Flexiblere Online-Meetings mit “Gather”

Wenn sich 10 Personen in der Realität treffen, sitzen nicht immer alle an einem Tisch und reden miteinander. Es gibt immer auch Kleingruppen, die sich spontan entwickeln und wieder trennen und wieder neu fügen.

Klassische Video-Konferenzdienste wie Google Meet, Zoom, Whereby, Webex, Microsoft Teams, Facetime, etc sind spezialisiert auf einen gemeinsamen “Meetingraum”, meist mit einer Galerie von Leuten in Rechtecken, oder einem “zeige nur die Person, die gerade spricht”-Interface auf kleineren Geräten (smartphones).

Es gibt aber auch flexiblere Video-Meeting Dienste, wo man Teilgruppen bilden kann und sich in solchen ein und ausklinken kann, ohne den Dienst zu “verlassen”.

Der scheinbar populärste solcher Dienste heißt “Gather“. Er kombiniert ein retro 2D Videospiel “look & feel” mit eingebetteten Mini-Spielen und klassischen Video-Konferenz Funktionen.

Nach kurzem googeln fand ich einen englischen Artikel und einen deutschen Artikel, in denen der Dienst mehr oder weniger kritisch beleuchtet wird.

Gather bietet eine kostenlose Variante (bis zu 25 Teilnehmer).

Alternative ähnliche Dienste listet dieser Artikel (englisch):

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Setting up a free C64 emulator for retro game fun

I just installed the C64 emulator VICE on an old Windows laptop and set it up with shortcuts for some old time games that I used to play in the 80s.

My 6 year old son really likes Donald Duck’s Playground where you do odd jobs as Donald to earn cents and dollars to buy playground equipment for your nephews and let them play:

Setting up the game required the download of a zip archive containing a *.d64 image file that can be autostarted by VICE. I created a desktop shortcut to the x64.exe file in VICE with the path of the d64 file as command line parameter. That gives you a shortcut that will start VICE and autostart the game right away. Add the -fullscreen option to start the emulator in fullscreen mode.

I had to enable keyboard mapping for Joystick 2 as shown on the WinVice c64-Wiki.

VICE is a cool emulator that runs on Unix, MS-DOS, Win32, OS/2, BeOS, QNX 4.x, QNX 6.x, Amiga, Syllable or Mac OS.

Games I might try next include Spy vs Spy, Aztec Tomb, Q-Bert and I few others. :)

Open Source games using libgdx

There are these demos.

And I found a list at the bottom of the main libgdx documentation page and used it as a startting point for the list below. I haven’t verified yet whether their respective licensing is covered by the OSI Open source definition.

I am actively maintaining this list, so feel free to send me additions or corrections:

• Fly, a 3D game in outer space. Open source and available on Github (Android)
• Backyards Pirates, a fun Ludum Dare entry by Stefan Wagner (desktop, Android, WebGL)
• Pax Britannica, a port to libgdx, by Stefan Wagner (desktop, Android, WebGL)
• Aureas Oceanus, another Ludum Dare entry by Stefan Wagner (desktop)
• Freegemas, a port to libgdx by David Saltares (desktop, Android)
• Frogger, by Roger Engelbert

I have also asked for a more comprehensive list on the libgdx forum and on libgdx lead developer Mario Zechner’s blog.

Using libgdx for cross-platform app development

I am looking for a framework that allows me to develop modern apps (mobile, web, desktop) all from one Java codebase. I prefer Java because I know it very well, it is already cross-platform and a statically typed language that allows IntelliJ, Eclipse and Netbeans to be better than any dynamically typed scripting language editor could ever be.

Currently my favorite is libgdx. I am planning to use it with IntelliJ Community Edition and with Maven.

By using RoboVM, libgdx even supports iOS.

For user input (forms) libgdx provides the scene2d.ui widgets. I hope that will be sufficient for most of my UIs. Now I just have to get OpenGL to work on my Linux box …