Somehow got sick over the weekend. Went geocaching in the cold and rain, may have had something to do with it. At least I found the cache=)
I keep thinking about the precedural programming that Will Wright is doing with Spore. I don’t know exaclty what it entails but I keep thinking of how to incorporate it into MMORPGs. Wright says that each creatures is a couple MBs at the largest, maybe even down to several KBs. And these are complicated 3D models that are customized. I keep thinking how cool it would be if a crafter could create his own weapons and armor, designed how he likes them in a procedural wal. They likely wouldn’t take as much space as a full creature in spore… if you could get than number to literally 5-6 kbs per item, this type of behavior could be doable in future MMOs…
This would be a boon to the genre where players have been complaining for over a decade about how they can’t leave a mark on the world, this would allow them to do so. Maybe we wouldn’t have as many different options as Spore offers creatures. But when I sit of all the various looks of player characters in Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes, I wonder why this couldn’t be done to some degree with a crafting system. It would really make it worth doing.
I need to talk to my advisor to see if I can get an internship at Raven Software here in town. She said when I transfered that maybe she could get me one later, and I think now is the right time to ask her. After struggling the first couple of semesters, i feel that I finally pieced things together this semester. I got 3 ABs, a BC and a grade yet to be announced. The 3 ABs alone give me more confidence that perhaps Raven would be interested in me coming in as an intern over the summertime at the very least. Even if that doesn’t work out, I got a class next semester that is grad level and orientated around game design and women. I’m really jazzed for that class.
I got something wrong with my computer. It is bad memory somewhere, but it is likely bad graphics memory instead of system memory. Games are crashing after playing them for awhile, and sometimes it crashes the entire system. But this only happens in games, outside of games I don’t have any problems at all. A new graphics card may not be so horrible… I was waiting to get new memory until Vista came out because I figured that is a good time to upgrade my computer. I’ve heard that with Vista every time you change your motherboard you will need to buy a new copy… so it will be a great time to pick up a new motherboard… and with a new mobo you need a new CPU and memory. So if I pick up a video card now I would be saving myself cash later. Only problem is that I would really need to find a vid card that is DX10 compatible and I don’t think any are coming out till later this year. Not sure if I am willing to pay premium prices for that….