It seems to me that this project is intended to build on a set of existing standards, so it would help me to see a diagram of how these standards fit together. Perhaps something like the following:
Except that it needs to show better:
- Where are the overlaps between these standards?
- Where are the gaps between these standards? does XGC intend to provide the filler?
- What needs to be covered that is not in these standards yet?
What would be good is, if you could draw a diagram showing all the blocks involved with developing and running a game (perhaps a more complete version of the diagram below) and then to overlay the above standards on them to see where the gaps and overlaps are.
This diagram is not complete, it is just intended to show a possible top level partitioning of functionality for game standards.
The blocks above would depend on the blocks below them, so it is a 7-layer model!
It would also be interesting to see where the gaps are in the existing standards. For instance, X3D seems to have physical shape modelling, and some very low level event modelling, then it has some quite high level stuff like battlefield simulation (I guess that’s where the money is) and human animation. It seems to me that there are several layers missing in between, such as physics simulation (I guess this is because physics is hard to do). This seems to lead to problems, such as placing physics information (such as mass) in the human animation part of the framework but not for other shapes.
Also since all this starts to sound very complicated, will there be cut down versions of the standard (profiles) ? for specific types of games, for example could you fill in a table like this:
| Geospacial | Human Animation | Physics | AI | state tables | ||
| Abstract Board Game | ||||||
| Real Time Strategy | ||||||
| Role Playing Game | ||||||
| Role Playing Strategy | ||||||
| Turn Based Strategy | ||||||