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Friday, February 24, 2006 7:34 AM

Hot Lab #8: Cancelled

It is with a surprisingly easy heart that I’m cancelling tomorrow’s Digital Gaming Hot Lab . This is due to lack of RSVPs. This isn’t really surprising since the community has been using Game Maker for quite a while and we do not need to cover the basics. The talk material isn’t a waste however since it’ll be used for driving game development into schools, a mission from Danny Day (BTW, you can read his LiveJournal and here’s his RSS Feed ). I will however rethink my ideas for the next Hot Lab since...
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Monday, February 13, 2006 8:41 PM

Digital Gaming Hot Labs #8

My apologises for posting so late about the next Digital Gaming Hot Lab. I have been completely distracted by work, SA Developer and my first home PC. Anyways, on with the show, and for February I’m giving a talk introducing Game Maker and exposing to you the basics to create a game. I have been convinced by Danny Day and other leaders in the local game development community to focus this year on Game Maker. It makes sense for a couple of reasons: A) It requires minimal coding and coding experience...
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Monday, January 16, 2006 7:18 AM

NAG January 2006 devLAN Conclusion

Wow! What an awesome time the NAG devLAN was. I don’t think I’ve spent so much time with Game Maker in a single sitting and though I say it myself, I think I produced a pretty decent game to enter. The “competition” started with arranging tables, PCs and power connections (like in most LANs) and after a short introduction and providing the theme of the day from Danny Day, we were off. The theme was “Everything Random” and we had to demonstrate randomness in our game. What was amazing was the silence...
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Monday, January 09, 2006 10:59 AM

Game Maker devLAN in Pretoria

The good guys over at NAG Game.Dev are organizing a Game Maker devLAN on the 15th January 2006 in Pretoria. This is where the participants all get together and try, individually, to write a game in a limited period of time (about 6-8 hours) against a theme revealed at the start of the competition. Visit the forum thread and RSVP if you’d like to come along. The times and venue are posted there. If you haven’t already played with Game Maker yet this is your chance to learn what it’s all about and...
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Monday, January 09, 2006 9:38 AM

Hot Lab #7 - Conclusion

Last Saturday was the 7th Hot Lab and I think it went really well. I did a talk on the Irrlicht Engine and demonstrated a few of its features and its ease of use. I also handed out copies of Microsoft’s Visual C# Express (along with Irrlicht, some demos and presentation material). The feedback on the talk was positive and while I thought I didn’t show enough to explain the concepts around the engine the general response was that I did a good job. (I’m really going to have to get myself some web space...
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Tuesday, January 03, 2006 9:04 AM

Hot Lab #7: topic change

While it’s not good practice to change the topic of your course a week before your presentation, I feel I’m obliged to in keeping with my Hot Labs objectives and the objectives of my audience. I can however “blame” Mariuce Kerrigan ’s Effective Speaking & Presentation course that BB&D sent me on. The course is fantastic and I can highly recommend it to everyone; especially those growing in the speaker circuit. So the new title of this weekend’s Hot Lab is “Irrlicht Tutorials in .NET” and...
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Thursday, December 15, 2005 3:53 PM

Digital Gaming Hot Labs #7

When: 7th January 2006, 12:00 – 14:00 Venue: IT Intellect, Bryanston ( map ) Presenter: Andre Odendaal Topic: Introduction to Managed DirectX 3D Level: Beginner Language: C# Platform: Direct X 9.0 Objective: In this hot lab attendees will learn how to use DirectX to render 3D objects, move them around and manage lighting. This is a hands-on lab and prefect for someone who’s new or never used DirectX 3D. RSVP: here This is the first hot lab of 2006 and I’m very excited as I’m starting to revisit material...
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Wednesday, November 23, 2005 11:05 AM

Ready Launch 2005 - Durban

Hey people, I’m back from the Visual Studio 2005 Launch in Durban and I’ve uploaded the photos to my blog. There weren’t half as many people as the Johannesburg launch but that just made it nicer because there was more food and drink and easy access. The launch is more of a marketing campaign than a technical overview, although they did have some cool demos floating around. By now you should have already been playing with a Beta and attended Dev Days, Tech-Ed or one of the community talks and seen...
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Monday, November 21, 2005 7:54 AM

Digital Gaming Hot Labs #6

When: 26th November 2005, 12:00 – 14:00 Venue: Microsoft, Bryanston ( Map ) Presenter: Andre Odendaal Topic: A look at DirectSound Level: Beginner to Intermediate Language: C# Platform: Direct X 9.0 Oct 2005 Objective: For the 6th Hot Lab I'm giving a introduction into Microsoft DirectX DirectSound and how to implement advanced 3D positioning effects and filters for echo, distortion and reverberation. RSVP: On my blog I’m really excited about the name change to Digital Gaming Hot Labs. It means I...
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Friday, November 18, 2005 2:40 PM

VS2005 Lauch Quick Post

Hey guys, you can check out the pictures of the Visual Studio 2005 Launch on my blog here . Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
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Saturday, November 05, 2005 10:09 AM

DirectX Hot Lab #5 Review

The last DirectX Hot Lab went off well, with Danny Day blowing us away with a barrage of tools for game development. What grabbed my attention was Wikipad , which is a notepad like app but with powerful wiki building capabilities for offline. Yes, it exports to HTML as well. But the star of the show was Game Maker , a REALLY powerful and awesome tool for Rapid Game Development. I can’t even begin to go into how cool this tool is, and all the functionality behind it; you’ll have to come down to the...
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Wednesday, October 12, 2005 6:34 AM

DirectX Hot Lab #5 - Johannesburg, South Africa

When: 29th October 2005, 12:00 – 14:00 Venue: Microsoft, Bryanston ( Map ) Presenter: Andre Odendaal and Danny Day Topic: DirectX Hot Lab #5 Level: Beginner to Intermediate Objective: In this session we’re be covering game creation tools and an example of rapidly producing great games with Danny Day from the NAG Forums . Danny’s quote of “Build games, not frameworks” should excite anyone who wants to make PC games without laborious code. Secondly, I’ll be redoing...
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Tuesday, October 04, 2005 2:46 PM

Content not worth the presenter

I must admit that I was a little disappointed by Steve Ballmer’s presentation. It was a sales pitch for Windows Vista and Office 12, and could easily have been done by the excellent South African Microsoft team. But this is a rant at the content, not the speaker. Steve Ballmer is clearly well spoken and passionate about his company, the venue (while simple) was well setup and efficient and the intro movies, slides and sound was all good. Maybe it was expectations that lead to a mass feeling...
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Thursday, August 25, 2005 10:08 AM

Steve Ballmer is coming to South Africa

OH YOUR GOD! Steve Ballmer is coming to South Africa on the 3 rd October 2005! Apparently he’s in Johannesburg attending the MVP Summit, but they’ve squeezed an hour out of him to give us a presentation! Places are limited so make sure you book a seat . Now that I’ve told you, you’re all asking (along with the other developers in my office and my manager) “So who’s Steve Ballmer?” Let me just scrub myself from the shame of having to explain and then I’ll...
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Monday, August 01, 2005 3:09 PM

Direct X Hot Lab #2 - Conclusion

I must say that the DirectX Hot Labs has renewed my enthusiasm for DirectX and exploring its bottomless depths. We doubled our attendance to 8 people for the second Hot Lab and lots of new faces. This time round we gave out “homework” for those interested in testing and playing with what they’ve learnt. We’re building a Mesh Viewer similar, but simpler, than the one in the SDK Utilities. As promised here are the tutorials we went through (sorry Senkwe, no pictures at the moment...
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