What do you want from the developers moving forward?

[ZURI]

@Aloys: Thank you for your posts. I am in agreement with you.

I joined the community in anticipation of this event (Release of the Source Code).

All I want is a good, no Great plugin for Blender. I completely understand that a lot of the development (even with the source) is a matter of waiting for version 2.6, or at least an almost-complete version. 2.53 might be it, but not being a dev, I don't know.

However, as far as the plugin is concerned... I just want it to be simple, graphical, intuitive, and powerful. No..more..scripting.. Pleeeease???? Pretty please??

The ONLY reason the group I'm with hasn't released several ages (not to mention a vast storyline..) with tons of cool puzzles... is frankly.. because I'm an artist, not a programmer. I try and try and try to get the hang of all the coding... but frankly, I just can't get my head around it. Maybe I'm just stupid.

Regarding the engine. The devs of this community have forgotten more than I've learned on the subject - and I have complete confidence in them. You folks are the best! I just hope you start with the Blender plugin first. You make the plugin, and we'll write the ages. It's a promise!

Edited for Grammar:

[Aloys]

I am surprised by people who want to use Plasma/CWE into a general purpose game engine for something else than Uru.. (not talking specifically about your idea J'Kla )
Plasma is nice and all, but it is litterally a 10 years old technology; and its toolset is quite limited compared to recent engines (yes even the Max plugin). Today there are several free game engines and SDKs that are much more powerful and much easier to use than Plasma. And most of them have plenty of great documentation and tutorials as well..

[J'Kla]

They build fast jets and rocket planes but some people still fly Tiger Moths.

BTW they are considerably older than 10 years. But they might use a GPS for navigation a new tool in an old engine and airframe.

[ZURI]

@Aloys, although I've mapped for other engines, Plasma seems to be better at reproducing colors/lighting better than most. Ambience is panamount for Myst, so it's of little surprise to me that it does it so well. I have a few non-Myst ideas for CWE myself.

[J'Kla]

People currently make a fine living making longbows from Yew.

Thinks "Better go to bed before I beat these similes to death"

[Tweek]

Age Prefix numbers.

Seriously this needs sorting out. As it stands you can reserve prefix numbers from that one site or you can add the numbers you want to a wiki page.

As a result there have been numbers taken by two people (couple of my Ages are useless because I reserved the numbers on the one site but someone else took them on the wiki).

This needs sorting out and centralized so there is just one place to go so these conflicts don't happen?

[Paradox]

Plasma is nice and all, but it is litterally a 10 years old technology; and its toolset is quite limited compared to recent engines (yes even the Max plugin). Today there are several free game engines and SDKs that are much more powerful and much easier to use than Plasma. And most of them have plenty of great documentation and tutorials as well..

I think everyone agrees that Plasma is using old technology, and it's showing (fairly obviously in the rendering at this point, but in other places too). But that's easy to update...

Other than new graphical effects and audio improvements, what about a game engine (or computing in general) has fundamentally changed in the past 10 years? Plasma was designed in a way that allows for new features to be added by extending existing components. The architecture there is solid, and I still believe that Plasma has a lot more potential for all types of games than most other engines.
Of course, there are plenty of places in Plasma that aren't so nicely designed (like anything security or network related). But the network code itself has already been rewritten a few times, and is somewhat removed from the rest of the engine classes.

In all honesty, I'd love to see someone make a 1st Person Shooter game using Plasma, just to prove that it's possible. There's already a bunch of bullet/projectile classes set up to do line-of-sight testing...

[Chacal]

Aargh! I'm stuck in a hotel room in Singapore with flaky internet access and no free time, and of course everything starts happening.
I wish I could put my 2 cents in.

[ametist]

@Chacal: Please take some pics if you have time, I have used your Beijing ones a lot and would like some new

I agree with Zuri and others: I won't be able to get max and I still need a lot of practice with blender to be able to do good ages for the D'niverse, but I still want to, so I thank you all devs , I very much appreciate all your work to make this endeavour possible!

[tachzusamm]

I would like to be able to put objects in ages or get them out quickly , without needing to export the whole age.

May be the wrong thread to give hints, but did you try to make yourself familiar with the paging concept?
I don't know if there's a wiki page describing it, but our fabulous Chloe has written a rough description about the procedure here:
viewtopic.php?f=59&t=2641&p=29273&hilit=pages#p29273