http://ahicks.in/enTue, 01 Oct 2024 20:37:50 GMTNikola (getnikola.com)http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rsshttp://ahicks.in/posts/series/essential_shape_of_games/essential-shape-of-games-2/Austin Hicks<div><p>NOTE: this is old, and I no longer stand by the design in these posts for a variety of reasons.</p> <p>In <a href="http://ahicks.in/posts/series/essential_shape_of_games/essential-shape-of-games-1.html">part 1 of this series</a>, I gave a proposal for what a framework for implementing most types of games might look like. In that post, I promised a part 2 in which I attempt to quantify the size of MMOs in terms of the framework. Here it is.</p> <p><a href="http://ahicks.in/posts/series/essential_shape_of_games/essential-shape-of-games-2/">Read more…</a> (11 min remaining to read)</p></div>Essential Shape of GamesMMOhttp://ahicks.in/posts/series/essential_shape_of_games/essential-shape-of-games-2/Wed, 16 Jul 2014 12:00:00 GMThttp://ahicks.in/posts/series/essential_shape_of_games/essential-shape-of-games-1/Austin Hicks<div><p>NOTE: this is old, and I no longer stand by the design in these posts for a variety of reasons.</p> <p>My quest for an MMO is leading me down all sorts of interesting avenues, most recently Libaudioverse and self-taught digital signal processing. While Libaudioverse is my top priority project at the moment, I am still devoting a non-negligible amount of thought to some core issues with game programming.</p> <p>One of these is how one might go about making a game system that has three essential properties: network friendliness, developer friendliness, and flexibility. Spurred on by a design pattern called the <a href="http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-1/">Entity Component System</a>, my brain began to generate ideas specifically aimed at MMOs, and for a while it seemed that an Entity Component System was the silver bullet. But I no longer think it is, at least not by itself.</p> <p>And I wasn't even asking the right question. The question I should have been asking is this: leaving aside network issues for the moment, is there some structure that seems to encapsulate most or all games? The answer seems to be possibly, but I have yet to implement it.</p> <p>Herein I share my thoughts on what the structure might be. <a href="http://ahicks.in/posts/series/essential_shape_of_games/essential-shape-of-games-2.html">Part 2</a> defines the problem in terms of an MMO and part 3 will talk about the options for actually getting this up and running. But first, we need to define the structure.</p> <p><a href="http://ahicks.in/posts/series/essential_shape_of_games/essential-shape-of-games-1/">Read more…</a> (11 min remaining to read)</p></div>Essential Shape of GamesMMOhttp://ahicks.in/posts/series/essential_shape_of_games/essential-shape-of-games-1/Tue, 01 Jul 2014 17:30:00 GMT