Entries by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen

Back in June, an event was held in Berlin called the Qt Contributors' Summit. This was such a success that the team decided that it should not be the last time something like that happened. So, to further this success, Nokia's Qt Frameworks Division has offered KDE a whole day of unconferencing at the Qt Developer Days in Munich later this month.

If you wish to take part in furthering the collaboration between KDE and Qt, and indeed other projects, then join the Qt Contributors' Day on Monday the 24th of October at the Dolce Munich Unterschleissheim. To join in, send me an email at admin@leinir.dk to that effect

You don't have a ticket to Developer Days, you say? Well, not to fret! The KDE e.V. has been given a bunch of tickets to be given out to community members. To get your hands on one of these tickets, give me an email at admin@leinir.dk to inform me of this.

Please note! If you decide that you want to join us, get in touch with me BEFORE the end of this week! (i.e. before Sunday the 9th, which is when i send off the list of people requesting tickets and the like to the e.V. board for evaluation).

So - come to the Qt Contributors' Day at Developer Days 2011 in Munich, and let's make this thing epic! Qt 5 is ahead, and with the launch of the Qt Project, we have more to say than we ever did before!

Lately, the Gluon team has been pulling a whole lot of work together, which is why you've not been hearing about us all that much unless you've sat in the channel with us. As you most likely know, the Google Summer of Code and Season of KDE tutoring programs ran over the summer, and Gluon of course took part in both. That is not what this blog entry is about, at least not directly - i simply mention it because as we are now at an end, we are getting closer to our next release, which will happen once the three projects are merged into master.

What this blog entry is about is what we've been up to over the last few weeks - specifically attending the enormously successful Desktop Summit in Berlin, and immediately following this GDC Europe.

Desktop Summit

While at the Desktop Summit, the Gluon team took part in various events, some of which got filmed. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the recording equipment seems to have more or less exploded, and while they're working on it and hope to still be able to gain at least some of the presentations, i thought it best to publish this none the less.

The first event we took part in was the lightning talks, where Felix Rohrbach spoke about his Season of KDE work implementing support for the Achievements module in the Open Collaboration Services draft.



The next event, unfortunately without video here, was our presentation. This had both Arjen and myself on stage, where we first talked about how this was our second aniversary in our current form, with the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit being the initial event which allowed us to eventually formulate our vision. After this, we showed off Gluon Creator, and what we can do with it. Finally, Shantanu showed up to show off his work on the distribution system - the part which allows you to push games directly from inside Gluon Creator and download them using any of the Gluon Player applications. From a personal viewpoint, let me just say - while the presentation fell apart due to broken network, it is still very impressive stuff!

Similarly without video, but very productive, we had our BoF, which unlike last year, where we spent the time brainstorming about the future direction of Gluon, we spent helping those present getting to grips with how to build games using Gluon. This event further showed that we need to get those screencasts done, showing how to use Gluon Creator to build games. If you want to help us with this endeavour, drop by the channel and we'll talk Scripts for the first few of them are already done, and they primarily need to be recorded.

Finally, of course, hacking went on. One of the things which we spent time on (Arjen specifically) was the particle system. So, when he had something to show off, we recorded this little video, where you unfortunately cannot see just how fast the whole thin is - but this is drawn eight times on top of itself, and there is no perceivable slowdown. Impressive stuff And this, i'm told, is entirely unoptimized as it stands, so expect impressiveness when it's merged into master later



GDC Europe

At the Qt Contributor's Summit in Berlin, Sulamita Garcia from the Intel AppUp team came up to me and asked two questions: Were i available in mid August, and would i like to go on stage to talk about Gluon. I'm always happy to talk about Gluon to anybody who'd like to listen, and it just so happened i was available at that time. So, as it turns out, they would like to bring Gluon to GDC Europe for an AppUp event. Over the next few weeks (six weeks from the invitation was extended until GDC Europe was due to happen) we worked on putting together something to show off there.

As it turned out the AppUp Lab got cancelled, but this happened at such a late time that everything else was already ordered, so Arjen and i went merrily on our way to Cologne, checked into the hotel and eventually got our passes. We walked around on the floor, talking to as many people we could about Gluon and what we are trying to do for the Makers and Players of Games, and a lot of people were more than happy to hear what we had to say.

There was lots of interest in using our various libraries directly, and our distribution system hit home as well with many people. We also spoke with a supplier of payment solutions about what we might be able to do for our donation-based monetization concept, and got some very good insights on this.

Finally, of course, everybody likes a bit of swag, and Intel decided to sponsor us some really nifty t-shirts! With a graphic designed by Eigene "it-s" Trounev, Arjen, Bjoern, Monika and i looked dashing in our dark blue Gaming Freedom t-shirts. Here is Arjen looking confused on the final day of the event (sorry, didn't get to taking other shots, we were so much all over the place i totally missed taking pictures ):



Now, as the AppUp Lab event got cancelled, i now have the remaining t-shirts in two boxes here in my home. So, we came up with the idea that, other than making sure that the Gluon team gets some t-shirts to wear, we would give others the opportunity to get one as well. And as these ones are a bit special, we thought that it would make sense to make it a bit of a competition rather than simply handing them out: So, make a game with Gluon Creator and get it up on GamingFreedom.org (through http://test.gamingfreedom.org/ - or using Shaan7's GSoC work to do it directly from Gluon Creator), and get in touch with us about it, so make sure you're you, so you can get your t-shirt! Note, there are about 200 t-shirts in various sizes, so to make sure you get one, you will need to get there before everybody else - this is first come first serve after all... and who knows, there might be an achievement in this later on

Next?

