CDG Is Annoying.

After some mad traffic, I arrived at Luton and was shipped off to Paris CDG as fast as possible. I was supposed to meet up with some people in CDG but due to the unexpected rushing in the morning, I hadn't any details with me. Still, I thought it shouldn't be too hard.

The first thing you will notice is that CDG is in three seperate terminals, and it's not really possible to get information about the other terminals from whereever you are. So I had to use pot luck to guess which terminal to go to to find people. After spending about 2 hours finding terminal 2, I needed to find an internet terminal of any sort to look up details. The internet access is sorely lacking, as is any information on where to find it or anything.

After finding their flight details I realised I was about 10 minutes late for meeting them, and then went to where I thought they should be, but it was probably the wrong place still because they didn't show up. Oh well. I found a working internet terminal finally and snapped a picture of the website detailing the hotel where the convention should take place and then got all my money converted to euros and got a taxi there.

The taxi driver also got lost but put his meter on quite low after he did so, so I don't think he really ripped me off or anything. In the end I spent about 80 euros trying to get to the hotel. Thanks a lot, CDG!

The Convention.

The most interesting part, and the part we all want to know about was MMF2. Here's a gui shot. My camera doesn't seem to be ideal for taking shots like this, but I'm sure if I played around with the manual settings mode I could get a lot better quality out of it. Too late for that now.

Some Zeb editing in MMF2.

Francois talks about MMF2. Really dark so I probably should have used flash.

Here's a picture of the layering. At the right hand side there are different layers. The first one has all the Zeb stuff in it and the second one is blank, but you get the idea probably. It's just like photoshop. Layering can be used to make parallax easily.

In the top left I noticed a debugger like the Jamagic one. The game was running, by the way, and the little grey platform at the left moved up and down, and the Zeb character could easily jump on it without problems. That's a long waited for improvement.

There is a group within a group. Bliss.

All the data files (sound, music, etc.) are no longer masked from view. If you want, you can now replace a sound throughout the entire project. You can also do other funky stuff. It's extremely funky!

Ah, he came back to the debugger. The first thing I'll say about the debugger is that it is FAST. As Francois made the Zeb guy walk across the screen, the debugger updated with the exact coordinates of the character as soon as the character reached the pixel. Very, very smooth. You can also bring details of any object up to the debugger and also extension developers can add debugging stuff in to their extensions so those should work in the debugger too. This is an extremely powerful little tool that's been added. I can imagine that it'll be really really helpful in the future.

After all the information, Francois answered some questions on MMF2. He says everything in English and French because at this convention, everyone spoke around one of those languages.

There was a break and people started talking about excellent stuff.

Here Yves talks to two french users called Toad and (I think) Batchman. He was just talking to them about their game they made and brought along (Gangs Of Boueville). It's great how the convention offers the chance for you to actually show the Clickteam the games you've made with their products.

Francois, DT and JasonDarby discuss how long certain talks should go on for. I hope this gives a good idea of how approachable the Clickteam people are during the convention. You can really just go up and chat with them.

Andos and Burfelt goofing around a bit. The 3D glasses are from a presentation that was done by someone whose name escapes me. The presentation was all about using Jamagic to render 3D wireframes which can be seen with glasses. It was pretty cool.

This is Neat Kliker. He apparently looks as innocent as a lamb. Jeff made me take this picture.

Jet lag? Jeff looks a bit drained.

He didn't want his picture taken so I made DT my new subject of photography for the weekend, just as Arwyn had been before.

I found out that the hotel had an arcade which had Crazy Taxi! It was 5 euros for three games which is expensive, so I didn't play. Judging by my console CT skill, I could probably play three games for around 2 hours and 15 minutes. Unfortunately there's no way I could pull that off in the arcade, so three games would probably last about 10 minutes. Not worth it.

The Hotel resteraunt served me a 'country burger' which sounded vaguely harmless. It was totally red in the middle, which the picture doesn't really show well. I was freaked out by this a bit but then decided I might as well just eat it. It didn't kill me as perhaps a Quick Burger or a Pizza Burger may have.

I get the feeling DT noticed I was photographing him again.

That was it for the convention day. I didn't take pictures of a lot of things because it slipped my mind, but there were plenty of amazing demonstrations. Probably it will be even better next year.

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