Dagobert

Some people might have noticed that Gamestudio development appeared a little slow in the last 6 weeks, as there were only a few new features for the beta version. The reason is not the work on the new WED, but mostly a new project.

The development started in December, and the main part is now done. Development will go on, but won't need much resources anymore. So the focus can now be on Gamestudio again. The next steps for the immediate future will be OpenAL, new PhysX features, and new templates.

The new Gamestudio project, with name "Dagobert", is scheduled for release by the end of this year. It's a massive multiplayer application, even more massive than "Utopia", but it's not a game. And most important, funding and payment are guaranteed this time .

Hi JCL,

That is a really good news! Good luck for your new project! And can't wait for the new features

I am guessing payment means more money for gamestudio development? (possibly for hiring more manpower for heavy stuff like new med?)

Sounds great, looking forward to see soft bodies.

And of course we all want some more Infos about Dagobert.

Greate Stuff!

The first thing I thought about when i heared dagobert was him. (he's only familiar to germans though.)

Will this be a crime MMO?
Or will this be a disney MMO? Would be a german disney MMO then, as Scrooge McDucks name in Germany is Dagobert Duck. Still possible though.. Or is it about the medieval king Dagobert I. ?

MMONASDAQ?
MMORPGDAX?

Congratulations.

"It's a massive multiplayer application, even more massive than "Utopia", but it's not a game."
So you are working on a Torrent client?

Good luck with your project, whatever it really is.

Is "Dagobert" made with Gamestudio

Good Luck

No one would use Gamestudio anymore, I'm sure that they bought a Torque or Unity3D license to make the MMBONG (Massively multiplayer bold online, not a game).

I don't like avaricious grumpy Dagobert. Clumsy Donald is way cooler.

And I was so excited to read another story. "The rise and fall of Dagobert"

congratulations. BTW, what about HDR?

it sounds lika a project with gamestudio!
mfg
xxxxxxx

I don't really care about this new project...too long till it will be realised.. At the moment I more care about new sound engine and more physics features (this are the only reasons for me to start working with A8). And really, what about HDR? And when we'll get good shadow mapping? All in all, happy to hear that development of GS will be faster now.

I wanna see Dagobert
---yeah and of course a lot of great new features (in physics and more)

JCL, what else information can you give us? For example how many persons working on that project? And give us a hint what genre (if not a game) it is?

In the time it'll take for them to get around to implementing HDR and shadow mapping up to your standards, you could learn shaders and implement them yourself.

I'm looking forward to seeing Dagobert, and what effect it has on A8's development (ie, what features they'll feel they need to add to get it to work).

Jibb

Implement reall HDR myself? Are you nuts? Yeah, I'm looking forward to see new features too, which will be caused by that project development. But more important for me is OpenAL And don't tell me to implement it myself...

I'm looking forward to OpenAL as well. But yes, implement real HDR yourself OpenAL would be a change to the engine. HDR would be them providing some shaders for us.

Use the shader workshops, understand shaders, implement HDR. I use HDR (not in KarBOOM, because it's not useful there), and my only training is the shader workshops.

Jibb

Can't you finish your project first and integrate HDR later when it's available?

Are you sure you can just integrate a new shader for HDR?

I thought the meaning of HDR is to have a higher range and precision. So when you have a bigger color or light depth, doesn't it mean, that also some engine commands dealing with bitmaps should support the same data width?

I mean, even the tools should be able to read hdr images then. So we could light a scene via a hdr background image as an example. So sky cubes could be an example for that. The lightmapper also should be able to read and write it.

If he has to build a complete game - and that's what it looks like - there are enough things to be done first.
And if Conitec keeps promises HDR will be available at the time where special things may need to be prepared for HDR.

Good Luck with the Project JCL

If Dagobert fails like Utopia (I don't hope so!), please, please write down the whole story as you did for Utopia. It was so great to read. Or event better: Sell the story to some Hollywood-Studios.

I have a vision: Bruce Willis as a hardcore conitec-programmer. He got hurt everywhere, one leg is broken and a bullet has ripped of half of his face. But he is going on programming, coding, modelling! Because someone has to do this dirty job...

(if bruce is not available, sylvestre stallone could do the painfull job as well).

Anyway, I wish you luck with the new project.

