[glypo]

Just thought I should pop in to your forum and say hi! I stumbled across Diaspora quite accidentally. I am amazed by what I have seen, looks like you have all put some real effort in.

Quite bizarrely I have been looking for a project to broaden my coding experience, yet not found anything I thought would interest me sufficiently. I have coding experience (C, C++, Fortan, Python, Matlab....) but I make a living as an Aerodynamicist. Despite what you might expect I don't spend all of my time designing Aircraft and Racing Cars but also do a lot of basic development behind the toolsets, hence have gathered some experience with coding and scripting languages.

I have been using CUDA recently (again for science related stuff) and thought I would love to broaden my knowledge by messing about with games. I am a massive BSG fan (hence came here in the first place) so maybe this could be a good place. Who knows, I will check out the source from the subversion repo before I apply.

Even if I (or you) decide helping out with coding isn't to be, no doubt I will stick about, as what you are doing looks fantastic. Hence the whole purpose of this message, just to say hi 

[karajorma]

The engine we use for this game is open source so there is no real reason anyone can't help out, team member or not. There's nothing to stop any coder checking out the code from our SVN and fixing bugs or adding new features. In fact we welcome that kind of thing.

I've written a guide on how to check out the code here and you can find Mantis here.

The alternative to fixing bugs is to ask me to assign you one of the features Diaspora needs done. We have a range of things both big and small that need to be added sooner or later which make very good first projects for coders new to the engine. Of course if you can see something you think we could use, we're open to suggestions too.

[DaBrain]

Hi, glypo.


I'm curious what CUDA could be used for. So far (at least in games), I've only seen it being used for physics simulations. Actually all of that was PhysX.

However I also heard Bullet can be used with CUDA and maybe more interesting, you might be able to use it with OpenCL, which would mean all games could get a pretty good, open physics API, that runs all modern gfx cards.

[portej05]

Welcome Glypo!

I've only just started looking at the code, and am not really all that involved, but it's absolutely worth the effort (and hell, testing is always good fun ) and the community are turning out some impressive stuff (ST:R is the current one I'm working my way through. Blue Planet, you're next.)

I will quote one of the original developers at you though:

Within this code you will find both razor sharp coolness and horrifying atrocities. I'm hoping it'll serve not just as tool for learning how to do things, but also for learning how _not_ to do things. Have fun with it.

[glypo]

Thanks for all the help and suggestions. For sure I will check out the code from subversion and maybe ask for some small tasks to help me get used to it. Certainly seems cool.

DaBrain - I haven't used CUDA for games at all, in-fact I am very unfamiliar with game coding. My CUDA experience relates directly to my Aerodynamics background, having been playing around with it for modelling fluid flows (CFD/Computational Fluid Dynamics). Because the basic equations behind fluid flow (Navier-Stokes) are very simple, it lends well to GPU which do basic calculation. So we end up with essentially massively parallel (240 cores on a G200 chip) processors which offers something like a 20x speed increase over a multi-core CPU. Therefore if you have a CUDA cluster (i.e. a machine with multiple Nvidia GPU's) you can do some serious engineering/science. All my experience based on Linux on that front also.

Awesome technology, sadly can't be bought to a game like this however. It's too specific and tied in with Nvidia. Generalised coding is always best for operation. I do hope at some point in the future there is a code like CUDA and PhysX that is an open standard between GPU's, allowing programmers (game and otherwise) to utilise GPU for more than just graphics without being tied down to a specific manufacturer.

[MetalDestroyer]

Hi, glypo.


I'm curious what CUDA could be used for. So far (at least in games), I've only seen it being used for physics simulations. Actually all of that was PhysX.

However I also heard Bullet can be used with CUDA and maybe more interesting, you might be able to use it with OpenCL, which would mean all games could get a pretty good, open physics API, that runs all modern gfx cards.

IIRC, nVidia use CUDA for their built in Ambient Occlusion since Forceware 185.xx. But I'm not sure. However, if you want a try, just enable Ambient Occlusion within the driver like the PhysX.  D