Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

IGDA Meeting Stuff

So I attended my first IGDA chapter meeting in… ooohhhh six months?? Something like that. The chapter met this month up in Bloomfield College. This was a location we had met at previously last year (or maybe the year before?) before we started hopping around a bit, mainly staying at Raritan Valley Community College but making sojourns to other schools like the New Jersey Institute of Technology. That actually wasn’t so bad, tho it’s in Newark and not many people are fond of that city.

We had a great turn out – around 30-40 people I would think. It was awesome seeing so many new faces as well as seeing the regulars and old-timers. There were two great presentations by Nick Smolney and Mark Grob on mobile gaming and virtual reality respectfully. Nick’s been in the mobile industry for 2 years and had a lot of insights to share, while Mark has been pursuing serious games and brought in a monoscopic headset with a motion tracker and a demo built off Garage Game’s Torque engine that let you run around and look with your head motion. We’ll be making these presentations available to the public on our website in the near future. If you live in New Jersey and you still haven’t made it out to one of our gatherings then shake a leg dammit! Bloomfield even gets us pizza and soda!! Thanks guys!!

Torque 2D Stuff

Well they’ve been stringing us out a lot over at GG for the past few months with promises of this new release to the T2D Early Adopter, v1.1 (from v1.02). Enough people have finally got up in arms for the lead developer, Melv May, to post a .plan update. If you’re using or thinking of using T2D then be sure to check it out right away! The stuff Melv has been working on is blowing my mind. I’m all excited about T2D again. Of course, now enough people have whined that they’re putting out a beta version of the v1.1 release (v1.1b). I can see how people are anxious to dig in to the new code, but come on – making them release a beta only further delays them from pushing out the actual release. Anyways I hope they get it out by Jan, because after this whole hectic holiday season is over I’m looking to dig in and get some work done.

Personal Stuff

It’s amazing how technology has affected our lives. I remember growing up and going through high school and never wanting to have a girlfriend because I was afraid that she or I or us both would go away to college, be separated for long periods of time, and sort of drift apart. You know, the whole long-distance stigmata. But even tho I find myself in that situation now (minus the hooking up during high school part) it’s not so bad because we can talk to each other all the time through a variety of means, online, email, myspace, cell phone, etc. Of course I’m not the first to realize this, but if any of you are still kind of thrown off by the whole long-distance thing (I live in Jersey, she goes to school in Vermont), I can at least assure you that it’s certainly a viable option these days. It’s still not as easy as being closer together all the time but hey, sometimes you gotta work at it. And they’re usually worth it too