[Event] Joburg Community Night - 12 November 2013

Bensonance

This event happens monthly, is free to attend and anyone may speak at the meetup - just comment in the thread below to let us know!

Test games! Talk games! Make games!

When: 18:30 until around 21:30, Tuesday 8 October

Where: Microsoft Campus Bryanston, 3012 William Nicol Drive, Bryanston, Johannesburg

Content:
- 6:30 - 7:00 - Meet, greet, and eat.
- Community News (5 min)
- Blizzard Design Video ~25 Mins
- Creating real- time fx for games ~15 mins (@Elyaradine)
- Focused prototype feedback

- Open Demo Floor

With demos of all the games we can muster, or that want feedback, set up outside the Auditorium.

- Your presentation/talk/game here.

Bensonance

So this month I'd like to make a concerted effort with the setting up of demos before the meetup begins.

So if you have a game that you're working on Please bring a build of it and ideally something to play it on. There are usually tables around that we can group together and set up a arcade to play in.

Oh and also, I won't be in Joburg for this meetup. It's the first I've missed in close to a year and a half, so sad face :(. Anyway, will @Rigormortis or @Fengol please run it in my absence? :)

Mac

Yeah, prototype... I need to get that done

AngryMoose

Is this going to be the last one for the year, or will there still be one more on the 10th of December? I seem to remember MS not hosting a December night last year...

Fengol

I will get confirmation but there is supposed to be a December MS community night

Elyaradine

I want to give a talk on creating real-time fx for games. The anatomy of an effect, how I approach thinking about what it's going to look like, and a couple of breakdowns of some shaders/fx stuff I've worked on to show what's actually going on.

I'd rather do it for December if there's still a meetup then, but I could probably still bang something out for this month if I had to, although it'd put some pressure on my already-packed schedule.

Tuism

I'm assuming that talk will be Unity-centric? Which would be awesome :) Awesomer if the same stuff could be GMS-considered :)

Elyaradine

Well, as always, my emphasis would on the thinking. While the examples would be given in Unity, you could translate it into whatever package you wanted, although you'd get the most out of it if your package allows you to write your own shaders and import meshes with multiple/custom UV sets.

Chris_Bischoff

Sorry dudes-I can't make this one. :(
I'm there for a December meet tho!

Nitrogen

Sweet! After yesterdays competition deadline, I now have a game I want people to play :D

shambok

Ill be there.

DarkRa88iT

I'll be there and bringing a couple of people! Woohoo!

Also, if somebody has the installer for the latest version of Unity, I'd very much appreciate it if I could get it from someone. See ya'll there!

Fengol

It's not 100% confirmed but I just spoke to Dave from MS and he's pretty sure we'll have a meeting in December; so Jonathan if you want to speak next month that's fine.

Are there any talks happening tonight? No design discussions? No games or prototypes people want to take center stage for?

I'm happy to just spend the time playing games in the make-shift arcade after some news.

duncanbellsa

I've got Blazin' Aces working on my phone... would love to get some feedback for how it runs on mobile. If anyone else has an Android phone I'm happy to pass along the APK for some testing.

Tuism

Myself and @loet have something of a surprise for tonight's meetup! See you guys there! :D

Elyaradine

I've got the talk prepared, but finding examples to illustrate my points was the main thing that I was worried I wouldn't have time for.

If we're cool with watching a Blizzard video, there's a really awesome one on which the design portion of my talk would've been based, and which has examples of how their games have done it right and wrong. I imagine he'd do a better job of talking about effects design than I would anyway. :P So... it'd be about 25 minutes of his talk (we don't need the whole thing), and about 15 minutes on a couple of fx/shader examples to show the tech-side of stuff and do Q&A.

DarkRa88iT

@Elyaradine I'm cool with watching a Blizzard video. Always good to learn from (who I consider to be) masters. And @Tuism, do we need to bring our bathing suits and pig masks, or what? This surprise intrigues me...

Tuism

Pig suits and bathing masks optional ;)

LazyLizzard

Apologies folks, my work day just never ended so I won't be able to make tonight :(

Avinvented

Was a great night, nice to see everyone again :-)

Mac

That lesson concerning particles was especially helpful

Avinvented

I would really like to give a demo of what I'm working on, but at the moment it is in the pen and paper phase and a whole lot of game scaffolding code. AI module their, a game entity manager here and physics processor everywhere, but one day I hope to have a demo level ready to show off my concept

Nitrogen

Thanks everyone for the feedback on Reservoir, it was awesome playing on 7 monitors at once! :D

Elyaradine

Pew!

