3-Jan-86
3-Jan-86 1pm. Talked to Marc on phone. Acknowledged reciept of two fedex
listings of communications software. Complemented his 6502 programmer on good
code. Confirmed visit for next week is still on. Discussed demo needs.
Looks like a 'tape recording' of some line interchange will do just fine.
They are going to install instrumentation on their end to capture such data.
Talked about upgrade distribution. Looks like on-line stuff will work. Marc
reiterated that their concern is who pays.
7-Jan-86
7-Jan-86 all day. Had meeting with Marc and Janet. Introduced them to Randy
and showed them balloon-o-matic, discussed communications problems.
Introduced them to Gary and showed them early avatar animation and the cel
editor. Introduced them to Aric, showed them the animation driver and
discussed animation problems/solutions. Introduced them to everybody else
(courtesy and cultural background info).
Spent morning discussing the big picture: what the components of their system
are and how they interact, what the components of our system will be, how it
all fits together. One of their concerns is how we balance the load when the
number of users gets large. What they have to be able to do is spread the
host's job over a bunch of separate computers running concurrently.
Fortunately, our design makes this quite easy. In fact, it turns out that
they will probably be able to use their existing software that that supports
their room-oriented chat system as the basis for the host database handler.
Took them to lunch at the Ranch. They were suitably impressed and ooh'ed and
ah'ed at all the right things.
Spent the afternoon discussing who had to do what to get the thing going.
They will do the host remote procedure call object behavior lookup system
(Looi). We will provide the object behavior software routines themselves.
They will do the host-end object database software. We will specify the
layout of the host database and actually provide the data to go into it. They
will provide tools for entering this data into their system and for altering
it once it is already there. We will provide advice on what these tools
should be as part of the database specification. They will provide routines
so that the object behavior code can get at the contents of the database
easily. In the process of figuring this all out we redesigned the
communications protocol and the object reference and naming scheme in order to
solve some problems which Marc identified. The result is greatly superior to
what we had before in every respect. Lots of ideas were generated and both
Marc and Janet got real excited. They even started talking about the eventual
need to do "MicroCosm II" (for fancier machines with faster communications)
someday after MicroCosm is a big hit.
We talked intermittently about the game itself and the MicroCosm fantasy. We
discussed the avatar and turf customization kits and what sort of interface to
the system they would require. This lead Marc to raise the question of
whether the players would be able to choose where their turves connect into
the world. I had thought that the locations were fixed, but letting people
fiddle with them in certain constrained ways enables a number of interesting
things to happen, including a real estate marketplace and the formation of
political alliances based on territoriality.
We discussed asynchronous events that can occur within the system. From our
point of view, the two most significant are the arrival of mail in the
player's electronic mailbox and the arrival of an on-line message from another
player. We (LFL) need to discuss the extent to which we want to integrate the
communications facilities of the MicroCosm fantasy world (mail, telephone)
with those of the Q-Link system. In particular, if somebody (who is not
inside MicroCosm) sends you a mail message, can you read it from your
MicroCosm mailbox?
We came up with a list of short-term things for each of us to do.
I am to define the basic layout and contents of the databases that will be
required, to make a first crack at defining what kinds of low-level routines
will be needed to interact with the database, and to think about interactive
tools for constructing and modifying the world model that the databases
contain. I'm also supposed to spend some time thinking about what sorts of
statistics collection and usage monitoring hooks we want to embed in the
thing.
They are going to start setting up the database structure itself based on my
input. (They are going to use off-the-shelf database software for the bulk of
it). They are also going to start hacking around a version of the "rooming
house" software (that which handles "rooms" in their chat utility) to become a
"region monitor" module. Part of this involves figuring out what sorts of
asynchronous events within the system will be needed to make it work. They
are also going to work on low-level routines for interrogating and updating
the database. Also, Marc is going to send us information about the Q-Link
load-file format so that we can have our Commodore 64 software load and run
off of disk under Q-Link's control (i.e., when you select the "MicroCosm" menu
item inside Q-Link). This will let me write a filter to make our object files
compatible with theirs.
We went out to dinner at the Royal Thai, which they both enjoyed immensely,
except that Marc accidently ate a Thai pepper and had to chug water and
hyperventilate for 15 minutes in order to survive.
Marc is going to CES and offered to take us out to dinner in Las Vegas while
we're there. Also, there is going to be a giant west coast Commodore Users'
Group meeting in San Francisco on February 6-7 (that's a weekend) which they
are going to be attending. Marc is going to be on a panel along with
representatives from all their competitors. He recommended we come to this
meeting, if only to see what kind of people our hard-core customers are going
to be.
13-Jan-86
13-Jan-86 1pm On arrival found message that Marc had called. Called him back.
Something about putting together dog & pony show for Clive Smith and Commodore
bigwigs. Didn't go into details because haven't talked to sda yet about what
it's all about.
16-Jan-86
16-Jan-86 Sent off progress report describing activities in December.
17-Jan-86
17-Jan-86 Sent off package with January 15 deliverables (object set document
plus cover letter).
17-Jan-86 Spent day putting together dog and pony disk for Clive. Sent it off
via Federal Express AND uploaded to Q-Link so that Marc can retrieve it for
insertion into demo Q-Link system. Talked to Marc on the phone twice, to
discuss upload and delivery arrangements for demo. He also confirmed reciept
of December progress report and said a reciprocal report would be on its way
soon.
20-Jan-86
20-Jan-86 11am Called Marc and confirmed reciept of dog & pony demo. All
seems to be well.