OEHack1

Tuesday the 26 of February 2008

The following is a summary of what when on during the day.

OEHack2

We decided to hold the next hacking day (OEHack2) Tuesday the 11'th of March 2008. 14 days from the first. The day and time for the future meetings will be decided by voting. Please head over and  place your vote.

Forum

Coordinator: Martin Have.

We discussed whether or not we should replace our existing mailing list with a web forum. The hope is that changing to web forum will increase participation and is also more well known to the majority of the project members. An almost unanimous voting was in favour of the change.

The requirement for the change are that

  • The existing list will be shutdown in order to keep the amount of information sources manageable.
  • The forum must therefore allow for announcements and email subscription.
  • An off topic area should be created for the more unrelated and social aspects of our community.
  • The forum should be public for posting and moderated by members of the project. This could be facilitated by hooking to the daimi LDAP authentication system.

The change does not affect the #openengine irc channel that remains in use on freenode.

Game Project

During the meeting we discussed what we would like the game project to consist of. Many ideas were on the table. And we ended up with something in the 3'rd person car / shoot-em-up genre. The concept team started working on stuff right away and have put up a game concept? page.

The following ideas were listed on the whiteboard:

  • First Person Shooter
    • Ghost Busters
    • Physics toolbox
    • Faste camera
    • Level editor
    • Puzzels
    • Game master
  • X-Wing Dogfight
  • Dungen Keeper / Drawf Fortress
  • Bil / tank
    • Bilspil med våben
    • Du er et våben!
    • Boldspil med køretøj
    • Capture the flag
    • Destruction
    • Multiplayer tankspil
    • Forhindringsbane
    • Skattejagt

Project Teams

During the meeting several teams were created and members attached to the teams. A team covers some essential part of project such as Physics or Game Concept. The main focus of the team members is then to develop, maintain and facilitate the needs for the particular part of the project. Members are not required to be part of a team and are likewise not restricted to a single team. It is however appropriate not to "overbook" as this can be an annoyance to other team members if you do not have time for active participation.

Every team has exactly one coordinator. The team coordinator should have a reasonable idea of the teams status and progress. And should try to facilitate the teams work. The team coordinator is not a boss and does not bear any extra responsibility. It is more a role to help teams work and communicate with other teams.

The teams that were created during the meeting can be found through the Project? page.

Scene Update

Ian Zerny held a small presentation on the how the changes that have occurred in the scene system since the course. This covered in more or less detail:

  • New traversal safe scene operations: RemoveNode, DeleteNode and ReplaceNode.
  • Scene serialization with boost.
  • Scene transformations, replacing the old builders used during the course.
  • Scene cloning.

These changes are in the scene-branch at the moment and will be merged to head shortly.

Module States

Anders Nissen held a small presentation on some ideas to structure and arrange modules in the engine. This would help dividing modules in to groups that can be (de)activated in unison. The discussion ended with some ideas to rework the engine to use events to trigger module processing combined with event interceptors of some sort. Anders Nissen is going to look a bit more at how to support this.

During this discussion we touched upon the possibility of replacing the current event system. The motivation for such a change being that the subscribing procedure is fairly cumbersome. An alternative means of subscribing might be enough. Possibility in terms of C macros?

Rendering Update

Some discussion on the rendering system started. Work is needed to support more flexibility in the rendering system. This could be done by generalising RenderingView to a RenderingProcess that could be linked to the rendering init, process or deinit processes. Or abandoning the views in favor of an event system such as that discussed for the new module system.

More Work Support for Extensions

Requests for more help and support when working with many OpenEngine extensions is necessary. The following should be done

  • Extend the make.sh script with targets for downloading all project extensions and projects.
  • Package nightly bundles of the projects and extensions for easy downloading.
  • Create a batch script similar to the make.sh script for windows users (Mads Tejlgaard Olesen).