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Yikes, another Slashdotting! Ok, everyone, batten down the hatches...

In answer to the question - currently no-one, and I mean no-one, has a really good idea what the best Machinima engine to choose is. There's just been too much happening in the Machinima world lately - with The Sims 2, Half-Life 2, Rome Total War, Doom 3 and all the rest coming out in quick succession, not even we've had a chance to really give all the available engines a workout.

Plus, with the Half-Life 2 SDK due next week, the Rome Total War patch coming soon, and people still learning how to make Machinima in half these engines, everything's still moving too fast.

If you want to create non-FPS style Machinima, you could do worse than check out some of the RTS and RPG games around. Dawn of War looks great for Machinima purposes, and obviously with Discovery and the BBC the Rome Total War engine is an old hand at Machinima already. My own company, Strange Company, is currently using the Neverwinter Nights engine, which is really powerful too if you're used to getting around engine limitations.

The Sims 2 appears to be powerful but limited, particularly in terms of controlling characters to follow your direction. I believe even the Rooster Teeth team are finding creating "The Strangerhood" in Sims 2 quite challenging, and we've had a lively discussion of how best to use the engine on the Machinima.com forums.

The Movies obviously isn't out yet. Looks good, but there's some major questions over how controllable the movie-making will be.

Honestly, currently, my best bet for an all-round Machinima engine would be Half-Life 2. Everything we've heard and seen says that it's got all the features you need, Half-Life 1 was one of the best Machinima engines ever, and whilst obviously you need a story that's appropriate to the content, our experience has always been that the HL content is remarkably adaptable to tell whatever story you want.

However, I should stress that, particularly until the SDK arrives, that's just a guess. We just don't know - perhaps there will be a key bug making it unusuable.

There's a whole host of Machinima possibilities out there, and the fact that even the pros (like me) don't know which way to jump means there's never been a better time to get started!

-

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock, Editor, Machinima.com

"My name was Mike. His name is Bob."

One is Rogue Farm and the other is GAME. Apparently GAME is both for broadcast and console delivery. You can interact with each episode somehow.

Ooh, look at those flames go. Brief intro to point out biases: I'm Hugh Hancock, the CEO of Strange Company mentioned above (although I should point out that we're far from the only motivators of Machinima- other groups like the Ill Clan have been instrumental in its growth). I'm also, I think, even more extreme in my views on IPR and its upcoming demise than Jon.

Yes, Intellctual Property Rights as we know them, or indeed at all, are doomed. Count on it. Why? Because they're not "rights" at all. They're abberations forced upon us by the primitive nature of the distribution media we've had, up to now, available to us.

I think that a key point of Bruce Sterling's brilliant Viridian Manifesto is apposite here: ideology doesn't transcend technology. Technology transcends ideology. And technology, in this case digital distribution, is forcing a change in thinking, back from a top-down distribution model, where a few companies crank out CDs for the masses to a, well, distributed version.

Distribution is only the first stage. The thing that's really going to do horrible things to the whole concept of owning either and idea or an expression (thanks to the poster who pointed out the difference) is the freedom to not only copy, but copy, alter and release your own version of a song, a film, a TV series- whatever. It's not the freedom to distribute an unaltered version that counts- it's the freedom to find something you like, take bits out of it, change it, combine it with something else and then release it.

That's where Machinima comes in, of course. In the next year, there will be the technology to allow Star Trek fans to create their own episodes of Voyager or Deep Space Nine. There will be the capability for fans of the Heavy Metal series of comics and films to go and create their own movies in that universe. There will be the potential to take any fictional universe, any story, and extend it, re-tell it or alter it, and then distribute it, in a way that's almost impossible to stop until it's too late. (For the curious, there's an article covering this concept in more detail over at http://www.machinima.com)

At the same time, we should look at other ways in which the concept of "plagiarism" is being destroyed: with fan-fiction, distributed over the Web. With "re-mixes" and "covers", now an accepted part of modern music, where an artist takes an existing track, changes it or re-records it to suit himself, and re-releases it. Hell, even with sophisticated photo-manipulation software: are you sure you haven't seen a similar picture somewhere else before?

So, does that mean that we're entering a new age? No. It means that the abberation of the last 400 years or so, and most pervasively the last 80 years or so- the concept of "intellectual property"- is about to come to an end.

Intellectual Property as a concept grew up with the spread of books as a means of recording information, but it became important with the creation of the printing press: a device that allowed mass reproduction of identical copies of a work. However, the important thing to note here is that IP is tied very closely with the notion that reproduction and distribution of a work, whether it be the printed word, music, a picture or a film, is difficult, and that distribution of the same is even more difficult. In every industry where there is a major fight currently underway to prevent "piracy", there is the situation where the monopoly big players had- the monopoly of distribution- is suddenly being undermined, as the ability to distribute freely is given to every player in the market.

The last time that was the case ended around 200 years ago, with the printing press and common literacy started to spell the end of the oral tradition of storytelling.

In many ways, the oral tradition mirrors the current situation on the Internet very closely. There was no ownership of an idea- a particularly famous storyteller may have been credited with the creation of a story, but that didn't mean he had the right to decide what happened to it, any more than nowadays Linus Torvalds has the right to decide what you, gentle reader, do with his source code to Linux. There were no "royalties", and by the very nature of the distribution medium- the human tongue- it was kinda hard to stop people changing a story to what they thought was an "improved" version.

Many people have conceptualised the Internet as a "group mind". It might be better to think of it as a "group campfire": a place where we can trade tales and ideas with, rather than just the people of our village, the people of (oh, horrible buzzword) the global village. And in that situation, the concept of preventing people from distributing the latest film or the latest CD becomes as idiotic as George Lucas trying to prevent someone from recounting the story of Star Wars in a bar to his friends.

Speaking as a licensee of Monolith's (we're making the product that's currently codenamed Lithtech Film Producer), this announcement has made us very happy, too. We've had a lot of complaints the our beta demo, Ozymandias, isn't compatible with Linux (and Mac), and I was just about to look into the possibility of porting ourselves when they made the announcement!

Speaking as a licensee of Monolith's (we're making the product that's currently codenamed Lithtech Film Producer), this announcement has made us very happy, too. We've had a lot of complaints the our beta demo, Ozymandias, isn't compatible with Linux (and Mac), and I was just about to look into the possibility of porting ourselves when they made the announcement!