Just got on the 12:45 out of Kings Cross - should be there in a little over an hour

I got away with one small rucksack (including a towel!) last time.  It's do-able, but might require creativity

The jam was a good excuse for me to buy myself a new bag, and I went for one of these:
 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Swissgear-GA-7301-14F00-Hudson-back-15-4-inch/dp/B000VSDLR0/

Was a bit concerned when it arrived, as it seemed smaller than expected (and my laptop is right on the upper limit of what will fit) - but the other compartments expand nicely, looks like everything's going to fit - just about...  had never really noticed just how chunky my Dell PSU is...

I really hope the jam is as awesome as I expect it to be... it's a bit scary not knowing anyone there 'in real life', though... Oh well, to help with that, I'm sure there'll be a friday night beer or two

It's about time to find out if I can squeeze all my stuff into one backpack...

Starts at 6 on the Friday.  There'll be people around before, but that's the time I'd aim for.

Are many of you expecting to be there before 6pm?

I'm expecting to be in Cambridge by maybe 2pm-ish - is there likely to be an obvious group of TIG-ers with laptops in CB2 by then?

Anyway, I've got a big list of things that still need setting up on my laptop... should really get on with it... only 2 sleeps left 'till the jam!

Now will this event be the final push that I need to make the decision to 'go indie', or will it convince me that I should just be happy my current job?...

IMHO, the 2-pass (Horizontal-then-vertical) approach to blurring is great, and it doesn't require high-end shaders

Yeah but my entire thing is I want to play with blurring that is inconsistent over the screen area and the 2-pass approach seems to make that at minimum tricky.

The usual approach is simply to blend between the blurred and unblurred buffers.

If you repeat the 2-pass blur more than once (do it with few samples but several iterations?), you can save the intermediate steps, to give you 3 or more levels of blur to blend between in your final DoF shader?

This is less a technical and more a 3ds max specific question.

The popular 3d-programs like max and maya has particle-effect stuff built in or as plugins that allows you to create an animation of an explosion. Then you simply render all the frames in the animation to images.

I didn't read the article though, so perhaps i missunderstood what you are asking about

May also be worth investigating Blender - it appears to have some rather sweet smoke/fire simulation these days:





(Haven't tried it myself yet, but plan to eventually!)

[ambient]

why a laugh? it's been done already:

Laughing because I've worked on that platform before, but can't say much more due to NDAs...  Also:

"Surprisingly, all of the ambient lighting in Toy Story 3 for the Wii is deferred rendering."

Maybe they are doing something clever or unconventional, but looking at videos of the game, at a glance it looks like bog standard baked-in vertex colours for the scenes?

A bit more on wii shader without breaking nda:

http://forum.wiibrew.org/read.php?15,50783,50907
It can do hdr + aliasing (seen in monster hunter 3)
Unity3D allow shader programming on wii
Toy story 3 wii use defered shading too.

Bloom != HDR.  (But bloom and good art direction can fake HDR pretty well)

And as for the thought of deferred shading on the Wii... 

IMHO, the 2-pass (Horizontal-then-vertical) approach to blurring is great, and it doesn't require high-end shaders

It works very nicely without needing a silly number of samples per pass, or forcing you to work with tiny buffers, or repeatedly-downsampled buffers (the main causes of 'shimmering' on post effects). For a bloom effect, I'm currently copying the bright areas to a half-screen-sized buffer, and then doing a two-pass blur (7 samples per pass at the moment).

For a really strong blur (especially for bloom effects), repeat the two passes multiple times. Avoid spacing the samples more than a pixel apart.

The only tricky thing is keeping the pixels and texels exactly lined up, so you don't end up with a slightly offset blurred image, especially when doing multiple passes (which accumulate this sort of error)

Hmmm interesting... are there other type of games that non-obviously suits the timeframe? Maybe experimental shmups?

Simple shmups work OK in very limited time - think something like a simplified Geometry Wars, maybe.  I've coded a Space Invaders clone in about an hour (C++/Allegro) for a Ludum Dare warm-up a few years back.

