Ancient Spaces Blog

Folks -

The new Ancient Spaces website is online at ancient.arts.ubc.ca. It's an ongoing work in progress, and will be for the next couple of weeks, as we start to populate the wiki and prepare the forum for broader use. You'll see the last week's blog entries from the development team stretching out below, an engaging and trackless desert of print.

See my first blog entry for some general news and updates.

Michael Griffin
Project Mgr

Salutations,

I am Dieter, co-founder of the original Ancient Spaces project and lead developer (i.e. glorified codemonkey). We have been working furiously this Summer to come up with the Ancient Spaces world editor, nicknamed ASEditor. It is modelled loosely after UnrealEd.

Most recently, I have been working on serialization, which is a fancy name for saving and loading. This has proven to be very painful indeed. So far it has consisted of little more than wading through a panoply of mystifying errors, such as:

(Sorry for the sucky inline images, this blog does not seem to like onClick event handlers.)

Sadly it would seem that the chief difficulty in getting serialization to work lies in getting a good library actually to build and link properly. When we have this working, much of the rest will be donkey work. Naturally in modern languages such as Python (yay) and Java (ugh), serialization is built in. Enough ranting for now.

Until next time,
~ Dieter

I'm a Computer Science undergrad and Co-op student doing development with the other two programmers on the editor. I'm working here on my second Co-op work term, coming straight from another company where I spent a few months working with Java based internet poker.

I've spent much of my time doing development on the interface, most recently finishing up work on the camera movement and control. I've been continuously bugging the artists to try out each iteration of the camera interface, and I've been making changes and improvements based on their input. Right now we seem to have some pretty solid camera controls.

That's all for now.
-Simon

Hi folks,

A warm welcome to the new Ancient Spaces blog. Those of you who have been keeping track of us (through several recent articles and this site) will already know what we're trying to do: in the long run, AS is meant to become a virtual 'multiplayer' world based on ancient civilizations. As a teaching and learning tool, this is a little different than most fledgling MMORPGs: our content will be vetted and continually improved by the academic community (in Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and First Nations Studies, among others), and built from the ground up by our students and its own players.

We've gone through some major developments since the site was last updated:

- Thanks to the modeling team, there are plenty of new 3D environments under construction for the pilot launch this September (mainly for application in courses), ranging from Egypt, Greece, Machu Picchu, and the Northwest Nisga'a First Nation in B.C. Check them out here.
- Thanks to the programming team, the Ancient Spaces platform is expected to go into alpha testing at the end of July, with the beta expected for the end of August. In about two months it will be ready to download as a Windows executable. It's based on OGRE 3D.
- Once the platform is in beta, we'll be sending a notice to our mailing list inviting participation (programming, modeling, and academic).
- The UBC programming & 3D modeling team will now be blogging here on a weekly basis, so I hope there will be enough updates and material to give you plenty to look at in the weeks ahead.

In the meanwhile, check out the website, read more about our team, and let us know what you think so far.

Michael Griffin
Project Mgr.