Contribute

Project Leadership

The project planning and management role falls on myself as the founder of the project, and in the future I may need to delegate responsibility to sub-managers to lead specific projects.

Lead Developers

The project revolves around the major leaders in the development process who dedicate enormous effort into the project because they believe in it and have the luxury of time to do so. Leads will be responsible not only for their own work but also for leading tems of contributors.

Team Contributors

Team contributors are people who sign onto teams run by lead developers to work as much as they can on projects.

Casual Contributors

Casual contributors make small but incremental improvements and additions to the project, filling in the holes and fleshing out the details while the leads deal with the more long-term issues of the overall framework.

Programmers

The technology contributors needed most are programmers with a diversity of expertise in all the areas that will make up the game’s underlying engine.

Artists

The artistic contributors have the challenge of 3D modeling, texturing, animation, sound design, map design, character development, story writing, script coding, the list goes on.

Empowerment Appeals To Everyone

Programmers Will Flock To It

Empowerment is an exciting and sexy project from the developer’s point of view. Unlike arcane command-line utilities of interest to a relatively tiny technical elite, Empowerment is a massively appealing project that will be used by millions of players. Empowerment elevates techies to a sort of priestly status in terms of their importance to the development of utopian earth.

Scientist Appeal: Why Academics Will Contribute To It

Scientists in many research fields already engage in simulation-building, so gearing their work towards a shared engine will only make things easier. Some of them will gear their work towards being used by the primary game community and take satisfaction at seeing their theoretical research used in daily gaming. Others will use the engine in ways that are purely scientific and unplayable. Many simulations will discover new ways of interacting.

Empowerment Game Dev Group

We are working on game.

This is our group to develop it.

Game Budget

How much will it cost to make a genre-defining hit video game?

The biggest costs are payroll. Video games are built on raw creative talent and hard work.

Calculating the Budget

Budget = Technology + ( Average Salary x Number of Develoeprs + Rent ) x months of development

Technology = Engine License + (Software + Hardware ) x number of developers

For example:

It the game could be developed by 10 people for $2000 a month with a $2000 rent in 2 years: 

Technology=$20,000 + ( Salary=$2000 x 10 developers + Rent=$2000 )=$22000 x 24 months = $244,000

Hit Game Budgets 

Some of the games in the industry:

Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft, The Sims: 10-30 million Source

Serious Game Budgets

While not necessarily commercial successes, these serious games achieve their non-profit objectives as training tools: 

A Force More Powerful: 3 million 

America's Army: 2.5 million Source  

Are Game Budgets Too Big?

Article

But the second thing that hampered Dynamic Human’s development remains with us, and shows no signs of disappearing. DH was by far and away the most expensive CD-ROM that EAI made for McGraw, but for all that its budget was about $150,000. Mike Sellberg, who helped oversee the development of DH, tells me he thinks EAI actually spent closer to $500,000 on development. As Mike, now executive vice president and chief technology officer at iMed Studios put it, “Oh yeah, we took a bath on that one.”

At the same time, EAI could easily get more than a million dollars to make games like Barbie Magic Hairstyler or A Bug’s Life. And those budgets are child’s play compared to the $10-$30 million dollar development budgets for major hits like Grand Theft Auto and World of Warcraft.

The market rewards for entertainment content are simply much greater than for educational content, and the result is that there is a lot more enganging content being created for the purposes of entertainment than is being made for education.

Which is fine if you’re a game junkie or a stockholder in Electronic Arts, but it’s more than a little disturbing if you’re a parent or teacher trying to encourage kids to spend more time doing their history homework and less time learning how to be a video assassin.

Content creation for this emerging media is an expensive, time-intensive process, and it is likely to remain so even as the delivery technology exponentially increases in capability and decreases in cost. While the market can help companies raise the tens of millions needed to fund the creation of rich, deeply immersive environments to teach kids how to be theives and pimps, there’s just no way for a for-profit company to raise a similar budget to help create content of a similarly immersive quality to teach World History, Biology or Chemistry.

Which is where drugs come in…

Because there is a similar problem in the development of a different type of intellectual property — drugs. Drug development is exceptionally expensive, and the market does not reward the treating of all diseases equally.

As Victoria Hale, a 2006 MacArthur Fellow and CEO of One World Health, the first not-for-profit drug company, put it in a recent interview with Marketplace:

Pharmaceutical R&D, as I’m sure you know, is extremely expensive. And even the ability to recoup the development costs, let alone bring back revenue beyond that, is in some cases, for some diseases just not possible.

One World Health hopes to address this problem by creating drugs targeted at these diseases that the for-profit companies can’t touch, funding their development through philanthropic contributions of money and IP, combined with revenues from the products it creates, which will be sold in private markets in the developing world.

It’s hard to say whether One World Health will be successful or not, but the idea of creating a company that plays by different funding rules to create worthy products to address needs that the normal market mechanisms can’t address is a good one.

So why not a not-for-profit company built along similar lines to create compelling immersive content for educational purposes?

