Common surface for MMORPG

Here's an interesting little theory I just came up with while watching the 'coast through the floor glitches on second life'. Have a common or 'default' or 'most commonly used' floor height and as long as the characters walk at that height, it's assumed in all communcation and you don't need to send any related info.

Edit: It didn't work out too good, at least not as my basic idea. First I thought height map... wow... a huge height map for the room. Then I found a book that recommended polygons... but why not just create an array of pointers to the 'sides' of the objects that have the polygons... hey... that works (came up with that while writing), anyway... anyone have anything better?

Zip zip and more zip

This was annoying the heck out of me.

Windows XP treats ZIP files as folders. This is an issue when you are doing a search and you specify "Search subfolders". To turn this behavior off, you can go to Start Menu > Run, type regsvr32 /u zipfldr.dll and press enter.

To revert things as they were, type regsvr32 zipfldr.dll and press enter.

found here.
http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/winxp_stop_searching_zip_files.html

Some game essentials.

http://gpwiki.org/index.php/Libraries
No game animation library for free... i know what I'd like to give the world. And hopefully I will (likely, it'll be crap, especially considering how little I know about... a lot of things).

http://www.pharr.org/matt/
Monte carlo equation... wish I knew what one of those is but it sounds like a probabilistic equation (statistics... which I suck at).

http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/emery/index.php?page=software
Also interesting.

An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display by Turner Whitted
The original raytracing doc.

http://brainwagon.org/?p=2507
Siggraph stuff, the plushie thing is nifty.

http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/duffs-device.html Duff's device... fun to think about what it does.

Everything's falling into line

Game Inducer (awesome source)
Cat Mother (would have been commercial, and it's got source)

Boost Library (source available, usable for garbage collection)
Object Pool source (faster than creation)
Other type of pool source (see boost library)

Basically, I've got 4 game engines (all c/c++ and all free and available for anything I wanna do) of varying quality

Now... which compiler to use... which source to use.

http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/emery/index.php?page=software Also cool.

To change the desktop from the default KDE desktop, just click K->Knoppix->Utilities->Choose/Restart KNOPPIX Desktop, or at boot type the cheat code desktop=name_of_desktop. Even the default desktop has a fresh look–KDE itself has updated packages and uses the PlastiK theme by default. I like gnome bettter.

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2005/06/knoppix_40_dvd_like_a_kid_in_a.html

Security

I just realized that swapping pieces of the server to a user would present a major security risk. To reduce this, there should be some redundancy(should also help with error checking). Also, locking a specific user to a specific piece (or setting the first piece he encounters as a 'favored piece) and the second... and so on... should prevent him from effectively reverse engineering everything... which will hopefully prevent hacking. Some level of security by obscurity is necessary in the case of a distributed server.

And the GPL... a horribly devisive license... why does it need to stop other licenses, even bsd. Look at it's license compatibility. By contrast the LGPL is brilliant (if only it permitted embedding) it fosters pieces of software which can later be used by anyone under any license to create software and keeps it free. The bits evolve... more are added over time... honestly... I'd prefer it if all code licensed to me was under BSD or MIT licenses... but that's not always an option. However... I would personally modify the LGPL to remove line 3 so it doesn't get GPL-ed (it fits better with my morals that way). I'd need to remove the parts about GNU. Why is this necessary... because I don't plan to work under the support model of red-hat and the other free software developers.

Write free... write BSD.

http://www-spi.lip6.fr/~queinnec/WWW/LiSP.html 94 bucks... aaahhhh. I'm just glad I don't hafta pay for software... thank goodness for free software.

I have no credibility!!! There is such thing as luck!

This is a little too convenient. When I need it... it just appears. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2391 Garbage collection without paging. rediculously fast!!! The implementation angle mentioned is also brilliant and seriously helps subdivide the program. On top of that it would make for faster implementation on cell computers.


http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gc.htm The garbage collection page... darn.... it's gone.

So my concept of a game engine now has the possibility of a fast garbage collector. Combined with a good multithreading concept (like haskell threads),


http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~yannis/ I thought I wanted the FC++ library from here... but now I think all I should use is the java virtual machine segmentation software for running in parallel.

This should allow for computationally intensive tasks to be shared by all machines on the network. Such as... oh... running the server??? Just an idea. Seriously... unreal uses it for raytracing, it'd be nice to do raytracing in real time... along with lipsynching. But... that would mean the game would require a few people networked in order to run well.