Subject: cavecon report
From: Tommi Leino (tmleino@helsinki.fi)
Date: Mon May 24 1999 - 10:52:33 EEST
It was quite a nice convention, it was may be the best convention ever, except I was a little bit tired after it, so tired I slept the night after it all my clothes and lights on too, and forgot to set my alarm clock and thus I was a little late from my work. Anyways, in this convention we really decided something. Along with other minor things we decided: * Angle of view * Magic system * Milestone system Angle of view The angle of view is not going to be from the eyes of the player, otherwise it will look just too much like all the doom-like games, and it is restricting and annoying. No-one have enough cpu power for we could make the display wide enough, otherwise it is possible to see just a fraction of what you would see IRL. Also you would always have to turn back to see just a little behind you and also you would have no chance to see yourself except from mirror of some sort. The angle of view will be from a little above and little behind the character. This is a little bit unrealistic but combat and such will be much less irritating. In this angle of view you don't actually have chance to just turn your head, it is already simulated so you will see a little from your back too, that simulates head turning on impulse when you might hear noices, detect movement or whatever, however it will be possible to turn your head up and down, so you can see either sky or dirt. When you turn around to sides, your character turns too, not only your head. Harum could try this on practice so we can confirm does this work or not. Magic system We decided that we will have Malekith's "extended" true name magic system, based on Aluna's work. All components including somantic will be selected from a list and items will be added to that list when someone teaches you, or you find them yourself. Milestone system See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/milestones/index.html By milestones we can keep this project going on with consistent direction and it is easier to force the developers and designers to complete our goals before the deadline, that is an advancement to a new milestone. It would be nice to set these milestones per one or two months. We this way also decide when the Majik 3D will be ready for alpha-testing, when it is half-way of alpha-testing and when it first appears as an official 0.001 version of pre pre pre pre pre alpha-testing. We need to have separate milestone goals for both development and design, however we will place these on same list anyways, so if design doesn't achieve the goals, then they're slowing down the development also. Now we could decide that we are on M0, milestone 0 and we don't have anything. Next milestone, M1, could arrive in a month. In M1 phase client should have working movement, angle of view and object system including system for loading .PNG images as textures and it would be open source and working and portable code across all the platforms. No any network stuff yet. For design, decide ! Initial ideas for M1 are to either complete the Worldbook's subjects that are not npc races, monster races, regions or anything else (pc races however must be in) that we can have many and can do later on. Other idea was to do an example region description. We also need a approximated list of all the milestones and their release dates and we need it ASAP. Don't say this is a free project and you want to idle, if you want to idle this project isn't going anywhere in near future. We need to KIUKKU a little. Mozilla is a free project too, but still the developers are doing the project with strict milestones. This also solves the fact we are falling to be a never-ending project, we are actually, but I would want someday to achieve the point when we release a first working alpha-testing version, at least :) And I would want that in less than a year! We can do that. Achieving alpha-testing phase in a half-year would be nice. Pictures of this convention will be added to convention-pages in few days, err., half of the pictures. Since I did get only one film full, second is still lacking 19 pictures to be taken. -- Tommi Leino / Majik 3D project manager Tommi.Leino@majik.netti.fi http://majik.netti.fi
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