Gluon Sprint - Day 3

On the third day, the developers all rose from their beds to meet up in the lobby of the hostel and then proceed to breakfast. Here, Sacha could tell us that he had just recieved an email from our final sprint participant. As it turns out, poor Eugene was so unfortunate as to miss his plane and thus be unable to show up. So, with heavy heart we decided that there was nothing to be done about that, accepted it, and continued on to go forth into the new day. Of course, it continued in the same vein, as the tram we were supposed to catch decided to be a no-show Luckily Munich has so many public transport options that it wasn't a problem - there was a five minute walk to the nearest S-bahn station, so everything soon found its way back on track.

The first thing that happened when we got to the office was, interestingly, that it was discovered that some of my code was causing horrible crashes all over the place. So... that needed instant fixing - which Albert was so nice as to provide While that was going on, Arjen began working on a small example showing how to actually use the Definition Language handler, and later on he worked on creating a Qt Model (the Model/View sort) which represents a GameObject hierarchy - during process, of course, a large number of bugs in my untested code was found, and for the most part fixed. There are still some left, which will be worked on tomorrow.

All the while that was going on Sacha, Sandro and Jure worked hard on Blok, the first Gluon game which was included with the tech preview last week, and the Blok Editor. Kim and Morten continued their work on KCL's MacOS X support, and towards the end of the day reached a point at where they realised that KCL in its current form does not function well in a cross-platform environment. So, they are planning on restructuring the entire library over the course of Monday.

Just before lunch the manager of all things not actually programming in Qt joined us, and he hung out with us for lunch (pizza sponsored by Nokia) and according to Knut his managerial roles included the pizza we were eating - so, much applause happened there Other than that, over lunch was discussed the visions for the project, and what sort of things Gluon would actually have on existing solutions. This, of course, is something which would be very interesting to have as a document - for example on the wiki - stating the goals of the project, and its unique selling points (to use a term which sounds a lot like marketing... which of course is what it is ).

After lunch, people go back to the room - after finding out that someone has borrowed the projector so that Wii Tennis is not possible - and return to working at their respective tasks. One highlight of this: At 15.45 Harald exclaims: "Good news - Gluon builds and runs on Maemo5. Bad news - It uses the wrong style. Good news - 50 fps. Bad news - doesn't render anything." At 18:28:41 he posts the following on IRC: "gluon on Mac OS X (native 64-bit Cocoa application): http://chaos.troll.no/~harald/Block.tiff"

In between Harald's two statements the team decided to do some brainstorming on the user interface of Gluon Creator. As can be seen on the image to the left, a lot of investigation was performed on what other similar projects have done - in this case you see a search for Game Maker. Other projects looked at were the already mentioned Unity3D, Blender Game Engine and Virtools. As an experiment, the mocking up was done in two places at once: Leinir did the mocking up on the flip-board, and Sacha did mocking up in Qt Designer simultaneously, shown on the wall with the projector (sorry, no image of this, but you can see the flip-board on the picture to the right ).

Having learned on Saturday that going out for dinner late is a really bad idea in Germany, we left the Nokia offices at around eight. We headed for a restaurant recommended by Harald named Hacker-Pschorr and arrived there in good time - there were almost noone else in the positively enormous restaurant (as it turns out, the huge hall we were in, with surely enough room for at least three hundred seated guests, probably more, was only one of two of such halls) and ordered ourselves some food and beer. Of course, since this is a Bavariant themed restaurant, when you order a large beer... You get what you ask for. The picture to the left shows just how big those beers really were Even better yet, the beer (their house brew) was absolutely stunning - wonderfully smooth and very tasty - and the food was just as good. Brilliant food and drink, coupled with good company, equalling a very pleasant evening of dining out with the team. Afterwards, we all walked home (the restaurant was well within walking distance of our hostel) and went straight to bed. So, all in all, a really great day at the Gluon Developers' Sprint!

Game concept of the day: Knitting Hero (multi-touch, with two styluses)

Final point: i need a new camera... hey, is that an N900?