The entire summer of 2009 has been devoted to rewriting the entire Rule Engine, for a multitude of reasons. Rules are now written in a DSL to provide the user with maximum flexibility, and are run in an external and distributed environment - separated from the main Game system. Other things that has been rewritten are the view-management system and the external communication protocols.
Staffan and Daniel - Code Dev
In order to fully test (and demo) the communication protocols and system for The Creator, we've spent the last week developing an iPhone application to interact with The Creator. Using an external proxy-application, it allows the game maker to define custom GUI for the iPhone application (updated at runtime) as well as custom gestures - and then bind these to rules in The Creator. When a player performs the correct gesture on their iPhone, the corresponding rules are triggered in The Creator - and returns any media (at the moment pictures, sound or video) to be displayed in the phone.
Daniel - Core Dev
We've finally taken the time to rewrite the view-system from last summer. Now, the entire list-handling, drag/drop-library and search-library are updated, refactored and rewritten - both removing a few old and nasty bugs, and providing some requested functionality (like search, proper support for drags and faster loading). The new version consists of about half as many lines of code as the previous version and requires a third of the server-requests.
Staffan - Core Dev
Just want to say welcome to Fredrik, who'll be spending some time working with us - both on The Creator and a few other projects, great to have you with us!
Staffan and Daniel - Core Dev
sherlock = Detective.find_by_name("detective")
sherlock.cleverness = Villain.find(:random).evilness
IphoneService.distribute("crime photo", :to => sherlock)
Just a sneakpeak at the Rule DSL (for now named "Creator Speak") for writing rules in the new version of the rule engine.
Yes, it's heavily inspired by ActiveRecord.
No, it's not ActiveRecord =)
Staffan and Daniel - Core Dev
The Creator will be the game engine behind the massive participative production produced by The company P in collaboration with Tim Kring! This makes us very happy and hopefully give us loads of insight into how The Creator performs in huge productions with thousands of game-objects to tracke, handle and manage. Major kudos to The Company P!
More info at their blog here!
Staffan and Daniel - Core Dev
We have been working hard and the first milestone has been reached. We have created a first working prototype of the game object system and deployed it for feedback and testing in the group.
Next target is the Rule Engine and we are approaching it at full speed. A system architecture draft has been completed and is currently discussed
Staffan, Daniel and Linnea
We would like to welcome Linnea Löfdahl to The Creator team. Linnea is right currently a masters student from DSV and has just returned from a year of studies in Hong Kong. Back in stockholm she is going to spend the summer developing The Creator together with the rest of the team at the Institute.
Staffan
At last we have a liftoff for the second iteration of the creator. After a intense year of productions, planning evaluations, iEmmys, patching and report writing there is once again time for a summer of coding.
We would like to welcome Anders Daven to the team. Anders is going to do interface design for the next version, something we seriously lacked last time. He has also done a suggestion for a new logo for us, have a look and mail us feedback.
Staffan and Daniel - Core Dev