(no subject)

Much as I love the Arcus offices, their wholly subterranean nature, plus the constant rush of white noise coming from all directions (echoed from the high-powered fans cooling down the many racks of network machinery and colocated computers, my beloved undef.jmac.org among them), never fails to make me feel sleepy very quickly, at least during weekend visits. So much of yesterday I spent half-asleep, reading Jabber documentation and such, popping topside every so often to let the sunlight wake me up enough to discuss MIGS ideas with daerr.

I really like where things are headed with this project, and have decided to try bending my mind to focus my creative free time wholly upon it for a while. After yesterday's discussion and discoveries I may throw out many of my core ideas in exchange for better, simpler ones, and this is a good thing. As was the case when I started to take MIGS notes 1.5 years ago, I intend to have a truly solid idea about how every piece of whole system's going to hang together before I write a single line of code. I hope that it doesn't take another 18 months, though! I suppose so long as I successfully avoid book contracts for that long we'll be all set.

And, yes, MIGS is a crappy name for the project. Experimentation suggests that it makes people think of the movie Top Gun long before it makes them think of playing games over the Internet. I guess that's an OK movie but it's not really what I want to evoke with a name. We'll pick a new name before any coding actually starts.

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Modified the previous paragraph to excise the phrase "internet gaming". I really don't like using the words "gaming" and "gamer" in a public forum, because they mean such different things depending upon audience. To the mainstream, "gaming" specifically means gambling, if it means anything at all, so "Internet gaming" is pretty misleading. Meanwhile, among the Slashdot crowd, "gaming" means playing multiplayer, action-oriented computer games, while the folks over at Gamegrene would take it to mean playing paper-and-pencil, you-guys-are-in-a-10-by-10-room role-playing games. And I mean none of these things at all, with what I have in mind...

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Played a little more Gnostica, with daerr and jjoy. Poor jjoy was very familiar with Zarcana but not Gnostica, putting him at rather a disadvantage, since the two games' rules are broadly similar but quite different in their details, which can prove quite confusing to players coming from one to the other. The game ended when daerr lost, due to my using the on-board Chariot to fling a piece into his territory after he challenged. He confessed that he didn't quite realize that was possible to do. So it was, technically, a test of the proposed new rule, but the test's impact was lessened to to player inexperience. Clearly I must force them to play it more, muha, etc.