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I worked on the cloud and textures and added a Moon. Found the shortcomings of the free version of Unity tonight. No shadows are supported in the free version. For the web app it doesn't make that much of a difference, but in the fullscreen version I run on my desktop-- I can see that this will be a problem. So no Unity for further development for me. I will use it for the sandbox only. I will try UDK next.

I updated the sandbox tonight with better looking clouds and slightly nicer movement to it.

If you are looking for a very complete and well supported interpreted programming language for Windows PC based devices, then thinBasic is well worth looking in too. ThinBasic is constantly being developed with an incredibly nice and helpful community around it. It can be used for console, windows GUI and OpenGL based applications. It is expandable by modules that can be developed in a variety of languages that can output dll files. Another interesting module is the O2 module, which can be used to write Assembly code or a BASIC like OOP syntax code that can be compiled at runtime and work with thinBasic. The tbgl module along with other supporting modules can allow the development of 3D, 2D games and applications using a very powerful entity based system. Some of the other cool modules are tbem (an event manager based on a trigger system), tbdi(allowing for direct input from joysticks, game pads) and tbai(an artificial itelligence system for path finding and such). More info at thinBasic.

Many popular game engines became free recently. Some of the expensive commercial ones used by the pros being Unreal Engine 3(UDK) and Unity. Both are powerful. In my little tests, I would say Unity is by far the easiest to use and learn right now. For now I will concentrate on it. For a hobbyist programmer it is a dream come true. If I run out of challenges, UDK will always be there. It is very powerfull as demonstrated by the great games made with this engine. More info at Unity and UDK.

I am evaluating whether to use C++ or Java for game development. Update: no need now with the release of some great game engines :) I probably would have ended up using c++. Although Java could more than handle what I would have done. Since Java is so good at running on so many devices and OS's, not having a single executable was the turn off for me. I think Java should do what the Mono team is doing for C#. Make it so you can compile to the platform of choice and make an executable file for that platform. Another cool language is free pascal. But there is just not enough easy to find information on how to really use it. You run across so many dead links when searching for help for this great language and IDE(Lazarus).

Work is being done on the site, so don't be surprised by changes or bugs.

Remmer the free programmer's multi-line comment tool is released today. ...more-->