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Irrlicht In Motion Competition

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 2:01 am
by bitplane
Update: Winners are out!
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... 386#185386


To celebrate the release of Irrlicht 1.5 and to give people a fun project to work on over the Christmas break, we're going to host a real competition with prizes!

Task
The task is to create an interactive demo that demonstrates an innovative use of motion in Irrlicht. So think animated meshes, custom scene nodes, scene node animators and/or particle systems.

The project should be released as open source under an Irrlicht-compatible license and use freely available media. It should be no larger than 20MB in size.
Windows binaries are expected but not necessary if your OS isn't Windows, but your code is still expected to compile and run in a Windows environment so we can judge it. Each project should contain some sort of document with a brief description of how to get it working.

The deadline is Monday morning on the 12th of January.

Prizes

The grand prize is $200 or equivalent in a currency of your choice, paid by PayPal or as cash via post. Thanks to Alvaro who kindly donated his $100 prize money from the DeleD summer compo to kickstart this contest, which I've also matched.

Second place gets a choice of relevant programming or graphics book from Amazon, for example GPU gems series, OpenGL red / orange book, Stroustrup's C++, 3ds Max 8 Bible etc.

The top rated three projects will get an irrKlang Pro license donated by Niko.

Judging

Judges will be volunteers from the dev team, each giving a score out of 10 for your project. The project with the highest total will be the winner. I'll be looking for innovation, clean code, good presentation and platform independence, but each judge has their own tastes; try to please everyone!

If a judge is unable to get your app working then you'll get 0 points, so don't expect Alvaro to install cygwin, write makefiles and download and compile all the dependencies to get it working.

Misc
If you decide to work in a team then you must decide who will take and split the prize money. If you get 2nd prize I'll split $60 of Amazon vouchers between people of your choice. You can't split the IrrKlang licenses though.

If you use code and media that you didn't make yourself, you must give credit in your documentation.

if the competition is a success, expect many others in the future!

I've now unlocked this forum for the use of discussing this and future competitions. :)

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 2:44 am
by Halifax
Well I would just like to say that I definitely like the sound of this contest! Especially the money, and IrrKlang licenses. I hope there is a lot of interest in this, because I would like to see many more Irrlicht contests.

One question, does it matter if we use a slightly modified Irrlicht?

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 2:58 am
by bitplane
Halifax wrote:One question, does it matter if we use a slightly modified Irrlicht?
Of course not, so long as you can provide the source so we can compile it :)

If you're talking about using a proprietary engine derived from Irrlicht and you can't provide source for legal reasons, then I guess we might be able to make an exception to this rule.

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 7:48 am
by BlindSide
Whoa, thanks bitplane, alvaro and niko! Alvaro congrats on the summer competition too, I know that was a while back but I didn't get a chance to congratulate you, I thought your village thing looked splendid. (Haha I am being a total kiss-ass aren't I? 8) )

Cheers guys

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 11:05 am
by Mel
Sounds nice to me... Self made content is allowed too, right?

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 11:38 am
by geckoman
Damn, I should have started with Irrlicht a year ago, then perhaps I had a chance to win something :cry:

Anyway thats a VERY good idea and I am looking forward to seeing all the great Apps!
Thanks :D

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 11:56 am
by fmx
wow, great idea guys, thanks a lot bitplane, niko, alvaro, judges and everyone else involved!
:D

I'm guessing "heavily-modified" Irrlicht engines would be a bad idea, so you would recommend just starting from scratch using HelloWorld or something right (ie, so the source can compile relatively easily for the judges as-is)?

IMO 20mb is really handy, ~5 MB tops for the EXE and DLL's, leaving plenty of room for additional content to really spice things up
8)

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 12:41 pm
by Virion
Mel wrote:Sounds nice to me... Self made content is allowed too, right?
i thought only self-made contents?

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 1:11 pm
by MasterGod
Great idea guys! I can't wait to see the projects coming!

I think you've made the right decisions regarding projects limitations and the prizes are totally awesome.

I hope we'll see more of this in the future.

P.S
I wish I had time to make something for the competition, even if not for winning but just to contribute by being active.

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 1:44 pm
by JP
Virion wrote:
Mel wrote:Sounds nice to me... Self made content is allowed too, right?
i thought only self-made contents?
It says you can only use content that's freely available on the internet, i guess to give it a level playing ground so everyone has access to the same models and textures....

Having said that if someone's good at modelling why should they be penalised by not being allowed to use their own models? (though i suppose if they made them freely available online that'd be fine!). If someone's a good coder they don't get penalised by being told they can only use code freely available online. Plus this competition doesn't seem to focus on graphics or anything, just nice motion effects so the content used shouldn't matter and the apps shouldn't be judged on how good they look in terms of content, rather how nicely they use the motion.

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 2:39 pm
by night_hawk
Would physics engines be accepted?

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 2:54 pm
by bitplane
JP wrote:Having said that if someone's good at modelling why should they be penalised by not being allowed to use their own models? (though i suppose if they made them freely available online that'd be fine!).
To clarify, by freely available we mean "released under an open content license", so either royalty free models from turbosquid, creative commons licensed media etc. This is mostly so that people can use parts of the finished demos in future works, so the whole community benefits from the contest. If you make your own models, music, textures etc, then it's completely fair to keep them secret until Sunday 11th of January ;)
night_hawk wrote:Would physics engines be accepted?
Yes, I'm sure you could do some great motion effects using a physics library :)

hmmm

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 4:00 pm
by 3DModelerMan
I know I'm going to enter :D (I need Irrklang). But I have one question.
Can this be made into like, an anual contest or something?.

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 4:01 pm
by joshcryer
I have a C-style coding style, I know it's terribly evil, but would I be too punished for doing things that way? :)

I think I might enter anyway even if I'm destined to fail.

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 5:15 pm
by Dark_Kilauea
I have a C-style coding style, I know it's terribly evil, but would I be too punished for doing things that way?
I'm pretty sure you are being judged on the result, not the method used to achieve it, so you should be fine.