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.