Foole's Journal: Foole's Incompleteness Theorem

I guess I can add 'typing up the police interview transcript' to my list of unfinished tasks. When inspiration hits, I can work on something for months. Then something happens in my head and any attempt to even think about working will cause an anxiety attack.

Some of my unfinished programming projects:

• a team play oriented 3D space shooter

I got partway thru developing an engine for this (IrrLite). I was hoping to make something with similar team play elements to the Tribes series, but set in space, like Allegiance. Actually part of the reason it was to be set in space is that I figured the collision detection would be easier. I got as far as being able to fly around in a skybox and shoot fireballs.

I tried to develop a system for optimising vertex buffers and got stuck.

On a side note, I think someone should redo Allegiance, but with a control system similar to Freelancer.

• an MMO using Jabber and vector graphics

I think this idea could work. A game that isn't time critical, where perhaps a battle is played out over months. Similar to Puzzle Pirates or Tribal Wars. I got noughts and crosses working and started on battleships before giving up.

• a MAPI provider and object database

The idea of storing objects in a hierarchical database the way Outlook and Exchange do interests me a lot. I think it's the one thing that all the "open source exchange replacements" have missed. It's as if they feel obliged to stick to standard protocols like IMAP and POP3 for client to server communication and yet go inventing things like CalDAV.

MAPI defines a low level object database query API with a few mail-specific features. This single API works for email, calendar, contacts etc. Each object in the database is just a variable length collection of field names and values. It's much more flexible than a RDBMS where every row in a table has the same fields and adding more requires schema changes.

Unfortunately just about everything you'd need to replicate this in open source is missing. Well, to be honest, part of the problem is that I insist on doing everything in C#. BerkeleyDB might be a good back end for this but its API is not C# friendly. I actually wrote a b-tree implementation but got stuck at working out a file format.

• a WoW server emulator

This is a long and complicated story that I should probably write up some day.

I had a server working to the point where you could wander around the world and talk to other players. Combat kinda worked and that was about it. Keeping it up to date with the latest patches was a headache.

Blizzard (and/or Vivendi) apparently have my name somewhere from their crackdowns on WoW server emulation.

• a game based on the OdT comic

I thought a 2D fighting game (mock-up) would be easy. I was wrong

These are just a few of the ones I found looking thru my project folders. There are many many more, and they all haunt me.