I found couple of good videos from the UDK wiki. I decided to download the UDK and try to make something with it. As I have used hammer before and I have experience on compiling source sdk, it wasn’t hard to learn with the videos.

Comparing to the hammer editor, UDK can be harder for first, but after while the UDK has many advantages over the Hammer editor.

Hammer editor is much easier to start with, because on UDK you need to use one special box to insert every brush. It is bit confusing at first.

But after I realized how the brush stuff worked, UDK became much easier. Inserting materials is awesome. Content browser is much better and faster than the Hammer browser. And lining materials automatically is just so useful feature.

Kismet is also much better way to create scripts/events to levels than the Hammers own I/O system. It is also very easy to make animations with Kismet+Matinee.

Only problems that I have with the Unreal editor is mostly just the amount of features. There is just so many options to setup

The play in editor feature is also nice, but it is not so awesome as it could be. It makes developing faster, but it won’t remove compiling…

On the code/mod side. UDK is MUCH easier to start with. With Source SDK you need to install Visual C++, extract the source, configure it and compile. With UDK you can code with unrealscript and compile that. Unrealscript is much easier than c++ and it won’t explode the whole game if you forget one variable somewhere.

Valve has to make some serious upgrades to Source to get more developers to use it. Unreal engine is very popular engine and there is only couple of non-valve source games.

I am going to play with the UDK some more. Maybe make my own mod or something. But only problem with UDK is that I don’t want to make maps for UT3 only I have to use Hammer if I want to make maps for my favorite games.

C++ is one of the most used languages, especially in the gaming industry. As I like to code lot in various languages, I had to try out the C++.

My coding experience in the past have been some coolbasic,random scripting languages and lots of php and mysql. So when I started coding c++, I had good knowledge of coding in general.

First “hello world” apps I build on Linux system using g++/vim. Setting up development environment and commonly used libraries on Linux was easy because of the apt-get.

Because I like playing games, I want to build my own games, so next step after the “hello world” is to get ball on the screen and move it. I build the app using sdl. This was the part where I really started to get bugs.

When I finally got the moving ball on screen working, I tried to port to windows… Working with c++, windows and custom libraries is pain on windows. I have to manually install every damn piece of libraries I want… I can’t apt-get anything…

It took couple of weeks of lazy coding to get the windows port working. After that I build small asteroids kind of game/toy, but porting that back to Linux made more problems because some variables had different values on different platforms…

Screenshot from my c++ project

So my opinion on c++ so far:

Pros

• Fast
• Multiplatform support
• Good skill to have
• Almost all modern games are build using c++

Cons

• Custom libraries are sometimes damn hard to install
• Managing variables and strings is so freaking hard… (I love php now even more)
• Freaking hard to learn some weird stuff

C++ is great language and I will try to learn more, but first I will try finish one php project…

I just published new layout for main site: www.pelikoira.net

I build it with awesome css framework called 960 grid system. If you code websites I recommend to try 960 gs, because it makes developing lots of easier and faster.

This site also contains my first JQuery effect that I have used. It is simple “tab” system on project page that allows to change project without reloading page. It also makes it easier to me to control the site, because now it has only 3 files. If every project is on it’s own file, I would have something like 10 .php files. Yes, I don’t have any cms system, because I don’t need them. If I need to change something I take ssh connection and modify files remotely with vim.

I build this site on Debian system with Konsole -> Bash -> Vim system.

And of course all the code (xhtml/css/rss/js) is valid.

I have tried Ruby on Rails many times, but this time I managed to create something useful that works. I created a simple pastebin. Actually I didn’t write any code. I just executed couple of scripts and then removed unnecessary parts from ruby code and edited the views.

To host the pastebin I used Heroku. Heroku is very simple platform to host Ruby on Rails apps. It is also very easy to deploy a app to it. Heroku offers free hosting, but it also offers very big plans. Biggest hosting packages can be over 2000$. I recommend to try heroku.

My pastebin runs at pastebin.heroku.com

When you code something bigger than Hello World, it will have bugs. You can’t create any project without bugs. Bug tracker makes its easier to manage bugs. Especially when there is many developer and there is lots of bugs.

Some developers wants something like Bugzilla, but it may be little hard to install and configure. If you want something simple and quick to install, try Mantis. Its PHP/MySQL based bug tracker.

Mantis has many features and it works well with almost any kind of project you are working on. One feature I like a lot is ability to have many projects under one bug tracker. So I can do one install of  Mantis and then manage all of my bugs in one place.

So if you need simple bug tracker, PHP based bug tracker or just a good bug tracker, try Mantis.