Re: Modeling PBM on Linux ...

From: tim@leaphome.pelican.org (Tim Franklin)

Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 00:00:00 +0000

MindShift Design <teammsd@mindshiftdesign.com> wrote:
>Here's a question to stir up a hornet's nest:
>
>There are many companies these days promote their own distributions of
>Linux. They tend to make to make money on the sales of distribution media
>and for additional services supplied to end users of the software, such as
>help support and custom applications for that. Anyone have any thoughts
>about the viability of this business model being applied to PBM ?

Hmm... as in PBM companies release their code, allow everyone to tweak it as
they will, but they have to release their mods back to the PBM community at
large?  Anyone who wants to can run the game, competing on the level of
service that they provide to the players?

I can only think of one example (and forgive me if I've got this wrong) -
Galaxy is available free of charge on the net, and can be run be anyone
via email, but there is a paper version of the game which charges per turn.
(Spellbinder, I think).

I can see it being a lot less likely to work in PBM, as the important property
of any PBM isn't just the code but the ideas.  You need a good setting,
objectives, characters / units, you need a lot of descriptive text (either
you need to type it per turn, or you need a bank of stuff for a program to
choose from, depending on your moderation type).

There aren't the same level of ideas involved in Linux (or NetBSD, or any of
the other free unices).  Although there needs to be a good overall design,
it's not a case of coming up with a cool idea for a SCSI card driver, it's
a case of knowing what a SCSI card is supposed to do, finding out how make
the hardware do it, and writing the appropriate code.  (This is not intended
to be at all disparaging of programmers in general or systems programmers in
particular.  I've coded for a living and still do as a hobby - I'm just
saying there's less "creativity" required for an OS than for a game.)

What I could see is one or more frameworks or engines being developed and
made available to the community (GPL or similar), so that firms can concentrate
on the ideas bits rather than the donkey-work that every PBM has to have,
such as maintaining player records, billing, talking to a database, backups
etc.

The big barrier there is likely to be choice of platform; I belive that the
kit firms are currently using varies wildly from one to another.  Maybe
Java is the answer, but then you're still narrowing down the language that
firms can use to develop the actual 'game' part.

Just my 0.02UKP,
Tim.

References

Modeling PBM on Linux ...
"MindShift Design" <teammsd@mindshiftdesign.com>
Sat, 14 Oct 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Referenced By

Modeling PBM on Linux ...
"MindShift Design" <teammsd@mindshiftdesign.com>
Sat, 14 Oct 2000 00:00:00 +0000