Jon Simpson

CSCS Week 2: Sodarace

12 Oct 2005 — cscs, sodarace

So, CSCS week 2 was all about SodaRace, a rather cool java based environment for building small moving objects/things. The concept seems pretty straightforward, you can add a muscle (push/pull) reflex to lines that make up your object. There’s a vast layer of depth concealed by this, and just getting simple shapes to move or stand upright seemed pretty difficult from where I was sitting (although I wasn’t 100% together yesterday).

A lot of people built interesting objects that flailed and moved about, which was pretty interesting. There are some amazing demos available within the Sodarace environment, but just getting something to move cohesively seemed to be a pretty big achievement. It was great to see a lot of people really having fun and enjoying what they were doing. I wish I could have taken more from this session, but I seem to have been struck down with a post-dated freshers flu (overdue from my first year, maybe…)

This session definitely achieved its goal of being ‘simpsons-like’ in nature, and it should be interesting to see the progression under this new format. Hopefully, this should be another good year for CSCS.

Note: Matt still hasn’t drawn a map yet.


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