The next steps on the path towards gaming freedom are many. Some of them are:

• Merge the tutored projects in


• Release a snapshot


• Produce those screencasts to help people build games


• Use those t-shirts constructively - want one? Make a game!

Hi people! Just to let you know that Gluon is very much moving - not only are all the students now starting more seriously on their GSoC and SoK projects, since their exams are starting to end, we have also been active in other places. Recently i returned from the MeeGo Conference in San Francisco, and rather than bore you with the details, i will just say that Intel are interested in a combination of GamingFreedom.org and their AppUp application store... Potentially interesting stuff on the horizon, we shall see!

Other than that, we were also featured on the FreeGamer blog, and two of the Gluon people (myself and Laszlo) took part in the OCS Next sprint - furthering the technology on top of which the GamingFreedom.org distribution site is built. Finally, a short article about Gluon was included in a recent Commit Digest, the weekly update on development efforts going on in KDE.

Finally, we will be presenting at the Desktop Summit, and on that note Laszlo has given a short presentation to the Helsinki chapter of the IGDA, whose members seemed to quite enjoy what we're trying to do. This is great news, as these are exactly the people we're trying to catch the attention of! So, in short - Gluon seems to be going places

Sharing a nice, big booth at LinuxTag, the KDE, Kubuntu and Calligra teams are pulling together to promo all things KDE. As you can tell from the picture below, the booth is very well visited, with lots of people interested all 'round - showing off Plasma on the desktop in the middle there, and the brand, spanking new Plasma Active running on an openSuse powered tablet nearest the camera - already a real crowd puller, even in its experimental stage! Kudos to the Active team there, great stuff, very demoable



Yesterday i did a talk about Calligra, standing in for Inge who couldn't attend, immediately following Michael Meeks' talk about LibreOffice - what an act to follow - and it was received very well indeed! The message of the Calligra Engine as a kind of WebKit for office applications is clear and easily understood, and the audience seemed very interested in this. Not only that, people seemed very interested in the fact that Calligra isn't just working on mobile versions, they're right around the corner. So, yes, it sounds like Calligra is, indeed, the future of office suites as hinted by Inge in a blog post a couple of days ago.

The day before, i gave a talk about the GamingFreedom network and the Gluon tool chain, and what it means for Free game development. While there was a fairly small number of attendees (about thirty people), those who were there were enthusiastic and positive about it. The question about JavaScript was brought up again, and it seems my answer that it is for reasons of easy distribution, and that the amount of code work when writing games is reasonably small as well, was acceptable. They also responded very well to the statements about how to monetize the effort - that is, that selling games is not encouraged, but that donations are being made extremely simple, thus removing all obstacles bar will and stinginess - in short, people liked to know that they would not have to compromise on their principles just because they wanted to make a bit of money with Gluon and GamingFreedom. Which is good to know

So, all in all, it seems to be going quite well!

In the summer of 2009, a few people gathered in a darkened room in Gran Canaria, to discuss what might be done about the current game development situation on Linux. From there, it was decided to begin putting together a solution to this problem: Support the makers and players of games, all the way from the idea to playing the game and back again.

Then in April of 2010, the first alpha of Gluon was released, which hinted at the Gluon team's implementations of the vision created as a suggestion for how to fix this problem. X-Ray, as the release was named, included one game, and included the beginning of Gluon Creator, the game construction tool.

Now we have reached a point in time where we can create games with Gluon Creator, and do it properly. We have the beginnings of the social features which are the basis of the connection between the makers and players of games. And we have a game engine which by now has most of the features required to create games in today's demanding world.

Since Last We Met

Those of you who played around with the last release of Gluon will remember that the scripting system was somewhat simplistic, and that the graphics system was very old fashioned. Since then, both have been redone almost from scratch.

The scripting system is still powered by QtScript, but is now handled in such a way that it is able to control many more aspects of the game engine, and generally much more consistent.

GluonGraphics has been rewritten as a fully modern graphics engine, with both OpenGL and OpenGL ES 2 support, allowing Gluon based games to run not only on the desktop but also on the many millions of hand held devices out there. It features, along with much more, a new material system based around programmable shaders and a rendering pipeline based around framebuffers, allowing for complete control over the rendering process and its end result.

Game UIs are a hot topic, and where many large games rely on middleware solutions such as ScaleForm, Gluon has decided to use a real user interface solution, specifically the powerful declarative UI system Qt Quick. This allows for fluid user interfaces integrated into your games.

On top of this, many other changes happened, and you can see all of those in the condensed change log found at the end of this release announcement. And, of course, X-Ray Invaders, the game shipped with X-Ray has been updated to employ these new features, and a further game, Electron Apocalypse, was created, showing off others, such as animated sprites.

Finally, those who tried Gluon X-Ray likely noticed an issue with the input system on Linux, namely that a permissions change was needed. This issue has now been alleviated, and input is now not only fixed on Linux, but in fact available on all platforms where Gluon will run.

Game On!

So, with no further ado: Downloads are available now for many platforms, all located on our website at http://gluon.gamingfreedom.org/ in the Download section. This includes the entirety of the Gluon platform: The libraries GluonAudio, GluonGraphics, GluonInput, GluonPlayer, as well as the applications Gluon Creator, Gluon KDE Player, Gluon Qt Player and Gluon Player Touch.

