Wait...  When did the start time go from 1pm to 6pm?  If makes sense, I suppose, but I was sure it was 1pm when I signed up...

It's still 1pm on the tickets site

I expect that a good few of those with the Friday off work will turn up earlier than 6pm anyway?

I can't make it. Draknek, will you be able to cancel my booking, or swap my name out for someone else who needs a bed at the hostel, or is it all going to be a massive pain? I don't want to leave anyone out of pocket.

You can swap me in then, just booked a couple of days off work, should be up for all 3 nights

Are we gonna do one of those "post pics of yourself" threads again?

We should do this. The intro thread really helped me get over my fear of all you horrible people.

Well, it's either that, or everyone needs 'Hello, My Name Is __________' badges

- There are regular, themed, 3-hour jams which you can opt-in to if you want.

Are there any 'rules' when for these, or is it more-or-less 'anything goes'? (coming from a Ludum Dare background where pre-existing assets are forbidden, and 'base code' can be somewhat controversial...  but as a C++ coder, completely-from-scratch isn't all that viable in 3hrs)

Quite excited now, first 'non-virtual' game jam for me!

Not sure if I'll just work on my main project, or take the opportunity to do something completely differnent... maybe (finally) learn Actionscript. Or do a remake of my first ever Ludum Dare game...

What's the power socket situation like at CB2 when a load of jammers turn up? should I be bringing a long extension cable/4-way? And for a first time game jammer, are there any other essential things to bring along besides a laptop, some cash, and a change of clothes?

Hmmm, might be in need of somewhere to stay...   I thought I'd end up a Travelodge, but the central one is a bit pricey those nights

Need to decide if I'm going to book the Monday off work or not first, though, not sure if I'll be around for 2 nights or 3...

I'm thirty and never considered I might be old.  I kind of assumed that most people coming would be late-twenties or older.  Old enough to have decided what they want from life, old enough to have the confidence needed to take a few chances and yet young enough that they can still make a go of it before their pension kicks in.

Really, I just wasn't too sure whether those attending the Jams were mostly the 'professional indies', likely to be in their late-20s or 30s, or mostly the student-age/younger-hobbyist developers? Or just a happy mix of all ages?  I just don't want to show up and be the oldest there by 10 years

I've been doing the Ludum Dare compos on-and-off since the very first one, and really, I've never stopped and wondered how old everyone else involved is, as it's purely online, you're not talking about meeting people face-to-face...

Would like to come along and meet the Cambridge Indies, and make up for missing the last Ludum Dare compo due to illness....

I could manage that weekend, but not too sure what I'd do about transport/accomodation...  Leamington -> Cambridge by train is a right pain (slow, via London, expensive...)

Is there usually a lot of drinking involved? Or do most of you stay sober and focused on the game dev? - trying to decide if bringing the car would be viable...

(Also, at 33, would I feel a bit out of place as the only 'old bloke', or are there usually a good few 'older people' showing up?)

edit: 'Ticket Get!' (only 8 left) - got to get there somehow now

If you plan to do it regularly, maybe you could set a maximum amount of pics/projects each time (like 20 projects each week for instance)?

Definitely don't limit the number of people/projects that can contribute!

But it might be worth limiting it to one tweet per user, and maybe limiting it to Saturday only?

(And it'll probably need some spam filtering before long, or someone will post pron or something unpleasant...)

It's a cool idea though, a little bit more motivation to stop slacking and have something new to show next week!  And Pekuja's done a sweet job with that gallery

Braid had a nice way of doing away with tilemaps:

http://www.davidhellman.net/blog/the-art-of-braid-part-4/

Soft-edged-alpha channels, free placement of tiles with arbitrary rotation/scale - that's the way to go - at least if you know how to handle a bit of OpenGL/D3D, and aren't scared of dealing with arbitrary line segments for collision edges (either manually or via a physics engine)

Take something like this, make sure all 'tiles' go into an animatable hierarchy, give it a nice Windows interface, add some support for 2D lighting/shadows and physics objects. Maybe 2D skinning...  And a set of blend modes and a few interesting shaders.  And post effects (bloom etc).

XML makes sense as a level format. Although for really big levels, it might be worth preprocessing those into a binary format.

That'd be getting pretty close to the ultimate 2D game editor...

My attempts to build it haven't got very far yet

I will have 3-4 points on the spline. The first and the last will be aligned horizontally with each other and the center ones will be elevated to create an arch. This is going to be used to calculate how the player should behave when jumping.

