Start Unreal Engine 3 for free

As many game programmers know, the famous game engine Unreal Engine is now free to the public. Although you need to pay when you want to sell your games, it is a great chance to get some experience from it. It will also give you better chance to get a job offer.
One who don't find where to start, I recommend the official wiki web site:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitHome.html
Just focus on UnrealEngine3 not 2. And the name of free version is called Unreal Development Kit (UDK).

You can download the engine for free:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitGettingStarted.html

There are books in Amazon too: "Mastering Unreal Engine". There are several volumes and several editions. Try to find the latest. As far as I know this book series doesn't cover Unreal Script. You will need to find other books that cover it or you can find the reference page here:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/UnrealScriptReference.html

There is also video tutorials which is an easiest and efficient way of learning a tool:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/VideoTutorials.html

E3 Best game awards

There are game lists on list web site.

http://www.gamecriticsawards.com/nominees.html

I can save time by playing those games first....

AutoIt - GUI Software automation script language

It is always hard to test GUI applications more than command line applications. One of the reason is GUI usually take inputs from mouse device and it is hard to simulate. There are several other reason though, I am trying to focus more on AutoIt: http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.shtmlAutoIt is a script language as far as I understand. Before I find AutoIt, I was trying to use Windows API "SendMessage" to mimic mouse click or keyboard short-cut: for example, SendMessage( hwnd, WM_KEYDOWN, xxx, xxx ). I found a utility to do this, SendMsg: http://www.maxoutput.com/SendMsg.html

I soon found it is very hard to find a right window handler and to find a right windows message even with Spy++.

At first time when I found AutoIt, I didn't expect something more than AutoMouse like simple features. My expectation was got suddenly raised after I read an sample example about notepad. It was a reliable script language rather than just sending some Windows messages.

Here is an simple example from its website:

Run("notepad.exe")
WinWaitActive("Untitled - Notepad")
Send("This is some text.")
; from http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/tutorials/notepad/notepad.htm

We can also send keyboard short-cut messages:

Send("!f") ; Alt+f
Send("^s") ; Ctrl+s
Send("{ENTER}") ; Enter

I haven't seen mouse input functions yet. But there must be someway to do it; I will figure it later.

I think this utility can save lot of time for testing GUI applications.

Game Physics 2nd

David Eberly who is one of the famous game related authors published a new book last month: Game Physic 2nd.
The book is based on Wild Magic new version, 5.1, according to the web page: http://www.geometrictools.com

I was wondering for a while what he was doing now. I haven't read the 1st edition, but I like to grep the new edition sooner or later.

*PS: It seems like he is now focusing more on physic parts than graphics or engine parts.