Paolo Munoz

A knight is sworn to valor.
His life honors the Lord.
His heart knows only virtue.
His blade defends the helpless.
His might upholds the weak.
His word speaks only truth
His wrath undoes the wicked.

Honor, Valor, Fervor, Ardor

Said to me over lunch: "Every Developer is a rockstar... In his own mind."

Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 has been released with a full set of documentation!

On the minus side, most of its development tools are for Visual Studio 2008 and my trial version is just about to expire. This means I will have to dish out about $1200 to get it along with MSDN Professional.

On the plus side, I've obtained a couple freelancing jobs which will help pay for these expenses. I'll be sure to post them as portfolio pieces of my Silverlight RIA work since most of the freelancing work will be websites for Hip Hop bands.

I just saw this technology featured on G4 last night - changeable tattoos. It greatly reminds me of the digital tattoos in the Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 Chromebooks.

Anyone see the relationship between Cyberpunk and Ayn Rand's Objectivism, or do we need more people to play Bioshock to wake up from the techno-nightmare we are going to create?

It looks like 2008 is shaping up to be the year for Indie Game Developers. Here are a list of new innovations that have come out this year announced just at GDC:

- Microsoft has thrown in its bid for RIA king with new Silverlight 2.0 functionality including sockets which opens the door wide open for multiplayer games. This puts Adobe Flash in serious competition mode, but opens the door wide open for Indie Internet game developers. Plus, it doesn't hurt that Silverlight 1.0 is free and 2.0 will be free once they start packaging it in Visual Studio Express.

- Of course, there is no discounting Microsoft's announcement to open the floodgates for indie created content on Xbox Live through XNA. This just cuts out the middle man for console-based game production and lets indies battle it out on the mass market.

- Adobe Director 11 was just announced which features even stronger features for 3D game programming, including using Direct X 9 - which will dramatically increase the performance and viability of using Director for game development - all for $1000 bucks. This also includes cross portability with Flash components.

- Adobe AIR 1.0 now allows Flash Developers to directly create games and rich media and places it on the Desktop. So even smaller Flash games can now make it as faster performing executables running on the desk top.

- This doesn't include other Indie game development platforms. Adventure Game Studio (AGS) has made a significant leap to .NET in its latest iteration along with hardware acceleration. Some awesome indie games that have been published under it just in 2007 alone, including "The Art of Theft" by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of "Zero Publication" fame.

This is looking like an awesome year for the indie game developer.

Holy cow...

Scott Guthrie's blog just outlined an amazing set of new functionality for Silverlight 2.0. I can't wait to get my hands on the beta!

They were able to squeeze in sockets as well!

Way to go!

My apologies for my lack of updates. I will update more in the future. Lots of things have been keeping me busy over the past month including a pressing deadline at work for our first major release of our company's main application - complete with Silverlight accouterments courtesy of yours truly. We should have it out by the end of the month with a ton of bug fixes.

Among those things that have been keeping me busy has been a deadline to do art for Anime USA's flyer. I'm not sure if it was even used, but it showed me that I can still do a cute figure drawing from start to finish in a very very limited amount of time (approximately less than 10 hours of work from sketch to final coloring.) It gives me a lot of encouragement to finish up my art site at mystisa.com.

Currently, mystisa.com only has a small Silverlight 1.1 Alpha program I made with my trial version of Visual Studio 2008. It is a single-solution maze generator that recursively creates itself and fills the entire screen like a screen saver. But I'm planning on getting Silverlight 1.0 so that regular users can view it without having to install an alpha release.

GDC has had a ton of great new announcements and exciting prospects for indie game developers such as myself, including the announcement from Microsoft that XNA programmers can have their games published onto XBox Live for other people to try and buy. And even better, the Havok Physics engine is now going to be for free.

It's going to be a helluva year for indie game developers. I hope to be a part of it.

"Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace-- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!"

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other."