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# RiverWash 2011
Sun
11
Sep 2011
Last weekend, at same time as WGK Conference in Gdańsk, another interesting event took place - RiverWash 2011, a Polish demoscene party. This time it was held in Łódź. Last year and two years ago I attended it, so I really regret I couldn't be there this time. After looking at some photos from the party on Facebook, I guess it was lots of fun. About the productions, all stuff can be downloaded from ftp://scene.org/pub/parties/2011/riverwash11/. It takes 1.43 GB (from which 933 MB is the "wild" subdirectory).
There were two full-size, newschool demos. 1st place went to "Machineris" by Futuris. Unfortunately it doesn't work correctly on my machine (probably because of the AMD graphics card). High-quality video recording can be found here: Machineris by Futuris @ YouTube.
4k intro category had 3 entries. 1st place was taken by "Chaos theory 4k" - an intro by KK from DMA, known on Warsztat as Krzysiek K. Congratulations on winning two competitions on two different parties, in two different cities on the same weekend! It's a remake of "Chaos Theory" by Conspiracy - a 64k intro presented on Assembly 2006. He managed to squeeze it into 4 kilobytes :) High-quality video is here: Chaos theory by KK / DMA | 4k @ YouTube.
There were 3 entries in Game category. 1st place was taken by "Vampire rabbits attack" by AsmCode and Presto - a 3D FPS shooter with toon shading. Generally the games are not very impressive - apparently demosceners are not so committed to game development as we are on warsztat.gd :)
Graphics and photos are also worth attention. 1st place in "Newschool GFX" category - "Last Train To Nowhere" by Slayer - is great, but I especially like "Halfway to yesterday" by Azzaro, which became my new wallpaper.
Of course there were other categories in the competition, like Amiga demo or Chip music. But I pay attention mostly to newschool PC demos and intros and I keep dreaming about making one. The vision of coding demos is very tempting for someone who likes graphics programming, because unlike in developing games, it's simpler and does not require dealing with gameplay and other things.
Comments | #competitions #demoscene #events #riverwash Share
# WGK 2011 - Our Compo Game
Sat
10
Sep 2011
Part of the National Conference on Computer Games Development was COMPO Games Bonanza - a competition where teams of up to 4 people have to develop a game in 9 hours. Our team was: Krzysztof Kluczek (Krzysiek K.), Tomasz Dąbrowski (Dab), Piotr Iwanicki (zxc) and me. That was our first participation in a contest in such configuration and it worked quite well. Zxc made all the graphics, sound and recorded voice. He was also doing game design by insisting on making this game cool, while we focused more on technical details :) Rest of us was coding. Music is done by Krzysiek K. in Fruity Loops, also during the contest.
Here is a video recorded by 2009xor. You can see our game presented by Krzysiek K. from the beginning of the video until 1:50.
The theme for this competition was "surrealism". We came up with a game about Salvador Dali. His thoughts (the players) are fighting in his mind - that's the story. Obstacles on the map are eyes which always look at some player. Periodically some bigger object appear, like a cat in a box or a guitarist with spider legs - so thanks to zxc's creativity the game is really surreal/psychedelic :)
Our work went quite well. We managed to implement most of what we planned - a difficult task. Of course we weren't happy about how the project is going all the time, there was some rush and frustration. But there were also epic moments, especially when Krzysiek K. implemented bloom shader literally in 10 minutes, right before deadline!
The game is written in C++. We used a framework coded by Krzysiek K., same as on IGK conference in previous years, that just initializes Direct3D, handles texture loading, mouse and keyboard input etc. Playing sound and music is implemented using FMOD library. Right before the competition I figured out how to handle multiple gamepads using Raw Input API. Unfortunately that decision forced us to implement only particular models of Logitech gamepads - the ones that we took with us and used during the compo.
Our game makes sense only for 2-4 players playing simultaneously. During the presentation we used two wired gamepads, one wireless gamepad and the keyboard. Players moving on the top-down view fight each other. By killing opponents they gain experiance, and after leveling up they upgrade to better weapon.
I'd like to thank everyone who voted for us, congratulate other teams that participated in the competition and thank organizers for arranging this competition - so traditional in our community - during the conference. See you next year!
