A new model
by Michael Arcadia · in General Discussion · 05/20/2005 (10:18 pm) · 63 replies
Salutations,
i have just registered, and basicly i'm just looking to find out if there is really such thing as an 'indapendant' game community out there. by indapendent, i don't mean, would like to join the industry fold but has yet to be accepted... i mean peope who would like to see a different, hopefully more scalable, development model.
i'm curious if real movers frequent these forums, and if not where better to park myself for serious collaboration if possible.
i walk many different lines as a developer, but my dream is to help provide the world with a toolset for free rapid virtual reality shared content creation and presentation. the idea is to allow individuals, single handedly if need be, to manifest their visions with minimal difficulty. the goal essentially is to reduce the demand of creating games to that of writing a book, or composing a song (or maybe an album).
i've worked out the specs for such a system and would think it best that such a system need only be designed once, hince relative perfection is the design goal. my present implimentation is about 50% complete. i don't work toward this goal directly persay though it is always in the back of my mind. more or less i allow my primary work to trickle down into the framework often with some retrofitting for the sake of robustness. i'm basicly at this point thinking it might be a good idea to try to open the project up some and hopefully generate some sort of community. drawing up implimentation independant specifications would probably be a good idea as well.
the design i have arrived at is essentially a 'game interpreter'. some internet game platforms might essentially work like this. but the idea essentially is the platform should be completely run-time configurable and run-time programmable. the programming platform i've developed is grammaticly agnostic, which basicly means it can take on any form. currently basic c++, lisp, and opengl syntax and semantics have been tested and are supported and may be used interoperably with priority rules where necesarry. the language itself may be altered at run-time. however the programming platform formally is not a component of the system itself but are rather facilitated by the seated operating system.
i would prefer not to go into too much detail at the time. but basicly the specifications partition task domains between the seated os and the vr system itself which is implimented in whatever computational paradigm the os pleases. if required functionality is not provided by the os then the vr system may emulate the functionality.
to be continued....
i have just registered, and basicly i'm just looking to find out if there is really such thing as an 'indapendant' game community out there. by indapendent, i don't mean, would like to join the industry fold but has yet to be accepted... i mean peope who would like to see a different, hopefully more scalable, development model.
i'm curious if real movers frequent these forums, and if not where better to park myself for serious collaboration if possible.
i walk many different lines as a developer, but my dream is to help provide the world with a toolset for free rapid virtual reality shared content creation and presentation. the idea is to allow individuals, single handedly if need be, to manifest their visions with minimal difficulty. the goal essentially is to reduce the demand of creating games to that of writing a book, or composing a song (or maybe an album).
i've worked out the specs for such a system and would think it best that such a system need only be designed once, hince relative perfection is the design goal. my present implimentation is about 50% complete. i don't work toward this goal directly persay though it is always in the back of my mind. more or less i allow my primary work to trickle down into the framework often with some retrofitting for the sake of robustness. i'm basicly at this point thinking it might be a good idea to try to open the project up some and hopefully generate some sort of community. drawing up implimentation independant specifications would probably be a good idea as well.
the design i have arrived at is essentially a 'game interpreter'. some internet game platforms might essentially work like this. but the idea essentially is the platform should be completely run-time configurable and run-time programmable. the programming platform i've developed is grammaticly agnostic, which basicly means it can take on any form. currently basic c++, lisp, and opengl syntax and semantics have been tested and are supported and may be used interoperably with priority rules where necesarry. the language itself may be altered at run-time. however the programming platform formally is not a component of the system itself but are rather facilitated by the seated operating system.
i would prefer not to go into too much detail at the time. but basicly the specifications partition task domains between the seated os and the vr system itself which is implimented in whatever computational paradigm the os pleases. if required functionality is not provided by the os then the vr system may emulate the functionality.
to be continued....
#62
Scale down your game so you don't all this stuff in order to make it. It's as simple and as complex as that.
Counter-intuitive? Yes. Unappealing? Initially very much so. Effective? I believe very much that it is.
I think it simply comes down to this - right-size your game. You're an indie. Live with it, and use it to your advantage. It has been done, it can be done. I'm not saying that any of these communitarian models are impossible, I'm just saying that they are really unecessary to make great games IMO.
07/18/2005 (5:52 am)
Here's an idea I'm trying which has been successful for more indies than any of these theoretical communitarian models (including this silly one I proposed way back) -Scale down your game so you don't all this stuff in order to make it. It's as simple and as complex as that.
Counter-intuitive? Yes. Unappealing? Initially very much so. Effective? I believe very much that it is.
I think it simply comes down to this - right-size your game. You're an indie. Live with it, and use it to your advantage. It has been done, it can be done. I'm not saying that any of these communitarian models are impossible, I'm just saying that they are really unecessary to make great games IMO.
#63
as for your concerns, you may be right if you are making 1 or 2 games, but if you are building the foundation for millions of game much less 3 or 4 games, the extra infrastructure really pays for itself in the end.
as for making games, i'm not into that business right now. its too difficult and time consumming to produce the scale and quality of games i desire. so the tools have to be created first.
if 'artsy' games like 'artsy' movies are ever to be a reality, then it has to be easy enough for a single independant individual or small group to do it themselves. and art has to be more complex than a triangle here and a triangle there. our brains are more complicated than that for better or worse.
07/18/2005 (5:48 pm)
So you were able to get things going then?as for your concerns, you may be right if you are making 1 or 2 games, but if you are building the foundation for millions of game much less 3 or 4 games, the extra infrastructure really pays for itself in the end.
as for making games, i'm not into that business right now. its too difficult and time consumming to produce the scale and quality of games i desire. so the tools have to be created first.
if 'artsy' games like 'artsy' movies are ever to be a reality, then it has to be easy enough for a single independant individual or small group to do it themselves. and art has to be more complex than a triangle here and a triangle there. our brains are more complicated than that for better or worse.
Torque Owner Michael Arcadia
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here is a demo i've had around for a while:
http://arcadia.angeltowns.com/share/arcadia-demo.zip
i really didn't want to host this publicly, but i could use some people to try to get it running in their windows environments. everyone i'm talking too right now appear to be in dire straights...
you can find out everything you need to know in the readme file, but just to help out, you will need to manually copy the .dll files into your system32 directory. the msvc.dll is probably unecesarry, but just in case it is there. i mostly need a way to find out if i am missing any other dll dependencies.
you will need the readme to get you oriented once you start. the only thing that is guaranteed to work is an armored core physics demo, which you will need to access from a command prompt, consult the readme to figure this out. you can configure game controllers and displays with the .ascii files in the system directory. there is a whole lot else you can do with the demo but it may crash if it tries to access data that i've removed for the demo.
i have a newer physics demo if people are interested that allows you to fire bullet type projectiles with the guns a nd large physics primitives to act as targets... only problem i still need to work out is with the auto aiming you can only fire at the center of the targets which is a little aim for a physics demo. if anyone is interested in this demo, let me know and i will work it out and upload the new executable.
mostly since i stopped working with the physics i've been focusing on the os shell, adding extensive support for disk mounting, and a revolutionary 'user' security/navigation model which has turned out very well and i would be quite happy to discuss... this work is in preparation towards properly abstracting the prometheus server, which is 95% a gui task due to the constraints of prometheus.
sincerely,
michael