Atari A7 and Australia?!?

@Matt_Coles: Maybe you could provide a little write-up what the session was like if you are attending that is.

Sounds quite interesting indeed, to bad I live all the way in Europe
A little write-up like Marco indicated would be great !!

Cheers

Frazzle

Hey guys,

I was the person that presented the session at FreePlay. Please let me know if you have any questions. The session was aimed at helping people who are absolute beginners to get started.

In the session I spoke about how 3DGS helped me learn how to program after nearly failing first year programming. I spoke about how I then moved on to other middleware and eventually came back to 3DGS.

I took the group through a point and click workshop on how to make a first person shooter and then wrote a small behaviour script to demonstrate how easy it is to get started in the engine.

I finally spoke about the strengths and weaknesses of 3DGS as I see them and then proceeded to get a lot of questions.

PS. I'm not from Atari, though I would have loved to work for them when they had a development house in Melbourne. I'm just an amatuer games developer and I'm doing my PhD in artificial intelligence at La Trobe University.

Thank you Chance!

It was a pretty good talk, if a little short, although the conference center was soo cold on sat I've been sick all week lol.
It's convinced a few of my other friends to buy it for their holiday projects which is a good thing

Hey guys,

The following are the main strengths and weaknesses of the 3D Game Studio system. This is from the point of view of using WED and then Lite-C. I have not used the SDK to do C++ programming.

Strengths
-There is a very low amount of resistance to get started. I can show a person how to make a simple level and a point and click game in about an hour.
-A large number of audio visual functions required for games development are already there. For example I have invested about a fortnight learning just how to load a Quake 2 model only to learn that I'd have to invest more time to learn inverse kinematics. 3D Game Studio is much better for this.
-A large number of game logic functions required for games development are already there. For example there are functions for handling bullets and events.

Weaknesses
(I know that this is a scripting language and that the SDK is available )
-There is no objects oriententation concepts such as polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation and namespaces.
-You can't create and pass local arrays.
-You can't create and pass local objects.

For a number of these weaknesses I have worked around them. I do have a feeling that I am approaching the system from the wrong angle. Kind of like using my object orientated hammer for every problem I see.

I started with 3D Game Studio in about 2000. I then moved on to other systems because I felt that I need more powerful functionality. I came back to 3D Game Studio in 2006 because I felt that the strengths and constraints of 3D Game Studio enabled me to be more productive and creative.

Why do you think you cant create and pass local objects and arrays? I use them all the time

function foo()
{
var my_local_array[10];
foo2(my_local_array);

ENTITY* my_local_ent = ent_create(.....);
foo3(my_local_ent);
...
}