Intro

The BUILDING document explains how to fetch all the source and build the project.

Plexus is an "advanced" programming project, focusing on shared, 3D worlds and integrating with Second Life. This is for people (like me) who want to learn some advanced things or get more practical experience with them. It's not "just" to make a cool game. So, if you're more interested in having a cool game than learning advanced techniques, stay away. You won't like this project (except maybe as a player). I'll be focusing on functional programming and other advanced techniques. Along the way, I'll need to modify Kirstensviewer and I'll contribute the code back (just like I always do). Here are a few things I'd like to see:

many worlds from a single server; players can easily create and destroy worlds and hop from one to another
"society of mind" style game actor control, dynamically distributed among the players' game engines

I'd like to explore some concurrent, model-based reasoning here, probably using actors
1. start exploring possibilities, based on some "complex" reasoning involving the player's state, etc.
2. go until it reaches a decision point that could have more than one alternative
3. at that point, create actors for the alternatives; each actor can change its own version of the world
4. the world is a HAMT, so "changes" don't affect the other actors' models
5. the output is a much simpler decision tree
natural language processing for decent text entry
both visual and auditory information propagation: I'd like to be able to create an object and send it to everything that could "see it" or "hear it". This is like "line of sight" vs "area of effect", for information (i.e. events)
visual portals, like "magic mirrors" -- a video screen that you can walk or shoot through
Tools for moderated games; control rooms with "voodoo dolls" that you can use to affect player objects
Tools for remote tabletop role playing
Tools to support spectator sports, like "human golf", where players launch themselves towards targets surrounded with dangerous terrain (our prototypes were great fun to watch)
A Git-based, rsync/bittorrent information distribution system that supports efficient transfer, versioning, and strong cryptography to verify authorship (so people can't steal credit)
A lot of other things I've written about before, which you can find on http://blog.plubble.com/, if you're motivated

I'm planning to do as much as I can in node.js, using functional techniques, but some things potentially depend on viewer mods, like overlay sensor maps, for instance. I want to retarget Coffeescript to generate Lua, though, because part of the coolness of functional programming is how it handles concurrency and Lua supports multithreaded code with shared memory. Node.js doesn't -- even with WebWorkers, you don't get shared memory; it copies messages around. Since I want to share megabytes of memory, that's not really a good option for me. Node.js could be be made to work, if each worker kept its own separate copy of the state of the world and they each got all of the changes and updated their own worlds (to an identical state), but since Lua can completely avoid all of that extra work, I think Lua makes more sense. Also, it's even faster than node.js :).

For me, the point is writing the code, teaching, and learning.

Flow

game senses event (from user, net, or clock)
the game calls update(event, incomingChanges, currentState) -> (nextState, outgoingChanges)
game installs nextState and sends outgoingChanges to viewer

Links

Here's an overview talk at the CCCKC hackerspace. It starts around 23:30 Here are the slides

Here is the Plexus git repo

Here is my Coffeescript git fork with the 'mofor' construct

Here is node.js, which you'll need to run Coffeescript

Here is my version of Kirstensviewer

Here is the Xus git repo

Here is the Wikipedia article on Functional Programming

For reference, here is the CubeCreate git fork I was using for the CubeCreate version

Milestone 1: Two Guys in a Box

Viewer Connectivity

Port socket code from sauer mods to viewer
- code uses "mysocket" in engine/main.cpp and remote/remote.cpp
Write socket handler in JS
each message from viewer to Plexus is a JSON array, followed by a newline: [msg, arg, arg, arg]\n
each message from Plexus to viewer is a lua expression (containing no newlines), followed by a newline: print('hello\nthere')\n

Functional Programming Support

mod Coffeescript with "__FUNCTIONAL__" tag: __FUNCTIONAL__ precedes a program and disallows secondary assignments or assignments to properties outside of constructors

This allows you to make "pure" or "impure" files. It doesn't preclude calling impure code from pure functions, but we could add support for that if desired (there would be a runtime peanalty, I think), by marking functions as "pure" and checking for that before you call a function.

Xus connectivity

Make sure Xus is up and running properly
Instructions for running Xus locally for testing
Fill out xus.coffee

Reactive model

state stored in HAMT
impure wrapper around functional code
- [nextState, newNetworkEvents, newCreateChanges] = engine(currentState, networkEvents, events)
- store nextState
- send network events out
- apply new changes

Two Guys in a Box

A room with two guys
transmit movement and orientation using Xus
reflect transmission in viewer

zot/Plexus