The analogy is pretty tight. Ignorance is the disease the game market can’t reach, immersive content the expensive but potentially effective cure that game companies can’t afford to create. Donations of IP could include gaming engines, development tools, as well as licenses to characters and concepts from popular culture - like the characters from CSI or the imaginative and popular world of Jurrassic Park. The immersive products could be sold to individuals, teachers, schools, districts for use on PC’s or Playstations or whatever delivery vehicles the future brings.

Any investors out there?

—http://asuutoblog.net/2006/10/09/grand-theft-auto/  

Game Design

Playing For Fun

The success of all games depends on fun. If you feel like some Grand theft Auto-style mayhem using the social engineering system it provides for meaningful activism, you could be like the nudist on the radio station who cries out for people to tear off their unnatural clothes and embrace nature. With the realism turned low enough, this would have immediate success and result in the streets filling with naked throngs. The adoring masses would flock to your station and raise you above them as their naked Fuhrer with the radio host as your disciple.

Emergence

“The map is not the territory.”

—Alfred Korzybski

“The poet Alfred Korzybski has already been enshrined in the prehistory of cyberspace for insisting on the divide between the representation of an experience and the experience itself. Virtual world builders repeat it to each other frequently, reverently, to remind themselves that they cannot confuse the shell of a space with the experience of it. You cannot build a virtual world and call it complete when you ship or upload. It is made complete again and again in each moment online, filled with people.”

—http://www.vrmlsite.com/apr97/a.cgi/spot1.html

Gestalt is a German word meaning shape or form. In English gestalt refers to the concept where an entity’s properties cannot be discovered from the total properties of its parts. The more general English equivalents are synergy, holism, emergence, and variations on the phrase the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology

Creativity Beyond Competition

The journey is the destination. Empowerment is not necessarily a game based on rigid competition. The idea war is like that, but it is more a matter of building something than destroying someone else.

“Brilliant example recounted to me by Dave Marvit: Two of the world’s top Go players met here in SF a while back for a challenge match. A reporter asked one of the players’ assistants what the match would represent. The reporter was not prepared for the response: “Two players come together to make perfect art,” the assistant said. Go is not a zero-sum game. There is not a ‘winner’ and a ‘loser’ in the binary Western sense — the experience of the game itself, with both players contributing to it, is the perfect art and truth itself. The outcome simply means that a particular game is over. Its message has been made manifest, whatever it was. The game is a consensual hallucination that takes place in the physical world.”

—Misty West, http://www.vrmlsite.com/apr97/a.cgi/spot1.html

Massively Multiplayer

“A generation is defining itself through virtual combat, without the casualties or consequences of World War II and the Vietnam War. And who knows? Maybe one day we’ll figure out less destructive ways to have fun in Carmack’s dreamworld. After all, it would be a shame if, having invented cinema, we made only war movies. Carmack might even be the one to broker that virtual peace. He doesn’t spend much time gaming anymore. But he isn’t giving up on the virtual frontier he opened.”

— http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040809-674778-3,00.html

“There’s something fundamentally interesting about the world in a box. If somebody can be an emperor in a virtual world, with only a cheap computer, is that really a fundamentally bad thing?”

—John Carmack, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040809-674778-3,00.html

Game Scenarios

Empowerment can stage a variety of different scenarios.

User Created Scenarios

Empowerment is a platform for building scenarios that enables end users to produce interesting new experiences. The more kinds of derivative games they create, the more players will try Empowerment and the more variety of learning they will have. User created scenarios also obviate the "Official" game developer from the responsibility of providing every possibility in the original game's scenarios.

THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

There are numerous scenarios, worlds that recreate approximate presents and possible futures.

Limited Locales

Some worlds only offer a few key locations that are developed in detail. Larger areas can be made accessible by applying procedural changes.

Procedural Change Datasets

Procedural change can be created using things like trends and forecasts. For example, if population graphs and economic predictions are charted at various data point resolutions, jumping into the foreseeable future will shift the whole planet along those lines. People will age and die according to probabilities.

People Through Time

For example, if Alex Peake lives at an address in 2005, in 2006 he will probably have moved in 2007 according to his goals most likely to Vancouver, San Francisco or New York.

Recordings

Scenarios can be recorded for playback and edited much like a musician recording live instrument input and sequencing it to perfection.

Approximate Presents

Present worlds are based as closely as possible on how things are now.

Near Futures

Near futures show show what could plausibly happen in the near future.

Todays

Todays are scenarios approximating the real world as it is right now.

Foresights

Foresights are scenarios which show the far-reaching implications of making certain choices today.

Hindsights

Hindsights are scenarios which show the runaway consequences of not making certain choices today.

Hindsight 2020

How did Hindsight go wrong? Apathy is the constant that was allowed to reign in the Hindsight. People abdicated their personal sovereignity to higher powers, becoming like children ruled by their parental institutions and uncontrollable impulses. Alex abandoned Empowerment because nobody listened to him or showed interest or the general public never caught on. In this world, we learn about the reprecussions of our apathy. Inaction is an act of apathy. Foresight 2020 Hindsight 2020 Hindsight 2020 is a darkish future will provide the guns and glory RPGers are used to, while the Present will be there for people to get used to. In Hindsight, ideas have taken their course. In some places corporatism is supreme and ideas like Free Trade have run their course according to a certain perspective on how they will turn out. So the ideas are exxagerrated to their extremes. Players deal with the effects of theories instead of thinking about them. Someone could make a sim where nasty pinko activist anarchists have ruined the glory of capitalism too, if they want :0

Game Technology

The Sim Technology project develops the underlying tech that powers empowerment simulations.

