AGDC wrap up

I was emptying out the bag I received from AGDC and realized two things: 1. I never posted anything about how AGDC went and 2. there was a pretty sorry error in the printed schedule for the track I participated in.

So to the first point, AGDC was fantastic in most regards. I bumped into many familiar friends, made a few new ones and in general did a lot of networking - something I've heard said often that this particular conference is good for. The open source technologies track I participated in also went very well. I shared the 10am session with gentlemen from two other engines, and noticed that in a room that could hold a bit less than 200 people, it felt about half full. As I noted previously, I spoke briefly about the jMonkeyEngine and how easy it is to get started. I also mentioned several of the folks who have used or are currently using the technology and showed again the movie Rikard and I did for JavaOne '08. Following me were presentations of Ogre3D and Panda3D, two mature C++ engines with nice feature-sets. I would say that jMonkeyEngine left a good impression though as at the end of that session all of the questions were about it. :)

On the show floor, Sun had one of the more active of the booths, showing off Project Darkstar through the help of a simple capture-the-flag style game with snowman avatars. I hung around the booth chatting with several of the Sun folks I've had the pleasure to get to know over the past several weeks (helping some in getting that game completed in time for the show.) Definitely some smart people there who "get it". I would guess that most of the Java gaming community sees only 5-10% of what these guys are actually doing to try to support everyone, which is unfortunate.

The second point I realized as I thumbed through the conference booklet for the first (and only - why do they print these things?) time is that they not only listed me as scheduled to speak at 9am during that track, but also credited me as "Creator, jMonkeyEngine" which is of course wrong. I have corrected Sun's overzealous crediting on slides and such in the past and reminded them of the history of that project but I suppose the original plan to have me speak in the "Views from the Big Chair" session made such a title sound more fitting or something? I only guess... but I'm glad that after asking them to remove me from that session (how do I fit into a group with the likes of Daniel James and Jesse Schell!) they replaced me with Prakash Ramamurthy from Gaia Online - a man who definitely had a lot more interesting things to say. :) (For example, Gaia is run on all open source software, including mySQL for its huge number of transactions!) Anyhow, seeing the mistake today on flipping through the guide was a bit disappointing and hopefully did not cause any confusion.