Search This Blog

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

WTF is up?

I've been super busy with work.  I work as the Chief Linux Systems Engineer for a fortune 500 company so I'm ... pretty loaded down right now.

I want to release my weather system code soon but I can't get time to do it.

I may talk to Lee Bamber directly and see if he's interested in it as part of the game-guru package.
The fact is the money I make these days makes anything from Game-Guru store sales peanuts so it's not really worth me doing much with as is.  It's hard to find the time aside from that with two kids, a wife, homeschooling, etc.

I like the changes I've been seeing with the release to Lua code for GG which allows full FPS/3rd Person controls.  This should really allow the engine to take off and while I realize some people want this engine to be a simple cookie cutter builder I believe that this is an important step towards legitimacy and allowing people the real tools to work.  I'm a huge fan of open source and crowd sourced intelligence.  Let me quickly explain my rationale on that.

Let's say you're a highly intelligent person.  You design and make an awesome widget.  This widget is a revolutionary leap forward and as such, it provides the common man access to high end tools at a fraction of the cost.

However, it's laden with side work such as debugging, test, analysis, etc.  These unavoidable components which simply eat up your time.  Progression falls behind and soon the product is unavoidably behind even the worst competitors.  Sound familiar?  It shouldn't.  It's the story of Game-Guru.

So given your inability to pay for a large service staff you're forced to do all that work on your own.  This eats up your one truly finite resource: TIME.

Now imagine you take say 30% of that widget and you open it up in a modular fashion.  You break out components into individual chunks which are easily digested.  You then allow several hundred people access to do whatever they want with it, but it won't modify core components.  This is effectively what Lee has done. 

Now what you've done is created a human parallel processing array of sorts.  It's an engine of great power; you have hundreds of people all designing and modifying - creating new things you'd never have time to even conceive of, let alone implement.  It provides a near-permanent longevity to systems that dedicated people will use out of familiarity even in the face of something newer or better.  Take the Fallout New Vegas modding community which is STILL extremely active to this day and makes fantastic, HUGE projects that are whole games in and of themselves.

THAT is the power of open sourcing your code and allowing modding to really take it's course.


No comments: