More Links

I am trying to gather as many links to useful gaming, education, and library related material as possible. If you know of a good site or resource not included here, let me know in comments.

Gaming in Libraries Symposium 2005

If, like me, you missed the Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium in Chicago in December 2005, then you can at least read what some of the bloggers in Bloggers Alley wrote about it. Here are a few posts:

Hidden Peanuts

The Shifted Librarian

Another one from The Shifted Librarian

Tame the Web

You can also see PDFs of the presentations at the Gaming in Libraries blog.

And if you're getting really excited about gaming in libraries, planning for the 2006 symposium is under way. It will be held December 3-5, 2006, and registration will be opening later in the year. You can keep track of news about it at the Gaming in Libraries blog.

Hello, world!

This is the first post on Library Games. This blog will be concerned with the intersection of the topics of games, gaming, education, libraries, and bibliographic instruction.

Blah....

I've been feeling really crap past few days, full of the cold or flu - who knows. So after being off wortk for a couple of days then back in today, I've decided to take a long weekend to relax and try and recover a bit more, today was hard going and I didn't really get very far.

Russell seems to be having fun doing some visual effects for our app, and while not vital, they will show how dynamic it is and the advantages it holds. Theres still a long way to go, but with any luck the visual quality should double which would probably make it more attractive to the people Dave's after. Im still finishing off my GUI system, but its almost done. I took a small timeout to help Russell with my 3D engine, and correct and improve some of it. It appears to be using lots of VRam, but Im not really sure why - something I'll have to investigate.

I've not done anything with my BASIC really, been too knackered. I hope to pick it up again soon, although I intend to buy the kids climbing frame this weekend so thats probably a wait and see. Still, these things usually take time to deliver so...

Google me this....

I've been playing with Google earth and Sketchup, and boy does it have issues. I mean, its nice being able to build your house and put it in google earth and all, but theres so many limitations to the editor that you just dont get with a normal 3D package. Initially, you think its much easier than a real 3D package, but as you get into an edit, you start to realise all the tools that have been removed, are actually ones you need. Its also dog slow, and I'm not really sure why. Being a games coder, Im used to throwing around 100,000's of polys, yet google earth stutters as it draws a few hundred. No idea why, particually since they do draw lots when you switch on buildings in New York. The comunity's seems a bit too wide spread as well, although they do have a good age spread. My father-in-law loves it for example, but I know that no one aisde from an artist could actually use sketchup. Oh well, I guess it might get better in time but there are still problems that the concept of using sketchup gives. But when you have almost infinite money, I guess those can be fixed too.

Work, Rest and Zzzzzzz

Boy am I tired. I think the heats starting to get to me. Every year I think, I know... I'll buy and Air-Con unit in the sales, and every year I forget. Oh well. Champions league final tonight, should be good.

I've been playing with doing a windowing system at work for my game, and was trying to find a nicer way doing things. In the past the systems been fairly simple, workable but not very expandable without editing the actual library code. So this time, I've set about trying to change that. Its workout out pretty good too, and now you can great your own buttons or gadgets and hook them into the system without the system having any idea on how it works. This is key to how everything in our interface needs to be. Totally expandable with simple code, and without changing the root codebase. Unlike Unreal for example where youre expected to change almost everything, here the idea is you change almost nothing, and expand it.

Relaxing....

Didn't do much this weekend, overdosed on watching Battlestar Galactica which was pretty good fun. Been thinging about how to debug a basic program and it gets fairly complicated when you start trying to step into functionts inside the middle of an expersion evaluation. For example if I try this i=1+Func(), then in order to step into a function I'd have to somehow store the whole evaluation process in a state machine or something.

An easy solution would be to not allow debugging through this, but its not very nice.