Technical Design

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Technical options discussed so far:

The current plan is developing OAM in a top VR game / world environment. Of course this depends on the availability of sufficient funding. It is important to have low-cost options for the development of a demonstrator that can be shown to investors.

The Novamente AI engine can be used for the AI subsystem. This engine represents an important advance in AI technology in videogames and VR worlds.

Cry Engine 2 is very expensive, but the initial implementation can be developed as a free mod. A mod developed with the Crysis Mod SDK will run on a PC with the Crysis game installed, and can be a total conversion (a completely new game). See also the crymod portal. Cry Engine 2 is currently considered the top game engine. It is suitable for massively multiplayer VR worlds, for example Entropia Universe is being ported to Cry Engine 2 and the Blue Mars metaverse will be based on Cry Engine 2. The Novamente AI engine can _probably_ be integrated in the full licensed Cry Engine 2 platform, not sure about the Crysis Mod SDK.

Multiverse is a massively multiplayer VR world (metaverse) environment. It is a very ambitious project with attractive technical and pricing options and has received a lot of press coverage. The Novamente AI engine has been integrated in the Multiverse platform.

There is also the possibility to use simpler environments for a throwaway prototype.

Second Life and open source alternatives under development (eg Opensim, Realxtend - The performance and graphic capabilities of this platform are not suitable for the full production version of OAM, but it can be used for a throwaway prototype and a community site. The Novamente AI engine has been integrated in the Second Life platform. A development option is developing a good prototype with SL technology, then keeping the prototype in SL as a community hub and moving to Cry Engine 2 or Multiverse as a final production environment.

The C4 Engine is a low cost engine with reasonably good graphics and available with C++ source code. It has very clean code and excellent support. It is suitable for throwaway prototype, for example one level installed on a server and moderately multiplayer (10-20 at a time), but it is probably not suitable for the full production version of OAM.