Skype Meeting with Maic

Yesterday, together with Marco and Sergej, we have a net-meeting with Maic through Skype. He talked on his experience visiting OLPC Foundation Office with Bert in Boston. Here are some of the inputs that we get and valuable towards our project:

1. Until today, Squeak etoys is the only application that are full-running in OLPC XO which also have Sugar (Python-based) as its operating system. Interesting part: depth view on software application OLPC is doing and etoys is the only thing far more advanced compared to others.

2. The Foundation target the first delivery will be early October and they were relief that etoys is ready and working well.

3. Bert made some interesting networking with those in OLPC Foundation. Maic contributes his ideas on the interface and found out there are no one doing anything with Squeak. He concluded that we are far more advance with programming interface, ideas on doing and pursuing the game making at school.

4. We agreed upon one thing. Instead of making GATELOCK as one game authoring application, we decide to make it as one of the features in etoys. In other words, embedded the game making elements in etoys. Maic gave us his ideas - first open etoys - click game making project - then the game making features will appeared.

5. OLPC Foundation have 3 version of OLPC board until today - B1 (256 MB), B2 (128 MB RAM and B# (strong processor, 20% faster and 256 MB RAM). The Head of Sofware Designer at OLPC did mentioned the tremandous developers all around the world are working with it and they are very restricted in giving any. Therefore, we should work with what we have ;)

6. Scratch is not really focusing towards OLPC. Scratch is concentrating on Web community and they idea is more on sharing via Web. The interface is good and focus on mediated presentation and simulation activity. But it is not purposely for game making and they didn't focus on using any game creation features.

At the end of the discussion, we agreed that the aim of our thesis is to have a building blocks of game engine and not designing an application but prototype that is usable right away. Then, Maic showed us JiVE project.