Frederick County “Future Link”, and memories of the past

I gave three half-hour hands on presentations at the Frederick County, Maryland Future Link conference for high-school sophomores Thursday. It was pretty fun, and the students (about 25-30 in each group) were great!

Preparing for this, I remembered that back when I was in junior-high and high school, I’d learned a ton about programming by typing in the game programs in SoftSide magazine, a little bit at a time to see what they did and debug them. Later I branched out to writing my own (very simple) games, which I gave away to my friends. One was a snake game, using the IBM PC’s line characters for the snake body. I wrote it as a high-school student in Maryland, then went off to college in Illinois. One day, I came back from classes to find my roommate from Washington state playing it! I don’t know how it made it coast to coast, but I really hoped to be able to give that sense of possibility to the students Thursday.

We used Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio, in part because it’s free and very accessible, in part because it has a rich set of examples, and in part because their new community game distribution system gives a way for individually created games to get out there. Plus, I was able to bring one of our XBox 360s to show what we did running on a game system. We started with the catapult mini-game example. With only half an hour, we could only do relatively simple things, but I wanted to show how easy it is to get started. First I dropped in an image of my head to replace the pumpkin that the catapult normally flings, then we walked through changing the bounce logic to do random bounces instead of the simple predictable bounces it normally does. Some of the students went off in their own directions, creating other simple modifications beyond the ones I’d suggested. Not bad in half an hour!

Posted in CS, Events, Game consols, General, History, xbox | 1 Comment »

May Baltimore IGDA meeting Student Showcase

The May 29th meeting of the Baltimore chapter of the International Game Developers Association will be a showcase and demo of student projects around the area. See the announcement for details on where and when.

Posted in Careers, Events, General, IGDA | No Comments »

Free self-organizing conference on Social Computing this Sat in Baltimore

Many online games have a strong social component to them — from Second Life to World of Warcraft — and the trend toward making games social is increasing. If you are interested in social media and social computing systems, you might consider going to a free self-organizing conference on the topic taking place this Saturday at the University of Baltimore. Lunch and parking are free and supported by the sponsors, which include UMBC. Here’s a press release for SocialDevCamp East, which describes itself “the Unconference for Thought Leaders of the Future Social Web”

BALTIMORE, MD (5/5/08) — Where is the social web going? It’s going mobile, to geocentric services, and to open platforms. On May 10th at the University of Baltimore a community of like minded developers, social media gurus and thought leaders will attend an unconference to discuss the future of the social web. Thought leaders from DC to Boston will converge upon Baltimore to meet, forge relationships, and envision the future.

SocialDevCamp East is a BarCamp-style event. BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, CA in 2005. Since then 31 BarCamps have been held in cities around the world. And now under the guidance of planners, David Troy of Roundhouse Technologies, LLC Ann Bernard and Keith Casey of WhyGo Solo.com, Baltimore will be added to the list.

According to Dave Troy, “Part of what we’re doing here with SocialDevCamp East is telling a story: a story about how there is latent intellectual capital and talent here on the East coast that wants to emerge, evolve and change the world. It’s the story of a new kind of silicon valley happening here – an Amtrak metropolis from DC to Boston rich with talent, schools, and industries that will shape much of the future of technology.”

With registration well over 150 the conference has gained lots of momentum using the social media tools that the conference will explore. As with all BarCamps, the attendees will create the sessions. Currently suggested topics include: Where is the social web going? How will location-aware devices affect the social web? How will platforms and data portability play out?

SocialDevCamp East - Charting the Next Course will take place Saturday, May 10, 2008 from 8:30am - 10:00pm at the University of Baltimore, Thumel Business Center Building, Baltimore, MD The event is free to attend. To find out more information go to: http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/SocialDevCampEast

Posted in Events, social media | No Comments »

UMBC 3rd Annual Digital Entertainment Conference

First, the announcment:

UMBC’s Game Developer’s Club along with the Computer Science Department, is hosting their annual Digital Entertainment Conference on April 12 from 10:30am - 6:00pm in Lecture Hall 3 in the Administration Building. This all day event includes speakers from local video game companies like Breakaway, Big Huge Games, and Firaxis. They’ll be speaking about different aspects of the video game industry, including art, programming, and design. If you have any interest in getting into the industry or just playing games, mark your calendars and come join us on April 12!

