Just as a little update:

Well, book is making great progress through the editing stage. Roughly 31/49 chapters are edited, and the process is going by quickly. It's tricky to make sure that math equations get formatted and printed correctly, but it'll work out. Book is scheduled to hit printers on Feb 14th, and probably hit shelves within the first or second week of March... just in time for GDC!!!

I've been working on a little side project the past weekend, and figure I'd announce it now; though it's not complete yet (about 75 percent).

I call it GamePack, and it's a media archival solution for the numerous game asset\content\config files spamming the file system of many games out there. It's basically a super duper WinZip for game developers (though it could be used for any software application). The editor is written in C#.NET 2.0, though the format will be open, and I will supply a loader for both unmanaged and managed code. I even have a demo working where I host the CLR inside of an unmanaged C++ app and call in and out of it like a sandbox. Works really cool!

This format supports optional compression at the file level (allows great configuration depending on the size of the file, type of the file, and how often is accessed). I may also support some level of encryption, though I don't want to go too nuts as too much encryption will bog down loads. Perhaps the editor project will be the only part that is encrypted. I also checksum the project and entry files to identify data corruption and minor alteration attempts.

More info of this cool utility will follow, and I'll either release it super cheap (like 20 USD per license with source) or free but closed source. Maybe both options.

Here is the splash screen:



And here is the main interface so far: