameplay, to presentation to input devices, videogames are a hotbed of innovation. Ernest Adams notes 50 game design innovations, some that have already made their impact, and others that will shape the future of the medium…

Article link

As you might know speed is a very importand issue for 3D engines, a good start for performance is to write highly optimized code. Here’s an article about how John Carmack uses a magic constant (0×5f3759df) to calculate an inverse square root. Article link

However interesting, the credits for this magic constant might not be Carmac’ but someone else’ as you can read in this post on beyond3D. A e-mail from the man himself actually confirms this.