GameCamp Oslo - Inspirational Boosting

Yesterday I left my dayjob early to go with my brother Marius to the Oslo GameCamp at my former school NITH. I really wanted to get a better understanding of game programming and my brother (who is 18) is considering getting more into programming so we both had good reasons to be there.

GameCamp is my third community event in the same amount of weeks. This is probably more community events attended for me than in total over the last two years, where I didn't have the time nor energy to attend these meetings. My inspirational level is more than doubled from these events, so I really urge anyone who's feeling really worn out to prioritize such things.

Einar Ingebrigtsen (who tagged with me at Objectware starting the day I left) and the rest of the guys @ GameCamp really had put together the complete geek event, with excellent help from the NITH guys, lead on by Anders Bondehagen (who also got an XBox 360 for his efforts - well deserved). There were Guitar Hero competitions, labs and dual tracks set up for the friday afternoon. A lot of the usual suspects also showed up such as Sondre Bjellås, and Peter Lillevold whom I haven't met in a really really long time. Me and Peter held our first NNUG presentation toghether in 2004 and now he's working to start KodeCompagniet at the same time as I'm starting Puzzlepart. Cool stuff!

Game developer Scott Gilas opened the event with a keynote focusing on career development, handing over some good pointers to all the attending NITH students. His message of "have fun - think about #1 - push yourself out of the comfortzone from time to time" probably was preaching to the choir for the more experienced developers in the audience (beeing that most were enterprise developers like me, taking friday afternoon off to play around with XNA:))

Me and my brother left after the Keynote to attend the XNA track. After a session from ArtPlant on art directing games we moved on to Einars session on basic XNA and started doing labs. 

We started out installing the XNA 3.0 beta and fired up Visual Studio 2008. As usual I whipped up a new "Windows Game" project and hit Ctrl-B to make sure everything was right. Build failure:

Building content threw FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'SmartAssembly.Attributes, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cd3409ee69028647' or one of its dependencies.

Nothing on google on that one. First hunch was that this might be some weird x64 issue, but after i downloaded the sample project from the Getting Started section at XNA Creators it seemed that it's something in the default project template for the 3.0 beta (on my machine). The sample project builds perfectly. We compared the csprojs and the contentproj files without finding obvious differences. With the default template we also experienced some nasty COM errors when opening project properties in Visual Studio, and had to kill the devenv process to get out of it.

The default template worked fine on other machines, but given that I've got all kinds of other Visual Studio stuff installed I might be proned to error here. For now I'll just use the sample project setup for playing with this, hoping that this bug gets resolved in the rtm of XNA.

After a couple of hours with Einars labs I got a primer of XNA and Marius got some C# lessons in addition. Very cool stuff, and anything that gets me up at 0800 on Saturday really deserves a blogpost. Here's my first ever XNA app (pictures actually spin on their own axis and rotates in different paces controlled by the keyboard - not too bad for a enterprise developer:-P)

Ps. No - I don't normally wear *just* a mustache:)