For an important project I am looking at a number of “platforms”, including Blender Game Engine which seems to be very attractive to me!
My requirements are not really “game specific” but more “virtual worlds”:
- several visitors connecting into the same virtual world
- they should be able to chat/IM using little windows, to see each other etc…
- I need to collect statistics on number of users, what they do,…
- it should be secure
- e-commerce should be possible within the world
- teleporting would be nice, as well as kind of “flying mode” (like in Second Life)
- avatar mode / 3rd person viewpoint
- from within a gaming world is it possible, when a visitor/player clicks on an object, to (1) first display a set of text lines (e.g. within a specific world window), containing also a standard www URL, (2) when the visitor then clicks on this URL, the system opens a conventional www window for this URL ?
- the biggest issue is around networking: as a minimum there should be a master or server system able to synchronize the clients at connecting time-- after that one can imagine they synchronize directly in peer-to-peer mode; however the server I have available is not accepting C++ libraries – which means that I cannot use Blender Game Engine on this server/master – how can I synchronize the clients then ? For instance can I write a Python CGI to do this ? Any hints/pointers ?
Many thanks in advance,
-michel
