Featured Terasology at Ludicious! And a small meet-up!

Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
Contributor
Design
Logistics
SpecOps
Terasology is attending the Ludicious 2018 conference in Zurich as announced and bunch of contributors registered. But, wouldn’t have been cooler if we decided to take an extra day and arrange a mini-internal Terasology conference? You guessed it :) - that is exactly what we did.

On January 17th, 2018 Cervator, manu3d, qwc, skaldarnar, msteiger, oniatus, josharias and flo came together in Zurich and took the entire day to talk about the Terasology project. For the first time since the project started, there has been a room full of Terasology-centered developer power. We used a lot of this time to share our knowledge as we all have different areas of expertise on the project and contribute for different reasons.

Starting with a good cup of early coffee farmed by Josharias from a nearby store, Cervator started the proceedings with an overview to the depths of Terasology’s build system and he and qwc shared many ideas on how to improve it and how we can share more knowledge in similar areas for the future.

Afterwards, qwc revealed the hidden secrets of Docker to the group. We did quite a lot brainstorming on ideas like large scale multi-node Terasology servers using Docker and how to include other concepts being worked on like Sectors.

This was followed by a larger discussion moderated by Cervator and manu3d about our project vision, how we are structured right now and where we can improve our organization and community process. Most of the time the result was the awareness that we have to reduce cervator’s bus factor and distribute responsibility to more people. :)

We still have to finalize our decisions on many matters but we shared many ideas and in time we will nurture them into great improvements.



We also took time for technical topics. Manu3d presented the refactored rendering engine including details of the entire rendering graph. Super interesting topic with so much history in it as Terasology started as a rendering demo :) also amazing to see how a piece of software will be able to evolve over the years to support a number of very different use-cases.

Later that day oniatus moderated a session about code quality. Similar to the previous sessions we collected a number of ideas how we can improve in the future, especially in the context of our review process and testing. Besides that we had super interesting debates what makes good code, how to test code and how to refactor existing code.

We ended the planned sessions with a discussion introduced by skaldarnar about the development environment and how our API can support module development in different JVM languages like Scala or Kotlin. We also sneaked a lot of Optional vs null-check and Java 8 Stream-API topics in here. Take 8 developers in one room and you have 9 opinions and a lot of fun. :)

Speaking of fun - time to end the day with a lot of programming, fiddling in the engine code, reading lots of trello boards, issues and finally preparing for Ludicious tomorrow.

See you there Terasologists!

20180117_151031.jpg 20180118_112149.jpg

(post by @oniatus edited by the group here - who is who in the image follows, written as placed in the image:
Msteiger flo oniatus skaldarnar cervator
josharias manu3d oniatus again qwc)
 
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