Hackathon 2019 I - Report

The 2019 I hackathon was a breeze, and we have many good news for you!

Firstly we would like to thank the CCCFR for hosting us in their lovingly hackerspace. It's been yet one of the most homelike locations that we've been to.

Also thanks to tau for preparing his famous Taulasch for us, it was very delicious ☺️

# What we did

We had lots of fun cooking, prototyping, exploring Freiburg, and as well @Fohlen cut some cucumbers really well 🍸.

On Saturday we held some quick talks about current state-of-the art Inexor which you can find in our media repository.

Let's dive right into what we accomplished this Hackathon:

# User stories

@martinmuzatko and @koppiman wrote a myriad of usefull user stories, sorted and prioritized them, so that it will be straightforward to implenent a "minimum viable prototype" from this list.

# User interfaces

@martinmuzatko wrote a nice debugger interface for the entity-system which you can see below:

The current UI lets you create entities and relations with attributes, as well as connect those. In the future it will be possible to display the entity-system as a graph in the UI.

# Entity-System, Visual Scripting and Rendering

@aschaeffer, @a_teammate and @Fohlen have made huge progress on the ground breaking entity-system.

It is now possible to reactively connect entities and processors, laying the foundation for the visual scripting. We collectively decided for magnum as a rendering engine and even created a demoscene which interacts with the entity-system:

This demo does the following:

• create a clock processor
• connect it to a sinus processor
• connect it to the triangle entity

Every time the change in the clock is made it is propagated down all the way until the triangle, and the renderer will do a transformation based on this value.

It may seem like a small step, but this demoscene lays foundation for a huge change in how games will work in the future, or as @aschaeffer put it: "What can't be done with the entity-system? I've thought about this for quite some time .... and to be honest, there's nothing I can come up with, that we can't make an entity"

# Future to-do

We also discussed what can be done in the future and came up with an agenda until our next Hackathon:

• Implement the basic connectors and processors as defined in the specification including the basic REST-API
• Implement a first prototype of an octree-based world rendering
• Implement a safer concurrency solution for everything outside the entity system's graph
• Think about synchronisation (multiplayer)
• Finish the work on the basic UI for the entity-system
• @koppiman will talk with Medienschule Salzburg about a potential model contest for the first Inexor demo

We would like to thank everyone who was involved (heads up @koenigr), helped, discussed and had fun with us!

PS: The detailed report can be found on HackMD