Re: Zombie, PFile and the like

[Jan Ekholm <chakie@infa.abo.fi>]

On Tue, 29 Jun 1999, Errol Smith wrote:

> That's a good point - somewhere we should have a large collection of FAQ's,
>documents & so on relating to game development & technology (and/or links to
>them). This will help us with a one-stop-shop for game developer stuff,
>plus be
>useful for those things that PP doesn't cover on it's own (like game AI for
>example, but also overall game structure, development tools etc).
> A nice collection might encourage game developers to come check PP out while
>they are looking through our docs...

As a realted note it is very hard to do a 'SDK' for AI. Games have
extremely different needs for AI, and at best one could come up with
different packages for Quake-AI, Command&Conquer-AI etc. To do something
really generic would be very hard, or require too much resources. 

Today games are not allowed to be smart, they must look good and sound
good, but have no content and no depth. I don't want to think it has to do
with people generally being more stupid... I remember playing old SSI
games on my C64, and boy did I love them. So far I haven't really seen
strategic games with as much _depth_ as they crammed into the poor old
C64. Games look better, sound better but are so much more shallow. Of
course there are exceptions, such as Civilization (which has it's roots in
the old times) and the odd SSI game.

Anyway, it's probably not worth doing more for AI that collect resources
in some common place.

---------------------+------------------------------------------------------
 Jan 'Chakie' Ekholm |    CS at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
    Linux Inside     | I'm the blue screen of death, no-one hears you scream