An Update · 6:54am Nov 23rd, 2016
After being silent so long I guess I should start by saying this isn't a gloom and doom type blogpost, heh.
This semester, for the past 3 months and for 1 more month yet to come, I've been doing paid research in a university lab. I've gotten to hang out with a lot of professors and even professors visiting from across country. According to my page the last time I wrote A Darkened Land was Sept 18th, but I'm pretty sure I wrote something on Sept 22nd and forgot to update it. Woops.
I spent about a month and a half implementing something that hasn't really been done before and having it perform ridiculously fast. I came back from work everyday feeling brain dead.
But now I'm finally back to doing relatively simple things, like making menu buttons toggle on and off, or... uh... well actually most of the rest of it probably won't sound simple, but at this point it really is for me.
So my brain is less fried and after writing this blog post I'm going to go dust off where I left off. I'm hoping to finish off arc 2 this holiday and start posting it shortly after new year's.
Good news is that the following semester I'm back to classes and I've managed to cajole my schedule into having classes only 3 days a week! I'm hoping arc 3 will come out much, much faster, but in all honesty I'm hoping to spend most of that extra free time developing a game. I should be able to do that and write as well, just as I was before.
What type of game?
What's your research?
4314946
Computer graphics.
4315295 I used to be a patent examiner for computer graphics patents. It was really boring, though, because people only patent stupid things. 2/3 of the patents are from Nintendo, Sony, and IBM, trying to patent absolutely everything--you can't write a computer game today without infringing on dozens of their patents; like, Nintendo has a patent on moving a camera viewpoint dynamically in a 3D world--and stupid or insane people patenting worthless things.
And I had to grant the patents most of the time, because the rules were so much in favor of the patent applicant. Basically you would get a patent unless someone had filed the same exact idea before. I remember one guy filed a patent on the used of linked lists for CAD software. Literally. That was it. I spent an entire day trying to find a way to deny it (I was supposed to spend 3 hours per case), but failed, because nobody in the literature says "we use linked lists in our software". Just saying "That's obvious" counts for nothing; the courts were explicit about that--if it hasn't been written about before, it isn't obvious. And people don't bother writing about really obvious things.
(I was a radical in the patent office, because I would search publications, or the internet, or interview experts over email, rather than just search the back file of old patents. Old examiners were very confused. I'd tell them, "The law says we can use any published evidence, not just prior patent applications," and they'd blink, and say, "But we don't do that here.")
The saddest are the crazy people who have spent years working on some worthless idea, and probably sold their car or mortgaged their house to pay the application fee. There was a guy who filed a patent application on making shapes out of lots of little "S" shapes, combining them in different ways to make curves.
4315533
Patents are a real insanity in software. Software law in general as well. In many cases the people dictating the rules in both know less than the average 8 year old about computers.
4314408
Delayed response, but I'm thinking something surreal/dream-like.
4316495 The problem isn't too much ignorance, but too much rationality. People have tried to make patent law objective and mechanistic, like proving a math theorem. That means taking human judgement out of it. So where in the old days, an examiner was allowed to judge whether something was obvious or not, now instead they have lists of specific requirements to meet to qualify as "obvious".
4315533
The US Patent system needs an overhaul.
There are companies that buy up patents and then sue other companies that seem to violate them.
One patent troll has a patent on a local app that talks to a remote server.
How many apps/games don't do that?
4316499
I wonder how someone does it in gameplay?
Visuals would be easy but to make a surreal game that plays like a dream?