Thought those of you who are novices but who might be interested in getting started in age creation might enjoy this article--

http://www.slate.com/id/2222546/

Interesting game - thanks for the link, stanhin!

Note that one of Kodu's developers (as listed on the Microsoft Research page) is Eric Anderson - former MMO server developer for Cyan. (Not to be confused with Eric Anderson, former art director for Cyan.)

<speculation alert>
Could he be the developer that Chogon referred to in his open source update post? Could Kodu be that product he mentioned? If so, one could reason that when Kodu is released, Eric can finally get to making the necessary changes to the MOUL code, which will then be turned over to community developers for further refinement.

According to the Kodu blog, they launched it on 2 July. So, we may see the source sooner rather than later...
</speculation alert>

_________________
Can we rebuild it? Yes, we can - here's how.

Myst Movie coming soon!

KI #: 1299

Don't forget there were at least two Eric Andersons at Cyan, and I'm sure there's more. Kodu has been in research for a few years now.

_________________
Can you withstand the gaze of the Eye of Eternity?

This Eric Anderson - the one currently working at Microsoft Research and part of the development team for the recently released Kodu XBox 360 game - is the one who worked as the MMO game server software engineer at Cyan, both during Prologue and MO:UL. You can check for yourself by logging into LinkedIn and viewing his public profile:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/eric-anderson/1/24/314

So, why do you think Eric is the only one who can make this particular code modification? Note that, in between Prologue and MO:UL, he also worked at ArenaNet (a wholly owned subsidiary of NCsoft) - during the time that they released the Guild Wars MMO.

<speculation>
Perhaps, while reworking the Plasma engine for MO:UL, Cyan decided to revamp the networking code. After re-hiring Eric, perhaps Cyan licensed the ArenaNet/NCsoft MMO networking code, with which Eric was quite familiar. When MO:UL folded and Cyan decided to make the code open source, this proprietary networking code could not be distributed under the terms of the license. Since this was Eric's piece, he may have been the only one that knew which code was part of the ArenaNet/NCsoft package - hence, he was the only one who could gut it out of the code base.
</speculation>

_________________
Can we rebuild it? Yes, we can - here's how.

Myst Movie coming soon!

KI #: 1299