Kaneva MMOG Game Platform

Kaneva

Game Technologies

All the technologies that form the underpinnings for Empowerment must be open-source and cross-platform to make distributing Empowerment free. The long timeline involved in large-scale game development means that whatever decisions are made now with regards to game technology must still make sense when the game is completed several years in the future. That can be a long time in the fast-changing world of game development, and technologies that seem state-of-the-art now can become painfully dated in comparison to more forward-thinking projects.

Game Platform

The game platform is the hardware on which the game runs. The game platforms in order of popularity are: Windows, Playstation, XBox, Game Cube, Macintosh, and Linux.

Targeting Windows as the highest priority game platform makes sense because Intel Mac users and Linux users can both run Windows on their machines to play. A console platform version would require substantial simplification of many aspects of the game such as the user interface to accommodate the limited capabilities of consoles.

Scaling Hardware Requirements

The game platform’s hardware determines the capabilities available to the game developer. It is necessary to consider PC capabilities years down the line. The higher the requirements, the narrower the audience will be with hardware fast enough to cope. It would make sense to use LOD in more than the graphics engine to offset these problems, tuning physics detail and simulation granularity to accommodate simpler systems. GPUs are likely to increase graphics power exponentially, but storage and memory becomes a bottleneck when the game needs to load data faster than it can be provided, resulting in disconcerting delays. Dynamic loading must be smooth and unnoticeable to maintain the illusion of the virtual world.

Cross-Platform Development

Game development must be targeted for platforms on which it will run. It is desirable to make the game run on many platforms at once. This necessitates using game technologies that support cross-platform development. It is feasible to develop the game first for Mac/Windows/Linux with console ports soon after. Playstation and Gamecube are unsuitable until they support hard drives and other PC-like features, but already Xbox support is made easier by its commonality with Windows.

Human Interface Devices

Interface Devices vary from platform to platform, but computers generally have the mouse, keyboard and high-resolution monitor, while consoles have more limited controllers with a dozen or fewer buttons and blurry low-resolution televisions unless plugged into expensive HDTV.

Future Interfaces

Empowerment should not require overly exotic technology that puts a satisfying experience out of reach for the average gamer, but it should eventually be enhanced to allow advancing interfaces to increase the immersiveness possible for those with the technology. 3D Displays can bring incredible depth to graphics. eDimensional.com 3D glasses can make existing computer displays with drivers display alternating stereoscopic images for glasses. Interface solutions like gloves and goggles may become viable in the future. http://www.ghostrecon.net/html/3d.htm

Game Engine

A game engine is a whole set of technology components designed to give developers a complete platform upon which to build game content and scripting logic. Empowerment will itself be a game engine for developers to build on top of, but it will probably be necessary to employ an existing engine for lower-level technology while focusing on game design and innovative new technologies instead of reinventing the polygon.

Commercial game engines set the pace

The top game developers like ID and EPIC license their leading Quake and Unreal engines to other developers for substantial fees. The problem with all these engines is that they are commercial and cannot be used for open-source projects.

The Game Mod Approach

Mods for the leading engines can be developed to leverage their cutting-edge technology and distributed freely. This might prove to be the most cutting-edge approach to start with: open-source mods for closed-source games. The advantage of mods is simple. You get all the excellent and tested technology on which to develop your content. But you lose the ability to distribute your game as a stand-alone product including the engine itself. This might be an intermediary step before open-source engines become viable options.

The Unreal 3 Engine

Unreal 3 is a very developer-friendly platform used in many leading games. No version of Unreal has been open-sourced as Quake II has so choosing Unreal technology gives little hope for eventually becoming free technology unhindered by retail game modding or commercial engine licensing.

Unreal 3 demo videos show some impressive physics like refrigerators with hinged and sliding components and support systems collapsing under shelves.

The Doom 3 Engine

The next-generation engine from ID for Doom 3 is the graphics champion with its realistic handling of lighting, leaving open-source efforts in the dust until they catch up. Doom 3 has in-game editing tools but does not yet have real-time editing during gameplay. Carmack wants to implement such an editing environment in a future game.

The Half-Life 2 Source Engine

Half-Life’s engine is also very impressive but less widely licensed than Unreal and Doom.

• Steam delivery system

Renderware ( www.renderware.com )

Renderware is a complete technology platform and development studio including design, graphics, physics, intelligence and audio. It is especially popular for console games such as Grand Theft Auto III. Renderware claims it has an edge because integrating the closely related aspects of gaming enables more efficient code sharing than is possible using separate component APIs. Renderware Studio is a real-time game editing platform and development management system.

Unity

Nicolas, Web Delivery, Aegeia Physics $2000 $250 Indy (No PC publishing) per seat.

The potential for open-source game engines

There are several open-source game engines currently available. It would be possible to embrace on of these and contribute to its development rather than starting from scratch. The limitations of open-source game engines are many. Because they are far behind the leading-edge in technology development taking place in the commercial game industry in terms of developers and popularity, they compare unfavorably in the eyes of gamers. This could change if more developers were attracted to developing an open-source engine on account of its relevance to a cool and exciting game project like Empowerment.

