River City educational MUVE port to Torque?
by Shari Metcalf · in General Discussion · 03/27/2008 (1:01 pm) · 1 replies
Hi! I'm with the River City project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. We're thinking about finding developers who can help us port to a game engine like Torque, and looking for suggestions. River City is a MUVE for teaching middle school science. Students visit a virtual town during several time periods in the 1800s and try to figure out what's causing the residents to get sick. Students walk around the town, look at and click on objects, talk to characters, and communicate with their teammates. The program interfaces with a web-based guide that provides instruction, data collection, and a saved notebook of student work.
River City was first developed in 2000, and uses the ActiveWorlds engine. We need to move to something that can support a larger user base (potentially thousands of students around the country), be multi-platform (Mac and PC), and allows scripting of game actions and events. We also need something with support for common mesh formats for models, and ideally, that has source included. River City is an educational application; we don't necessarily need the most high-performance, physics-based engine, but we do need something usable in a school-based setting. Our budget is also based on non-profit, educational research funds. The goal is to have something ready for fall 2008.
Does Torque seem like a good choice for a platform for us? Do you have any suggestions about how we might find developers who might be interested in working with us? How hard/easy is it to port from ActiveWorlds to Torque?
Any assistance or advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated,
- Shari
Shari J. Metcalf, PhD, Researcher
Professor Chris Dede, Harvard Graduate School of Education
http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject/index.html
River City was first developed in 2000, and uses the ActiveWorlds engine. We need to move to something that can support a larger user base (potentially thousands of students around the country), be multi-platform (Mac and PC), and allows scripting of game actions and events. We also need something with support for common mesh formats for models, and ideally, that has source included. River City is an educational application; we don't necessarily need the most high-performance, physics-based engine, but we do need something usable in a school-based setting. Our budget is also based on non-profit, educational research funds. The goal is to have something ready for fall 2008.
Does Torque seem like a good choice for a platform for us? Do you have any suggestions about how we might find developers who might be interested in working with us? How hard/easy is it to port from ActiveWorlds to Torque?
Any assistance or advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated,
- Shari
Shari J. Metcalf, PhD, Researcher
Professor Chris Dede, Harvard Graduate School of Education
http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject/index.html
Torque Owner Lee Latham
Default Studio Name
It seems to be Torque is currently the most flexible engine available, due to all the community resources.