Author Archives: olano

About olano

Marc Olano is an Associate Professor in the CSEE department at UMBC and Director of the Computer Science Game Development Track. Dr. Olano's primary area of research is real-time 3D graphics, with forays into other applications of programmable graphics hardware.

2013 Digital Entertainment Conference

Posted on April 12, 2013 by olano

Make plans to come to the 2013 UMBC Digital Entertainment Conference (DEC) on Saturday, April 27th, starting at 10am in the Engineering Building lecture hall on the UMBC campus. This day long event is organized by the UMBC Game Developers Club, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Baltimore Sun on local games industry

Posted on April 4, 2013 by olano

There was a nice article in the Baltimore Sun on the state of Maryland’s games industry. Word of the day: “turbulent”. Second word of the day: “indie”

Posted in Linked Content | Comments Off

Global Game Jam demos

Posted on January 27, 2013 by olano

We have 30 participants in the Global Game Jam at UMBC this weekend, working on eight different games. Fitting for a world-wide event, the theme this year is non-verbal, it is the sound of a human heartbeat. They started at 5PM … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Looking forward to Global Game Jam 2013

Posted on January 23, 2013 by olano

This weekend, UMBC will be one of 320 sites from 65 countries around the world participating in Global Game Jam 2013. This year’s theme is announced at 5pm local time on Friday, and teams all over the world work all … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

OnyxFest Indie Game Development Showcase

Posted on January 4, 2013 by olano

OnyxFest is an independent game showcase, with networking opportunities, presentations by area indie game developers, and games to try. It will be Saturday, February 2nd from 10:00-3:00 in the Gameroom in the UMBC Commons. Details on the facebook event page.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Video games and violence

Posted on December 21, 2012 by olano

According to a story on the Washington Post web site December 17th, a study of game sales per capita and gun-related murders per capita in 10 countries shows no real correlation. At the end, there’s a graph showing a linear … Continue reading →

Posted in Linked Content | Comments Off

Observations of water

Posted on December 11, 2012 by olano

Here’s a post that’s interesting for both programmers and artists. Sébastian LeGarde is an game engine and graphics programmer at Dontnod entertainment in Paris. He has a blog with a variety of good posts on the programming side of achieving … Continue reading →

Posted in Linked Content | Comments Off

Register now for Global Game Jam 2013

Posted on December 4, 2012 by olano

UMBC will once again be a host site for the 2013 Global Game Jam. This is a weekend-long game development event with hundreds of host sites across the world. Participants at each site form teams and work all weekend long … Continue reading →

Posted in Game Competitions | Comments Off

AI Game Contest

Posted on November 9, 2012 by olano

For those of you with an AI programming bent, there’s AiGameDev.com is running a game AI contest, details at AISandbox.com. The contest started November 7th, but you can build and submit your entries through December 10th. You (or a team) … Continue reading →

Posted in Game Competitions | Comments Off

Game Data Structures

Posted on November 5, 2012 by olano

Another linked article, this one about a set of foundation libraries released by bitsquid under the MIT license, the Bitsquid Foundation Library Some observations… Memory management and avoiding C++ STL Memory is often as critical a resource as execution time. … Continue reading →

Posted in Linked Content | 1 Comment