As hinted at in the introduction, Gluon Creator is now at such a level that you, as a maker of games, can start up the tool and construct your game. Of course, no matter how much effort we were to put into the usability of our little project, no tool is 100% intuitive, and as such, we present you with documentation on how to use Gluon Creator to build games. These exist both in the form of written guides and short video tutorials, explaining how each part works.

We look forward to your visits to the #gluon IRC channel on irc.freenode.net where the team is happy to receive you and help you with any issues you might have. Or, of course, if you wish to join our little revolution, it's the same place

What Does The Future Hold?

The next step for Gluon is the social aspects, which we hint at in this release through the inclusion of the Gluon Player applications. The beginnings of the distribution site can be found at http://test.gamingfreedom.org/, and you can see the effects of this in the players, where you can use your openDesktop.org account (users of kde-look.org or any others from that network of sites will already be aware of this). This will let you make new comments, as well as view and reply to existing ones.

After the release, we will build a new panel for Gluon Creator, which allows the makers of games to not only upload the games they build, but also keep in contact with the players of those games. This effort also includes the extension of the Gluon Player applications to include downloading of new games and interact with each other directly.

Additions to the game creation features which will happen after this release feature such things as an editing view in Gluon Creator. This view will allow for direct manipulation of the objects in the scenes of your game. This will allow for even easier placing of the objects than is possible now, which will help game designers and other visually orientated users of the tool. We will also be employing the powerful KDevPlatform system, which allows us to integrate version control systems into Gluon Creator, as well as using the code knowledge system to provide code completion and other things, which will make the life of game programmers easier.

Lastly, the near future also holds the Google Summer of Code, where Gluon took part last year under the KDE umbrella; a choice so successful that we will do it again this year. As KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organisation, and with two really great proposals accepted for the Gluon project, and great interest for the Season of KDE as well, we hope to see a powerful boost in development to what is already a fast moving project. More information on these projects will be published over the next weeks and months. In short: The future looks very bright, and we hope you want to take part in it!

Condensed Change Log

General

• Gluon API docs now available on api.kde.org: http://api.kde.org/playground-api/games-apidocs/gluon/html/index.html
  
• New game: Electron Apocalypse! Mouse+keyboard top-down multi-directional survival shooter. Move your goblin with the keyboard, aim with the mouse, shoot other goblins and survive the apocalypse for as long as you can!
  
• New sample game: Ball. Google Code-In project by Michał Koźmiński
  
• Invaders renamed to X-Ray Invaders and given proper menu
  
• General sanity of names and examples
  
• Compilation speed up (also code size) with unnecessary header file eliminations
  
• Code quality changes, refactoring, more and more sanity checks.
  
• AStyle-like code unification
  
• Fix krazy issues
  
• Fix valgrind issues
  
• Eliminate Java-like getters
  
• Fix spelling errors
  
• Improve the documentation
  
• Add lincense into more files where it is appropriate
  

GluonCore

• Handle references to any GluonObject in properties correctly, through the GluonObjectFactory
  
• Refactor GluonObjectFactory to be much more efficient (speed and memory both)
  
• Refactor GDLHandler for clarity, move the GDL parsing methods from the gluonobject into this singleton class
  
• Support comments (ignore them while parsing)
  
• New script system, integrated directly into core, with many improvements
  
• Add simple message passing class (MessageHandler)
  
• Add GLUON_DEFINE_SINGLETON macro for convenience, very handy to create gluon singletons by hiding the internal details.
  

GluonAudio

• Support for streaming sounds (no longer allocates entire music files into memory)
  
• Alure used to handle various useful things, such as further file formats support
  

GluonInput

• Establish a backend based management (backends are X11, mac, windows and the indirect Qt wrapper for X)
  
• Add Qt backend management to the Input system, used when platform-specific input system fails because the user does not have right credentials to read the device directly or when the low-level platform specific implementation is just missing
  
• Add more examples, like a loop for all the devices and/or Qt backend testing example
  
• Rename examples from tutorialX for more talkative ones according to the functionality of the given example.
  
• Implement the touch and keyboard mechanism in a way on N900, thus the touch example for instance works for now (More investigation on the engine later pretty soon because of the Meegathon)
  
• Optimize the linux backend code further on (there were some time-consuming loops that were called more times for iteration than needed)
  
• Eliminate the Standard Template Library namespaces and C, C++ headers usage completely
  
• Implement libudev input detection mechanism (commented for now for later consideration)
  
• Add support for the Qt namespace and start using Qt::Key - much cleaner and easier, simplified code that way (implement the mapping accordingly)
  
• Start the work on the QGesture related Qt touch management, too.
  