For me, I think my laptop keyboard is going to be the limiting factor, not used to coding with it, so it'll be slower-than-usual going...

What kind of frameworks / engines will people be bringing, just out of curiosity? 

I'm very much a C++ person, so for mini-jams it's going to be C++ with some pre-built 'base code' to get things on screen quickly.  Was trying to get SFML set up with C#, as that seemed a better option for these, but it seemed to be a bit of a mess, with dependencies on additional libraries (Tao) that aren't included with the SFML package - so I dropped that idea...

Will have Flex/Flashpunk installed if I feel like trying something completely new. Might install Python/Pygame, as that's something else that I've been meaning to take a look at...

Also set up with Blender, an assortment of paint packages, Mappy, and SFXr. And remote access to my SVN server running on a MiniITX box at home

If you're staying at the hostel, bring a towel! 'Cos there ain't no towels.

Thanks for the reminder - that's probably something I'd have forgotten

Oooh, only a week or so to go now

Couple of practical/boring questions from a noob for the TigJam/CB2 regulars...

- Do I need to bring an extension lead/4-way? (Only got great big things with long cables, and I'm aiming to travel light)

- Which network is most likely to get a usable 3G signal? 3 or O2?

- Security - we're all bringing laptops'n'stuff - have there been any problems with gear 'disappearing', I'd like to hope that we're all a trustworthy bunch - does everyone generally do a good job of looking after each other's stuff? (Are laptop locks and stuff unnecessary, or worthwhile?)

Any other essentials that a first-timer may forget to bring along? My current list includes:

- Laptop, well prepared with *everything* installed (Including documentation etc, in case internet access isn't too good)
- Some sort of base code/framework or very-rapid-development-environment for 3hr jams*
- Mouse, Memory stick, Headphones
- Mobile Broadband dongle
- Notepad+Pen
- Food/Coffee/Beer money

Or what about things that are essential to leave at home? (big speakers, huge monitors, etc... - looks like space is going to be fairly tight? - I guess I'll leave my Wacom at home, but hoping there's just enough space for a mouse, as I can't stand my laptop touchpad...)

(*todo - write this at the weekend!)

http://www.desura.com/

I understand this is like an indie Steam.

Had heard of that before (then forgot the name) - looking at it now and it seems a little less indie than expected (looking at the games selection) - more a wannabe Steam competitor?

No obvious mentions of leaderboards/achievements/social features on their site, though, seems very much a distribution platform at the moment (although it did take Steam a while to add some of the nicer stuff)

Wondering about how an 'indie online' network could be funded. Really, it has to be open to free games if it's going to take off. I wonder if the system could be some sort of mesh, where developers host a 'node' of the system with enough capacity for their own game(s)?  Ideally, it'd be built on easily-hosted technolody, such as PHP/MySQL - but I can't imagine that scaling up well enough to work with 'indie megahits' such as Minecraft?

The API would need a lot of care, too, to avoid buggy games spamming too many requests to the server(s), keeping data compact and throttled.  And then we'd need a port of the API to a wide variety of platforms/languages...

If the primary method of browsing achievements/leaderboards/stats was web-based (rather than in-game), maybe it could be ad-supported to some extent?

As for cheating, with a big enough community, it may not be much of an issue? Let the users report suspected cheats with a couple of mouse clicks, and appoint a small community of 'moderators' to deal with them?

Has anyone ever attempted such a thing?

Essentially, implementing some of the most useful features of Xbox Live in a way that indie developers (those that aren't on XBLA, Steam, etc) can integrate into their games for a (hopefully small) fee? To begin with, account management and leaderboards, maybe achievements and 'indiescore' (but potentially matchmaking, auto-updates, maybe DLC, cloud savegames, or even whole game sales eventually?)

