Archive for OGRE tag
Guernsey Software Developers Forum, June 28th
Changes
A number of changes are happening within the Guernsey Developer Users Group!
We have changed the name to the Guernsey Software Developers Forum to better reflect the nature of the events and moved the Guernsey Software Developers Forum web site over to a new location, host and software.
It is also our intention to arrange presentations as often as possible as fewer members were interested in the free-format discussion events.
Next event
The next event will be on Thursday 28th of June 2007 starting at 6pm at the Guernsey Training Agency offices above the post-office in Smith Street, St. Peter Port.
As always the doors are open to everyone so if you have an interest in any of these subjects just turn up and grab a chair. The planned agenda is:
Opening
Welcome to the forum, news and announcements.
(6:00 pm)
XP2007 Conference Report
The XP2007 8th International Conference on Agile Process in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming took place this month in Como, Italy.
Filippo Borselli will be sharing what he learnt over the course of this five day event as he attended many of the keynotes, tutorials, workshops and panels on offer.
(30 minutes)
The OGRE 3D Graphics Engine
OGRE is an open source library that makes it easier to render highly detailed virtual worlds in real time using the latest in consumer graphics hardware.
The founder of the project, Steve Streeting, will introduce some basic 3D graphics principles, show what OGRE brings to the table, a quick technical overview and code example, and will end with some sample demos and videos from people around the globe who use it.
(45 minutes)
Questions & Answers
Questions and answers session.
Group Discussion
Open-format discussion between attendees.
Closing
Discuss the date for the next event, determine what presentations are possible and what attendees would like to see.
(8:00 pm)
[)amien
My development tools
Christopher Bennage wrote about his development tool set-up and encouraged others to do the same so here’s my current set-up.
Daily tools
- Visual Studio 2005 – IDE of preference despite it’s sluggish behaviour
- SQL Server 2005 Management Studio – Took getting used to but it’s an improvement on 2000′s Enterprise Manager
- AnkhSVN - Subversion support inside Visual Studio 2005
- .NET Reflector – Searching .NET API or to find out what it’s doing
- Web Application Projects – Stop using VS’s web sites and start using web applications!
- Web Deployment Projects – Deploy to dev, test or live servers as easily as building a project
Not quite daily
- CodeSmith – Need to get to grips with v4 to build our whole database layer in one hit
- Trac – Bug tracking, milestones & wiki with integrated support for Subversion
- TortoiseSVN – Check-in/out of non-project items (e.g. art assets)
- Web Developer Extension – Trying CSS changes on-the-fly, validating pages etc. from Firefox
- Firebug – Examining pages, the page DOM etc. from Firefox
- KDiff – Excellent 3-way diff tool that works great with AnkhSVN
- Subtext – Blogging system running here
On occasion
- Visual C# Express and XNA – Messing with 3D graphics, controllers and pixel shaders
- Ogre – Steve’s object-oriented 3D engine
- XCode and Cocoa – Still quite alien with it’s message-based calling mechanism but obviously powerful
Keeping an eye on
- Eclipse – IDE for developing Java (C++ and C# support in various stages too)
- Ruby on Rails – Interesting RAD approach to web development – Apple also supporting on Mac OS X 10.5
- Sandcastle – Microsoft’s documentation tool that already seems to have had an impact on NDoc
- SubSonic – Build-provider that generates an ORM on the fly and provides automatic developer-only db editing pages
Not used lately, still installed
- Delphi 5/6 – Borland’s great RAD tool for non-.NET development, later versions support .NET too
- JBuilder – Java development although I’d probably move to Eclipse
- Visual Studio 2003 – Still required for the odd .NET 1.1 application/testing
[)amien
Adding depth to my programming ability
I remember gazing at the screen of Acornsoft’s Elite in my childhood wondering what the code behind those 3D images looked like.
How did they rotate like that? How did it know which lines to hide? And more importantly where I can get a good price for this cargo hold of radioactives and platinum?
Scouring through magazines, books and the library revealed nothing. Where on Lave was this elusive magic formula?
My attempts at reverse engineering Vu-3D shed no light and the web was still being conceived in Mr Berners-Lee’s brain so Google wouldn’t be able to exist for some time yet.
My programming continued on a more serious tract writing first silly hacks and demo’s, then utilities and into business software as an actual paid job. In my spare time I knocked out some other developer tools, utilities, drivers and even a Flash game of pool for a National Lottery.
3D remained the elusive beast long after the information became available to me. Matrices were not something my mind wanted to grasp a second time.
Then along came Ogre, written by a long-time friend of mine – Steve Streeting.
We’d actually hoped to write a game a long time ago when we were younger and less informed about how much work that would involve. The only thing that survived was the company name I still use for my consulting work – Envy Technologies.
Ogre looked promising. Object-oriented design meant it could hide most of the complexity and let me get on with high-level concepts and setting properties.
If only my degree wasn’t in the way!
Still I had a play and then the lure of Microsoft’s XNA came along.
Based on .NET Framework 2 and C# – the very two technologies I use day-in day-out to write those aforementioned serious apps. Write a game once and deploy it to the PC and Xbox 360 and from C# – a more enjoyable experience than the last C++ stuff I did (under DOS!)
XNA has been interesting to mess with at least on the 3D front. I’ve managed with not too much effort to plot a pyramid on the screen using co-ordinates I figured out, get it bobbing about a bit and changing the colour via vertex and pixel shaders respectively and even get it and the viewpoint spinning round from the 360 controller.
Whohoo.
From there on you find yourself soon needing features that aren’t there and you have to build yourself or acquire an engine to do it. The managed nature of XNA means that any engine you want to use will have to be specifically written for XNA itself – I guess Garage Games is hoping to cash in once XNA 1.0 gets out with their XNA engine Torque X.
Steve popped round this weekend for a chat about the usual geek topics we discuss I was very grateful that he lent me one of his complementary copies of Pro Ogre 3D Programming (he was technical reviewer and wrote the foreword).
I’m only at the end of Chapter 3 so far and with the exception of wondering what Scene Graphs were I’m still following everything.
Maybe I’ll be able to escape my 2D prison soon.
[)amien
What friends get up to
Some of my friends get up to such interesting things. 
Matt has been making his way across Europe and through the Middle East into the Far East across land. Alas, the journals he writes aren’t up online at the moment – I hope he’ll consider putting them up at a later stage because they make for some interesting reading. In the meantime check out his wonderful photo blog.
Matt’s brother Jo is currently out in Japan teaching English at a school and brushing up on his Japanese. He also plays in a band out there and they’ve put some of their material up on Google Video.
Steve ‘Sinbad’ Streeting has taken the plunge and decided to give up his day job and concentrate on his Ogre3D based consultancy business. Ogre is a 3D engine that sits on top of Direct3D and OpenGL and exposes them in a platform-independent way as full first-class object oriented citizens whilst also adding useful tools, classes and utilities into the mix. He also wrote the foreword to the Ogre3D book that has just been published.
GrinGod and myself have snapping pics of abandoned buildings from the island of Guernsey and put them up onto Flickr! to provide an alternative look at our picturesque island.
Whilst not a friend Adam Buxton from the Adam & Jo Show fame has a blog up too with plenty of clips from the show as well as some new material and some amusing rants.
[)amien