Well Dagobert could be interesting only if we could play a demo !
Torque 3D with it's new pricing would be lot more appropritae for an MMO indeed with all it's features, editor and code network ! Strange !!


What i really wait is the new collision system using Nvidia Physics, something like collisions used in Unity !
And it should be cool to find one day some visual capsule editor like in Unity for adjusting the collision of a characters directly without coding !

Well cool news for 3DGS, even if i think turning to some
license between open source and payment would allow it to grow
lot more fast and have lot more features like Ogre 3D !
Juts my opinion !

Read: It should be cool to find one day some visual capsule editor for getting a lot of unnecessary overhead. Just because I´m to lazy to type vec_scale(my.max_x, 0.5);

Well again my friend

Why coding so such simple things ?
It's somethng used for any character , why coding whe you can do it visually ?

Well each people have is own preferences ,mine is workflow instead of coding , that's all !

Well just my point of view !

Because the underlaying thingyfoo would have to create another file that saves the customized settings. Like the T7 template system for example.
This introduces a lot of overhead and it´s not simple at all.


But we are getting OT.

Sounds Interesting, hope you will have success

(Hoping for new engine features :D)

Really interesting product which might indeed make you Dagobert-like.

But I doubt that

x = x >> 2; // divides x by 4

really conforms with the no real programming approach

http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
For the future

I like what I see on the beta page, I hope the development continues this way!

Yeah but I dislike that the new HDR effect is tied to the camera view. Why in the world would someone do that! Sounds like someone of us has to port it to arbitrary view stages

I didn't know that Galep uses Lite-C... but I guess it explains some features which never seemed to make much sense

I hope this means more work on the linux server.

How is the development going?

any news?

Here is something about Dagobert:

http://www.unendliches.net/german/reichtum.htm

--> http://dagobert-trader.com/

year what happend o.O

edit: @Rei: seriously o.o

?

As Forex (a pretty capital company) is sponsoring this software i assume that conitec is doing well...

Uh no wait cant be conitec op gamestudio and the forum is dying!!!1111elf!!
Gefälligst!

gehässig?

Wenn Dagobert das tut was es verspricht werde ich ein sehr sehr glücklicher reicher Mensch!

Wenn es das tun würde, würde Lotti nicht mehr arbeiten sondern auf einer schönen Insel wohnen und einen neuen Morbius Roman schreiben

Don't worry. I'm still working. Dagobert can't make poor people rich, it only can make poor people less poor.

Dagobert development is proceeding well, although as usual, it's more work than expected - just like any game development.

yeah that could be added to the end of just about any project. ive noticed that when im planning a project i think about the hard parts and just expect to run through the easy parts... then it always turns out the easy parts are never 100% easy.

Sometimes, its literally vice versa! The easy parts become really exhausting, while the hard parts are solved in minutes if you are clever.

@JCL: Good luck with your project! Maybe you can make some profit with it, too ^^

At least it will make Lite-C more public (if it does not fail) -> the community grows -> More licenses sold -> more effort in the development of GS -> Better for us!

AWESOME...
"...it only can make poor people less poor."
NOW... that's a great line.... and funny too...

But
"Falls Sie dennoch den Ehrgeiz haben, in den Besitz einer obszönen Menge Geld zu kommen - natürlich ohne zu arbeiten - folgt hier eine Schritt-für-Schritt-Anleitung" ( source)
sounds different, more like "make any people rich"...

This is interesting.
Waiting for first tests

@Clemens: You can't make any person rich because the pool where the money comes from is generated by those who lose the gambling game. You can't make money from nothing so your profit is always the loss of someone else, this way there must always be a loser and a winner to play the game.

For sure! Gambling is in fact NO win-win-situation. that's also what jcl indicate at What's the catch?->Pkt.3
What I simply mean is that the german quote above says "obszönen" amount of money, which sounds for me more like "getting quite rich" instead of "getting less poor".

rich != lots of money

@Clemens "make any people rich" often present in my country's political propaganda.......
but seems nobody believe it. in fact, bureaucrats & capitalists (somecases they are one) hold majority of money & cut the chances which let poor pepole earn more.

