Ever wonder what the backend of creating video games, and video game programming looks like? Enter Alice.

It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

Alice is free and open source. It is a stand alone application, and is available on many platforms. It uses much of the technology that was used in the making of The Sims2.

It’s used at many schools and colleges as a teaching tool. Instructions are similar to that of C++ and C# But includes a neat drag and drop interface for the actions, methods and properties. I made a short sequence myself in about 10 minutes.

Exporting to the web is a bit difficult because it requires the end user to have a lot of Java framework installed on their unit. Exporting as video isn’t functioning yet as the video’s are just too big.  You can view a bunch of Alice works on YouTube.

Here’s some more info direct from Carnegie Mellon:

The rumored description by ARS Technica sounds believable:

ASU students received a questionnaire yesterday, screenshots of which were originally posted by a MacRumors forum member, that hinted strongly at Google’s plans. Specifically, the questionnaire intro says that students will be able to test a product that will be publicly launched later this year by a “major Internet company,” and the graphic makes reference to 3D modeling, video gaming, and avatars. It proceeds to ask questions about students’ involvement with social networks like MySpace and whether they have Gmail accounts.

Video games? Could Google be looking to expand their iGoogle product to include MMORPG? With news of Metaplace and the Sony PS3 Home project both arriving in Spring 2008, does this add a third player with a big G in their name to the space? Wouldn’t surprise this writer, as Google doesn’t really have a serious gaming platform — yet. Sure, you can add widgets to your personalized Google pages, but that’s nothing on the scale of what a real gaming platform could provide.

Though this is only barely related, this also reminded me of the commercial traffic tracking software, Visitorville which will show you real time visitors to your website, including buses with the Google logo on it when somebody arrives at your website from a Google search. Imagine if Google could wire up something like that where your customizable avatar plays in part what’s happening in real time — or close to real time as possible — on your website or personal home page? With Google Analytics, search, orkut, Sketchup (for the 3D avatar creation) they have a lot of the necessary pieces to glue together.

Or is this all just somebody’s 20% project at Google and nothing serious? As usual with rumors, Google isn’t talking, but that shouldn’t prevent the rest of us from having fun speculating at what the Wizards of G are secreting from the rest of us in Kansas.

If you’re looking at an interesting perspective of the other side: pulling Google Earth data into Second Life, take a look at fellow VTOR author, jvastine’s post: Google Earth & Virtual Reality.

Entropia Universe, the safest virtual world utilizing a real cash economy, has signed a license agreement to use the stunning high-tech game engine CryENGINE 2®, from German developer Crytek, creators of “Far Cry®” and upcoming “Crysis®.” This will make Entropia Universe the closest-to-reality looking massively multiplayer online game ever seen.

It’s said to be finished by mid 2008.

Some of the really cool features (seen in video) that I’m looking forward to are;

• Parametric skeletal animation system
• Breakable buildings & vegetation systems

This is going to bring gaming to a completely different level!

Download the wmv direct from Entropia Universe (better quality).

Let’s visit an old friend that began many of the look and feel of MMORPGs. Quake. While Quake was not the first FPS, it was one that was wildy popular and one that incorporated the use of skinning for the models that was eventually open to the rest of the world. This was very apparent in modifications later on when you looked at the layouts of skins and found that what you were seeing in 3D was actually a 2D layer that was draped over the 3D body. These days, practically all 3D engines skin models as such. The more the polygons to fill out the skin, the more realistic. Still confused? Let’s bring it down a notch in terms that everyone can understand. Think of it this way. Take a bed sheet and drape it over you. Now if someone were to trace your features on the bed sheet, then take the sheet off and lay it flat, then that would be what a skin is like in a game.

Caption: Note that the moon doesn’t change from different angles, it just elongates like a flat image laying inside a curve.

The next thing we started to talk about is stuff that are harder to make money from. Selling houses is one of these cause you need land to show off your homes which would cost more money if you want to show all your houses. Also you need to make unique houses which means a lot of work for you to do and you must have a crative mind. Another business that would be hard to get into is scripting. The important thing here is you need to have a product to sell with the script. Selling just the script won’t sell as much. Building a lamp with a lamp script would sell more than trying to sell the lamp script for example.

I will continue this in another post for the second part of businesses in second life.