I asked a question on gamedev.stackexchange, more specifically about leaderboard systems, and wasn't exactly overwhelmed by lists of options:

http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/7589/online-leaderboard-systems-for-small-indie-pc-games

So has anybody attempted such a system/service already? Is it just too big a task? Are the bandwidth/hosting costs just likely to quickly become prohibitive?

Or would it just be 'not indie enough' to support something like this?

I'm thinking primarily about Windows/Mac/Linux games, but there's no reason that web-based and mobile platforms couldn't be supported too.

You need some sort of online activation system, which could be a fairly simple web interface to a database containing a table of users who own the game.

When they first run the game, it connects, to activate it. When this succeeds, save a license file that includes their email address or username, and some information about their hardware (hash of their MAC address, CPU type, graphics card name, etc)

When it loads, use this to make roughly sure that it's running on the same PC.

If the information doesn't match, automatically re-activate it.

Count the activations (on your server) from the specific user. Don't allow any more if it reaches a limit (say, 10). Reset the activation counts every few months, and it should allow for users that upgrade their PCs a lot, without allowing mass piracy, but allowing buyers to run it on, say, their desktop and their laptop, without any issues.

But expect to do some support for users who manage to run out of activations... And prepare to keep the activation servers running 'forever' (or plan to release an update, say, after the first year or two), to remove the DRM system, and allow you to turn off the activation server.

Obviously, if the game is good, it'll get cracked eventually to skip the activation check...

I'm gonna warn you about XNA. Don't use it if you want to make a pc game. Its a great tool but the dependence on the .NET framework drives too many people away.

But can't you get around that by building a proper installer for your game?

I don't think it's really much worse than, say, needing a D3DX .dll - those things are also a bit of a pain.

Depends what you're making, really - is it a 'lo-fi' game that just needs a simple framebuffer, or something that will benefit from 3D graphics acceleration?

[Name]

Name
Dave

Pic


Coming from
Leamington Spa
(Which is pretty much the game dev capital of the UK, so why no indie scence?  )

What I does:
I'm mainly a C/C++/C# coder, with a little over 10yrs games industry experience as a programmer.

Some of the things I've worked on:
First (and last) commercial indie game was this, in 1996: http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=1552

Since working in the industry, I've rarely finished any indie stuff beyond numerous Ludum Dare entries - http://www.bluescrn.net/?page_id=5 - but I aim to change that this year... A plan is forming...

Highlights of my games industry experience include doing programming work on Super Monkey Ball Jr. (GBA), Colin McRae 2005 (PS2/Xbox), and the DJ Hero series.

And here's some fun things that I've worked on that never got finished: http://www.bluescrn.net/?page_id=4

TIGJam participation:
Definitly up for at least a couple of mini-jams, maybe do some work on a larger project, and also hoping to enjoy at least a little bit of beer whilst moaning about the state of the games industry...

What I want out of TIGjam:
Have fun making games, make indie friends, chat about 'going full-time indie' with anyone that has (try to decide whether it's for me...), Oh, and to ask Terry the correct pronounciation of 'VVVVVV'

I quite like the 'random team event' idea, as long as it's an opt-in thing and only a small part of the weekend. Maybe a one-off thing on the first evening, to help us TIGJam noobs feel a bit more a part of it?

Although I'm not sure how practical it is, might not get past the 'well, which language/tool should we use?' stage!...  But with a bit of effort, it'd be possible to pre-arrange some teams that could work, matching people based on familiar language/platforms or maybe whether they're primarily into code, art, audio, or design?

It sounds like a pretty sweet idea, but a bit of a logistical nightmare to get setup.

Sounds pretty cool, I quite like idea of some sort of 'game jam holiday' - as a single geek, I don't really do conventional holidays...

Not sure about doing it somewhere isolated, though... whilst it might be more productive that way to begin with, keeping the supply of caffiene and takeaway flowing my be a pain. And it'd probably be more fun if the evenings involved eating out and a decent amount of beer? (something that I'm hoping the UK TIGJammers will be up for on at least one of the evenings!)