Gluon Sprint and other things

Hello Planet. :)

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Arjen Hiemstra, I am almost 24 years old and I have recently finished my studies of Game Design. I have recently joined the Gluon team. I am very new to KDE development, having only started to use the KDE and Qt libraries two to three months ago. When the blog post about Gluon was posted on the Planet, I was intrigued and after some deliberation decided to join the development. I quickly became involved with KGL development as Sacha (DrIDK) needed someone who could write him a Mosaic Shader, I have a bit of experience writing shaders so I decided to take a look at it. After some hacking and a quick maths problem solving in the train I had a working shader, which made Sacha quite happy. After that I did some more KGL hacking, mostly on the full screen mode-switching code which I completely refactored. (It was depending entirely on XRandR - not a good thing if you want to support more than X11. :) )

The Sprint

Originally, when I joined the Gluon team, the sprint was already full. However, the Monday just before the sprint, I was contacted by Dan Jensen (leinir), who asked me whether I was available for the sprint, as someone else who planned to come could not come. After arranging some stuff, I was all set for the sprint and quite excited that I was going. It would be my first KDE related event and basically my first event of any such kind. This blog post is mostly my view of the event, Dan already wrote some very extensive blog posts about it, so I will try not to repeat too much. :)

I myself arrived around 7 in the morning after leaving by train around 2100 the previous evening. The arrival was very early, too early even for the coffee places down town to open. So instead I wandered around Munich a bit, looking around. As the original plan was to arrive around 1300, somewhere between 1200 and 1300 I arrived at the hotel to discover that there was no one there yet, unsurprisingly. After something like ten minutes, a guy with a blue K on his chest stepped in, whom I quickly recognized as Dan Jensen, the guy who arranged everything for the sprint. After Dan put away his car we were joined by the three other Danes, Morten, Kim and Rune, who had travelled with Dan. Dirk Leifeld also joined us and we sat down in the lobby to wait for others and the rooms to be prepared.

Later that day we were joined by Luciano Montenaro (mikelima) and Jure Repinc (jpl) and went out for dinner at restaurant near the hotel. I realized too late that it was a place which specialized in meat stuff so that gave a little problems when I wanted something without meat. (I do not eat any meat at all.) However, everything turned out all right and we had a nice dinner. Once back to the hotel, most of us went to bed almost directly. I myself was rather tired from the train trip and so also went to sleep.

The next day, we woke up around half past seven and had some breakfast and everything. We also found three others had joined us: Albert, Sacha and Sandros, making us miss only Eugene. Harald Fernengel came to pick us up and took us to the Nokia offices in Munich. The offices are quite nice, with large windows to let in lots of light. We had the use of one of the meeting rooms for most of the sprint, which was a nice large room with one big table and a view of most of Munich. We settled down and got to setting up the wireless internet. Some of us - including me - had some problems connecting with it. As it turns out, my problems were with the Kubuntu 9.10 KNetworkManager which kept asking for a password. Manually configuring wpa_supplicant and /etc/network/interfaces fixed that issue and I had wireless working. :)

Most of the morning was spent on presentations, mostly presentations of Unity3D. As I did not have any previous knowledge of the program, apart from that it existed, it was interesting to see the work flow. Dan had already told me that most of his ideas on the GameObject structure we are implementing and to see a similar structure in use cleared up some things for most people. However, not everyone understood it fully so Dan was asked to explain it a bit more in-depth. I myself did not pay too much attention, as I mostly understood the base structure. Instead, I worked a bit on the KGL full screen code and discovered that KXmlGuiWindow, while great for normal applications, can be quite a pain. As we decided to make most of the libraries not depend on KDE I chose to delay the work on the full screen code a bit and instead help Dan get the GDL (Gluon Definition Language) parser code into shape. By then, it was getting late and so we went to a restaurant in Munich to have some dinner. After dinner, we went back to the hotel and to sleep, as it was past 1 in the night by then.