• BUG: 236254 - gluon/input: RPMLINT error which must be fixed
  
• BUG: 254842 - gluoncreator can not find keyboard whenever i try to run examples
  

GluonGraphics

• Replaced all the old OpenGL 1.1 rendering code with OpenGL 2.0
  
• Support for OpenGL ES 2.0
  
• Programmable pipeline support, with vertex and pixel shaders
  
• Provide a render widget directly from the library
  
• Remove GLEW dependency
  
• Multiple render target support
  
• Support for using Qt Quick to render in-game UI
  

GluonEngine

• New Scripting asset/component combo, to replace the old, naive system
  
• All new assets for rendering sprites and simple meshes
  
• New material system, based on the new GluonGraphics programmable pipeline
  
• Make Sphere collider component more efficient
  
• New Beam Renderer component
  
• Games are now NeXT style bundles
  
• Renaming objects now means that the files which Assets represent are moved in the bundle's file system, so the object hierarchy and the file system hierarchy are identical
  

GamingFreedom.org

• Development of GamingFreedom.org begins - base and hosting provided by Frank Karlitschek of openDesktop.org
  

Gluon Player

• Gluon Player Plasmoid, Google Summer of Code by Shantanu Tushar Jha
  
• GluonPlayer library created as part of plasmoid project
  
• Gluon Player for KDE, Qt Quick and standard Qt, based on GluonPlayer library
  
• Social features emerge in the Gluon Player apps
  

Gluon Creator

• Prettier listing of objects in the Property View
  
• Ability to handle limits and steps on numerical properties
  
• Templates for Assets
  
• Allow locking the UI
  
• Components list categorised, and generally more friendly looking
  
• KPart support for editing and viewing Assets
  
• Support for rendering mode switching in View pane (texture/wireframe/points)
  
• The beginnings of a visual, graph-based code editor, Google Summer of Code project by Kevin Whitaker
  
• Support for adding custom properties to objects in Property View
  
• Messages pane now shows debug from all debug() calls on all objects
  
• Change menu bar to resemble KDevelop's project-centric approach
  
• Watch assets for changes outside of Creator, and reload on changes
  
• Drag and drop support for rearranging items in the Project View (similar to Scene View)
  
• Fix the left-over, obsolete plugin desktop file related issues, crashes (basically a plugin version management system)
  
• Add Name/Location versatile validation for the newprojectdialog
  
• Add a new bool mouseTrack property inside the mouse component class
  
• Implement the Move Up/Down features inside the property view
  
• Fix the command line argument related crash about the creator
  
• Add overwrite confirmation dialog option for KFileDialog (saveAs).
  
• Reset input filter on game view during play when clicking (allows selecting items in the Scene tree and otherwise interact with Creator's UI during gameplay)
  
• No longer crashes when deleting certain Assets
  
• BUG: 243723 - Add a closeEvent to the mainwindow and stop the game there.
  
• BUG: 233336 - removing GameObject in treeView cannot be saved
  
• BUG: 265016 - Crash when dragging a gameobject in scene treeview to its parent
  
• BUG: 235011 - Gluon: RPMLINT warnings which should be fixed
  
• BUG: 244105 - Gluon crashes upon opening and creation of Gluon projects
  
• BUG: 244107 - Gluon Creator crashes upon load and creation of a Gluon projects
  

A few days ago, i was approached by Chris Woolfrey, who asked whether i would be interested in being interviewed for the Free Software Foundation Europe's regular feature called the Fellowship Interviews. Each month some person from the FSFE membership is interviewed about their involvement with Free Software and Free Culture, and i was introduced as somebody who had something to do with this, as one of the people behind the http://GamingFreedom.org/ network. So, i said sure thing, and we had a chat over Jabber, where we touched upon many a thing. And then, last night, it was released! http://www.fsdaily.com/Community/Fellowship_interview_with_Dan_Leinir

Also, i'm going to be at the KDE Games sprint in Dresden, named Blue Wonder 2011! Leaving tonight, to spend the night in Gatwick airport so i can catch my stupidly early plane tomorrow morning... yay excitement there Much more excitement, however, on finally getting a face-to-face between the core KDE Games developers and the Gluon team! Great stuff here, much cooperative work hopefully in the future

In the weekend leading up to the Qt Developer Days 2010 in Munich, 13 KDE hackers and community members, and Nokia employees Knut Yrvin and Ralf Engels have got together in the Nokia Offices near by. There they discuss the potentials of Nokia's Ovi services offering and what opportunities exist in Ovi for KDE as well as what KDE can offer Ovi. The meeting was sponsored by Nokia, and approved by the KDE e.V. - both of these indicating that both parties are interested in seeing such a collaboration succeed.

I am "sorry" to report that we have been so busy here that i have not been able to set aside time to do a proper blog entry about the sprint each day as normally happens during the KDE sprints, but as you can tell from the following, and the Dot article which is going to be posted soon, this sprint was really quite a heavy deal - in the good way!

Friday

My Friday started out with me getting up at horse o'clock England time (that is, the moment in time when by all rights only horses ought to be standing, in this case meaning 03.15), and as my poor house mate had offered to drive me to the airport, he of course got up a matter of minutes later. So, off to the airport we went, and i shall not bore you with any details of the entirely uneventful remainder of the trip itself.

Arriving at the Nokia office in Munich to find Rune 'dimse' Jensen already there, i promptly got my little, already prepared signs ready to be hung up. Unfortunately, as it turned out, their monochromatic nature, caused by our printer's lack of colour quality, meant that they were mostly unnoticed by the intended recipients, but oh well - i know to make them bright KDE-blue for next year


After spending the day waiting for people to slowly trickle in and chatting with Knut and each other in general, we decided to go into town and find a place to get something to eat. So, off we went, finding a nice bar, which in stark contrast to so many places in Germany simply had English language menus by default - an obvious hint to the fact that central Munich is a place where a lot of people come from all over the world to drink beer and gawk at really pretty architecture.

