 | from David Bolton
I'd suggested that if any reader wanted a mention of their open source package to let me know and the first three projects are now listed on a new page. This will be ongoing, so fill me in with your details, so long as it's implemented in C, C++ or C#. Have a great week! PS. Thanks for the user feedback to my request last week and full text newsletters are back! PPS. One more week for Challenge 29- entries and scores are being updated every few days- details below!
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In the Spotlight | FreeSpace 2 Source Code Project
 FreeSpace 2 was released in October 2000 and was considered one of the best space sims with a rating of 9.4 on gamespot.com. You can still buy the game from a legitimate download site gog.com for $5.99 but commercially it wasn't a success and the company Volition Inc was acquired by THQ. The source code (in C) was released in 2002 and the individual programmers who were enhancing the original code soon organized themselves into the FreeSpace Source Code Project and kept on working. Judging by the forum activity, it's still going strong. What makes this different from other games whose source code has been released is that - You can get the game graphics from the retail game.
- Ongoing development of FreeSpace Open
- Development of FreeSpace open has been extensively documented on the Wiki.
There have been several total conversions (replacing all the original files) e.g. the Babylon Project with over a 100 models based on the the Babylon 5 universe. Getting involved with release commercial game source can be overwhelming but at least here there is help and documentation. If you know of any other similar type projects built around released game source, please let me know.
| | An Astonishingly Simple Concept
There is a simple technique that anyone can use to help avoid mistakes. Without this technique the US commercial aviation industry may have taken a lot longer to be established and it has been proven to save lives in hospital. It's also a technique I use some days. The first prototype of the B17 Flying Fortress bomber crashed killing two of the five crew because the takeoff sequence of flight controls was too long to remember everything and a vital step was overlooked. After that they introduced the humble checklist. It's had other successes as well; I highly recommend this New Yorker magazine article by Atul Gawande. Some software changes are complex enough to require a checklist and it helps brings new developers up to speed by insisting they follow the list. For example say for checking code in to a version control system or deploying databases. Humans can on average remember seven things at once, without the help of a mnemonic type memory system. So if there are more than seven steps then create a checklist.
| Programming Challenge 29 Heating Up
We've now got five entries with average times running from 0.11 to 3.3 seconds. Anyone can send in (hopefully) faster entries from now until the end of November. I'm not publishing any source code until then. Since I wrote this we've had more entries and there's still a week to go so keep entering!
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