A good time was had by all at the Crystal Space workshop held at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, on 2 & 3 November, organized by Dr Samad Ahmadi of the School of Computing, and run by Amir Taaki (genjix), Dariusz Dawidowski (darek) and Mat Sutcliffe (oktal).
The university will be using Crystal Space for teaching its Games Programming course, so the workshop was intended as an introduction for students and staff. A broad range of students attended, numbering at least 50, undergraduates and postgraduates from the faculties of Computer Science and Art & Design. The first day focused on the artistic side, basic game design, 3D modelling with Blender and creating textures with Gimp or Photoshop. I was unable to attend on the first day owing to work commitments, so I will leave it up to genjix and darek to say more about this in their own reports. We were all very impressed by the students' enthusiasm and the speed with which they developed their modelling skills. In some cases, I am told, students stayed in the labs until late in the night working on their 3D models, and were then up very early in the morning taking photos for use as textures. The second day looked more at scripting and programming, mainly using blender2crystal to create CEL entities. In the morning we showed off a selection of CS and CEL games using the projector in one of the lecture rooms, and explained about CEL entities, property classes and behaviours. In the afternoon Dariusz walked the students through the creation of a simple celstart game which he made specially for the workshop, involving a mouse collecting cheese while being chased by a cat. After that we went back to the lecture room where I gave a talk about AI, ably assisted by genjix and darek. I was extremely pleased with the whole experience. The only problem was quite major, and that was the issues we had with installing Blender, Python, blender2crystal and celstart on the Windows machines in the labs, but overall it was a resounding success. Outcomes for consideration: - As mentioned, De Montfort University will be using CS and CEL in teaching their Games Development course. The students produce projects every year which count towards their grades, and the faculty have requested a list, perhaps updated once every month or so, of projects for students to undertake in adding features to CS and CEL, something like a to-do list, similar to that produced for the GSoC, but with a greater range of ideas. - As explained, we had problems getting all the necessary dependencies installed on the Windows machines in the labs. We decided that it would be best if we could have an MSI installer containing celstart, Blender, blender2crystal and all their dependencies, for simple, one-click installation. - One student, to whom I must apologise for forgetting his name, expressed an interest in providing packages (specifically Gentoo, Fedora and Ubuntu I think) of CS and CEL. This is of course of special interest due to the problem described above. Hopefully we shall be hearing from him soon on this list or on IRC. - Dr Ahmadi expressed an interest in running similar workshops again - which we would be more than happy to do - and also possibly hackfests and suchlike. - Videos of the workshops and presentations should be appearing on the websites of the university and/or CS in the near future. Our thanks to the people with the cameras who made this possible. Of course it was great to see Amir again, and to meet Dariusz for the first time, and I would like to thank them both, as well as Dr Ahmadi for all his hard work in organisation, and his colleagues and all the students for a totally awesome weekend :D -- Ist Ihr Browser Vista-kompatibel? Jetzt die neuesten Browser-Versionen downloaden: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/browser ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Crystal-main mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/crystal-main Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