Seems like a very odd choice for jumping??

Catmull-rom splines are neat if you want a smooth curve between a set of known 2D/3D points (e.g. camera movements, enemy paths)

But for jumping? - seems overkill compared to very basic physics ( y = y + yVel; yVel = yVel + kGravity )

Kind of tempted by this... But I don't think I'd get much coding done in a location that sells beer!

(Although I'd have to drive, as Leamington->Cambridge by train is a silly 4hr affair, multiple changes, in and out of London...  So it'd probably be no beer, and expensive parking?)

Normally I'd totally agree with you, but for me VVVVVV is an exception. Maybe it's because the pixels are so large, and the sprits so simple, but I actually found I preferred the blurry full-screen mode;

I quite liked the blur, too - made it look more like an 8bit game viewed on a TV

I listen to a lot of music when coding. A lot of singer-songwriters, some electronic stuff, and occasionally a bit of rock/metal. It has to be very familiar music, though - anything new can be quite distracting, and I'll concentrate far too much on the music instead of the code.

I find it best to play whole albums, too - rather than 'entire music collection on shuffle', as that can be distracting when an unexpected song comes on...

Have tried watching DVDs / TV series on my 2nd monitor. Can get far too distracting, even if it's something that I've seen many many times before...

I hate Flash with a passion (after seeing so many games that should be a solid 60fps chugging along at 20fps or so in a postage-stamp sized window on a page of adverts, with awful controls). Although flash seemed to be holding this game back a little (30fps or so on my Macbook, and some slight control lag?)

Uh, I have a Macbook too (a three year old one, in fact) and I didn't have any "lag" whatsoever. 

Actually, should have said it's a Macbook (unibody 13") currently running Win7...

But yeah, it's probably not actual lag, just a combination of framerate, the inertia on the player, plus frustration at some of the tougher screens

Really quite enjoyed this - demo got me hooked, played through it twice then bought the full version, played through most of it (I think). Definitely doing something right for me to part with cash for a flash-based game!

I hate Flash with a passion (after seeing so many games that should be a solid 60fps chugging along at 20fps or so in a postage-stamp sized window on a page of adverts, with awful controls). Although flash seemed to be holding this game back a little (30fps or so on my Macbook, and some slight control lag?), I found it a very enjoyable experience

But something about it had the 'magic' of real 8 bit games that usually isn't quite there in lo-fi indie games. Very cool level design, with amusingly named screens, and sweet sweet chiptunes adding a lot to the atmosphere.

And I guess the retro style of graphics makes you really focus on the gameplay, rather than analysing the tech or artwork, as I too often found myself doing as a coder...

The only real complaint I have is that it had me impaled on a couple of very large difficulty spikes (please re-tune 'not as I do'!! - even after figuring out how to do it, pulling it off took a *lot* of attempts...  that screen really needs nerfing!)

I made it as far as 'The Final Challenge', but got stuck at a checkpoint that seemed impossible to continue from, will have to try it again later...

It doesn't seem to like running on my laptop (Unibody Macbook running Win7 64bit via boot camp)

It runs - and seems to run at a good speed - but the screen flickers like mad throughout (all the time - menus and in-game) - big black bars flickering all over the screen (sort of as if it wasn't double-buffered, and you could see the screen being cleared to black each frame?)

Looks pretty cool from the video, though

Yeah, it'll probably be good enough for what I'm doing.
But the inaccuracy haunts me so. 

If you're moving fast (more than a few pixels in one update), just subdivide the move into several steps.  Even pixel-sized steps if you want.

I think Super Mario etc. do this simply by moving the guy and checking if the guy rectangle is inside a wall and if so they move it left or right by the depth of the collision.

If all your tiles are square, this works pretty well - to implement it, do the X and Y updates separately - this will help avoid problems when you hit the corners of a tile:

Update player X position
If we're overlapping a tile
   - Correct our X position (and set the player's X velocity to 0?)

Update player Y position
If we're overlapping a tile
   - Correct our Y position (and cancel any jump that may be in progress?)

Then you won't have the case where it's overlapping, and you don't know whether you should be correcting X, Y, or both to resolve it.

(If you want slopes, things can get rather more complex, and you may end up dealing with line segment intersections, normal vectors, etc - and your may find it easier to treat the player as a circle, or a pair of circles, rather than a box?)

I just deleted C:\Games\World of Warcraft!

Also bought a Visual Assist licence.

And now I've got 2 weeks off work for xmas - Time to get coding again