Got a URL for this stuff?!

  - A.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Charles-A. Rovira [mailto:crovira at wt.net]
> Sent: Monday, March 13, 2000 9:08 AM
> To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Cc: recipient list not shown
> Subject: [Machinima] Epiphany
> 
> 
> Hello, I've just discovered something and I'm still reeling!
> 
> I just stumbled across a nascent animation and interaction 
> medium called
> "Machinima". It uses game engines like Quake
> Arena and Unreal to let you see and/or interact in real-time in a 3D
> world. It uses the game engine to render the world
> and to act as the virtual space.The avatars, their appearance 
> structure
> and functionality are controlable interactively as
> well as scriptable.
> 
> Since modern game engines can operate over the net, it opens up all
> sorts of possibilities (from "Imaginariums" and class
> rooms to virtual shopping malls and boardrooms.)
> 
> Disney should be _very_ interested in this since it open up a 
> whole new
> medium for entertainment. Also part of the promise
> of Machinima is the ability to create these virtual worlds cheaply,
> quickly and easily. D.I.Y. worlds & movies, "a la",
> "Blair Witch Project." The "easily" portion needs a lot of work of
> course. That's where Squeak! and Alice could help.
> 
> What Machinima needs an Alice-like mechanism to make the creation of
> worlds, avatars and animation scripts and to port
> these to whatever game engine is being used to host the virtual world.
> (The best way to insure compatibility and wide
> distribution is to use what's already out there, not to reinvent that
> extremely well-oiled wheel. Besides, no Squeak! VM
> will achieve the level of perfomance available on inexpensive game
> consoles.)
> 
> Being multi-platform and free, Squeak is perfect for creating/editing
> Machinima world files.
> 
> I need to find all of the documentation I can about Alice to 
> see how to
> use it to create the passive and scripted objects
> required to create worlds and avatars from AutoCAD, Canoma, TIFF, PNP,
> JPEG and MPEG and output the objects in the formats
> used by individual game engines. (I know... "You've got all the code.
> Read it!" But I still need help with hints, tips,
> "how-to"s, etc. so I don't rediscover those wheels either. 
> I'm trying to
> "Tell time", not learn "How to build a watch."
> :-)
> 
> I'd also need the ability to launch, start/stop, kill sessions of
> various game engines in various run-time environments. I
> know its messy and needs to bind "below" the VM to the 
> underlying OS and
> particular engine but surely, somebody has some
> experience doing something like this.
> 
> -Charles-A.
>