From Ecksdee

The Crystal Space conference

It really was a great event for our community ! Two days long (15&16 July) in the nice city of Aachen, and meeting people you usually only know from mails or IRC. Many thanks to the RWTH crew. There's a page on Crystal Space website with all the slides, and soon videos of the talks.

The talk

The Ecksdee talk took place in the great conference room downstairs, on sunday afternoon. It was planned at 13:00, but began at ~13:15, mostly waiting for people to arrive, but finally the majority of them were attending the blender workshop which was being held upstairs. So there were ~15 persons.

The goal of the session was to introduce Ecksdee and:

• show how Crystal Core was used as a base for the game
• explain technical details about inner workings of the program
• give an overview of choices about the art content

We also wanted to get feedback from the audience about the idea of in-game advertisement.

The talk started with Amir about the history of the project: how it started with his test application for a hover vehicle, and gradually evolved to a full fledged CEL application, finally using Crystal Core codebase. The different possibilities for programming the hover physics were then explained, with their ups and downs. Next step was the CEL integration of the hover and craft code into property classes, so that hover vehicle is reusable in other projects, like Crystal Core.

The mike was then "handed" to me, and spoke (with a horrible english pronunciation, sorry) about the "port" to Crystal Core code, and the different usages of CEL quest system for Ecksdee specific game logic were detailed. He then went on the repartition of different tasks in the program, between ship behaviour and the application object. Next point was the packaging of the game for the end user, with a list of requirements, the method choosed for Ecksdee, and a tip for GNU/Linux dependency treatment.

Amir was then back to speak about XML usage and the properties of the player's entity. He also explained the actions on the game manager entity initiated from the behaviours. Next, he presented the art guidelines for Ecksdee, and introduced the concept of minimalism, using screen and graphical user interface mockups as examples. Still on the art subject, he went on with restriction problematic in Free and Open Source Software context. Last point was about priority given to art and content in Ecksdee.

It was time to show Ecksdee running, so I took the joypad and played, while Amir was commenting about the different stages of the game session. People could enjoy the recently added sounds and music, due to the powerful speaker/subwoofer combo I had brought.

After the demo, Amir unveiled the future of Ecksdee and detailed the TODO list. The two big items are networking and artificial intelligence, so that the player is not alone ;-)

The most important result of the presentation was Jorrit's thought about making Crystal Core generic enough so its executable could handle different games, which would then be packaged as additional files. As the first step, we will have to list the changes we made.

In the evening, there were discussions of possible techniques about artificial intelligence for non-player ships. Since then, I found about OpenSteer library, which may be considered for inclusion as a CEL plugin.

Vknecht 13:02, 24 July 2006 (PDT)