Crystal Space ( crystal.sourceforge.net )

The leading open game engine project seems to be CrystalSpace. It supports many cutting-edge features like: bump maps, procedural textures, curved surfaces, dynamic lighting, particles, volumetric fog, soft shadowing, frame & skeletal animation, level-of-detail balancing, halos, OpenDE/OpenAL/OpenGL support. It lacks several important features: Good networking, speed optimization, vertex shaders. CrystalSpace was developed without commercial input, demonstrating that such open-source projects are feasible. It has about 700 subscribers.

Once (once.sourceforge.net) is a MMORPG based on CrystalSpace that will probably show how many of the technical hurdles can be overcome. Much of its code should be usable by Empowerment since it is open-source.

Neoengine ( neoengine.sourceforge.net )

Neoengine seems less developed than CrystalSpace but is worth noting.

Torque ( www.garagegames.com )

Torque was originally developed commercially for Tribes 2, and still carries licensing restrictions, but has outstanding networking support and in-game editing worth looking at and emulating.

Graphics Engine

Stunning visuals are what draws players into a game world. Without cutting-edge graphics, the visual quality of the game suffers by comparison to better games and the immersion is lessened. People tend to find believable whatever looks better than what they’ve seen before. SimCity’s black-and-white 2D graphics were compelling to people who had never seen GTA’s 3D city streets teeming with urban life, but it takes more to capture a player’s imagination today.

OpenGL ( www.opengl.org )

OpenGL is the open-source hardware-accelerated 3D graphics library that visualizes stunningly detailed scenes in real-time. It is already used in almost every game engine and platform. Its nearest competitor is Microsoft’s DirectX, which is unsuitable for cross-platform development. OpenGL is the clear choice.

Graphical Effects

Level of Detail

LOD (Level of Detail) is a technique for adjusting graphical quality for real-time performance. It downscales to a number of increasingly simplified models that can be swapped when they get farther away or the frame rate drops. The distance at which LOD comes into play depends on the display resolution, so higher-res systems will reduce LOD farther away. LOD does necessitate multiple models, which increases file size and complexity. LOD should scale all the way from much older graphics hardware to the cutting-edge in cinematic real-time 3D. There are a great many graphical features that can be implemented to improve the game visuals. The choice of graphics engines and game engines will probably determine what can be implemented initially.

Bump Maps

Bump mapping is an especially convincing graphical effect to enhance the lighting complexity of objects. Normal mapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mapping) is an advanced form of bump mapping that encodes XYZ angles using RGB instead of a grayscale height. One game that uses normal maps well is Deus Ex 2: Invisible War. It feature cobble stones that just pop out in 3D when lights move past them and shadows blocking the specular hilights. Displacement mapping actually occludes itself and appears to have geometric depth. Polygons: Real-time 1500 bumped vs 250,000 rendered

Colored lights

Multitextures

Shaders implement complex texturing techniques. For example, detail textures are level-of-detail bumpmaps that come into view when a texture gets close enough to start pixelating. Surfaces like woodgrain, speckled stucco and brushed metal are excellent examples. Detail textures are assigned in addition to the primary texture, and only appear when the texture is about to become pixilated according to LOD.

Detail Maps

Dust that accumulates on surfaces like computer monitors interferes with use during sunlight when the glare makes it difficult to see. Wiping the dust off leaves only oils, which may be random spots or keyboard-shaped marks.

Plants Rendering optimized using SpeedTree

Challenging subject matter like natural plants can be rendered with new techniques like those used by SpeedTree (http://www.idvinc.com/). It is commercial software, but it shows what is possible in the future if an open-source equivalent can be developed. This toolset lets the builder design trees, populate them into the modeler across rugged terrain with customizable distribution, and render them in real-time using an automatically LOD-scaled engine to blast thousands of totally vertex-optimized trees into OpenGL at once with realistic wind interaction.

GPU FX

There are a variety of next-generation graphics technologies becoming available with new GPUs. Implementing all of these is a major undertaking, but the long-held dream of achieving cinematic realism in interactive real-time gaming is worth the effort. Vertex Shaders Complex programmable effects like ripple simulations can now be programmed as vertex programs. Per-pixel shading Specular hilights and other effects as maps enable complex surface shading like combinations of metal, clothing and skin. Dynamic Lighting Unified system of truly dynamic lighting that changes with time. NVIDIA has posted videos of an impressive demo of real-time dynamic lighting. Self-shadowing and soft shadows really add realism to the lighting. Doom 3’s engine will fully implement this technology for the first time. Gas Station dx9demo/main.html

Displacement maps

Unlike bump maps, these actually deform geometry instead of merely lighting textures. Motion Blur Truform This GPU-based technique creates additional mesh smoothness by interpolating four polygons from the normals of the modeled polygons. This allows smooth meshes to be transferred without clogging the GPU. Truform also allows dynamic LOD so that only nearby objects will gain the extra detail. Truformed objects have smoother silhouettes and lighting than the lower-polygon models they enhance.