Comments | #competitions #compo #events #igk #productions Share
# WGK 2011 - Links
Tue
06
Sep 2011
WGK 2011 - First National Conference on Computer Games Development - took place 2-4 September 2011 at Gdańsk University Of Technology. It's time to aggregate links to information and multimedia about this event:
Official:
Text:
Multimedia:
Downloads:
Comments | #competitions #compo #events #gallery #igk Share
# WGK 2011 - My Photos
Mon
05
Sep 2011
First National Conference on Computer Games Development in Gdańsk is over. I didn't take many photos this time, but I have some - see my gallery WGK 2011 @ Picasa.
Comments | #competitions #compo #events #igk #gallery Share
# WGK Gamedev Conference - This Weekend
Wed
31
Aug 2011
This weekend - 2-4 September 2011 in Gdańsk, Poland - National Conference on Computer Games Development takes place (see also forum.warsztat.gd topic). It's the first edition of this event. I'm going to go there and I look forward to see if it will be good.
It's impossible not to compare it to the IGK conference in Siedlce, which was already held 8 times. Similar to it, WGK is focused primarily on games programming, includes lectures on Friday evening and whole Saturday and on Sunday there is a competition where team of up to 4 people have to develop a game from scratch during 8 hours. We will see if MrKaktus and others from Gdansk University of Technology succeed in organizing as good or even better conference. Anyway it's a great opportunity for us - programmers from Warsztat and other Polish game developers - to meet live and have a nice time together. So see you in Gdańsk!
Comments | #competitions #compo #events #igk Share
# Hotkey for Macro Inserting Text
Wed
03
Aug 2011
I recently code in C - an ancient language with no support for namespaces. To code a bigger system and not create name conflicts, prefixes for all public identifiers must be used. But they not only make the code less readable, but also take lots of time to type. I thought that at least the second issue can be minimized by setting up some macro that would insert predefined text (like "rendering_"), whenever I press a hotkey button (like Pause/Break).
I couldn't find such feature in my Visual C++ 2010 Express, so I decided to look for some general tool for Windows that can trigger a script when a hotkey is pressed. I found AutoHotkey - a free application with its own scripting language that claims to be successor of AutoIt, which I used some time ago. After reading some documentation, I coded following script:
Pause:: SetKeyDelay -1 send rendering_ return +Pause:: SetKeyDelay -1 send RENDERING_ return
If you have AutoHotkey installed, just save this code to a file, give it "ahk" extension and double-click to run it. Program will create a system tray icon for this script indicating that it's running in the background. From now on you can just press Pause key to insert text "rendering_" to whatever input control you are focused, or Shift+Pause to insert "RENDERING_". It really speeds up coding in C :)
Comments | #windows #tools #c Share
# Demoscene Night - Review
Wed
27
Jul 2011
Together with Tdc we have written a Review of Demoscene Night (in Polish) - party which took place on July 23rd. It is published on atarionline.pl website. You can also find there some photos from this event.
Comments | #events #demoscene Share
# DevMeeting and Demoscene Night
Sun
24
Jul 2011
Yesterday I attended two events related to my interests. First was about collision detection in JavaScript games, organized by Marek Pawłowski from devmeetings.pl. During this almost 12-hour workshop we could learn about JavaScript, as well as some theory of 2D collision detection and space partitioning techniques. Nothing new for me, but I liked formula of this workshop. We could learn some theory from slides, but most of the time we had some tasks to code on our laptops - first to implement a simple library for aspects in JavaScript and then to code Asteroids game, including precise collision detection and QuadTree. Most of the code for this game was ready - we were given a framework, as well as libraries with math and a class for QuadTree. Our task was to just to connect it together. I think it's a good way of teaching programming in practice.
Web technologies are not my main interest, but I like JavaScript. I even think it's the most beautiful scripting language in terms of syntax. Being able to freely draw 2D (using HTML Canvas) as well as 3D graphics (using WebGL) makes it a good technology for learning and prototyping geometry or gameplay algorithms. Marek also pointed on the DevMeeting an interesting conclusion that it's very easy to port algorithms from C/C++ to JavaScript. But on the other hand, Dab reminded me today that Lua is a scripting language with very similar features, but faster and more lightweight interpreter, so it's still better choice as a scripting language embedded in high-performance software like games.
Second event was Noc z Demosceną - Demoscene Night. It took place in Fabryka Kotłów club (former No Mercy). During that night we could see some olschool, as well as newschool demos presented on a a big screen and, what is most important, meet some nice people there. Thanks Voyager for organizing this event! It was great especially because the 3-day demoscene party RiverWash, which took place here in Warsaw in last 2 years, this year is in Łódź and I can't attend it. This night was very inspiring and now I feel like developing a technology to make a demo :)
Comments | #demoscene #webdev #javascript #math #events Share
