Community Achitecture: MonoDevelop

MonoDevelop is an idea so cool, I swore I thought of it.  Basically, it’s a cross-platform IDE that initially caught my eye because of another product made by Mono: MonoGame, which is basically XNA reincarnated.  But this isn’t about singing Mono’s praises or even chastising Microsoft for how they handled XNA (that’s another article).  No, this is all about the the people behind MonoDevelop and the code itself.  That’s right children, FOSS strikes again.

As a body of code, MonoDevelop is a beast.  But honestly, shouldn’t it be one?  I mean, it’s an IDE.  It got a few points on Callaway’s Coefficient of Fail for being humongous and I guess I have to be OK with that.  Outside of being huge, I must say that it’s quite a hospitable body of code.  That is to say, I feel comfortable perusing it.  Comments abound, and I’m always confident that I know where I am.  Maybe that’s just me being a guy, but kudos to the people keeping tabs on internal documentation.  Also, every file has the licensing info right there.  Normally I don’t care much about that but for this monster of a project, it’s a big deal.

In the interest of ending on a happy note, I could just stop, but I won’t.  I want to emphasize what went wrong when analyzing this community.  Namely, the community itself.  The IRC chat was so dead, a tumbleweed would have felt awkward.  Nobody said anything for the longest time.  I’d like to think that I just got unlucky.  On top of that, the community seems to be like five people.  The more I delved into MonoDevelop, the more it seemed like a secret club of five dudes in their tree-house hacking away at a project for fun.  The whole thing kind of soured the experience, even though I personally love Mono.  As an outsider, this makes me want to shy away from working on it, and that alone—the perception of a project’s community—is sometimes more important than the actual community.

I know I sound like a hater now, but I’m being critical because I love this team and this project.  Besides, all things considered, it only got a +25 on the CCOF.  Not that bad really.

Here’s a link to the report.

You’ll need the questions too, brah.

UNLIMITED POWUH!

So, apparently this company named Euclideon is claiming that they have a graphics engine which uses virtual atoms instead of polygons.

Let that simmer in your mind for a bit.  Atoms.

I won’t go into the specifics of it all, because the info is in this video…

This blew my mind, especially the part about scanning real objects.  This revolutionizes character creation.   If scanners could be created for average consumers, you could actually be yourself in a game.  3d concepts can be sculpted and immediately imported into the game.

I don’t have the technical expertise to effectively assess the potential of this technology, but I don’t need to be an expert to say that this will surely change the way we look at games (literally).

And so it begins…

Hooray for my first post!

Hopefully this is the start of something good.  Basically, I plan to use this blog to express my opinions on video game related topics, but some other random stuff might ninja its way in.  Hopefully, I say enough interesting things to differentiate me from the other thousands of people speaking on the same topics.

Also, let me explain my name.  I have two older brothers.  For a while, we only had consoles which supported up to two players by default (never had a Playstation Multi-Tap).  So for a long time, I had to forge my gaming identity independent of them, even as they influenced me.  And so, a unique middle-childish-but-not-the-middle-child sort of character is born!

How’s that for an intro?