Anisotropic Filtering

This technique reduces the blurring of nearly perpendicular surface textures such as the ground. This should be free from the GPU. Antialiasing Anti-aliasing smoothes jagged edges, one of the ugliest artifacts of polygonal 3D graphics. New GPUs make anti-aliasing almost free.

Artificial Intelligence Engine

Character AI is one area where Empowerment will innovate dramatically over previous games.

OpenAI

OpenAI is Sim Empowerment’s revolutionary new artificial intelligence model. It will facilitate multiple overlapping models of AI in a general framework that makes AI programming easy and powerful. Perception and the Sensory Services Model OpenAI handles the sense perceptions and biological systems of the character. Whatever decision-making the character uses, its higher thought runs on top of these “services”.

Modular Decision Making Models

OpenAI abstracts the sensory system to perceive the environment from the decision-making process to guide actions within it.

The limited scope of current AI

Examples of current technology in AI scripts: guards who patrol and investigate noises and can be distracted by various ruses such as thrown pebbles or animal noises. They notice signs of intrusion such as opened doors or damaged property and sound an alarm, summoning reinforcements. This could serve to distract them from other areas as a distraction or it could result in a player becoming surrounded.

The Empowerment Idea-based AI

Ideas are like programs running in the AI’s brain system, interacting with each other and the perceived environment. This will closely mirror the AI used in the roleplay, but with the added challenge of explicitly programming all the possibilities without the subjective human interpretation of roleplaying.

Pathfinding The Planet

Getting around the real world is much more complicated than navigating a simplistic game map. There are regional boundaries to be crossed and multiple forms of transportation to be utilized such as elevators, stairs, bicycles, buses, cars, airplanes, trains and more. The use of transit will depend on well-designed AI ideas governing benefits of each method.

Animation Engine

Character animation is an important part of making a convincing simulation. Combinations of key-framing and motion capture are desirable. Motion capture is currently only done by the big studios, so it may not be feasible. Facial animation is a must to convey convincing emotional responses. Speech animation is also important to convey communication convincingly. It would look great to have all the phonemes of speech matched up to the text-to-speech. I’m not sure how this will work yet or what technology should be used. Interpolated animation and physics interactions

Games like Oni show how animation should flow smoothly between actions rather than waiting for one to complete before the next one begins.

Realistic Bodies

Human and other animal bodies have bodyparts with modeled joints and flexibility constraints. Hair that can be shaved, burned, messed, combed, modeled using geometry up close.

Free interaction with hands using the mouse

Most games have special keys assigned to each command, giving the player detailed freedom of movement only in terms of their walking and facing. It would be great to give freely articulated motion to the player’s hand to let them touch objects in unscripted ways, such as to sweep something off of a table or pour a liquid. This will remain awkward with the mouse until more immersive input methods are available like gloves.

Physics Engine

Physics engines (also called game dynamics) detect hard collisions between interacting objects in real-time and simulate the forces of inertia, gravity, friction and other real-world factors of moving bodies. The most popular application of this is currently the “rag-doll” effect of seeing gunshots and punches fling victims to the ground and off walls in a million realistic ways. Empowerment has much more use for physics for things like biological simulations where many organisms can interact and highly detailed environments like city streets where many vehicles can move realistically. It would be cool though to make many objects that come apart out of their component pieces, like making tires that can be pulled off cars to replace a flat using a jack. OpenDE ( opende.sourceforge.net ) OpenDE is an open-source physics engine for simulating articulated rigid body dynamics - for example ground vehicles, legged creatures, and moving objects in VR environments. It is fast, flexible, robust and platform independent, with advanced joints, contact with friction, and built-in collision detection. OpenDE might be too intensive to run universally, but it could be invoked during physics-related interactions and substituted by simpler physics to handle simple walking about. OpenDE’s creator previously developed MathEngine, which is now part of Renderware, the leading console game engine. This suggests good things about the performance and quality of OpenDE. A commercial game called Monster 4x4 (http://www.monster4x4.com/) uses OpenDE, as does the free Racer (http://www.racer.nl).

Review: “We used OpenDE for GooBall and found it to be extremely brittle and prone to extreme explosions in random directions and we were only using one object for physics interaction. We switched to Aegeia and helped port it and have been much happier with it. They are great guys to deal with.” —Nicolas, Over The Edge

Aegeia

Aegia is Mac and PC friendly.

Havok 2 ( www.havok.com )

Havok is the leading commercial dynamics engine. Havok is integrated into animation packages like Maya and 3DS and web tools like Adobe Atmosphere and Macromedia Shockwave. PPU: Physics PROCESSING UNIT ACCELERATION http://www.ageia.com/pr_03082005c.html

New Kinds of Physics

It may be necessary to develop additonal physics systems from scratch given the increasingly broad scope and high realism required for Empowerment. Liquid poses a whole laundry list of physics simulation challenges, as do different materials and terrains. Flight and outer space perspectives might need their own way of handling things. Open-source flight simulators might be relevant: (www.flightgear.org)

Gas: Fog and smoke as a more realistic kind of volumetric substance. Billowing effects add realism as seen in Ghost Recon and Morrowind.

