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Tech Talk at Google – Gaming for Freedom

Last week on friday, I gave a Tech Talk about Open Source Gaming as part of Leslie Hawthorn’sOpen Source Developers @ Google” talk series. For those who were silly enough to miss it, it should be soon coming to a YouTube near you.

I had given a similar talk at my local LUG only recently, I think that version went a little better but it was quite a different crowd. The first part of my talk came across way more preachy then I had hoped. I also see now how I can better use Thousand Parsec as examples of the tips I came up for releasing FOSS games. I guess practice makes perfect, maybe I’ll get it right to one day be able to give it at Linux.conf.au.

At the beginning this time I tried some of the “one word per slide quick succession” talk which Anthony Baxter had suggested. I think however think I ended up just insulting every American! I don’t think I speak fast enough to make this type of talk successful, but I’ll keep experimenting.

If you have any feedback on the talk, please do send me an email!

The real reason for this post is to upload the slides for the tech talk so they can be linked from the YouTube video.

Edit: The talk has now been uploaded, you can access it via the following link or see it below,

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Thousand Parsec accepted into Google Summer of Code 2008!

As I’m too lazy to write a post myself, here is one from JLP:

Google has just published the list of accepted mentoring organizations for Google Summer of Code 2008 and it is great to see that Thousand Parsec has made it once again. We must be doing something right 🙂

So, if you are into turn-based 4X space strategy games and would like to help in game development, this is your chance. Take a look at our Google Summer of Code and Ideas for Programmers pages and get involved. There is even US$ 4500 to encourage you to take that step into the world of open source software programming.

Interested students now have about a week to get to know us better. You can chat with us on IRC (Freenode network, #tp channel) or write to our development mailing list. Starting March 24 student applications can be submitted, all applications must be in by March 31. I’m looking forward to be a mentor again.

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Gaming Miniconf Videos

At Linux.conf.au 2008 the AV team did a great job of recording the main conference and almost all the talks can be downloaded from the main website. They where however, unable to record all the miniconf proceedings. I ran the Gaming Miniconf again and like last year I was able to record the proceedings myself. It took me a while, but I have finally finished encoding the videos and you can now download the videos. They should be of similar quality to the main conference videos.

The day on a whole was fairly successfully and there where lots of interesting talks, panels and tutorials. One of the coolest talks was Douglas Bagnall’s “Playing with Crayons“, while we had a number of technical difficulties with getting his laptop talking to the projector (he has an evil Nvidia card), it was really cool to learn about this program which turns a kid’s crayon drawing into a playable game. Douglas has now open sourced the code and looking to port it to the OLPC!

We also had some very cool panels sessions. The first was about using FOSS in Game Development education, we had some representatives from some of the top game education institutes in Australia. The second was an interesting licensing panel which includes Jessica Coats from Creative Commons Australia and Kimberly Weatherall – a former Rusty Wrench winner. I think our last panel was the best however, people got to grill representatives of the Australian commercial game industry on how they are using FOSS at their commercial game companies!

There where also some really good talks by Richard and Alex about pyglet, including the most impressive live coding I have ever seen. As the pyglet tutorial is so cool and I have also uploaded it to Google Video for your viewing pleasure. Of course, we couldn’t keep Rusty Russell away, he gave a short lightening talk about his new Pong Hero!

So why not download the Gaming Miniconf vidoes and take a look.

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