[gluon] Re: Sun IRC meeting RE: Game development in Gluon by Jan2011

[Eugene Trounev <eugene.trounev@xxxxxxxxx>]

Results of the Sunday meeting.

Participants:
[14:03] <it-s_home> I am it-s; [14:04] <it-s_home> and I eat people for lunch

[14:04] <leinir> i'm leinir, one of those weirdos who come up with big visions and try and push them into reality ;)
[14:06] <ahiemstra> im ahiemstra, I am a crazy dutch person who likes working on low-level

I m Dinesh, currently working on KDE PIM, and am quite interested in Game Design :)

Meeting Details:
The topic of the meeting was: a proposal by one of our teammates to develop a game by January of 2011 and possibly participate in a game development contest called The Global Game Jam. The Global Game Jam is a world-spanning competition for game developers, amateurs and pros alike, where people in over a hundred locations throughout the world get together for 48 hours and create games to a common theme. It's a time-fixed competition, it runs from mid day on the 28th of January and for 48 hours straight. And that's about a month and a half to get Gluon into competition-readiness.

To learn more please goto http://globalgamejam.org/wiki/basic-questions

What has been discussed:
1) How realistic is it to make a game considering current state of Gluon library and the time constrain./Gluon readiness review.

Keyboard and mouse input works to a degree. chmod on /dev/input is still required. Doesn't seem to be a showstopper. The Judges will be simply watching the game played by the team who created it, which means all the necessary preparations (including chmod /dev/inout) can be done apriory.

Currently basic graphics are working. Textured sprites with possibly custom shaders are awailable, rotation and scale are possible too. Also, animated sprite support is planned for addition this week (12-18Dec,2010).

We have sound, what we have problem wise with sound is that music is considered a very, very long sound effect which makes it extremely memory intensive. There is no streaming support currently. There is a good possibility these issues will be resolved in the month of jan 2011. There is a possibility of using using libavcodec & friends for decoding, as it supports more audio formats, and to integrate all the decoding into one class basically. Also considered finally writing a phonon backend for openal, instead of the ugly, unused hack that is kalphonon.

New scripting system is ready for gamejam use. It is not perfect, but it works for building games. It supports all the stuff that any component has.
"moving items in the project view" and "deleting components from a gameobject" to be important actions to fix.

An asset manager for Gluon is planned, but at this stage it's too early to say when exactly will it be rolled out.

   1.5) Can we enter the contest at all at this stage?

Summarizing all that has been said Gluon seems to be mostly ready for the competition even now. Some of the rough edges will hopefully be ironed out this holiday season.

No other topics had been discussed during the meeting.

See you next time.