[vworld-tech] VWorld Ontology

[ceo]

Richard wrote:
 >>From: Jim Purbrick [mailto:Jpurbrick at climaxgroup.com]
 >>What are the axioms of virtual worlds?
 >
 >
 > I know its not necessarily the direction Jim was going with this,
 > but is anyone else working on formalising the axioms for their
 > virtual world in order to base its functionality on an inference
 > engine?
 > ...
 > Any thoughts?

It's something we've used for a while now, and there's really only one 
major problem: speed.

Inference engines these days are generally either very very expensive or 
very very slow :P.

We're still evaluating whether any of the commercial off-the-shelf 
engines are fast enough to drive any non-trivial parts of real-time 
games. Obviously, if you're game can cope with a low update frequency 
(e.g. 1Hz or slower) then inference engines should work quite well for you.

However, most (non-top-of-the-range) engines are optimized for 
behaviours that are quite hard to get in games; e.g. the classic 
rete-based systems. We developed our own that has been optimized for the 
kinds of patterns we expect from MMOGs, and this is our base for 
benchmarking the generic commercial ones against (nb: our inference 
engine wouldn't be much use outside of our game-server; lots of 
shortcuts have been taken to try and get it to work tolerably fast, 
using assumptions that are valid for our app domain).

If you're going to attempt this for a hobbyist game, I'd suggest picking 
a game-design where low frequency game-logic was acceptable (there are 
many such game-designs, but it's not going to be easy if you're hoping 
to make a modern MMORPG)

Adam