This weekend...

[Ian Crawford <icrawfor@uoguelph.ca>]

Well, my social life got in the way of game design this week, but I have
made a little progress.  I've got my brother working on a plot as an
experiment.  He said that if I needed a story, then he'd write one for me. 
I've read some of his stuff before and, although it's not going to win the
Nobel prize for literature, I think his writing style is perfect for
games.  He's not a bad artist, either.  He'd probably be really good if he
had training, but that requires effort and he's not big on effort.  What
ever the case, he's really interested in computer games and will
definitely help us out.

Don't expect to hear anything from me this weekend.  I'm going on a short
but much needed vacation.  I'll be back online on Monday night or Tuesday
morning (latest!).  I will, however, bring my game design ideas with me
wherever I go. 

Would anyone like to perform maintenance on the webpage this weekend?  I
am going to be no where near a computer a who knows what might come up!?! 
If you're interested, let me know. 

Has anyone seen any references to 3D multi-player action game network
protocols?  The game I'm currently conceiving will have multi-player
support (perhaps even before single player.  That way, I won't need to
worry about AI for quite a while) and I'd like to see some documentation
(or source code, where applicable) on what's already been done.  Let me
know where I can look. 

Finally, I sent a few messages last night that haven't bounced back to me
yet.  They could be queued on my system at home, but who knows.  They were
all responses to other posts on the list.

One described how impressed I was with the football player and I think
it's great to have an artist on this list (especially an artist who can
code, too!).

Another was just a brief comment on the use of Java with games.  Java is
perfect for anything that is relatively small or where speed is not of the
essence.  The structure of the language really lends itself to games.  I
think some tools written in Java would be perfect support for a game
(i.e., level design tools, web based player profiles, etc.).  With the 3D
API in JDK 1.2, the possibilities are endless.  Of course, it will be a
while before that stuff hits the Linux world.  Has anyone had any
experience with the Java 3D API?

Alright, back to work.

Ian

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----- Ian Crawford - Email: icrawfor@uoguelph.ca ----------------
-------------------- URL: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~icrawfor/ -----
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