After managing a really nice steak for a surprisingly small amount of money (EUR 19 for a perfectly prepared, rare cooked steak, very good!) and further chatting - this time including beer - we went off to the hostel. We had ordered space for 13 people, which in A&O Hostels speak seems to actually mean "the smallest number of rooms we can fit that many people into", which here meant four people per room in six person rooms... which when we arrived were even equipped for eight people, with four bunk beds in each room. Somewhat confused, we tucked ourselves in and prepared ourselves for an early start the next day.

Saturday

Early starts are not something geeks traditionally are particularly brilliant at, and as a result we did not manage to get everybody up and out before almost an hour after the planned time. At least we got to the office before mid day

So, with everybody arrived at the office, we started out by attempting to describe in some detail just what Ovi actually is. A lot of people have been confused about this, so this helped streamline the whole thing a lot: Ovi is not just the app store, or more recently Ovi Maps. It is, in essence, an umbrella term which covers all of Nokia's service offerings. And it means "door" in Finnish - yes, door, not gateway or portal or somesuch, simply door


After getting the basics done, we began our discussions - in particular this happened by putting three big pieces of paper up on the wall. Each then had a title added, reading: What can Ovi do for KDE, What can KDE do for Ovi, and What features could be added to Ovi.

During these discussions, another piece of paper was added when we realised that one of the Ovi services, Ovi Files, would be shut down (in fact it is being shut down as i am writing these words). As a result, we made it one of priorities to come up with specific ideas for Ovi Files, and how to offer a sensible replacement for the service. As we are reasonably well informed that the reason for shutting it down is technical and not a lack of users or the like, we spent some time coming up with ideas for what we could possibly offer in this area, and came up with what we believe is a sensible business model for using ownCloud to provide an Ovi Files style service.


After working out the first details of this, it was time to get ready for the fact that Germany is entirely shut down retail-wise on Sundays. As such, we went out and bought enormous amounts of food. To be exact, 120 euros worth of food was purchased, preparing us for lunch on both days. Bread, meats, cheeses, salad things, and even some pasta and sauce, in case of occurrances of The Geek Hunger

In the evening, after much more talking, including a round table, where we talked about our individual wishes and interest areas (with notes taken by Chani), it was pizza time. However, getting 15 geeks to agree on which pizzas to buy can be quite a task. One we managed to complete in only two hours! While waiting for the pizza to arrive, more work went into getting some arguments put onto the sheets of paper on the wall and generally discussing the various potential topics. As you can possibly tell by now, the structure of this day was very, well, unstructured: This was in part a deliberate move, to allow people to get their heads wrapped around the concepts in Ovi itself - Sunday would be the day of more structured work.


Before catching the train back to the hostel - something which was much fun, and took two hours(!) due to strike action, and leading to the discovery that the extra bed had now been removed - was that Knut handed the devices over that he had brought. This meant that the first two people, Dipesh and Arjen, were given an N900, to assist in their work: Dinesh on his PIM work, and Arjen for his work on making GluonGraphics work in other places than the desktop. The remaining devices were put back in the bag and put to one side for the next day.

Sunday

Sunday started with a breakfast in the hostel's hotel section. While some people seem to have assumed this would be in any way different, it was of course discovered that, being A&O, the only real difference was the fact that it was higher up and had families with children in there Oh well, the food was the same, so at least there was no change in quality there - except for the fact they'd run out of croissants when i got there, but oh well - the cereal was nice, as was the bun. All in all, a successful second visit to the A&O Hostels Hackerbrücke - certainly recommendable. Simple, cheap and pleasant enough, with actual bathrooms rather than dorm showers


After a relatively successful getting out of the hostel (only twenty minutes late this time! ), we arrived at office to find that our final participant, Pradeepto, had arrived. After people got themselves woken up a touch and caught up on email, µblogs, feeds and other such things, we began discussions again - both one on one and in groups. One of these things end up with Pradeepto giving a short lecture on history of Symbian S60.

At some point, we finally reached the point where some structure was needed: We split into the groups suggested by the round table presentations from the previous day, with yours truly joining the group discussing Ovi Store related items. This, in essence, focused on how we could potentially convince Ovi that exposing their store through a web API would be advantageous to them, and have no real drawbacks. Seeing as the Ovi Store seems to run as a web page as opposed to a fat client on the various devices, we have based our ponderings and suggestions on there being no API already. Talks with the head of device development at Orange Labs R&D, Rafel Uddin, at Qt Developer Days following the sprint have shown that this seems to in fact be the case: Orange have wanted to create a rebranded version of the Ovi Store, and they would very much like to do this as a fat client rather than the current solution which requires them to do it as a web application. The suggestion this group comes up with is to suggest basing this exposure on the well proven and by now extensively implemented (both for clients and servers) web API named Open Collaboration Services, as this would instantly bring support in various places around the world - including directly in the KDE desktop.


At some point when most of the teams were reaching some level of completeness in their discussions, it was agreed that it was time for food. And so, lunch happened. This consisted of leftovers from the previous day, as well as something which translated roughly to white saussages. I am told this is a Bavarian specialty, and they are eaten by peeling the skin of the rapidly boiled sausage, and with mustard and brezes - the soft version of pretzels as you might know them from beer drinking

After lunch, people slowly start working again. Rune mentioned that he is in need of arguments for the mobile devevelopment camp he helps run for UNF.dk (the Danish youth association of science) to use Qt rather than Android. Pradeepto consequently offered to put him in contact with Jarmo Rintamaki, the manager at Forum Nokia responsible for contact with universities and other educational institutions. This finally happened at DevDays - networking, people, is the name of the game

Arriving at dinner time, we were all more or less ready to round off the sprint. The video below is the current end result of what has become an on-going discussion of what we need to contact Ovi about: In summary, we have many very good arguments for why it would make all kinds of sense for Ovi to help us and also let us help them. Drop by the wiki page to see where we are at the moment, it's already looking good, but needs much more work on the formulation part before we can hand it on to go further.

