Pandora port now available
Time to celebrate!. Steven "Stuckie" Campbell reports (here) he's recompiled BennuGD for the Pandora console. For what one can read from his quick post, the port works pretty well and he's been able to play some BennuGD games' GP2X Wiz (with which Pandora shares its roots, but not its design) version without much ado.The Pandora console is quite an interesting platform to add to the list of platforms where BennuGD runs on, you can read about its specs in its Wikipedia page and you can download his port either from our Downloads page or from Stuckie's site.
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We need YOU!
We really want to publicize BennuGD, so someone in the forums suggested doing what the guys from Blender do: eat our own dogfood.
We're going to take BennuGD and create the best game we can, and we'll make it run on all the platforms BennuGD supports (Linux, Windows & the Wiz) and we're going to make our best to bring it to as many of those not officially supported (MacOS X, FreeBSD, Haiku, Wii, PSP, GP2X, Pandora...) platforms as possible. And we need your help! The idea is still in its initial planning stages, so we need any and all the help we can get: ideas, music, graphics, coders... everything is welcome.
If you feel you can help, please head to the forums and explain how you can make the project greater than it is (don't be afraid to post there even if the main thread language is Spanish, you'll be more than welcome).
If you feel you cannot make a great technical contribution, you can also be very helpful by spreading the word. Send this notice to any of the sites you usually read with the buttons below or copy this entry to your own blog (we're CC, baby!).
So, more than ever, happy coding!
BennuGD as an educational tool
Windgate, who is known in the community for his work with Bennu3D, reported some time ago that through Trinit -a cultural association he's involved with in Zaragoza, Spain- he's been teaching computer programming to students aged 14-18.
Last year, he used regular Bennu in his classes, and given their success, he's moved to Bennu3D this year. In his classes, he assigns parts of the videogame creation to the different students, and in the end, they all mix the pieces to create pretty cool looking games.
In the video below, you can see them creating a very nice-looking 3D game. The video is itself part of a much longer video destined to some other school in Bolivia from which I've taken only the parts relevant to BennuGD.
It's really inspiring to see what people of that age, who have no prior knowledge on computer programming, can do with a tool as powerful as Bennu is and in virtually no time. This is the kind of thing that make us all want to be part of the community :)
If you want to download the game the students were creating when the video was shot, you may do so here.
Video on Vimeo (no subtitles): http://vimeo.com/11742483
More interesting user news
Forum user FreeYourMind has announced a new experimental project of his. He's created a Tech Demo for a very simple 3D engine that shows the BennuGD logo with which you can interact in 3D.
You could already do this with Bennu3D by hardware, but FreeYourMind's created this all in software. If you want to have a look, you can get his demo (for Windows, Linux & the Wiz) here.
Also, forum user Grisendo has created a module based on wiiuse to control your games on PC with the Wii's standard controller: the Wiimote.
Grisendo has stated that he'll merge the module with the existing unofficial Bennu port for the Wii (created by your favourite bennugd.org writer) so that you can write the same BennuGD code for your games in your PCs and for the Wii.
You can get his module here (Spanish).
Interesting community projects
Some very interesting projects have arisen from the BennuGD community lately.
The first of these is Bennu.NET by Folken and its first game: "Xibalba. The beginning and end of everything..."
Bennu.NET is an abstraction layer above BennuGD that allows it to communicate with Microsoft's .NET platform (and possibly with Mono, too) and run games in a browser.
Click on "Read More" to know more about Xibalba and other interesting projects.
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