Liquid: Dripping, pouring, pooling, soaking. Rippling, reflecting, mixing, drinking, swimming, drying, waves, shorelines. Postal 2 has some of this. The ultimate liquid engine should let you do some high-school science experiments in real-time.

Temperature: boiling liquid turns into hot gas and burns! Freezing. Shattering.

Fire: Overheating, flammability, extinguishing, melting eg. Wax candles dripping.

Magnetism: Magnets attract and repel. Fridge magnets are an obvious example of everyday magnets.

Flotation: Boats that actually float and lower into the water with added weight.

Friction: such as putting down your feet on the ground to stop a bycicle and being held to the ground from a moving car to suffer friction damage. Modelling creation of sparks. Velcrow. Knots. Friction creates sound.

Bending & Snapping: colliding with poles, snapping objects in half, shattering objects into pieces, breaking chopsticks, etc. Destruction: Breaking up objects is something only Red Faction has done with their GeoMod technology. For example, a player chops down a tree with an axe or rips a paper in half.

Controls

Obstacle Traversal

In many games, you have to jump over or crouch under obstacles. GTA San Andreas and others allow you to climb up fences. But in many cases characters are unable to crawl through small spaces because they lack mobility and animation complexity.

Camera

The camera should be mostly first-person, but it can be set to third-person or even allowo a top-down strategic point of view for admins. The tools admins need to control a large-scale world are the same tools that ideology strategy players need to orchestrate large-scale simulated campaigns.

Networking

Networking support is extremely important to running massively multiplayer games with acceptable speed. Crystalspace’s networking is currently lacking. MMRPG engines use all kinds of tricks to manage huge server loads, such as distributing load between federated servers along regional lines. Engines like Unreal can support dozens but not hundreds of players.

Game Toolset

The game toolset is the set of tools with which developers will build worlds for Empowerment. It will empower the core team to build the first world and all the content to go with it and serve community developers adding new modules to extend it further.

Interface Editing

Creating 2D game interface elements like menus, HUDs and help systems should be doable in-game. That way, if you create an object with some logic to handle its behavior, you can quickly connect its logic to controls like menus for players to interact with. For example, you create a telephone with multiple lines and hold. You quickly create the menu for players to click on the phone and put people on hold, switch lines, etc., or you create a mechanical pencil and create a menu to refill it.

The default appearance is minimalist, using clean lines and sans words overlaid on the 3D worldview. The overall approach is to avoid using unnecessary intrusive graphics and focus on the immersiveness of the environment. Health should be represented by visual and audible cues like limping and moaning rather than silly numbers.

World Editing

Every game system needs a toolset for core developers and community mod makers to create and alter the game’s content. It must be easy enough for a newbie to quickly build simple worlds and powerful enough for advanced designers to fine-tune to minute detail.

Live World Creation

===View results instantly===v Sun positions, colors, terrain attributes, water volumes, sky, clouds, weather, fog, placement, scale, size, rotation, triggers, logic Polygon Modeler: Detail Sketchup (http://www.sketchup.com) is a great example of how easy modeling can be.

Modeling

All the game’s 3D models have to be created using modeling tools. These will initially be external, but internal tools would be the goal to make editing a seamless part of the game experience instead of an offline challenge. An open-source modeling package called Blender (www.blender3d.org) is being used on the Once project. Popular packages like Maya and 3D Studio should also be supported.

Texturing

Texturing turns flat models into colorful materials by wrapping bitmaps onto the polygonal surfaces. Higher-resolution textures stay sharp at higher magnification, but can overload GPUs.

Creators can 3D paint in real-time by clicking on an object and choosing ‘Edit Texture’. This displays a 2D projection of the texture with painting and simple layers. An Export button allows for opening an external editing application such as Photoshop via clipboard copy-paste. Shaders: Textures can now incoroporate advanced procedural pixel shaders that generate new levels of complexity beyond the simple texture map approach. Shaders should be applicable from a library of effects and compound textures consisting of shaders and textures should be lumped together.

Real-time texture modification has other applications for in-game use such as to enable certain advanced effects like splatter maps. Splatter maps are ways of showing where liquids and other such partially-covering effects have touched the object beneath, so that if someone splashes your arm with water, you won’t drip from your entire body, just from the area affected, and if you spray paint a wall and touch it before it dries, only the painted areas will leave paint on you.

Tile Modeler: Quick & Easy

Tile-based modeling like that found in Neverwinter, Simcity and Blizzard games provide instant results but are constrained by a limiting grid. The problems start when tiles and polygons meet. A building created using untiled polygons is no longer modifiable with tiles. It is like sequencing tempo-matching MIDI over freeform audio.

Terrain Engine

Blending between meshes from different sources and maps like the edge between the countryside and the city or more detailed areas like roads.

Erosion operators

Fractal terrain generators

Realistic earth terrain can be generated by combining several sources of detail. Maps and satellites can be combined with detail-generating techniques like erosion simulators and terrain generators. Deserts, for example, can have their own special terrain generation system to create details like salt flats, oasis, sand, etc.,

Rule-based texturing tools based on masks like slope, altitude, fractal distribution, all in real-time.