Another blog entry in such a short time, i must have gone bonkers! So, update:

The sprint has been booked out - we are twelve people signed up for it, with one person even scheduled to drop in on us a bit late.

The training sessions are still nowhere near booked up, though - so if you're interested in free training on Qt technologies at any level, and have the ability to get yourself to Munich on the 10th of October, please don't hesitate to sign up! Either send me an email or add yourself to the list of attendees on the wiki page (or even better, both! ).

Next step for me: Get an estimate for 12 people in a youth hostel in Munich between the 8th and the 14th, put together a budget with that information and get it shipped off to the KDE e.V. board for approval. Damn we're getting close!

Yeah, i went there - apparently the headline in my previous blog entry wasn't really clear enough

So, here we go with a few updates and clarifications:

Price:

FREE (for you). Yes, in the tradition of KDE developer sprints, this will be free as much as possible. This is why you need to supply me with a good estimate of your travel costs

Time and place:

Knut Yrvin has confirmed that Nokia are offering the Nokia offices in Munich from the 8th until the 10th, and DevDays Munich is from the 11th until the 13th.

Food:

Taken care of by Nokia during the sprint.

Sleeping:

None, this is a sprint! ...alright, so you need space to sleep, ok then - we will attempt to book space at the hostel we stayed at last year. Simple, but effective and including breakfast. Four persons to a room (we can probably work something out if you are desperate, but if you wish so, i would really like some help with organising that part of the trip ).

Signing up:

Please ensure that you email me ( admin@leinir.dk ) with your name, your irc nick (if you have one) and your travel cost estimate (in euros please)

Wiki page:

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Mobile/Pre_Devdays_Sprint_Munich_2010

Also NEWSFLASH: We have been granted 50 tickets for the Munich developer days training sessions! Specifically we have access to the following three modules:

• Qt Essentials (yes, this is for you who already know some programming and want to start coding in Qt, but just haven't gotten around to it)
  
• Qt Quick
  
• Qt Mobile Development for Nokia Devices
  

This is in addition to the sprint, and you will need to sign up for this separately. Please make sure to do this as SOON AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN. Note that you do not get travel cost covered for this (unless you happen to be at the sprint anyway, though you as a sprinter in no way am forced to take part in the training sessions if you do not want to... but consider what you're missing out on ).

So, if you are near Munich, consider very heavily whether you should not sign up for one of these training tickets - they are all kinds of worth your time.

In closing: PLEASE BE QUICK TO SIGN UP! We need the travel cost estimations really soon, so we can ask the KDE e.V. to provide the funding.

As some of you will know, it has almost become tradition for the Trolls at Nokia's Qt Developer Frameworks division to offer some tickets to Qt Developer Days to community members. This year is no different, and it is my great pleasure to extend an invitation to you:

Join us for a pre-devdays sprint at Nokia's offices in Munich - last year the focus was the Gluon game development and distribution framework, and this year it the focus is aimed at bringing the OVI services into KDE (seeing how they might fit in, where they fit, and hopefully the ability to provide the OVI team with feedback on their work). In the process we will also be looking at how this all might fit into MeeGo and Symbian. So, if you've got a thing for KDE on Mobile (yes, i know there's a few of you guys out there ), come along, and let's spend a couple of focused days on that topic.

In return for taking part in the sprint, you will be given a community ticket which allows you to take part in Qt Developer Days 2010 Munich. As someone who took part last year, i will not hesitate to mention just how amazing and productive it all was. Everybody were wired up by the prospects of attending developer days - close to a week of all kinds of Qt-related things.

The sprint is scheduled to run from Friday the 8th until Sunday the 10th (the weekend before Qt Developer Days). We have space for 12 people (of which at least two have been reserved already, one being myself of course ), so please - sign up soon

Sign up by writing to admin@leinir.dk and saying you would like to go. Include in the email the following information: Your full name, an estimated price for travel costs, and your background (reason for wishing to take part, and what you believe you can bring to the table at the sprint).

Following up on some questions on email: We will most likely be staying at a youth hostel (the same one we stayed at last year, simple but entirely pleasant), and this will hopefully be paid for by the KDE e.V. in the style of any other KDE sprint. Similarly, you will be reimbursed for your tickets - but please, we are a community project without huge sponsorships, so try your utmost to find cheap tickets

The rapidly moving and Qt based Gluon game creation and distribution framework will be present at Akademy, where two events in particular will happen:

On Sunday at 16.45 in Room 1, the Social Games talk will be happening. The goal of this talk is both describe what, in fact, this odd entity Gluon is (hint, what is KDE? Yeah, the new version ), and how you use it. There's also a quick round-up of what our Summer of Code students Kevin and Shantanu have been working on.

On Friday at 09:30 in Area 2, the Games with Gluon BoF session will happen. This is aimed squarely at everybody in our community who have even the slightest interest in game construction. Also, free breakfast included, but registration required for that, so if you want to get in on that, make sure you've registered (no worries, easy registration ).

