Tuesday, March 29, 2011

POSSCON

    Last Friday was the last day of POSSCON but I was still very excited to attend. Not only did we eat good, I learned so much today. The first workshop I went to was with John Diamond about open source gaming. Designing games has always been something that I have wanted to do so I was finally able to learn about it a bit more. John began his discussion talking about blender, an open source program that is used for character development. I also learned about MD5 which is format that allows models to be animated by the use of an internal skeleton. Generally two files are needed to make a functional MD5 model; md5mesh and md5anim. He demoed the characters for his game, Alien Arena. He even taught us about rendering and shading techniques that he and his team used. I was briefly able to ask him some questions about what I should do to get started developing games. He told me I should definitely know C and/or C++. I still learning C and haven't really done any C++ so no im more eager to learn them. He also told me I didn't have to just settle for using the quake engine I could even use Epic Megagames' udk as a base engine so I could develop many different types of games. Lunch was the best, there was so much food and all you could drink soda it was like heaven. After that I went an sat in a workshop with John "Mad Dog" Hall about the History Of Linux. It was quite interesting and he brought up very interesting point about why software patents should not exists and I did learn a lot from his talk about Linux development.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

POSSCON 2011!

So next  Friday is my classmates and I will be attending POSSCON 2011. I'm really looking forward to it and its also in my home town so I was able to invite my parents and some friends so hopefully they will attend. One person I really want to meet is John Diamond. Mr. Diamond is is the CEO and lead developer of COR Entertainment LLC and is a senior developer at Orange Technologies Inc. He codes and does the artwork for the games he designs. Gaming is one of my favorite hobbies and I always wanted to design games for a living. When I meet him I would hope to ask him "how can I get my foot into the world of game designing?", "Is there any specific programming language that I need to be familiar with?", and "What is your favorite part of designing games before the project is complete?". I would also like to meet David Trask to see how open source is taught is at other schools. John "Mad Dog" Hall also seems like an intere
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sting person to meet since I'm just learning to use/getting use to linux. So I look forward to asking him about linux.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Time to work

So for a couple of weeks my team and I had some technical problems, but now all those problems are gone(at least the ones on my end). Instead of using tomcat to run a web server I could have used eclipse to do it, so that worked out a lot better than trying to configure tomcat(Major thanks to the guys on the IRC). So now we gathered together to create a timeline for what we wanted to do for the rest of the semester. The time line can be found here.