Report from IVDC

I spent the past two days in Milan attending the second Italian Videogame Developers Conference (IVDC). I was interested because I am deciding if it’s better for me to stay in the academic/research area, go back to the usual software development (business software, Internet stuff and so on) or move to the game development.

It was an interesting conference and many of the speakers were industry big players.

The conference was open by Andrea Pessino, ex-Blizzard and co-founder of Ready At Dawn, who talked about the creation of Daxter: he explained the problems encountered developing for the (at the time)  new and mostly unknown PSP console, and how the development process was from both the technical and the production point of view (i.e. hardware and operating system problems, relationship with Sony and so on).

Another vip speaker was Ian Livingstone, co-founder of Games Workshop and president of Eidos, who took a fun and interesting talk about his career and the Lara Croft franchise.

Carsten van Husen, CEO of Gameforge, talked about the free-to-play business model and he was very kind to spend some minutes after his speech to provide useful insights, even to someone like me who was stuttering due to sleeplessness and lack of  confidence.

Some interesting projects presented at the conference:

• The Global Game Jam by IGDA, a 48 hours competition for game developers
• Critical City, a game to be played in real life with social and cultural achievements
• augmented reality projects by SpinVector
• Naumachia: Space Warfare by indie developer Aurea Section

I may be tired of using technology

Long time since my last post. Many things happened in the meantime.

• I worked on a book chapter based on the research I did for my thesis (I am waiting for the “accepted/rejected” answer)
• I updated SoloWiki Editor, more additions are planned for the near future
• I started hunting for a job, both in the academic and the “real” world
• I was on holiday in August: a lot of sea, good food and the best company (I may post a report about that)

For the next weeks I plan to:

• finish and polish a small puzzle game using Ogre 3D (I already implemented it using OpenGL long time ago)
• check academic opportunities all over Europe
• attend the first Italian Videogame Developers Conference

.. so, sorry for the rare updates but I prefer to post once in a while about interesting things rather than to post every day about the weather or news you can find elsewhere.

Ogre3D and NetBeans on Windows

I just started a project I was waiting to start for so long. Before writing design documents, planning classes and stuff, I started setting up the development environment.

I’m working on Windows XP with MinGW, I’m used to C/C++ development  in GNU/Linux (vim, make, …) but in the last years I coded a lot in Java using NetBeans IDE. So I wanted to setup NetBeans in order t take advantage from code completion and syntax check.

When I stumbled on Ogre SDK support in Eclipse I thought “I’m done”. I was wrong.

What doesn’t work is the path system for includes and libraries. Using ${OGRE_HOME} will lead to a “Build failed” message.

Include directories and libraries path must be in a slash form, i.e. c:/OgreSDK/include;c:/OgreSDK/samples/include

I changed some other setting, here is the full working setup (assuming Ogre installed in C:\OgreSDK):

• C++ Compiler
  • Include directories: c:/OgreSDK/include;c:/OgreSDK/samples/include
  • Preprocessor definitions:
    • WIN32
    • _WINDOWS
    • _DEBUG
  • Additional options (add -v if you need more control): -fmessage-length=0 -mthreads -fexceptions -fident
• Linker
  • Additional library directories: c:/OgreSDK/bin/debug
  • Libraries: (use add library button)
    • OgreMain_d
    • OIS_d
  • Additional options: --enable-auto-image-base --add-stdcall-alias

If you want to run your project directly from NetBeans, add this setting in Linker->Runtime search directories: C:/OgreSDK/bin/debug;C:/Programs/Microsoft DirectX SDK (August 2006)/Developer Runtime/x86

Same story for “release” build, just change _DEBUG with NDEBUG, use normal libraries instead of debug ones (throw away the _d from library name) and use “release” instead of “debug” path for libraries.

(assuming that you need DirectX and you installed it in that directory)

Be sure to avoid adding extra spaces in paths and settings.