DEC’s official web site: www.umbcgdc.org/dec/
For Facebook members, you can join the DEC event here:
www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=9446589599

This has really been a great event in the past. It is open to the public, so whether you are a UMBC student or not, if you want to find out more about what the games industry is really like, you should come.

Posted in Art, Careers, Events, Game design, News, Programming | No Comments »

Game Career panel at UMBC Commons

The UMBC Shriver Center has organized a panel of experts from Firaxis Games, Breakaway Ltd., Legendary Studios and the Imaging Research Center to talk about their experiences in the video game industry. If you want to learn more about the video game industry or are interested in a career in gaming, modeling or simulation (and if you’re reading this blog, that seems likely!), this should be pretty good.

It is Monday, November 5th from 12-1 in the UMBC Commons room 331.

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Epic’s Tim Sweeney on “Programming for future CPUs and GPUs”

Tim Sweeney, the CEO and Chief Architect of Epic Games, will give a distinguished lecture at 10:30am this Friday 2 November on “Programming for future CPUs and GPUs” at Johns Hopkins in room 3 of Shaffer Hall. The talk is open to the public.

Sweeney is doing R&D work on game, graphics, and programming language technology aimed at the large-scale multicore CPUs that will be prevalent in the next decade. In his lecture, Sweeney will be sharing his thoughts on the major changes coming in programming practices and computing architectures in that time frame.

Tim Sweeney founded Epic Games in 1991 and wrote a number of early shareware games. In 1995, he began developing the Unreal Engine, which has since grown into the game industry’s leading technology. Now on its third generation, the Unreal Engine is used in over 150 leading-edge games for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3; Epic’s current games include Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 3.

Posted in Events, Parallel programming | No Comments »

Introduction to Second Life, 1:00pm 10/16, ECS 023 @umbc

Join Gale Zasada (aka Gamay Nouvelle) at 1:00pm Tuesday, October 16, 2007 in ECS 023 for an introduction to Second Life, including a virtual tour of Info Island and the rest of the islands that make up the library and education archipelago. In her “First Life,” Gale Zasada is currently an instructor for the Library Associate Training Institute in Maryland, where she teaches search engine skills and Web 2.0 technologies.

Seats are limited, so register to ensure a place.

This workshop is jointly sponsored by the Library, Faculty Development Center and Office of Information technology.

Posted in Events, Second life, social media | 1 Comment »

UMBC dissertation proposal: Rendering Massive Models

UMBC PhD student Mark Bolstad is presenting his dissertation proposal on Rendering Massive Models at 9:00am Monday, October 15th in room ITE 352. If you are interested in computer graphics and what a dissertation in the area is like, you might attend. In general, thesis and dissertation proposals and defenses are open to the public and attending some is a great way to learn about an important aspect of graduate study. Here is the dissertation abstract.

Whether it is for the quest of increased visual realism in cinema, or in the processing of the latest scientific data sets, the sizes of models being rendered are becoming larger. As this trend continues, the number of elements within a scene or a single object will exceed four billion, thus requiring 64-bit data structures to reference the components of the object, and consequently, new techniques and algorithms to efficiently renderer the object.

