Life, as it is

Bangla Mountaineering and Trekking Club (BMTC) was formed in 2003, aiming to make people aware about trekking and prepare them through training. It was founded by Mr. Enum Ul Haque, the first Bangladeshi to reach North Pole and Antarctica. Since then, it has initiated a lot of significant expeditions:

• 60 km urban trekking from Manikganj to Dhaka in 2005
• Expedition on Chulu West mountain, Nepal (Hight:21,049 ft.) in 2007.
• Expedition on Fray and Mera Peak of Himalayan range.
• This month, they have formed a team of six mountaineers who will embark on an expedition to Singu Chuli peak (Hight:21,328 ft) of the Himalayan range started on May 24. This is by far the hardest expedition for the six members of BMTC and their fourth one to the Himalayas.
• They plan to climb the Cho Oyo peak on this September.
• And finally, they have announced to climb the world’s highest peak Mt. Qomolangma in 2009.

If you think you have one drop of adventurous blood running in your vein you can contact these guys and take a chance to be part of a history on the making.

For sometime I have been studying this Graphics Engine called Irrlicht. I came to know about this one from the monthly game development talks at BDOSN.org, the lecture was given by Al-Mamoon Shohag, Technical Leader at S-Games Ltd (http://www.s-games.co.uk, Previously known as Deep Red Studio Ltd.). So thanks to him and BDOSN. I think this is a really good graphics engine, because even if you’re just new to graphics/game programming you’ll be able to pick up its features within shortest amount of time. And that is not because of its simplicity but also for the wide range of documentations and tutorials found over the net.

Irrlicht supports 3D rendering via OpenGL, DirectX 8 and 9, and internal software rasterizers. External renderers can be written and plugged via a simple interface, giving rise to a community-made SDL video driver. The engine comes with a library of standard material renderers, allowing fallback materials where user hardware is unable to handle advanced techniques. New materials can be added to the engine at run-time, allowing users to write their own where required. In addition to legacy fixed-function pipeline materials, programmable Pixel and Vertex Shaders (1.1 to 3.0), ARB Fragment and Vertex Programs, HLSL and GLSL materials are supported.

The engine supports most common 3D mesh and image formats by default, and more have been written as external plugins. Lights, cameras and 3D objects are managed as a tree of ‘Scene Nodes’, arbitrary groupable entities which are responsible for their own behaviour. Nodes can be managed by generic animators, by each other, or manually by the user. A large number of built-in node types exist and can be used together to make complex indoor and outdoor scenes, new nodes are trivial to make and can be added at runtime, many extra ones are provided by the community. Internal node types include a terrain renderer and sky domes/boxes for outdoor rendering, BSPs for indoor rendering, bone based animated meshes, stencil shadows, billboards and particle systems, water surfaces and primitives.

A skinnable 2D GUI is available, sporting many controls and the ability for users to plug in their own (or community made) custom controls at runtime, access to a full event system is provided for responding to GUI, mouse and keyboard events without having to rely on external libraries.

Filesystem access is abstracted allowing platform-independent file and folder access, and transparent access to files within Zip archives. Other IO features include an XML reader and writer, the ability to take screenshots, manipulate images and save them in several different file formats.

Rudimentary collision detection is also included, but for more serious physics uses, users are recommended to use a full featured Physics engine.

Links for starters:

1. http://www.irrlicht3d.org/wiki/
2. http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/tutorials.html
3. http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=136776 (Highly recommended, but there maybe some bugs in the code snippets. Read the whole topic posting to resolve those issues).
4. http://comsci.liu.edu/~murali/index.html (Some basic examples, very helpful to get u started)
5. http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/misc/samples/games/article.php/c10469__1/
(Review of Irrlicht engine with some cool sample codes.)

Here’s a list of some open source games using Irrlicht. If you’re intersted in game development using Irrlicht, maybe these examples might help.

1. Crimson Glory – http://www.crimsonengine.com/
2. Supremacy – http://supremacy.sourceforge.net/
3. First-King – http://first-king.sourceforge.net/
4. http://aresfps.sourceforge.net/

Guitar Idol is a massive online competition to find the most talented guitarist from all around the world and the very first of its kind. Anybody can sign-up to the http://www.gtridol.com and post their video (youtube) or audio link and participate in this competition. The top 10 finalist will be performing in London Guitar Show 2008. So far I’ve seen the europian guitarist are dominating the competition. And above all, the winner will be opening up the show for the legendary Joe Satriani!

So, any talented guitarist in Bangladesh, I encourage you to participate. Maybe you’ll be able to bring some pride to our nation. This is the chance.

From my recent experience, it seems like the door of higher education is closed for IUBians in BUET. BUET has a program under their IICT dept. which is called Msc. Engg. (ICT) which requires Bsc. Computer Science with minimum 2.5 CGPA for being eligible for admission. Since I fulfilled that criteria , I recently applied for that program, and appeared for the written exam. There are 30 sites available under this program. By grace of almighty, I placed 20th in the examination. I was very excited being able to perform this well and was dreaming about a beautiful career after acquiring this degree. But fate had a different path set for me. You see, BUET has a thing called ‘equivalency committee’ which decides whose degree is good enough to get admitted to
this course. And they decided that I didn’t event acquired ‘Minimum eligibility’ for this program!

I have humbly accepted their judgement. But still some question arises in mind which they didn’t answer me. If UGC has approved our degree and syllabus, how is that BUET decides that our degree is not good enough for getting admission to their masters? If they have set a different standard, why are not we getting that standard in our syllabus / curriculum?

I discussed about this with hour honorable Director Dr. Anwer. He said that, he can do nothing about this. He tells me if I sue BUET I will win. But I dont have the money nor I have the time to go through that kind of trouble. If only there was some initiative taken from our beloved university, as for my opinion and also by one of the professors of IICT, this problem could be removed peacefuly.

Since then, I think the opportunity for studying in BUET is blur for our future CS graduates of IUB.

Iqbal Nouyed
CS’00, IUB