NB: This is not a job advert :). It is an opportunity to showcase your JOGL work, whether or not you’re a commercial group.
Summary: We need to produce a new demo of our MMOG server technology, and we’d like not to have to write our own custom clients for it. We need to demo stuff like thousands of (very simple) AI’s running around in a virtual world, etc. We could do this with a text-only interface that just listed e.g. “number of AI’s in world; size of world; number of updates / second; cpu usage; ram usage” etc. It would be much nicer to be able to do this with a 3D client logged-in to the world, able to run around and watch all these AI’s moving around.
The closest we came to doing this before was evaluating the open-source Quake1, and the time it would take us to implement our network protocols into this, etc. We didn’t go ahead because of the time and cost (too few C programmers here; time spent making Quake work doesn’t showcase our technology!).
What would be really cool (from a “promoting java” point of view) would be if we could use a Java-based client. Again, we face challenges on time and resource for a DIY job, but…for someone (individual, group, or etc) who’s building/built a simple-but-decent 3D engine anyway, we could collaborate and produce a demo that showed off both our tech’s with each of us spending time only on the bits directly relevant to our own tech.
So, if anyone here’s developing an FPS, RTS, or something similar (even just a landscape + MOBs engine), and wants a chance to really show it off, please get in touch. I know there’s a lot of people doing some great stuff here, and I know that many are doing it for specific games (so wouldn’t have time / interest in this). But for the sake of a little extra time (to co-ordinate with us, and cooperate on debugging the complete system), your work could be part of a bigger system.
We’d obviously give you full credit and maximum exposure to every audience we promoted the resulting demo to (and would hope you’d do the same, although that’s not much of a concern to us), and give you everything you needed to be able to run the demo - i.e. copies of our software, with all necessary licenses etc, for free.
If interested, please email me directly at ceo @ grexengine.com. If no-one comes forward, or no-one has the time to do this / won’t be ready to start for a year, then we’ll have to go with a non-java 3D engine (there are a couple of commercial companies that have offered us free licenses for the purpose of a demo only, and the attendant free promotion for them). But that would be rather sad.