Chris Pirillo » alice

Have You Ever Wanted to be a 3D Game Developer?

Chris — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:58:41 +0000

Have You Ever Wanted to be a 3D Game Developer? is a post from Chris Pirillo

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When I was a kid, we had a Commodore 64 computer. It had a program that would allow you to create little games. It was kind of cool, but they were nothing like what you can create and play today. The tools for game creation today are just so advanced and complex, right? Not necessarily, no. Alex sent me an email with a link to the Alice project. Alice is educational software that allows you to learn programming in a 3D environment.

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.
In Alice’s interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

The software is about as easy as it can be, in terms of giving you control over what you’re doing, while still being accessible. It doesn’t matter how old you are, you can still use Alice. You’re never too old to learn something new. I believe a fair amount of people who follow me online would want to do something like this. Alice may be the way that you can become more than you are today. Learning to create a game could lead to an awesome future for you in that career field.

This is a great, free opportunity, no matter what your background is… and no matter what operating system you’re running on. Maybe this will be your first time messing with attempting to create a game. Heck, I still remember my first time with it, and that was a couple of years ago. This is just so much better than what I had to work with. This tool won’t transform your entire life. But it is worth a shot. If you’re a teacher, or a student, or just someone wanting to dabble… it doesn’t matter. The Alice tools could help you jumpstart something very cool.

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How to Handle Remote Tech Support

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 06:30:00 GMT

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VMware and Parallels for Virtual Machines

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:30:00 GMT

It doesn't matter if you're running on Windows or Mac OS X - every power user needs either Parallels or VMware (or both). There's never been an easier way to test software without destroying your primary operating system's stability. Think of how many times you wish you could press a 'reverse' button on your computer. Plus, there's no easier way to try new Linux distributions - see what all the fuss is about. Run Windows in OS X, run Linux in Windows, but the best way to do either is with VMware and/or Parallels.

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