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December 05, 2003
Funding opportunity
Next meeting re: possible funding: Sunday, Dec 6th, 1:00 PM, Brian Spratt room. Email Matt if you want in on some pizza.
It's easy to get blinded by money. In discussing this opportunity, making sure we're making good choices for the longevity of the CSCS group is important.
That said, we decided to spend some bandwidth (mental, physical) thinking about wireless gaming. In particular, we weren't thinking so much about things like "Hey! I could play Tetris with my friend wirelessly!", but more like "Hey! What if me and 30 people were running around in the woods with WiFi PDAs?"
Or an open field. Or a dungeon. Or wherever you run around with WiFi PDAs.
There has been some good discussion along these lines on the list, but I chatted with Ian Utting about our initial brainstorming; he basically said this would be hard. In particular, WiFi devices, by nature, expect to connect to the strongest signal, and partner with them. So doing a completely ad-hoc, wireless network where all the participants are freely communicating with each-other will (potentially) involve developing all the protocols and networking code (at a relatively low level) ourselves.
Hm.
Doesn't sound good. But, I haven't even googled on questions along these lines. I don't know how hard it would be to develop this kind of code; perhaps someone out there has an alpha toolkit for doing ad-hoc WiFi networking? I suspect they don't.
We didn't spend much time discussing how WiFi PDAs could integrate with our BotNet project, which might be something we can think about as well. There were a few other ideas as well, which might warrant some additional consideration.
I'm not gunning anything down, but I'm starting to worry about the difficulties involved in doing an ad-hoc networked game using wireless PDAs. It might be very hard---as in, low-level network hacking hard, which might not be the best thing for the CSCS group. Nor does it hit on any of my areas of comfort, which generally covers pedagogy, domain-specific programming languages, the design process, and a smattering of AI/Alife.
Hm. This hasn't provided much of a summary from the mailing list, but you can go back and read the messages again, now that you know their context.
Posted by mjadud at December 5, 2003 02:27 PM