Hey guys. Although I’ve tried to move to using PureOS and libre GNU stuff as much as possible, one of the projects that I have continued to mess around with is my personal hobby of rewriting one of the old Warcraft brand games as a Java program. Because I was rewriting it in Java, it’s extremely easy for me to take a project that I originally made in a very corrupted and nonfree world somewhere else, and to try to leave that behind me and move to PureOS and my code still runs.
But, because the fundamental concept of that software game ecosystem is mimicking proprietary things, it still leads me to socialize online with groups of people who just do not – whatsoever – care about the problem that we all subtly know exists somewhere in our mind. For example, there are a lot of Windows users in that space, and since Windows made Microsoft more powerful then eventually Microsoft bought that Warcraft brand so that they can eventually own all games ever created on Windows, or something else comical like that, since the monopoly laws made for Rockefeller back in the day probably don’t apply to Microsoft anymore since Microsoft has a lot of money.
Anyway as a result of that, my social activity of trying to do game stuff is super tainted. I try to play my rewrite of the game of Warcraft (a brand now owned by Microsoft) by downloading the source code for my project which is hosted on GitHub (a bunch of servers owned by Microsoft to help them take over open source or whatever) and use that to try to rebel against the original game. And then people expect me to help them to get my rebellion rewrite to run on Windows (owned by Microsoft). And when I talked bad about Microsoft for selling out the US government security to foreign powers, including the nuclear weapons (DoE) on a forum for the video games, because Microsoft was shown to clearly know about “SolarWinds” hack in advance but got everyone to focus on “SolarWinds” instead of Microsoft as the problem and then knowingly sold the deficient technology to US government for profit because fixing it would have cost too much time and risked losing the government contract… when I said because of all that, I didn’t respect Microsoft and wanted some further help on my rewrite of the game, and I posted something like that on a supposedly third-party game forum where people discuss modding the Warcraft, my post was deleted by the admins. Maybe they necessarily have to suck up to Microsoft, I do not know.
But it’s all pretty stupid. It’s like a giant monopoly that is destroying my country, and destroying how I want to pretend to fight orcs or demons in my spare time, and manipulating where and how I try to rebel against them. And I appreciate that it would all go away if I would rip the particular style of art out of my head, and go and do some other thing on the computers for fun that is expressly not that thing. At least for now – there might be a future where a monopoly that powerful finds a way to patent the concept of “playing a game” or perhaps “fighting a demon,” so I appreciate that in a few years maybe the idea that I could escape and still own my imagination is maybe going to become wishful thinking.
But partly I’m just curious if other people don’t have this problem. Maybe what gets me the most is using resources online to work out the linear algebra necessary for hermite and bezier curve interpolations, chaining the matrix multiplications for that together into character geometry deformations on OpenGL shaders to skin 3D models against their animations, configuring my per-pixel fragment shader software to run and blend the colors of one triangle as it passes in front of the other and to incorporate its distance from a concept of “light source” that I invented to mimic my childhood, and then layering on top of that a lock-step game simulation based on my own loose understanding of how I wanted it to flow and hooking up UDP networking with some shoddy attempt at packet loss recovery, and seeing all of that run and sitting there playing with friends in person boasting about, “yeah man I rewrote Warcraft, thanks for playing the rewrite with me.” And yet, then even after all of that, I realize that we live in a society with laws that are voted on based on a jury of peers and there are still people who believe that everything I created using open source tech online, and all of that, because it reads from proprietary art files would still be voted by a jury of “peers” (meaning non-peers, ignorant people, they know nothing of technology) that it is the same as a trademark or patent technology. And accordingly, I exist within the confines of some bizarre mind prison, manipulated by people hiding in the shadows, who would show up and tell me to stop doing what I’m doing if certain conditions where met where it negatively impacted their (villainous?) takeover.
One of the funnier things I did for a while was to take this 3D render universe and change my code so that I could touch a button on the keyboard and then run one of the RTS units around as if he were a hero in an adventure game, and then I uses some open source tools to parse and load the “World of Warcraft” game interface as well, so that I could essentially join into the older strategy game as a hero from one of those newer third-person roleplay games, and run that around. This was again a very fun and weird concept. But it’s all tainted by loading art files and stuff from the works of people who were morally okay with trapping everyone into Microsoft’s giant monopoly.
So I’m curious if anybody is doing anything like that – running around little mini people with OpenGL calls (glDrawElements, glDrawArrays) – on their PureOS, and sometimes toggling between a camera in the sky to run the mini people around to instead use a single-person camera floating behind one character and running that character to and fro with WASD. It seems like the fundamental concepts here would be really good concepts to allow any child (or even inquisitive adult mind such as myself) to play with in a manner unfettered by proprietary software. So, it would also be nice if there was a way to point-and-click to draw basic fantasy world concepts, such as trees, and rocks, and birds, and maybe little soldiers and orcs. It would also be nice to have a generic premise where the little characters, if we select one as our main focus for a while, could collect little items in some kind of inventory, and perhaps have some form of spellbook where they could learn new skills and abilities.
And I really think, that if everything I just said gets people to say, “No, no, sir, Microsoft owns the concepts of pretending to have little mini people in a computer,” then we should really worry about our society, I mean, a lot. Because Microsoft also used their money to get tons of influence on the future of AI, and a lot of people are aware that AI is filled with stupid scams and people pretending their computers can do what they can’t. But I think that in the long term future, it’s extremely likely that advanced forms of digital intelligence eventually can generate any digital art or digital software that can be described. And if we get to that point, restraining ourselves by saying, “You described something too similar to the concept of little mini people, which is owned by the Microsoft monopoly” and then to either have the machine (1) reject the users command, or (2) submit the user to legal authorities for being a violator… then society would really, really go off the rails.
Does no one else have this problem? Is there a simple solution of just sudo apt install mini-people-fantasy-3d in PureOS?
Edit:
And I know that, obviously GODOT exists, but I think the process of converting GODOT into what I’m describing, to have little mini soldiers and the option to give every soldier a bag so he can carry some items, and the option to make enemy soldiers drop their items, and the option to have a graphical map editor program to place down little soldiers and pick which items the enemy soldiers have, and to point and click to have map events that trigger dialogue cinematics when our heroes walk into certain areas… these concepts would take a lot of time to put into GODOT. And so, it may be that my specific flavor of those concepts is actually so specific that nobody would want to post them. And, it also might be that if I try to write them down and post them online that I would get trolled by pull requests from different people trying to add tons of irrelevant features like porting the code to run on Android, that I don’t care about, and which wastes my time, so that I do not get things done.
But maybe my entire approach is flawed. Maybe what I’m asking for is impossible, and is owned by Microsoft, and so as a result the only way to have little imaginary people is to submit to the people who sell out the US nuclear arsenal to foreign powers, or else to stop using computers for that purpose entirely. I have certainly had discussions with people for whom the obvious solution to modern technology gone wrong is to stop using it.
But I kind of feel like that would be some extreme tragedy. Why can’t we do for Warcraft what X11 does for desktop computing?