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:

On Thursday I was supposed to have a telephone interview with Rich “Tisirin” Weil, Community Relations Director for Kaneva, but I had several conflicts come up and couldn’t participate. I had sent Rich a few questions to give him some idea on what direction I wished to take the interview, and he kindly emailed me answers to those questions along with the suggestion we have that phone interview next week. Rich I appreciate your working with me.

I had suggested to Rich, that Kaneva’s changing the economy where credits became reward credits, which could only be used for personal items (because the items bought with the reward credits can not be sold, traded, or given away) had hurt the creative innovators inside the World of Kaneva to the point where those innovators were leaving.

We absolutely want to do whatever we can to facilitate innovation, creativity and fun in Kaneva.

As we continue to develop the Kaneva service, and add new features for our members, we have had to temporarily tweak or alter some systems. The Rewards / Credits changes are a good example of that. Because we plan to sell Credits to users to enable them to buy things in the Virtual World, we needed to make sure that there weren’t any holes in that system where people could just get unlimited Credits for free (by creating multiple accounts, for example). However, we also wanted to be able to give new members some starting money. The result of those two needs was the Rewards system, — an alternative currency in Kaneva that can be used in a similar but limited way as
Credits, but also gives our members starting money and gives us the ability to safely hand out “free” money for various reasons.

The transfer of built-up homes and spaces in Kaneva is actually a different matter. We have temporarily disabled this because of some issues that came up around moderator / owner privileges that were potentially exploitable. We’re reworking that and will have a new system of owner / moderator privileges and home/hangout transfers in at a future date.

When we roll out the Credit Purchase system, then members will see fewer restrictions on items purchased with Credits (as opposed to Rewards). The Credits / Rewards system, once fully implemented, will help encourage all those things and give Kaneva and our members maximum flexibility.

What are the plans to allow user created content in Kaneva? Will in world tools be available or will users have to use outside programs? Any idea of a time frame for allowing user created content?

We’re not ready to talk about our plans in this area at this time. But, again, we recognize that our members can be very innovative and creative. We want to make sure we enable, encourage and reward that.

Now there is no control over texturing items in Kaneva…. Unable to determine the repeats, alignments of the textures etc. Will that be something for the future?

I’m not sure I understand the question here. Members can still texture items in Kaneva as they always could. Witness the Pizza Restaurant hangout, for example. It’s a marvel of texturing creativity.

O.K. Rich, let me see if I can get you to understand with a couple examples. This is a texture of Spanish Tile with one repeat per face horizontal and also one repeat per face vertically.

These faces are the same size and this is that same Spanish Tile texture — only this time it has 5 repeats per face horizontally and it also has 5 repeats per face vertically. Starting to see what I was trying to ask you?

Again this is the exact same Spanish Tile texture on the same size face, only this time I have there repeats per face set at 0.023 horizontally and 9.642 vertically with a rotation of the texture at 37 degrees. Again these faces are the same size and in the same alignment orientation to the virtual world. This thumbnails are linked to larger images.

One of the wonderful things about virtual worlds is they can become so “real” when there is a level that them mind can fill cogitative gaps during virtual immersion. The level of immersion into the 3-D environment of Kaneva seems to be lacking …. One reason is the inability to control your view … will there be attention given. to that aspect?

We are constantly working to improve all aspects of the Kaneva experience, so improving immersion and perspective are both things that are on our list. We haven’t received a lot of comments on the camera system thus far, but I’d be very interested to hear what our members had to say on the subject.

There are many complaints about not being able to create folders to hold textures, items, etc. I mean when you upload a 1000 textures to build with…. Scrolling through them all is a pain in the ass.

Your wish is granted! Our new media library upgrade allows our members to categorize all their media on their profile page, including textures/patterns, and it’s live now!

Here is a comment from one of our readers… Give me your thoughts about her comment.

I am pretty sure I am the one you are talking about in Kaneva with the Real Estate office and the Cemetery. I have actually pretty much left Second Life at a chance to be in on the beginning of what I felt like would be a good opportunity. I joined Kaneva on March 7th and now 3 months later it feels like we took 2 steps backwards.

I saw one great update and that was with them fixing the alignment problems, I dont know what it was but THANK YOU!

We still all look alike, we still have the same clothes, we were given a plant but that was taken away, then we were given a new light but that turned out to be the plant. LOL
A few small bugs were fixed but that wasnt something we could have functioned without.
The profile pages have been loading extremely slow the last few days and I noticed today that each page was loading around 200 invisible gifs…. hmmmm food for thought.

I have a very little money and it is impossible to “earn” any money in Kaneva right now….
I have people still sending request for communities to be built but without the ability to even transfer the community to them when finished, I cant even build them one for free!

Rich seems to avoid the question ReneeM asks in her quote with his response:

We have already implemented an avatar art change that gives our members more choices in differentiating their avatars. As I addressed above, we are aware of the issues around transferring Hangouts, so we’re taking a look at that system overall. We do want our members to be able to build and transfer Hangouts, as well as have a robust Owner/Moderator system.

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.

Go to the file menu and click: Edit->Preferences->graphic detail, and uncheck the “avatar Vertex Program”. That should resolve the issue.