The second day began by us being late at the Nokia offices thanks to some problems with the tram. Once at the offices, we started working and I started seriously working on the GDL code. I quickly found out most of it was broken, so I poked Dan to fix it, which he did. Once the basics were running, I found out that I needed some way to display all the stuff created by the parser. So I set out to create a tree model for the GameObject tree. After a bit of fiddling around with it, I had something that basically worked and found out more of the parser code was broken, so we set out to fix it. We did some more work and finally had something working and creating the basic structure. By then it was evening and so we set out once again for dinner. This time, we went to a "Beer Garten" which Harald had recommended to us. The beer there was great, the food as well and we went back to the hotel very satisfied.

The last day of the sprint was spent on more coding. I spent more time fixing my GDL code stuff and others went on with working on KGL and KCL. A few others from the KDE project joined us that day, which was nice as I got to know some more people than just the Gluon geeks. The evening was spent at the Hilton hotel, where the Qt DevDays would be held. The reception had good food, but we were a bit disappointed that there was a limit to the amount of drinks you were allowed. So we went back to the hotel without anyone being completely drunk - which I guess is a good thing but apparently broke the tradition of new people getting completely drunk and then regretting it the next day. ;)

DevDays

Tuesday was the start of DevDays for us. We arrived at the Hilton pretty early because the registration opened early and talks started early. (Yes, a lot of early. I hate early...) The morning saw several presentations from big guys at Qt software. Funny detail - it was opened by someone (I cannot remember his name) who I had been talking to on Saturday. Nice to see that the "Big Guys" at Qt do not all have a big attitude. :)

The afternoon was filled with talks. I attended one about performance optimization, another about scripting and the last one about QWidget. It was interesting and even though I do not have a lot of Qt experience yet the talks were easy to follow. After the talks the Troll Happy Hour started while dinner was prepared. I and several others from the Gluon team, did not know many people around there, so we gathered in our own little corner of the Hilton suite used for the Happy Hour. I got out my laptop and did some work on what was to be the start of Gluon Creator. I did get around to talking with someone from the Ogre project, which was nice as I have quite some experience with Ogre. The dinner later on was nice, Hilton makes good food. :) During dinner there was the fact-or-crap show, which was quite fun. Too bad we did not make it to the finals.

Wednesday was the last day of DevDays and also the last day of our happy little gathering of geeks. In the morning we started out with a talk about multi-touch. During the talk, Dan came to us and told us to gather up after the talk as we might get free Qt certification. We gathered as requested and went to the sign-up office, where we were told to wait a bit until there was room for us. So, we all went back to the common room to study, as there was a list of topics that one should know when doing the exam. Many of us exclaimed "We do not know all this" and other things. I myself did not feel that way entirely as the Qt API makes a lot of sense. Later on I took the test and felt quite confident about it. We still have to get the results, so I still have to see whether my confidence is misplaced or not.

After the certification test, we went back to the talks. I attended a talk about the new animation framework and one titled "Qt Kwan-do" which discussed several optimizations you can do to your Qt applications. That was the last talk of the DevDays. After a little bit of discussion we decided to head into Munich centre and search for a Mac store, as Rune needed a VGA-converter for his MacBook. :)

Having found one, we went back to the hotel to get our stuff. Dirk left us and Dan and the other Danes also had to leave. I had dinner with Luciano, Sandros and Jure as my train left at 2300 and we still had some time to go. We had some nice discussions and food, then went to walk around in Munich a bit longer. After a while of walking and more discussing we went for a coffee at the station. The coffee store closed at 2200, which still left me an hour to wait for the train. Luciano and Sandros left to go to sleep and I remained behind with Jure, whose train left around 0:00. We did some more talking until my train left.

All in all, it was a great experience. I met a lot of nice people. We grew together as a team, to a point where I saw us more of a group of friends then a bunch of geeks on the last day. We had lots of discussions and now have quite a good idea of where we are going with Gluon. We also produced a lot of code, which is of course also quite important. :)

I want to thank Dan for arranging most of the sprint, Harald for showing us around in Munich and finally the people from Nokia and Qt who made the sprint possible.

P.S.: Yeah, I know, not tl;dr compliant and all that stuff. I originally wanted to add something about Gluon Creator, but that will have to wait until another blog post.