Sorry about all the technical fails. Everything was set up on my laptop, but when that wouldn't show on the projector, everything kind of fell apart... :P

Hope you got something out of it. :)

Tuism

Great meet guys :D Thanks everyone!

I'm super interested in getting a practical hands-on regarding your examples @Elyaradine, like... Source files or something, that can walk me through how shaders and UV maps and whatever are put together?

Elyaradine

Sure. I'll upload a package when I get a chance.

Sarge

It was nice to meet you guys. Some cool and interesting stuff. Thanks

cairnswm

Was great to be at a meet up again. Really hope it inspires me to start making a game again ;)

I still have my old libraries etc, so expect something done in Delphi/FreePascal ;)

Elyaradine

So... these worked fine on my Unity (free version, 4.2.0f4), where Ed's broke everything. Maybe importing them as a unity package will work where copying the project over failed...?

Package: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9847316/vfx.unitypackage (1.74MB)
Web Build: http://pixofile.co.za/jonathan/vfx/_Build.html (~300KB)

Assets > Import Package > Custom Package...

If you have any questions, ask away. If there's something you feel you don't understand at all (we might have jumped in the deep end), then maybe I can put up a guide on devmag, or do a follow-up talk that explains things for you. Answering stuff here is better though, because it's less formal and I don't have to go digging up examples or anything. :P

Also, I rushed these on Monday night. They're all done by me, except for the image of the baby, which was stolen off of a Google image search for education! <_<

Nitrogen

@cairnswm - long time! How is Delphi going these days?

@elyaradine - I just had a look at the web build, did you take the frozen baby out? That was my favourite :(

Elyaradine

@Nitrogen: The frozen baby's in the unity package. :) I took it out of the web build because I didn't want to code camera some camera movement, as easy as that is, and you can't see the effect unless the camera moves.

Nitrogen

@Elyaradine Ah no worries, I'll give it a bash in Unity then.

cairnswm

@Nitrogen - tried to leave delphi behind - only use free pascal and lazarus now ;)

At work I do very little coding anymore :(

Got a small idea I want to try.

Anyone seen Basic 4 Android? Looks like a very neat Andorid development tool, pity its only android.

mattbenic

How did everyone feel about the timing as a result of having only one presentation?

I for one really enjoyed getting to the open floor sooner, and feeling less rushed. I wonder if we should place a hard limit of max 2 presentations per meetup?

Tuism

That actually sounds like a good idea, the open floor is good, I feel we need to know how to run the open floors better, though. It's probably more individual experience than structural niggles.

LexAquillia

We're trying out a two talk limit this month, will report back. Also important (at least I've found) is getting the speakers to stick to their allocated time (we do 20min per talk). My looming technique is getting better by encouraging the speakers to wrap it up :P

Nitrogen

LexAquillia said:

getting the speakers to stick to their allocated time (we do 20min per talk).

Often this is not the talk's fault - they finish on time, but then the speakers dont know when to stop taking questions, so the Q/A section takes up as much time as the talk did.

As for the shorter presentation time, I think it's a good idea. Maybe rather limit the time than the number of presentations. eg. 3-4 short presentations or 1 long one.

mattbenic

3-4 20 minute ones could still run pretty long, and we do have times when we don't have enough content. If we limit the number of presentations, those can be used for later meetups. I think having an upfront time limit per presentation is good as well. There can always be exceptions if pre-agreed and it makes sense for a particular talk, but for most cases 20 minutes should be enough.

@Nitrogen you make a good point about Q&A time. Limiting this time would certainly help-we can always come back to these topics in open floor time. @LexAquilla how are you guys handling your Q&A time after the fixed-time talks?

Also, while I didn't stay to play, having the tables at the back for people to set up their games to be played is great, excellent idea :)

LexAquillia

Either the Q&A needs to form part of the allocated 20min. I usually give and extra 5min though if there are a lot of questions. We also use the Q&A time of the one presentation to allow the other person to setup. If there are lots of other questions then people ask them during the open floor.

Thelangfordian

Can't believe I missed this! Gaaah, why work, whyyyy!?!?

Nitrogen

Thelangfordian said:

Can't believe I missed this! Gaaah, why work, whyyyy!?!?

I motion for another night per month in addition to what we've got now, where we just hang out and play / make games.

Tuism

Hey guys, has the December meetup been confirmed or not yet?

Fengol

Yes, it's confirmed. And there's no January meet in JHB. I still need to confirm for CT but my guess is it'll be the other way around.