4Lennie.nl

A story about the Melange developers meeting I attended and the horror of an Iceland Ashcloud (I still think it is revenge for IceSave) have reached the Google Open Source Blog. You can view it here.-Lennie

Hi All,

Google Summer of Code 2009 has ended and it is the most successful year so far, with just over 85% of the students passing their final evaluations. Including all four of the Melange students.

I must say it has been a hell of a ride. Starting at the moment the organizations are asked to fill in the application form up to the point of completing the final evaluation for the students. Melange has made great progress over the last few months and is now fully capable of running the next GSoC.

Of course there are many more challenges ahead that we need to take. One challenge in particular is hosting the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contest. This contest is designed to get high school students involved in open source and will also help them to earn some cash when doing so. This contest has only run once so far and it ran on the Google Code website. Now due to one of our GSoC students we are close to running it on Melange. Hopefully we can get a demo website up and running shortly ^_^.

Actually I was more closely involved in the process of the GHOP module for Melange then I’ve said so far. I was also mentoring this particular student, who is from India. Meaning there are a lot more barriers to overtake then the initial hello :). We are talking time zones, cultural differences and language barriers.

Next to those difficulties you also have to think about what you want to have done, how you want it done, when you want it done. How can you keep your student motivated? How can you turn someone who is of a shy nature into someone who takes initiative and dares to ask questions however silly they may be? These are just a few of the questions which have popped into my mind during the last few months when working on this project.

All in all the student has passed the final evaluation successfully and I’m now working with him to integrate his code into our repository and ensure that the next GHOP can be run successfully. Lets hope I can be even a better mentor next year.

-Lennie

Hi All,

it has been a long time. A lot has happened in the last couple of months. Not to mention the fact that a lot has also been getting done :). I won’t share all of it here but I’ll give you the most interesting part.

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation at NASA AMES Research Center in California. This presentation would be about my bachelor thesis which I’m currently doing here at the Dutch Organization for Applied Sciences(TNO) in The Netherlands. The bachelor thesis involves helping to design a multi-agent system which will be used to support astronauts on Mars. It is called the Mission Execution Crew Assistant, or MECA. The project is still in its early stages and involves experimental research to refine the baseline requirements for such a system. In a few years they hope to have completed a basic prototype based using these requirements.

Together with two co-students I have been working on integrating an agent language called Brahms and a policy provider for multi-agent system called KAoS. As a sidestep, Brahms is a language that was being developed at AMES so coupling these two languages together was the focusing point for my presentation.

The combination of these two languages allowed for an interesting setup in which Brahms could be used to model the work practice of astronauts and other smart systems. While KAoS allowed us to specify several policies which ensured crew and equipment safety.

Currently we are working on the final stage of our project, writing up our report :(, but more importantly creating a Graphical User Interface which can be used in a human-in-the-loop experiment. This experiment will be useful to further refine the requirements of MECA.

The presentation went pretty well, it is not every day that I get to present my work to people at NASA. However nothing beats the awesome experiences that is called Google I/O, maybe more about that in some other post.

-Lennie

So what’s been happening lately? I’ve put the Imagine Cup plans aside and joined an open source project a buddy of mine is working on. The codename of this project is Melange which is going to be a framework for representing Open Source contribution workflows. More information about this project can be found here.

Somewhat more then a month ago I started creating patches for this project and a few weeks ago I got promoted to project member. 

This being a Google project and all means you get to talk and report to people from Google, which is a nice experience to begin with. Not only that but being a project member also means you get invited to meetings that take place in the U.S.A. The next meeting is planned for the first week of January, hopefully I can get some nice pictures of the whole experience and post them here ^_^.

 -Lennie

Hi all,

 The summer was great, it was filled with all kind of fun activities with friends and games. I’ve now gotten myself a 1-year subscription the the XNA Creators club, so it’s time to start on an XBOX360 game. It’s probably gonna involve shooting and space, unless I come up with something brilliantly innovative.

 The first round of the Microsoft Imagine Cup has also started. I’m thinking about entering, but for that I need some teammates. I’ve heared some rumours that Microsoft NL is gonna put up an online teamportal within the next two weeks. So if that happens, I’m sure I’ll try to find a nice team to work with.

 -Lennie

And here it is, the RTS made with XNA and the Cannibal Engine. You’ll take control of a group of gorilla’s who are taking reving on the monopolistic, nature-abusing people in a Brazilian rainforest. For more info and downloads click here.

Expect the next game sometime after the summer, but for now it’s studying for exams :(.

 -Lennie

I’ll let the picture do the talking :).

-Lennie

So the devdays are over. I’ve had a blast! I’ve seen a range of cool people including Rob Miles wich is a fantastic speaker with a superb sense of humor. Talking about speakers, even I had my own presentation in one of the final sessions of the day. Wich I must say was a pretty cool challenge to do, luckily the crowd loved it :).  Me and my friend were even caught on camera by Tweakers.net .

 - Lennie

Hi all,

Sorry for the lack of updates but I have been very busy lately. The game of wich the concept art is showed in the previous post I made is coming along nicely. So nicely even that my group has been selected to present this game at this years Microsoft Dev Days in the Amsterdam RAI. All this thanks to Cannibal Gamestudios who’s engine we are using for this project.

 The game is called “Nature Strikes Back” and it is an RTS with a lot of micro management for the units. It’s written in C# and makes use of the mentioned engine. The goal of this small game is to rid the land of a big nasty company that is trying to destroy your habitat. You’ll take control of an army of gorilla’s to take down the human capitalistic empire that is threatening your home. The deadline for this project is in a few weeks so expect a release by then.

- Lennie

Here’s a sneak peek to the concept art for my biggest game yet. It should be done near the summer. What it is about…. I leave that to your imaginiation. This game is being developed with XNA 2.0 and the Cannibal Engine.