Weekly Links #128

Hello, everyone. This week I must confess to a couple of broken promises. I didn't get around to uploading a fix for the bug found in the online version of Glittering Light. And last time I forgot to announce my decision to abandon the graphical port of Tomb of the Snake. Sorry, but an already overengineered game was only getting even more so, FreeBasic's supposed portability turned out to be illusory where it mattered (though SDL carries part of the blame), and the community less than friendly. But I learned a few things; my next projects will be tools, not games. Hopefully you'll find them useful.

In other news, early this week Konstantinos Dimopoulos alerted me about Procedural Content Generation in Games, an academic textbook on the topic that's nevertheless an easy enough read overall. It seems the project was launched a few years ago, but it's only now ready for publication. Grab it while it's still free!

Also in the way of long reads, Hardcore Gaming 101 is running a six-part feature on the Fallout series. And for the impatient, my friend Chris Meadows compares two online games of Catan. Last but not least, a piece of news not related to games, but just too cool to pass up: the source code for the Apollo 11 mission is now on GitHub! Amusingly, lots of people have been submitting pull requests, some jocular, others not so much.

But that's about it for the past week. See you around.