GDC: The OLPC Project And Games

Gamasutra continued their extensive coverage of GDC Tuesday, with information on the second day of serious and indie gaming tracks. For those who have been following the One Laptop Per Child Project, one of that project's developers put out a call for serious games to support the device. With plans already in the works to get Sim City open sourced and on the machine, OLPC content manager SJ Klein hopes that more serious titles will enable children to learn through play. Other sessions on Tuesday included a look at the Gatekeepers of indie content, suggestions on prototyping for indie developers, and what sounds like a humorously interesting presentation from Eric Zimmerman about milking the casual games cash cow.

Comments

SimCity for OLPC

[SimHacker]

SJ Klein and I just had a productive meeting with Charles Norman at EA to discuss the details of SimCity for the OLPC, and it's looking very good! It's not officially announced or available yet, but EA is very supportive of the idea, and is just crossing their eyes and dotting their tease (or something to that effect), and Will Wright gave us permission to demonstrate SimCity on the OLPC at the game developer's conference.

If you're at GDC, please come by the OLPC booth at the expo and play with it!

I've done the first basic cut of porting the X11/TCL/Tk based multi player version of SimCity to run on the OLPC, and the next step is to integrate it with Python and Sugar in a deep way, that will make SimCity scriptable in Python, enable all kinds of interesting hooks and plug-ins, and result in a set of reusable general purpose components for building games.

For example, the next step I've taken is to rewrite pie menus in Python with Cairo and Pango, so SimCity and other applications can use them:
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/128

The point is not just to port a game to the OLPC, but rather to use SimCity and other games to drive the development of an open framework to enable and teach kids to program their own games!

The goal is to enable the open source community to renovate SimCity and take it in new educational directions, by applying Seymour Papert's ideas about constructionist education, Alan Kay's ideas about interactive user interfaces and object oriented programming, Ben Shneiderman's ideas about direct manipulation and info visualization, and many exciting ideas about multi player games, blogging, storytelling, game mods, player created content, and lessons learned from World of Warcraft, The Sims, Spore, etc.

Thanks to John Gilmore for getting the ball rolling by suggesting that EA make the original version of SimCity free for the OLPC, and for supporting the development of great free software and tools like GCC, and to Charles Norman for guiding the process through EA, educating people about open source, and making it actually happen, and of course to "Will Wright Code for Food" for creating SimCity it in the first place, and putting his Will Power into making SimCity open source for the OLPC project!

-Don

PS: Here is some stuff about the multi player X11/TCL/Tk version of SimCity:

Multi Player SimCity for X11 is now available from DUX Software!
http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announ cement.html

Screen snapshots:
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/SimCity-For- X11.gif
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/SimCity-Indi go.gif
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/SimCity-NCD. gif
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/SimCity-Sun. gif

X11 SimCity Demo Video:
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/X11SimCityDe mo.mov

Video Tape Transcript of X11 SimCity Demo:
http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/x11-demo.html

Video Tape Transcript of Toronto Usenix Symposium Keynote Address:
http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/keynote.html

Bedlam in SimCity:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-re view.html

PPS: 15 y

Re:SimCity for OLPC

[SimHacker]

Great questions! I'll try to answer:

a) There is already a Linux-capable SimCity: Yes!

b) We are talking about SimCity Classic: Yes!

c) The end result will be OSS: Yes!

d) It will be scriptable in Python: Yes!

a) Are you going to keep it in Tcl/Tk, or is it a complete rewrite in Python and (insert toolkit here)?
The TCL/Tk version will be open source (GPL), so you can do what you want with that, but it's using an old hacked version of TCL/Tk circa 1992. It's stable and playable, but it would be a lot of work to upgrade it to the most recent version of TCL/Tk, and I believe the effort would be better spent converting it to Python and then working on that instead. I plan on porting it to Python by using SWIG, so it will be possible to plug it into other languages that SWIG supports, like Lua.

b) Will this version be usable/portable outside of the OLPC (both leagally and technically)?
The TCL/Tk version will legally and technically run outside of the OLPC. The Python version that I'm developing will use libraries like GTK, Cairo and Pango which run on the OLPC and also work well on other platforms, but it will also use some other libraries that only make sense on the OLPC. The primary goal of my efforts will be supporting the OLPC, but other people can work on supporting other platforms, or even porting OLPC specific libraries so they work on other systems.
c) How faithful is this version to "reference" SimCity (Let's say either the Win31 or Mac versions)?
It's faithfully based on the original Mac version of SimCity "Classic" (before they added the word "Classic" after releasing SimCity 2000). I also have the old terrain editor code, which would be nice to update and integrate into the new code base. It would be great to dig up the old tile sets (European city, moon city, etc), but I don't currently have a copy of them. I have cleaned up and reorganized the code a lot, fixed some bugs, optimized the hell out of it, and replaced the random number generator. I've totally rewritten the user interface and graphics code. But functionally the simulator and is almost exactly the same as Mac SimCity. The save file format is the same, so you can use Mac and PC cities. The only change to the simulator that I can remember was to make the helicopter attracted to the monster so it blows up more often!

-Don

How to get a free OLPC

[SimHacker]

It would be a great idea to sell the OLPC retail to software developers and people in developed countries at a premium price to subsidize them for kids in developing countries. That was the most commonly request people made at the OLPC booth at the game developer's conference.

But the reason they aren't currently selling the OLPC retail yet is that it takes a huge amount of effort and overhead to manage something like that, and the OLPC organization is small and focused on delivering them to the target countries by the millions, at no margin. Managing retail sales would distract from the more important goal of rolling out the laptop to children.

Eventually some other organization might buy a million or so of them and sell them retail, but nothing like that is planned or announced yet, as far as I know.

It's not because they want to keep the laptop away from us, it's because they want to get them to the real target audience as soon as possible.

Software developers can send email to the project describing what software they want to port to it, and if you qualify they will send you one right away for free. I applied for one around christmas, to port SimCity, and it arrived by fedex in just a few days. I don't believe they will ask for them back, since the beta units will soon be obsolete anyway, after they make the next run of them.

They are however putting a lot of effort into making the software development environment available to external developers, so you can develop software without having the actual laptop. You can install the software on a Linux system and run it much faster than it runs on the OLPC, because the "emulation" does not slow it down signifigantly, and your Linux box probably has a much faster processor and lots more memory than the actual machine. There is nothing special about the screen from a software point of view -- it's just a 1200x900 16 bit display from X11's point of view. Get your software running in the development environment on a regular Linux laptop, then make it run as fast as possible, and consume as few resources as possible. Once you can demonstrate a working application on the OLPC under emulation, and need to test it against the actual hardware, you chances of receiving an actual unit to test it on are much higher.

Here is why they are not for individual sale, and here is information about where the Retail Sales Model fits into the whole concept of a $100 laptop. This article describes why One Laptop per Child Has No Plans to Commercialize XO Computer.

"The bottom line is that our mission is learning, not laptops. While we will be working with a commercial partner at some point for both machines and interesting parts--we've been looking at models where by the commercial side can help drive down the cost for the kids--our immediate priority is the non-commercial machine." -Walter Bender

-Don