Satellite Imaging

Creating Cityscapes

The city environment is modeled in a real-time fashion like the Sims. Objects can be placed instantly from a library of available items relevant to the site. The list is automatic, so natural features like local plants and landscaping alterations show up when outdoor areas and various fixtures show up when viewing a room designated as a bathroom.

Complex objects like entire buildings full of objects can be assembled in temporary space before placing them into an environment.

Scripting & Coding

The coding engine implements the low-level technology referenced by the scripting engine. The scripting engine is the principle method of developing game logic. Script implements humanly understandable game rules in explicit programmatic form for computerization and simulation.

Scripting must be easy enough for non-programmers to start using. The balance between easy and powerful is hard to find. A compromise can be achieved by simultaneously supporting a powerful low-level coding language like C or Java and an easy higher-level scripting language like basic. Beginners start with script and gradually start using more and more code as they get more ambitious. Exotic techniques like the visualized dataflow graphics found in prograph might be helpful aids in visualizing scripts.

The World Engine

The Earth is the focus of all Empowerment. The Earth and other planets are simulated within the context of Sim’s encompassing universe.

Political maps

You Can See Yourself

Unlike the majority of games other than Second Life, you can look down and see your own body interacting with the world. In fact, doing so will become necessary and important to store and retrieve items you are carrying. Putting things in hard-to-see places becomes a literal pain in the neck.

“Real Time: The real world. Go to your front door and open it. See all that stuff out there? That’s called Real Time (RT). Scary huh? Okay, now get back to your computer! Quick!”

—Reality Check, Manga by Rikki & Tavisha Wolfgarth-Simons

Lattitude and Longitude Lines, city lights, cloud animation, daylight,

EarthBrowser is a Mac program that lets you view webcams and information about various locations.

Environmental System

Most of the intricacies of outer space are rarely relevant enough to human-scale events to warrant detailed simulation, but simple details like visualizing accurate stars and weather are very powerful realisms for creating verisimilitude.

Satellite data could be used to provide a cloud overlay that would then be used to generate detailed local cloud models. Updated data would be transitioned rather than just swapped like a morph.

Round Earth, Flat Maps

Joining worlds

The world is simulated and depicted as a real sphere with a global coordinate system. It is broken up into regional locations that are nested hierarchically and may overlap. Some modern technologies such as telescopic lenses and other modern long-range sensor technology make regionalization difficult. How can warships track 10km distant targets and satellites track ground objects if the servers are separated artificially every few kilometers?

Transitions

A smooth transitional effect between the global model and the local model like the whooshing of clouds by the camera or the white glow of re-entry would smooth the change between round and flat geometry.

Human-scale maps are flat. This is sufficient over most city-scale distances, but over states and continents it breaks down. One solution is the transform from the globe to a top-down projection and then zoom into that. How has this been done before?

Terrain

Terrain height-mapping is more CPU-intensive than depicting the smooth earth, and should activate only when zoomed in closer to a manageable area.

Distant objects blur into view. Artificially imposed fog can make the horizon popping effect less abrupt.

Locations

You find places by entering street addresses, landmark names, . Cities are modeled or generated from maps with dynamic LOD.

You can create landmarks to keep track of important places. Every simhuman has landmarks for their relevant locations such as home, work, school, shopping.

Layers

There are many different layers of information that can be selectively layered on the world globe depending on the player’s context.

Geographical

Geographical and ecological regions of climate, species, terrain, soil, pollution, moisture, rainfall, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, flooding.

Logistical

Roads of different sizes such as interstate highways, routes connecting your favorite locations. LOD can be used to dynamically increase detail as you get closer to the area.

Political

Political borders of different kinds such as the US & EU, states, counties, city limits, voting districts.

Informational Overlays

Landmarks like police stations, retail outlets, hotels,

Google Earth is a program that displays a 3D world with visible landmarks and satellite imagery and terrain. Empowerment lightmap shows not only the places where people live with electric lights, it shows the places where people are emancipating or idealizing like little stars that grow into suns that connect. Communications show up like strands of light.

Orbital Movement

The globe can be orbited by rotation, altitude and angle.

Interfaces should stay on the edges of the screen, especially the bottom, and be minimalist translucent vector lines of white light.

A console is always available for issuing programmatic commands but it should not be necessary for normal operations or casual players will be intimidated and alienated.

Controls should be infinitely configurable, scriptable and saveable online along with other account information. Defaults should be easy to learn and a help button and key should show a keyboard overlay with rollover explanations of what each key command does.

What is the game like?

Playing the game is like having the power to try anything in the world without consequences.

The Key Power Center Locations

Sim Empowerment’s “game world” is meant to simulate whole Earth, but it can only achieve an incrementally improving approximation as new locations are modelled with ever increasing levels of detail.

It Has To Start Somewhere

Empowerment’s first version starts with some key power center locales and some iconic locales that can represent typical smaller regions from the school up to the town up to the national capital. The most important pla

The White House: Political

State Capitals:

Liberal, Conservative, & Battlegrounds

Campuses

Universities Georgetown

City Colleges

San Francisco: Silicon Valley Technology Industry

New York: Financial & Media Industry

Los Angeles: Hollywood Entertainment Industry

Vancouver: Cool place to network but cut off from US influence

Activism Simulation

The simple value of an “activist” simulator is the main new idea. Play a hindsight, run up against a really nasty outcome, identify the causes, go back in time, try to avert them without telling people you know the future. A side-effect of Empowerment is that your perspective can be focused on your role so that this world seems the realest of worlds.

