Category archives: Young Coders

Only got about 8 hours in on OLPC today, mostly on developer documentation. Last night I got a test written for using the camera and gstreamer to display video on a pygame display surface. I'll have to come up with a nice control mechanism that makes what's really a child X window look like a ...

Spent the day organising and rewriting the Developer's Manual and Emulation manual for the OLPC. Still have lots of work to do pulling information in from the wild corners of the wiki, taming the emulation stuff so that it's readable and coherent, and then filling in the missing bits. At least part of that will ...

Whole day spent on OLPCGames today. Updated the documentation on the wiki considerably. Cleaned up the skeleton-activity builder so that you can create a basic Pygame activity with a few commands, and looked into a bug report from Story Builder.

Story Builder is very different from Productive. It's got lots and lots of text entry ...

Spent all of yesterday evening and all the time so far today getting the little details put together. We now have a file-format for Productive (just a zip-file with some specially-named sub-files) and the original world definition can be shared with the clients to provide topology information (and eventually map size, layout, resources, etceteras). The ...

I think I've got most of the rendering-speed improvements I'm going to get without activity-level changes. Here's how it breaks down:

* 26% of the total time is spent in display.flip now (likely only possible to optimise that by reducing window size or something changing in SDL/Pygame, either is possible, but I'd prefer to give ...

Long day of non-OLPC work today. Spent the evening with a profiler going through productive and whittling down some of the slow spots. It really goes to show that the things you don't think are going to be problems are always the ones to bite you (hence the advice to optimise late in the development ...

Since the trip to Taiwan I've been working full-time-plus on OLPC stuff. Originally the plan was that I was to spend 1 day/week on it, with the other 4 days available for my other clients... but OLPC really needs someone working full-time on making things easier for developers. Getting OLPCGames whipped into shape, making sample ...

Since I seem to be incapable of sleeping, here's a quick description of how networking works in Productive...

Lobby Level

Productive has a traditional "lobby" interface, where the children who are gathering to play the game can configure their player characters (and eventually the game-size and in-game name). This interface is handled by the olpcgames.mesh ...

I've put up a brief summary of the state of development environments as I see them on the Wiki. I want to get to the point where we have at least a LiveCD image that can be installed to a machine's hard-disk which includes a (likely Qemu) emulation script that can download the latest images ...

As of right now I can play Productive (minus a few rules) under jhbuild on my workstation against myself. I've also got it building an xo and a POT file (pot file is still a bit anaemic). The UI is nowhere near what it needs to be, but the networking works and the main game ...