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In this article Michael shares his thoughts on teaching folks to program in 2019.

Preface

Autumn 2019 was the third time I participated as one of the teachers in the course to teach 10-15-year-old folks to program. The course took place from mid. September to mid. December. Each Saturday, we were studying from 10 AM to 12 PM. More details about the structure of each class and the game itself can be found in the 2018 article.

I have the following goals for conducting such courses:. . .

Anyone, who watches our progress long enough, can say that we restarted the development from scratch plenty of times.

Even before releasing "OGS Mahjong", we changed the underlying technology more than once. After that, we did it again several times, throwing away already completed features. It seems that right now we have less completed features than before the release of "OGS Mahjong". It's true, but not entirely.

When "OGS Mahjong" was released, we had a descent looking (for that moment) open-source game, that worked under Windows and Linux. With some luck and effort it still works today, but not out of the box.. . .

This article describes our first durable application for desktop PCs: PSKOV static site generator.

Durability

A durable application is an application that functions without a single change on operating systems released in years 2010-2030. In other words, a durable application has backward compatibility of 10 years and has the stability to run for 10 years. Actually, PSKOV runs even under Windows 2000, so PSKOV has backward compatibility of 19 years.. . .

In this article, we describe the beginning of our efforts to protect ourselves from third-party solutions.

Since day one of Opensource Game Studio project, we rely heavily on third-party solutions to help us achieve the goal of creating the best game development tools. To this date, we used forums, task trackers, mailing lists, social networks, code version control systems, hosting providers, compiler suites, libraries, and so on. Each third-party solution we used had its own lifespan.. . .

In this article, Michael shares his experience of teaching kids to program.

Here's what he covers:

• organization of the learning process
• learning plan
• memory game
• development tools
• lessons
• results and plans

Organization of the learning process

The learning process is conducted as part of corporate social responsibility: a company provides a room with equipment and connects employees that want to try themselves in the role of teachers with employees that want their kids educated. All this is done voluntarily.. . .

It was a year of reimagining and rethinking. As some of you may remember, we started this project to make a game development tool. During the years, the idea evolved from one form to another, sometimes the changes were significant, other times we threw away all the code and started anew.

As a result of all these changes, we came to the end of the year 2018 without a tool, but with a clear understanding of what tool are we making.

There are plenty of fine game development tools out there. Some of them are even open source. We spent plenty of time trying them, and some are quite good.. . .

In this article, we discuss how ideal video game and video game development tool look like, in our opinion.

Questions

As you know, the goals of Opensource Game Studio are:

• creation of free video game development tools
• making video games with those tools
• preparing video game development tutorials

This time we asked ourselves two simple questions:

• What is an ideal video game?
• What is an ideal video game development tool?. . .

We are glad to announce the release of the second demonstration of OGS Mahjong 2. The purposes of this release were to refine our development techniques and build a solid cross-platform foundation.

Release

Run the latest version of OGS Mahjong 2 in your web browser: http://ogstudio.github.io/ogs-mahjong

You are encouraged to run the game with seed parameter like this: http://ogstudio.github.io/ogs-mahjong?seed=0. . .

This article describes two new OpenSceneGraph cross-platform examples and the change in handling dependencies.

Examples of HTTP client and node selection

Once we finished working on the remote debugging example and reported its completion, we were surprised by the fact that secure HTTP connection between a debugged application and debug broker was only working in the web version of the example. Desktop and mobile versions only worked with insecure HTTP.. . .