Hopefully we'll have a good time together there, let's make it happen! We've got a world to take over


And so, in case that was not already clear:

Finally, after long months of a whole lot of hard work, the Gluon team is now very proud to announce the immediate release and availability of the Gluon software packages - The Gluon libraries, Gluon Creator and a couple of little samples. So... Come one come all! Announcement over on the Dot. Sacha (DrIDK) has furthermore recorded a little screencast (yes, i know, it's on youtube, but hey, if you care enough about that, you are obviously using a html5 compliant browser and thus you should be able to view the video anyway ). Watch out, though, the sound is a little funny, thanks to GtkRecordMyDesktop being weird

Thanks to Eugene (it-s) for the amazing graphic above, which is used on the GamingFreedom.org website.

For those who don't want to worry about the reasonings behind Gluon and such, you can go straight to the download page and grab yourself a copy, and start playing around

Before i start, i would like to appologise for the lack of pictures in the following blog entry. Please accept it as a testament to the extreme level of niftiness of DevDays that i completely forgot to take pictures

The 2009 edition of the Qt Developer Days started out in great style with a really nice, if decidedly business-ish (not really my style, but understandable considering the target audience of the conference and such), party at the Hilton Munich Park. More or less standard reception style, and sponsored by Tieto, which is a huge company, i'd never heard of before - but now i have! Apparently a good 16000 employees spread out over the entire world. Funny how large the world is that things like that can be entirely unknown to you. The party had lots of finger food, and beer, wine and soft drinks on tickets, and lots of pleasant people and similarly reception-styled (i.e. relatively short lived but lively) conversations with people such as Jean-Baptiste of VLC fame. The Gluon contingent left party at around ten, to prepare for the next day, the start of which was planned to be half an hour earlier than normal during the sprint due to needing to get to DevDays and get registered.

The following day started nice and early with breakfast and getting to DevDays again, where it was much fun finding out where i should be registering. Because of my full name being Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, it took a while to figure out that i should be in the T queue. So, not the last surname, and not the first surname... but rather the second one. That's logic for you Oh well, if that is the only gripe about a convention, then there isn't much to gripe about - and this is the case here, so wooh!

After registering we all went for the keynotes, which were spectacularly good - a well rounded and very different set, all the way from the very marketing-heavy "We are so great, and our greatness is only exceeded by the greatness of our greatness!" styled presentation of Sebastian Nyström (please take this in the most positive manner - it was a really great pep-talk in exactly the right place and time), to the rather technical presentation (including code and everything) by Mattias Ettrich.

After lunch i and Jure hooked up with Knut Yrvin, with whom we spent most of the beginning of the afternoon. The reason for us doing this rather than attending talks for example was that Knut and i had to put together the outline for an article he had to write about the Gluon developers' sprint. So, we sat in the lobby for a couple of hours writing some of this, and then ended up having a long talk which somehow went from open source politics and ended up in world war II... without me noticing any real transition happening. At any rate, it then later became time to stop talking - plus Knut had to go and have a nap, to get ready for his presentation later on that day.

That meant it was time to go back to the con proper. In my case it meant actually attending some talks. First one was the Qt on Maemo talk, in which was shown how well Qt integrates into Maemo 5. Spectacularly well as it turns out! The menubar is automatically turned into a proper Maemo 5 style menu and the widgets all look native. Very swish! Afterwards it was time for Nokia, Qt and the Internet, in which the Common Web Runtime was presented. Now, this is something i'm a little weary of. My problem with it is that it seems like something a web developer has thought up. To my eyes at least, it seems... Somewhat displeasurable. i'm sure it has it's place, but i'm not particularly impressed. However, the presentation itself was well paced, and even with a little techy friendly code demo, so it wasn't all bad.

After this i went onto the balcony where i ran into Bart from the Amarok team, who had been up all night and was hanging out with the Forum Nokia people. He was showing off Amarok 2 to them and we all got to talking about the visions for how Amarok would fit on Maemo, such as an entirely new UI based on Qt's new declarative UI system, while keeping most of the backend intact, which will be possible due to the strongly decoupled backend). While i was there, i took the time to also shortly mention Gluon's vision of creating a distribution system for games which would work amongst other things on Maemo 5 and ahead (e.g. anything that has Qt and OpenGL or OpenGL ES). More on that, of course, will come later - the vision document is being prepared, and will be presented to the world in a more official manner once it's in a state of relative readiness.

Two very important traditions at DevDays are the Troll Happy Hour and Troll Dinner. The first is a rather straight forward drinks type party - standing of course, to encourage moving around and networking, proper corporate style and though executed in a very professional manner by the Hilton personnel also very pleasant and get-togetherish. The second is an entirely more involved matter. A proper sit-down dinner, with lots of different dishes plus desert,during which also took part one of the more important events, named The Annual Fact & Crap Showdown. This is a competition in which the table has to answer a number of questions - this year 24 - of varying difficulty about Troll related items. This year's price was an N900 for every person at the table - a worthy price for any competition! Unfortunately we didn't win. However, we made a good, solid attempt! 19 correct answers out of 24 asked. So, while we went home from the party N900-less, it was still really funny and a great experience in general. Also: Tasty food and good company makes all winners

The day after started directly into an explosion of activity. Having talked with a few of the others about possibly attending the Qt Essentials exam the day before, we talked with someone, who i honestly cannot remember who was (please tell me if you remember ), who suggested that we should try talking with Knut or Alexandra about possibly getting sponsored tickets. So, Dirk and i went around trying to locate them, and ended up upstairs with the certification people, who told us that no, they didn't know. But they did know where Vladimir Minenko, the man at Qt responsible for the certification programme, was - in fact, he walked into the room immediately i asked. So, i was introduced to him, and my query presented to him. He asked me to hang around for a bit and meet him downstairs after a little.

