User talk:Carnildo Greenacre/Night Skies

Marv's crazy thoughts

See Project:Celestial Effects

Rename feature to "Celestial Effects"

Since the effects you refer to- comets, planets, starfiled, and one assumes Aurora Borealis, as well as celestial bodies such as nebulae, pulsars, supernovas, asteroid fields etc etc, are effects seen in the sky or space (which is the basic definition of 'celestial'), it would make sense to make allowance for the code to be extended to provide this wider scope.

I would suggest implementing bitTorrent (or other P2P protocol) client, putting an option in the Network tab, and adding the necessary UI elements that say "Customised Celestial Effects Server XYZ has n celestial packs available for this parcel/simulator, please select download", as well as options for saving/deleting/editing said celestial effects.

Separate bandwidth control options would be advised, although the gzipped/7zipped celestial effects packages are likely to be rather small.

Since it would be cool to have the ability to edit the celestial effects, it might make sense to implement a version control system, so once people have played around with the effects package, they could submit their take on the pack/their improvements back to the server.

• It would be useful to alert people who are using another version of the effects pack that another version has been made available

I'm going to hazard a guess that doing a mashup of CVS/SVN + bitTorrent might be a pain in the ass, but with 20k+ concurrent Resis, and filesizes of less than 16kb (adding support for procedural generation of content to help lower things further would be advised), this would make things rather efficient if it was pulled off.

Individual items of content should be made available for distribution individually- one person's comet effect might be better than another's for example.

Since these creations will involve intellectual property, I would advise enforcing a Creative Commons licensing policy from the get-go.

Summary

• Rename feature to "Celestial Effects"
• use bitTorrent or other P2P technology to distribute content
• use Version Control systems for server-side storage
• enforce Creative Commons licensing ( CC BY-NC-ND for example would mean refusing submissions back to the central storage server.
  • Since multiple servers are likely to be made available, it would make sense for the following two features to be added to the servers
    1. Checking to make sure someone hasn't resubmitted someone else's content as a fresh asset.
    2. Allowing communication between servers to check results.
• Allow individual assets of the effects package to be modified or replaced
  • An option for:
    • Always use asset X for asset type Y
    • Never use asset type Y
    • Never use assets under a specific CC license
  • This would mean a single data format could be designed for things such as constellations, which could be combined with any number of celestial effects for the numerous Star asset types, rendering effects for specific subsets of the Star asset type.

Celestial Asset Types

• Stars
• Nebulae
• Comets
• Asteroids
• See the Wikipedia article on celestial bodies for full list

I'm going to stop myself short on this, as I feel this feature alone would eat up a rather large amount of the talk page and is complex enough that it should be given it's own sub-section of the wiki, Project:Celestial Effects, since I have all kinds of crazy ideas in mind for this :-D

SignpostMarv Martin 08:52, 13 January 2007 (PST)