[prog] anyone for #mxug IRC?

Sam Watkins sam at nipl.net
Tue Mar 1 05:36:23 UTC 2011


I'd like to invite melbourne coder/hackers of whatever affiliation to hang out
in #mxug on freenode and/or attend MXUG meetings.  MXUG is a good friendly user
group (can present full or lightning talks about whatever is of interest,
generally with a dev / tech focus).

Although the group meetings are always interesting and well-attended, the IRC
channel isn't!  So, please come and visit it and stay joined in it.  I saw
#PerlNet is also not well populated.  Do people use something other than IRC to
chat these days?  Please don't say facebook!!

There was a very interesting and useful discussion last month about safe
database deployment, upgrading and versioning, etc.  There have also been talks
on Quantum computing, AI, geometric algorithms, various hacks, etc.  I did a
quick one last time, on how I made a video of Cyclone Yasi's progress across
Australia from BOM satellite images.

I've been doing some OpenGL coding, working on a 2D game for a Pandora game
coding competition.  I'm using my C / cz / brace but apparently perl has pretty
good OpenGL bindings.  Has anyone done any GL, SDL or games programming in
perl, or would be interested in doing so?  I'm also interested to talk about
audio synthesis and mixing for my game, will be using SDL as the backend I
guess.

I went with GL rather than plain SDL because vsync / waiting for vblank does
not seem to work in plain SDL, at least not with my little Intel GPU, so the
animation looks scraggy.  I think my Pandora has a better GPU than my netbook!
Anyway enough about that.

Also, does anyone know how to create good high-framerate video capture from X?
I wanted to record a video to show how my game is progressing, but it didn't
work well.  I tried using xvidcap and ffmpeg.  They work well, but the only way
I can ffmpeg to dump 800x480 at 60fps is using .bmp format and a ramdisk.  Even
then it hogs the CPU and makes the game's framerate drop.  I quickly crashed my
machine by using too much space in the ramdisk!  Maybe I need a faster CPU for
encoding those pngs / jpegs / avis at 60fps.

Sam



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