Automating the campaign world is an interesting goal.

Interests are a definite Idea feature. Reading things and doing things sparks interest in different topics.

tech: thumbscrews replace tool screws. Makes it serviceable without parts.

Empowerment network: the simplest payment form in the world: pay for the bandwidth cost to your provider!

Open Source Model

Open-source is the only feasible way to develop Empowerment because of the freedom it grants and represents.

The freedom it grants makes it freely distributable and openly collaborative for developers. The freedom it represents makes it appealing to developers and players alike because it serves as a guarantee that contributions to the open-source project will not be wasted by corporate greed. It guarantees that if there is a disagreement in design philosophies between developers, the project can branch instead of self-destructing, creating diversity instead of decay.

Open-Source: The Technology Freedom Movement

Open-source is a legal framework for the public development of software technology.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond

Open-Source can best be understood by reading Eric Raymond’s essay, the Cathedral and the Bazaar. It is a great example of an open book that is both free and profitable. It was published freely on the Net and gained a wide readership popularizing the bold new ideas of open-source software development. It was also published in a conventionally distributed and priced printed book form, with sales largely fed by its online popularity amongst people who had not paid anything for it in the first place. Being free was the key to its being profitable, not a hindrance. http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

Online Developer Collaboration

EMP will incorporate developers from around the world collaborating on a common project. It is unlike commercial games that are developed by small, tightly knit teams on short schedules under commercial pressures.

SourceForge Development System

Team management and help wanted listings

File package listings

CVS: Concurrent Versions System is a tool used by many software developers to manage changes within their source code tree. CVS provides the means to store not only the current version of a piece of source code, but a record of all changes (and who made those changes) that have occurred to that source code. Use of CVS is particularly common on projects with multiple developers, since CVS ensures changes made by one developer are not accidentally removed when another developer posts their changes to the source tree. Though CVS repositories are most commonly accessed using a special piece of software called a CVS client, we also provide a web-based interface to view CVS repositories. Browsing the CVS tree gives you a great view into the current status of this project’s code. You may also view the complete histories of any file in the repository.

nightly build management, forum management, mailing-list management, technical support tracking, bug report tracking, feature request tracking,plugin tracking, patch tracking

Foundries: SourceForge.net has created areas for top-tier Open Source developers to congregate, get information, contribute code and collaborate on a particular technical topic. These areas are called Foundries. A Foundry is a targeted software development Community built around a specific technology focus. It’s where developers share expertise and news, get and give advice, and generally help each other develop better software, faster. Some key features of Foundries: Contain news and original content that pertain to the technology focus of the Foundry, Newsletters, Searchable mailing list archive to see past discussions and research information, Software library, Foundry Guides who are leaders in their respective fields and chart the course of the Foundry and the information within it.

It Has, Can And Will Be Done: The Linux Precedent

To say an upstart project cannot take on the industry titans is to ignore the 500lb penguin staring you in the face. Linux, with its cute penguin mascot Tux, sets a significant precedent for David vs Goliath success.

Its unpaid developer community managed to outdo the world’s largest technology company. Whereas Microsoft has to employ a hierarchy of thousands of full-time developers and management to achieve its immense profit margins and market share, Linux is a project shared by freely associating developers who create technology they want to use. Microsoft already considers it the most serious competition for the lucrative server business, and Linux gets closer and closer to desktop acceptance with each free new version. What Linux did was inspire a watershed of smaller open-source projects that contribute to its diversity and strength as a whole. Thousands of developers have created totally free technologies rivaling the commercial software industry in scope and quality.

Good ends achieved by good means

The game development process is as important as the technology and game design itself. All progress and future development depends on a successful and effective process. It forms the superstructure much like a written constitution forms the basis for governmental operations. For more information on the open-source nature of Empowerment and the process it entails, see Empowerment: The Master Plan.

Open Source Gaming

Competing with the gaming industry

The challenge of open-source game development is that the majority of the leading games are developed using closed source. There have been some notable successes where amateur game developers achieved immense popularity and bridged into commercial success, such as Counterstrike. Counterstrike started as a mod for half-life and became the most popular online first-person shooter game. It succeeded on the strength of its excellent gameplay and is still enjoyed today despite the dated technology of its six year-old game engine.

It is a common mantra amongst open source advocates that open source software isn't competing with commercial software because it is free and can continue to be developed without profiting on market share. In actuality, all software competes for mind share, regardless of the underlying business model. The need for quality and popularity competetive with commercial offerings is even more important for an activist project which seeks not merely to make a lot of money but to have a widespread positive effect.

Open-Source Games Remain Marginal

One area where open-source has yet to initiate significant changes is game development. Empowerment is the project that will change that, and in the process, repeat the success of Linux.

Commercialism Skews Games

Profit motives skew corporate developments and prevent them from enlisting the full community.

Prior Open Source Game Developments

There has been very little open-source game development. FreeCiv is an example of a clone that improves only on the technology of the original game design.