Another late entry
Recently I’ve become obsessed with Javascript. The more I use it the more I like it. I’ve started using the ExtJS framework at work in building the CRM system.
On the games front, I’ve been working on writing a wrapper for DarkGDK for the V8 Javascript engine. I’ve almost got all of the commands for it wrapped, then I plan to release it as a free community experiment on the community.
I also started to look more into Ogre3d for the engine instead of DarkGDK. It has always bothered me that DarkGDK isn’t Object Oriented. Of course everything has it’s ups and downs, DarkGDK has libraries for many different aspects of a game engine (sound, networking, input, etc.) where Ogre3d is just the rendering engine. There are tons of plugins and extensions however to getting those extra libraries working with Ogre.
One really cool thing that I found while looking around at Ogre is Awesomium which is taking the Chromium sdk and combining that with the Ogre engine to have browsing inside a 3d environment. I suppose when it comes down to it, it isn’t super useful application wise for things to be in 3D, but as their suggestions with games it makes sense. Having web ads on virtual billboards in game is neat. Paying for the games’ production with in game advertising isn’t a new concept, but I don’t think there have been many advances prior with it. Beyond that I also always liked that EverQuest 2 had an in-game browser (although it was UI only), having in-game browsing in an MMO seems almost necessary today. What really excites me is just the possibility of creating UI elements using HTML and Javascript. I think having a game or other 3D application that can load up a website and be controlled by that website is very interesting. I also think (which one of my ideas with my V8 wrapper) that loading up some games purely by remotely loading some Javascript file is awesome. If you could merge the website and the game so that people outside the client could have some effect on people inside the 3d client that would be cool too. First step though would be a Javascript arcade. Post the simple text file to the website or use a web interface to configure a database, save the script, then have the client load it up remotely with JSON data.
I realize that the above is a sort of broken thought, but whatever, it’s my blog :P
Check out this video of the NaviLibrary which uses the Awesomium to do the whole 3D browsing, it’s pretty cool.