Below are the topics for our next two meetings. We will be meeting on December 9th, 2012 and January 13th, 2013 at the Technology Cooperative from 2PM – 5PM. As always we will start with a open discussion / Show and Tell before the topic so feel free to bring a game in progress to demo, a favorite tool, a mechanic you love in another game, or anything you find helpful and want to share with the group. Its not required to bring something to Show and Tell, but it’s a great way to share with the group!
Coding for Charity
Today (Friday November 30th, 2012) and through Sunday I (Mike) will be coding a game from scratch live at twitch.tv/vinull! I’m doing this to help raise $1000 for the Technology Cooperative. You can read all the details and donate at gamemarx.chipin.com, and there is also a ChipIn widget on the live stream page. Everyone is also welcome to just hang on in chat and encourage/mock me live!
December 9th, 2012 – 3D Point Clouds and Google Earth
Jeffry Turnmire will give a demonstration on 3D laser scan technology for generating 3D point clouds. Discussion on point cloud manipulation tools and data extraction for generation 3D TIN surfaces. Demonstration on extracting 3D surface information from Google Earth.
January 13th, 2013 – Scrolling Tile Engine and Waypoint Pathfinding System with XNA and Windows Phone
Chris G. Williams, Microsoft XNA MVP, will be combining two talks into one on XNA and Windows Phone. The first part is a fun and easy going talk that shows basic techniques for creating Windows Phone games with XNA that use a scrolling tiled map. Leveraging freely available images for prototyping, principles of tilemapping, map design, basic animation, sprite (2D graphics) rendering will be covered.
The second part builds on the previous to provide a degree of limited Pathfinding AI for the creatures in your game by creating a system of waypoints they can use to navigate the terrain on your map. Includes discussion of simple game AI and ways to use/tweak the waypoint system in your games.