User:PeterBlake
Contents
About me
I live in Brisbane, Australia with my wife Allison and daughter Kiara. I'm originally from the UK and have degrees in maths and information and library studies.
My day job is as a librarian at a small uni - there I'm involved in software support, website editing and customising our CMS as well as the normal librarian-y things.
My MORPG interests lie firmly in simulation/modelling - I'm into fractal terrain, towns and borders that fit that terrain, and developing NPC AIs that influence each other's personalities.
Ultimately, I'd like to help with keeping the program documentation up-to-date and contribute some ideas and code myself. I'll need to be deeply familiar with the project for that though, so I'll begin by playing to my strengths and trying to tidy up the website and wiki. I can also help keep you up-to-date with the published research on online games or AI via my work connections - shout out if that would be useful. (see also Kai's reply to this).
Current projects
- Compiling Game Publications - a list of published books and articles on ORPGs and game development.
- Compiling /WorldForge components - a personal vade mecum which I hope will also be useful to others.
- Transferring Dural information from Durasaur to the wiki.
- Improving my grasp of wiki syntax in my personal /Sandbox.
Completed projects
- Cleaned up website files called meetings, news, status, tasks and team_info.
- Cleaned up website index_html files with the wrong content.
Possible future projects
- Extend wiki to-do list to cover documentation and website/wiki housekeeping (old website to-do lists: 1 2 3)
- Archive bulletin board content on wiki
- Compile a single central list of contributors (old list)
- Ensure most (all?) website content is accessible without recourse to the site map
- Build a release history for each sub-project (possibly not needed if good changelogs already exist, but there is a large amount of old news on Sourceforge that it might be good to summarise somewhere)
- Improve documentation (2002 survey)
- Fix some apparent website issues
- Fix the broken links on Help:Editing.
- Make sure all TODO entries use the TODO template. (Here are some links to wiki pages that are or contain to-do lists: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.)
- Use the TODO entries to auto-magically compile a global TODO list.
- Contribute to the following wiki pages: Crafting, Game Features, Procedural Map Format, Quest Generation Algorithm (closely related to Contracts), Sub Games.
- Resurrect and improve on the auto-generated documentation that was at http://www.worldforge.org/dev/eng/auto_docs/.
- Expand the Dural information.
- Look for exploits in the Circe ruleset i.e. test them to breaking point. (This may well have been done for LARP, but I have a feeling the propensity of MMORPG players to grind may introduce some new dynamics.)
- Create links to all the Special:Lonelypages.
Questions I think are newbie questions
(and thus I should be able to find out the answers as I go)
- What information on the website is up-to-date?
- What information on the wiki is up-to-date?
- What information on the mailing lists is up-to-date?
- What is the status of the Venus server software?
- What is the status of HerbiForge?
- What is the status of ComicForge?
- The Atlas type reference pages on the wiki seem to contradict each other - which is the correct version?
- What is the status of wftk? Do any other parts of the project depend on it?
A quick bit of philosophy
My philosophy in interacting with this wiki is to get all my project-based and general MMORPG notes off of my PIM and into pages here. That keeps everything in one place, and allows you to see what I'm up to and what I'm planning. Hopefully you can also expand upon the numerous half-formed ideas I have.
My game ideas
I've two game ideas in the back of my mind that I eventually want to implement. Briefly, they are:
- Behind the screens: players entertain an invisible audience in the static-walled world of television genres to gain appreciation and fame. (Key WF feature that would need implementing to achieve this: ability to insert random static in place of a texture.)
- Aspects: in a borderless natural world, the actions of both PCs and NPCs are tracked against two dozen ethical scales. Each scale corresponds to a god in the pantheon, and high standing enables miracles aligned with the god's domain. (Key WF features that would need implementing to achieve this: highly versatile AI code, potential for server to auto-generate new maps when players near the edges of the current ones.)
(Nb: I have worked out these ideas in greater detail than I give here. Please get in touch if you would like to hear more.)
Contact details
- Email: peter dot blake at acu dot edu dot au
- Skype: peter.blake
Brisbane is GMT+10 (with no daylight savings), so please don't give up if you can't get me straight away.
