On my way, see you soon after 6:30

Have you tried phoning this place?: http://www.cityroomz.com - it's also right near the station

(There's no online booking, so no idea if there's rooms available)

I don't mind paying a bit more more to stay somewhere with an en-suite and a more comfy bed, if there's going to be a group elsewhere (the combination of CB2 chairs, YHA beds, and lugging a heavy laptop around didn't do my back much good last time!)

Just checked the Travelodge site too - but that's looking like £100 a night for a double room or family room (sleeps 3 - but 2 would have to share a double bed...)

Cool, I'll be there, too

It's not just about the cost of changing textures - it's about reducing the number of draw calls and any other related state changes (setting up shaders, blend modes, and any other render states)

If you're trying to draw a lot of sprites/tiles/particles, then to get decent performance, you should aim to batch them up into a relatively small number of draw calls - and having lots of tiles/sprites on a single texture helps a lot with this.

However, if you're only drawing maybe a couple of hundred sprites, you can get away with 'one draw call per sprite' quite happily.

It's easy to test how big the performance gain is - just draw say 10,000 sprites with separate draw calls, and then try it in one big batch.

(And as already mentioned, loading a few big files is likely to be a fair bit faster than loading several hundred small files)

Looks like I missed it again  for shame. Would it be worth setting up an midland indies mailing list or something?

We're trying to make it something more regular - looks like the first Wednesday of the month. So the next couple would be:

6th July - Coventry   (What was that little place with the beer garden called? - seemed a good choice if the weather is decent, otherwise Browns?)

3rd Aug  - Leamington (Jug+Jester?)

Three nights for me, too, please

Thanks for tonight everyone who was there - it was nice, and next time I'll make sure I can stay for longer 

Well, it was a bit short notice/disorganised - seems like most people only check this thread once every week or two?, but it was a slightly better turnout than the one at Easter - and as always, beer was good - it's probably going to be fairly quiet until the Warwick/Coventry students are back, though

To get it a bit more organised... I suggested making it the first Thursday of each month and alternating between Leamington and Coventry

Which would make the next one 7th July, in Coventry (pub to be chosen nearer to the time, somewhere within easy walking distance of the station)

The trains are every hour so I'll be there about 6:40..!

Ok, cya there

Doesn't look like there's going to be many of us, though - I think we're into the summer slacking months when the students have gone home?

What times tomorrow? I should be able to mosey down on the train.

6-7pm onwards? - whenever people can get there?

I'll have to sit the next one out unless it's before 6th June

Since there's only one of me and lots of you WGD peeps, I'll give this one a miss.

Best of luck with it, though

Probably too short notice now, but we could do something this week?

How about Thursday night, Leamington, The Jug & Jester?

Was hoping I'd get to Bristol for this, but might have to give it a miss - short notice and still some annoyingly uncertain stuff going on in my life...

How did this go last time? I'd be up for coming along for the next one.

There was a huge turnout of.... 3 of us! - It was on Easter Sunday, though

Leamington next time, maybe?

It seems like the bigger LD gets the more people vote on "safer" generic themes.  I think the new people get intimidated by a lot of the themes and don't want to leave their comfort zone for a 48 hour game.

Some people want a hard game *design* challenge, and want the harder, more restrictive or experimental themes.

Some people are happy with the game *development* challenge of just making something complete-ish in 48hrs (even if it's fairly uninspired platformer or shmup)

The end result this time, with heavy downvoting of sensible themes by 'both sides', was that a theme from the 'silly themes' list actually won!...

For me it's always been about the development side - I'm an experienced programmer, but a bit weak at the creative and artistic side of things - but like the challenge of completing a project in a weekend.

Anyway, I enjoyed making my platformer-with-grapple-mechanic game - playable here: www.bluescrn.net/ld48_20/WebPlayer.html (and a dev timelapse here:

)

I've only skimmed this thread... but if you're implementing an auto-updater in your project, you should consider security quite seriously when hosting your update files.

It's scary that the average PC has maybe 5-10 or so different auto-updaters running for all sorts of apps - Flash, Java, Windows Update, AV software, and many more... and any one of these could deliver malware to millions of PCs if the server was compromised...

Would be much better if all software shipped complete and mostly-bug-free...

Grumpy today. Bogged down in tools work for an ongoing-but-lacking-in-direction platformer project. Non-tile-based 2D seemed like a great idea, but I somewhat underestimated the amount of tools work involved before I'd see any gameplay...  Should have just stuck to tilemaps...  but I wanted more curves...

And every day I see another Minecraft-inspired game/clone rise to fame... yep, it's tilemaps, in 3D...

My work-in-progress editor may be semi-impressive to see in action:
http://www.bluescrn.net/projects/twodee10.png (Editor - C# with Windows Forms and SlimDX)

But the game isn't...
http://www.bluescrn.net/projects/furballs.png  (running on iPhone 4 via Airplay SDK)

Well, the physics works (using Chipmunk), but there's no real gameplay yet...

On the plus side, I'm liking Blender 2.5. Well, everything except for dealing with UVs...

Cool beans.

Hope you're feeling better, Dave!

I'm still on for tonight (I've just had breakfast, gonna have an chocolate egg for lunch and then Brown's for tea. Marvelous!

Still feeling a bit rubbish, but I think I'll come along for a couple of beers. Should be there a little after 6:30pm

That sounds good to me! I'll be there.

I've got a nasty cold at the moment - so not sure if I'll make it - have to see how I feel by tomorrow afternoon (typical, I'd been looking forward to this easter break for ages, it finally arrives and I'm ill...)

Who's going tonight? And if so what time?

I don't think I'm going to make it tonight, unfortunately - I've not been feeling too well today, beer would be a bad idea

(I'm around on the 24th if anything happens then. Still not sure if I'm going to be at CB2 for Ludum Dare, that's 50/50 at the moment)

20th is fine for me for another pub evening.

Is this definitely on for next week then? - Browns again, or elsewhere?

Hmmm... I'm quite tempted to come... but as an oldskool C++ coder, I don't seem to fit into these modern Flash/Unity-dominated LD48s so well...

I've been learning a little bit of AS3 though - as soon as Flash Player 11 / Molehill goes live, I'll make an effort to get a decent framework together so I can join in with the web-based Ludum Dare action