Author: tdr

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St Patrick’s Festival Big Day Out


TOG is delighted to be taking part in this year’s St Patrick’s Festival. The St Patrick’s Festival is a 4 day event with different activities taking part all over Dublin. We will be taking part in the Big Day Out.

The Big Day Out takes place on the 18th of March. One of the flag ship events of the festival, it aims to amaze you with street performances, theatrics, Irish language events, workshops, fun zones, music, open air shows and more.

The event takes place in Merrion Square, 12:00 until 18:00. The event is free and open to all ages.

TOG will be making a home for itsself in the Discover Science & Engineering area. We will be helping to promote the upcoming Dublin Mini Maker Faire.(Open call ends this week)  TOG along with NUIM Makers Club and robots.ie will be putting together a fun and interactive stand. On the day we will have sumo fighting robots, arduino powered  instruments , 3D printing  and our freshly made buzzer game.

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Unity3D Development Workshop

Unity is a fantastic tool/engine for game development, but what’s not obvious when developing it is the best methods for developing the game code.

Coming from a programming background, Unity can be quiet confusing. The idea of attaching components to objects in order to add functionality is easy to grasp and makes creating small games fast any easy, but what about larger and more complex games?

The Dublin Unity3D Development Workshop is designed to compliment the Dublin Unity3D Development Discussion, which occured in January. Instead of talking about development methods and patterns we’ll be using them to create a game.

 

I’ll be bring assets and (some) scripts, we’ll use them to build a game. Rather than following a set plan we’ll be “winging it” and each person will be encouraged to make theirs unique, trying different things to see what happens. The goal isn’t to create a full game, it is to understand how you might go about doing that.
Some of the things we’ll be covering are:

  • Using design patterns in Unity to structure code:
    • Singleton – For instantiating a single Scene Manager
    • State – For GameStates which encapsulate logic/code for each scene
    • Observer – Having components/classes subscribe to event notices
    • Object Pool – Limiting instantiations of GameObjects to reduce garbage collection (improve performance)
  • Version control

Continue reading “Unity3D Development Workshop”

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Engineers Week Talks

TOG will be hosting a night of short talks as part of engineers week on Thursday 1st of March . Each talk will be twenty minutes long on a range of interesting topics. The space will open from 18.30 with the talks starting at 19.15. The event is free and open to all.

Talk 1

Title: PRESENTING WITH EFFECT


Blurb: Not effects, e-f-f-e-c-t. If your presentation doesn’t have an effect, why do it? Rowan will delve into the elements that will raise your talk from the level of background noise, get audiences to pay attention, and ultimately, get them to take action as a result of your talk. Presenting can be powerful and effective if you give a little extra thought in advance. Rowan will show you where to focus your efforts to best effect.

Speaker

BIO
Presentation skills demon, PowerPoint nerd, wordsmith, storyteller, speaker, trainer, and dancing bear.

Talk 2

Title: Data erasure for the security conscious and the overly paranoid pervert.



Blurb: Lets discuss some of the commonly used methods of data erasure and

why they might just be overkill due to the limitations of modern forensic investigation tools.
Will include a couple of live demos of file deletion and recovery (or lack there of).

Speaker

BIO
Kevin is a full time student studying computer forensics and security at Waterford institute of Technology. He founded the WIT Hackers Society in Jan2011 and was involved in the organisation of the CampusCon hacker conference. He loves hacking, forensics & networking.

Talk 3

Title: Continuing Professional Development (CPD) – “keeping it real”.


Blurb: We live in exponentially changing times. This talk sets out to showcase why CPD is so important.
Dismissing the ‘turgid’ HR type definition of CPD for a more verbose real life CPD.
The talk will explains the different stages of CPD though a person career.

Speaker

BIO
Chartered Engineer Joe Fitzpatrick, BE CEng FIEI, is the Program Director
for Industry Solutions Development with IBM Software Group in Ireland.

Talk 4

Title: Broadcast Yourself, without the Internet – An Introduction to Amateur Television and how to start your own TV station


Blurb: We have all heard of CB radio where anyone can talk to anyone without the internet. A step up from that is Amateur Television where anyone can start broadcasting television and others pick up the picture.

Speaker

Daniel Cussen
BIO
Daniel Cussen an Electronic Engineer will explain what’s needed to get involved, and how Dublin-wide coverage of his TV system was recently achieved. A little bit of electronics wizardry, a video camera and a TV is all that is needed


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Birthday Party

Saturday the 28th of January 2012 marks TOG’s 3rd birthday. You know
what that means.

PARTY!!!! And yellow rubber ducks.

The plan is to start at around 19:00 in TOG. Our last few get togethers
have been a great success and keep getting better so let’s try to top
them all. Make it passed 05:00 this time!

Hacking, eating, drinking, making, gaming, singing, dancing, arranging
rubber ducks into various positions – whatever takes your fancy.

So come one, come all. Bring your good self, your friends, your family,
vagrants, strangers, pets, more rubber ducks, plastic army men and
anything else you think may or may not be appropriate. Everyone is
welcome.

We hope to see you all there.

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Dublin Unity3D Development Discussion

Unity is a fantastic tool/engine for game development, but what’s not obvious when developing it is the best methods for developing the game code.

Coming from a programming background, Unity can be quiet confusing. The idea of attaching components to objects in order to add functionality is easy to grasp and makes creating small games fast any easy, but what about larger and more complex games?

The Dublin Unity3D Development Discussion is an event where attendees will get the opportunity to do a talk on the development methods (including, if they wish, the project management techniques/software that they use) and design patterns that they use to develop games. These presentations can take any form and involve any kind of media (a game, code examples, slides, handouts). Those giving talks are welcome to demonstrate their game(s), whatever state they are in.

Doing a presentation/talk is completely optional. They are also informal, there’s no list to sign up to, just come along with any material/media you’d like to use (if any).

After the presentations there will be a discussion on development in Unity.

Some of the things we’ll be discussing are:

  • Using design patterns in Unity to structure code:
    • Singleton – For instantiating a single Scene Manager
    • State – For GameStates which encapsulate logic/code for each scene
    • Observer – Having components/classes subscribe to event notices
    • Object Pool – Limiting instantiations of GameObjects to reduce garbage collection (improve performance)
    • Adapter/Wrapper – Used for integrating Jitter Physics and maybe managing GameObjects
  • Project management (in relation to managing issues and code)

 

Everyone’s welcome to attend, however the topics covered will require some understanding of C# (or a similar language).

Date: 26th January

Time: 18.30

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