Plan for Pat Wilson

Today I came to work in my pajamas because I could. Sometimes it's good to do things just because you can. I realized, on my way to work, that GarageGames is kind of like college. I don't really skip classes at GarageGames though, I guess. I had a Torque development meeting with Ben last night at like 10pm while he was kicking back playing SSX3 and I was working on painting the Farseer for my Warhammer 40k Eldar Army, that was pretty college-esque. I don't have to pay to go to meetings here, so I guess that's how meetings are different than classes. Actually I get paid to go to meetings, so they really are different than classes, and interesting stuff tends to happen in meetings too. We tend to learn stuff every day too, which is different than college, and we produce things that are actually useable. There aren't any girls at GarageGames, so I guess it's not like "college" but more like the Computer Science department. Actually, come to think of it, GarageGames really isn't like college at all, but we can still wear pajamas.

The marketing team is just starting the spin-up on Zap, but already I am seeing the need for some features in Zap. Right now there is a problem, and that is that there is not a constant game of Zap going at all times. It's tough to get people to demo a multi-player only game if there is no multi-player going on. I had planned to fix this problem in Zap 1.6 which is becomming increasingly shiny and will also fufill all your wildest dreams, however I think that it may be better for the game as a whole to fix it now. Mark and I have had a few discussions about it, and I have a rough idea of what I want to do.

My first idea was a small little tray-app that would let you know when X people were playing Zap. This turned out to be a very stupid idea, because it doesn't actually solve the problem. What we need is something to let people say, "I want to play Zap. When N other people want to play Zap, let's start a game," so that is what I am thinking about. I am not sure if I want to build this in to Zap or have a small external application. There are upsides and downsides to both. If I build it in Zap, everyone will have the application automatically, it won't make you log in, it has the server join code in it already, I don't have to try to figure out how the hell to work wxWindows, etc. However, the downside is there is really no way for Zap to notify the user outside of just comming out from being minimized and saying "Hey!" which could be annoying. I'm leaning twords building it into Zap, but I'm not entirely sold on the idea yet. This is kind of a band-aid solution anyway until the full suite of community features get put into Zap, and that won't happen until after 1.6 when we move Zap onto the TorqueApplication framework, which probably deserves it's own .plan in itself, but when it's further along I'll worry about that.

Here's a screenshot of Zap running in Torque Application.