This dissertation will present a system that will have the ability to render models of extreme complexity. The system will be designed to generate photo-realistic images of complex scenes, but is not strictly limited to those types of images. The system will support procedural shading, global illumination, and scene geometry that exceeds four billion primitives, whether it is in a single complex objects, or in a scene with a large number of simple primitives. Some of the unique contributions in this proposal are:

• Rendering models of extreme complexity: This will be the first rendering system that will be capable of rendering scenes with geometric complexity exceeding four billion elements.
• Stochastic algorithms for geometry processing: A unique stochastic algorithm is proposed that reduces the total amount of geometry processed by the renderer with little to no impact on the visual quality.
• Acceleration structures for improving the performance when rendering scenes of extreme complexity: Many of the acceleration structures used for rendering do not scale well with large models. This dissertation proposes modifications to existing acceleration structures to not only increase their efficiency with respect to large models, but to also identify the best candidate for use with a scan-line algorithm.

Dissertation committee:

• Dr. Marc Olano (chair)
• Dr. Penny Rheingans
• Dr. Hillol Kargupta
• Dr. Charles Nicholas
• Dr. Howard Motteler

Posted in Events, UMBC Research | No Comments »

Baltimore and DC IGDA chapter meetings, Oct 2007

The Baltimore and the DC IGDA chapters are both meeting this week. Both hold open meetings and welcome new people who are curious and possibly interested in joining. IGDA is a non-profit professional society that is committed to advancing the careers and enhancing the lives of game developers by connecting members with their peers, promoting professional development, and advocating on issues that affect the developer community. If you are serious about a career in the game industry the local IGDA chapters are a great way to learn about it and to begin building your professional network.

Wednesday 10 October at 7:00pm the Baltimore IGDA chapter will meet at the 2nd floor of the Treehouse Restaurant and Lounge in Cockeysville (map). Chapter officers (president, content/speaker manager, sponsorship manager, community/web manager) will be elected.

Thursday 11 October at 7:00pm the DC IGDA chapter will hold a “Back to School” meeting with representatives from area colleges and universities talking about their programs. The meeting will be held at the Westwood College Annandale Campus, 7619 Little River Turnpike (Suite 500), Annandale, VA 22003 (map). UMBC Professor Marc Olano will talk about the UMBC GAIM program and related research activities here at UMBC. Dana Wortman, a part time UMBC PhD student (CS), will talk about the programs she oversees at the Art Institute of Washington.

Posted in Events, IGDA | No Comments »

UMBC Halo 3 launch party a success

Last Friday UMBC held a Halo 3 launch party sponsored by Microsoft, the UMBC Game Room, the UMBC GAIM program and the UMBC Game Developers Club. We had a good number of Xboxes since Professor Marc Olano graciously provided four consoles from the GAIM Lab for the night. Paul Oliver of the GDC described it this way.

“The event was a Game Room, Microsoft, and UMBC Game Dev Club co-sponsored Event. The event was run from 7:00pm to Midnight on Friday, and held in the Game Room, a large room in our student building that has many pool tables, airhockey games, TVs, etc.

We had eight 360s but only seven copies of Halo 3. We ran a tournament using two projectors setup back to back, and then six TVs, two of them were HD, the other four were 27 inches. In order to prevent controller loss we had the game room staff check out controllers — turn in your License or school ID to get a controller. We also taped the DVD tray of the 360s closed so that we didn’t have to worry about copies of Halo 3 walking off.

For the tournament we had 14 teams of four sign up and ran it single elimination. The tournament itself ran from 7:30 to 11:30 with just a short break (20 minutes) for the Imagine Cup presentation. As for the 200 people, we had a lot of people just watching the tournament and a lot of people drifted in and out. The game room was nice enough to donate the usage of all of their equipment, so we had probably 30 of the people at any given time playing pool, airhockey, etc.

The XNA presentation itself went rather well, with many people very interested in it. I also went around to each of the TVs and gave a shorter presentation to everyone who had not been paying attention during the larger presentation. The swag had great prizes for the Halo 3 tournament, with a copy of Halo 3 going to the Game Dev Club, and the games that are arriving to be split up amoung the people who helped me Dr. Olano, who provided four Xbox 360s for the event from the UMBC Gaim Lab.”

Paul took some pictures, which you can see here.

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