To avoid a misconception: Trading can indeed generate money from nothing. In fact, financial asset trading generates every second a huge amount of money. But it can also destroy money, as happened in the 2009 crash.

The financial market is no zero-sum game. That's why it's theoretically possible to release a software like Dagobert and increase the worldwide wealth.

But even if money is created, no value is created. More money means inflation. That means if someone makes money out of nothing, someone does lose, not money, but value, because their money will be worth less. And that is everyone else.

How much money do you have to invest since you generate some reasonable profit with Dagobert?

Actually an inflation is not a bad thing at all, if your money is less worth tomorrow you are more likely to spend it today thus you help the market grow which at the end pays you back. If we had a deflation, everyone would sit on their money and nothing would happen, thats a real loss.

However, I don't agree with JCL on his point with the market is not a no-zero game, thats exactly what it should be. Remember the bank crisis 2009? We should have let all of them die, because this is how the market works. You risk money if you want more, but if you lose, you should really lose instead of being saved by whatever. What do you think happens now? I as a bank manager would start the next money risking adventure right away, risking even more money if possible because I know, if I lose, someone will help me out. Thats a problem and it needs to be fixed and not exploited.

Don't worry about inflation. You probably had in mind the 1920 inflation in Germany, when money was printed like mad. But trading does normally not cause inflation. Your money won't lose its value. Inflation is caused by a demand/supply imbalance that can be completely unrelated to the money circulating in the financial market.

The financial market can also not be converted to a zero-sum game. Otherwise you had to freeze the exchange rates and prices of all financial assets, which is unrealistic. If the banks and fonds should have been left to die in 2009 is another matter. But I think we did not really have that choice.

As to the question how much money you need, you should have about 20000 EUR in your account for receiving a monthly income in the EUR 1000..2000 range. But this is preliminary, as we're still working on the trade algorithms. It's surprisingly complex to calculate the real income from the income gained in the simulation.

One question, though: isn't buying/selling stocks very expensive? Afaik it costs about 5$ per transaction, which would make trading senseless for less than some million $.

you are not trading stocks here, you are buying and selling moneys of other currencies.

Dagobert does not trade single stocks. It trades currencies, stock indices such as the DAX or NASDAQ, and commodities such as oil or gold.

The usual cost per trade and curreny unit is about 0.0003 $. If you're not Warren Buffett, you normally trade not with millions but in the 100$ range.

ah, I didn't know that. But then, of what time scale do we speak here? How long is one average period of buying and reselling an index?

If the platform you are trading on allows that, avarage period could be a couple of seconds/minutes

Okay. I'm still not sure how you could probably make money out of it. Stock quotes are grey noise, so... well. Without some extremely sophisticated cross-correlation algorithm... how do you expect the average user to model the stock market? If it was that easy, more people would do it.

from sudden changes on parities.

you buy dollars when they are cheap, then sell them back when they got more expensive.

And for finding out when they are cheap and when they will get more expensive, the average user will hopefully use a somewhat more sophisticated algorithm than cross-correlation.

I bet the average user doesn't even know what that is, let alone know how to code it.

i bet jcl is not really interested as long he receives his money

btw: theoretical view: this CAN not work, because if it worked, more user would use it. If more users use it, they push the prices at the same time and influence the currencies. If really a LOT of people are using this it will be contraproductive to use this tool, as you'll buy when everybody buys, and sell when everybody sells, just seperated by different lags to the internet..

So my conclusion: If this tool works, it will stop working with rising sucess. If the tool does not work, it will never work

Or am i wrong somewhere (as already said: not that this is really important to jcl, as this is probably contract work, and not work, paid depending on how sucessful the tool is).

I doubt very much this will be the case. I can't imagine someone's offering JCL a contract in which he only gets rich if the contractor does.
Though now, this suddenly reminds me of the other project recently undertaken and thinking maybe he did sign a contract with this being offered.

Well, software like this certainly raises questions like "Can automated trading work" or "Are average users too dumb to write a trading script". Obviously, these questions can only be answered empirically and not from a gut feeling or kitchen logic. You have to try it, or look what other people do, or do studies.

All this has been done, so the short answers are Yes and No. The long answers will be given in the Dagobert documentation, which is still rudimentary but will be complete for the beta test. BTW, this is a contract project and payment is not dependent on the number of users.