From the series Things I Used To Hate Now I Am Using, now I finally testing Twitter.

I created my account as brmassa and I started to post micro stuff: my favorite football team stupid results, political jokes and things that are REALLY useless for most of people.

After about 2 months, I still don’t see much use on this, except on spying on peoples lives (HEY, they are aware of it� they are publishing the tweets). �With instant messaging, blog witting and spam reading, they are the Time Wasting Toolkit.

It is now just another fragmented piece of information about people. The only advantage I see is for companies like Google now have another source of free external data about potential customers. They can cross with their own data and offer ads more and more targeted to them. Social networks + search history + email history + tweets + photos = complete profile about you!

And I foresee that soon the site will add a higher level of permissions, so you will choose which people can follow you or can do some operations regarding your profile. In other words: it will gradually transform in a Social Network site.

PS: I just added the Twitter messages list at the bottom of this blog. It’s updated hourly.

I simply don’t get the point when the game producers advertise the engine behind a game. Engine, for those are not familiar with, is the piece of software that deals the core functions in a game: 3D rendering, sound, network, etc. They usually say that their own home-made engine is capable of more graphics in the scene, with more details or more effects (mostly about the graphics power). But more than what?

Unless the company license their engines as core business, like Epic’s Unreal Technology, Valve’sSource�or id’s id Tech, there is absolutely no point on advertising it or even giving it a name but creating it some pseudo-credibility to the project.

WOW!! Mafia 2 are going to use�Illusion Engine! What the heck is Illusion Engine?

These pieces of software are complex to create. However, there was a lot of people that were capable to create one from scratch. Today, there are several of them, with different purposes (some are for hookies, some are for 3D pros or only for FPS games) and different quality (some are slow, some have incomplete documentation or lacking of tools). But there are enough that it might be considered almost as commodity.

Unreal Engine is, by far, the most popular among the big companies. Many bestsellers were created using its tools and libraries. But don’t even think about using it: it costs a fortune! So various companies had the same idea about position their owngame engines free. Some are worthy to mention: Garage Games’ Torque, Blender/Crystal Space and Radon Labs’ Nebula Device.

Some good games came from they: Torque is quite inexpensive, and it was used on the Penny Arcade Adventures; Nebula Device is completely free with the most permissive, the MIT license, and its behind Drakensang, which I’m going to play really soon.