When he came there about five minutes later, he told me to round up every KDE person i could find, and that they were all getting a full, 100% discount on the at-DevDays exam. Suffice to say, Dirk and i went into activity overdrive, running around to find every KDE person we knew, and asking them to pass on the word. Half an hour later we'd found fifteen people, roughly, and we gathered upstairs to register for it. Over the course of the next couple of hours, until around three o'clock, we all went through the exam, and we are now waiting for the email with the results along with everybody else.

One of the extra little perks that went along with the exam was the chance to win one of two N900s, and the first of them was drawn live in the big aula area just before the final presentation. Another couple of competitions were drawn there as well: A beagleboard by KDAB, an iPod Touch by Tieto, and a t-shirt by Nokia for filling out the Qt Ambassador programme survey. During this we were all taught about a small known effect of statistics called the Birthday Effect: Sandro from the Gluon team won both an N900 and the t-shirt. He was so surprised at winning the first time that he didn't even realise that he'd got the second until someone told him

In general, there was much talking about the Gluon distribution system, and eventually it was suggested that i should approach Nokia, Qt Developer Frameworks in a more official capacity, suggesting them possibilities for cooperation on the topic. So, while waiting for the information i've asked the Gluon sprint participants to send to me to roll in, another important thing to work on is a more formal description of the process, specifically a vision document.

Game concept of the day: I Qt Coffee - Make sure there's enough coffee and warm cocoa for all the Qt developers
Final point: Make sure to ask Sandro for lottery numbers!

The final day of the sprint, the room in which i slept awoke quarter of an hour late - which would have been a problem with our rather tight morning schedule, had it not been for the fact that Harald also ended up getting in late. His excuse was the same as ours the previous day - problems with trams and the U-bahn - so we all, of course, understood.

As we are settling in after arriving at the office, a few more KDE people show up to hang out with us for the day, while waiting for the welcome reception at Qt Developer Days that night. The first to arrive was Patrick Spendrin, and a little later Frederik Gladhorn and Frank Karlitschek showed up.

Kim and Morten began restructuring all of KCL, something they decided to do the previous day, starting out by scribbling a whole lot on one of the large sheets of paper from the flip board. After a while they ended up with something that they could work with, and began coding. In short: They decided to reimplement the entirety of KCL, while keeping the API intact in as much as it was possible to do so.

Just before lunch, Sandro and Sacha showed off their work on embedding QWidgets in KGL - something which of course will make it very easy for developers to create UIs for games. Something which did not come up while this was going on, but rather happened during one of the keynotes at Developer Days (this blog was, of course, not written at the time, but rather the day after, from notes taken at the time) was that this will enable us to use the declarative UI system that is under development, because the way this is used in normal applications is to use a QFXWidget, which then shows the declarative UI.

Lunch happened at the caffeteria in a near-by office building - i must say i'd have never guessed there was a caffeteria in that building, but it really was clearly visible from the outside... Odd design, but pretty neat anyway - very minimalist and modern looking. In general the food there was entirely acceptable and respectably priced. Lunch, plus a large drink, plus a desert at less than ten euros isn't really that bad. Also: Strawberries with mascarpone cream is very, very yummy.

Immediately following lunch we decided to do the group photo, but since some people needed to get out some money and such, one group went with Harald to the shopping centre, while the rest of us went back to the office. Now, of course, German weather is as efficiently timed as everything else in Germany, and as such it decided that the perfect time to start raining was to wait until the first group got back to the office and the second had just left the shopping centre. As such, when they returned they were all quite wet. Luckily, though, it was not so much as to make it impossible to do the group shot. But, as a bonus, try and spot the wet people on the group picture (the group shot will be put up on the Dot when the wrap-up article is released later, still needs to be written)

At a bit to five, everybody moved into two of the smaller room in the office, since someone else needed the big room (the room in which pizza was consumed the previous day and the wii room without a projector for the wii). Just when we've moved in there and settled down a bit, Albert mentioned that we were on the list of most active teams on Gitorious - screenshot on the left.

After a good bunch of further coding we finally reached six o'clock. Arjen for example put together the first bits of Gluon Creator by adapting his GDLExample application (more information will come later on the concrete results of the sprint). Everybody then packed up their laptops and snacks and left for the Hilton to take part in the welcome reception at Qt Developer Days 2009, an entry about which is forthcoming (decided to split it out into a single, separate entry).

This officially ended the first, and hopefully not last, Gluon Developer Sprint and i would like to take this opportunity to personally thank all the many people who made it possible - Knut, Harald, Alexandra and everybody on the Gluon team (including honorary members from the larger KDE Games project, you guys rock!). Hope to see you all again soon, it was an absolute blast!

Game concept of the day: Lost - The Game! Getting lost in new and exciting locations, all over the world! Munich Edition!
Final point: Geeks have an uncanny ability to pick out identical t-shirts

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?