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Weee! Ta for the plug Mark. We've been sitting on this a good while now nice to have it out there we're very excited!

Privates: Reason #14262 that there is still no TFE OR Balloon Headed Mexican. :p

Man, being a web developer is tough. I can already see I'm going to have to learn how to program web apps for XMPP. :-/

It's not that hard. In fact the reason it's so awesome is its simplicity/extensibility. The core principal is just that any communication is represented as a chunk of XML with a from, to, message type and body, whether it's an IM, email, voice communication or a file or anything else that could be construed as 'conversation'. And that any XMPP client has their own name@domain.com address which you can send the xml directly to.

There's XMPP libraries for practically every language: http://xmpp.org/software/libraries.shtml

It will not be revolutionary for the average, ordinary web user who just IMs for fun and uses Facebook maybe.

I disagree. The whole point of XMPP is it breaks down barriers between these things, so in 10 years time receiving a phone call / SMS on your mobile, chatting on facebook, chatting on MSN, posting on AGS could all be things using XMPP.

Therefore instead of sending something to a facebook server to post on your wall, sending something to the AGS server to post in GenGen, sending something to your mobile network to send an SMS to someone's phone, sending a request to PayPal to pay for something, sending a message to Steam to invite someone to a game. All these things and many many more can communicate directly with each other without a server needing to get involved.

This means the entire internet could(and probably will) transform wildly and massively into something you wouldn't even recognise today. In the same way HTTP transformed the bulletin board based internet people who used that knew into something they now wouldn't recognise. And what is possible with it, even for a casual user you describe, will be massively improved and somewhat akin to the future we see on sci-fi films where everything computery from your TV to your phone to your computer is connected in a such profound way that is not possible today.

Just off the top of my head, surely a gamer, who wouldn't care about Google Wave in the slightest, would appreciate the technology that allowed him while walking home from the train station, to get an alert pop up on his mobile phone saying 'so and so has invited you to play L4D5' and pressing a button and suddenly being in the voice channel with the guys playing and saying 'hey guys, will be there in 10 minutes when I get home, save me a slot!'

This stuff isn't possible as things stand without some company writing a specific app for it, but this is just an off the top of my head example of the kind of free connectivity I'm talking about where these things just work because they are all XMPP clients, and XMPP clients just know how to communicate with each-other no matter what they are to an XMPP client a 'text communication' or a 'voice communication' are just that. Imagine if every app, on your phone, on the internet, on your desktop, on your console, on your stereo or fridge, had this kind of power to connect blindly to anything else. That's revolutionary for everyone who uses any of this technology in any way. And Google Wave is step one on that road.

I want to know more about how the interface will make a difference.

The whole point of the article is that if you're focusing on the interface you're missing the point of why it IS revolutionary. Since you asked why it's revolutionary that was my answer. :p

it's kinda like 20 years ago saying 'I don't see what's so revolutionary about HTTP. All there is is some weird gaudy coloured HTML pages people have done with what their favourite bands are. What's to be excited about?' And now you're replying on the AGS board, buying books on Amazon, booking flights, doing your weekly shopping, finding directions on google maps, connecting to people on facebook, practically everyone in the western world has a PC on the internet now, and none of this would have even existed without HTTP. Now doesn't the guy who wasn't impressed with HTTP and didn't see that as revolutionary look a bit silly?

Wave, or rather the XMPP underlying it, has the potential to have that huge an impact on the internet, that far far trancends what's visible in that one web client called 'Google Wave' that we've got at the moment. It's the nuts and bolts you're not interested in that could change absolutely everything we do on the internet today, that's revolutionary.

To compare Wave to MSN or to Google Mail or Hotmail or Facebook, is rather like comparing two web pages with each other. Irrelevant. All you've seen is the first implementation of an MSN like Google Mail like thing using a more far-reaching technology. It's that more far-reaching technology that's revolutionary, the MSN like and Google Mail like thing are just the first uses of that technology. The technology that is capable of much much more, and that's why people are excited.

If you're not personally interested then that's cool, but to say you don't think it's revolutionary, not read the stuff offered that explains exactly why it is revolutionary, and yet still deny it's revolutionary is blinkered and a little annoying and somewhat akin to creationists bleating 'show me the evidence' yet refusing to look at any of the evidence when it's offered. :p

Also as Rich says, as a collaborative tool it is already immensely useful. We're using it on a project right now and it makes a huge difference in how you can communicate on a project over stuff like MSN / email.

Google Wave is NOT as good as I was hoping it would be. To me it's an over glorified e-mail/IM app that has a long ways to go before it is public ready. People say it's revolutionary... I guess I just don't see it.

Google Voice is MUCH better in my opinion...

Oh it is. It will change the internet. If you're focussing on the wave client in your browser you're kinda missing the revolutionary point.

I could explain, but happily this guy will do it for me

http://www.jasonkolb.com/weblog/2009/09/why-google-wave-is-the-coolest-thing-since-sliced-bread.html#more

Haha already did yours, Nik!

I got 30 invites now, yay! (well nominations, may take a few days to come through)

pm me your email address if you'd like one.

Don't bother. Scammers I'll bet.

Okay, sorry chaps but it's gone. Mr. Darth has been nominated since he very clearly fit the brief of 'obsessed about getting in' , so at some point in (hopefully) the not so distant he can start spreading AGS Google Wave love across the boards and nominate up to 8 more as he sees fit. And so on and so on until AGS is all Waved up!

They can't possibly be proper invites because Google want a controlled number of people in the system at the moment for testing, so if everyone had invites to invite others then ultimately the system could bloat to millions of users before the servers are known to be able to handle it. Remember it's not a beta, this is a alpha preview thingy.

I got one nomination to give away to a lucky AGSer. It needs to be someone who's been REALLY itchy to get on it, and is super excited about being on it and simply CANNOT wait and has been tearing their hair out about not being in the first 100,000, as I only have this one spare and don't want to waste it on someone who's just curious or could gladly wait and deny someone who wanted it more.

Also bear in mind nominations are not instant and are not a direct invite, they simply make you a priority for Google when they send the invites out, a queue jumper if you will. Whoever it is will then be able to invite more AGSers as they will have nominations themselves.

Not sure yet, will let you know! either way I'm sure in the coming weeks / months invites will keep getting added on as gmail did.

Haha awesome. I somehow managed to blag an invite from one of the google programmers by sending him this picture:

What's great about it? All the sexy sexiness and the fact that it pretty much reinvents everything we use on the internet!

Whoops sorry should have searched. I'm just too darn crazy about this whole invite business! I'm currently on a massive whore campaign across twitter to try and convince/trick or otherwise cagoule someone into giving me an invite.

Hello all! I'm like completely whoring the internet up for a Google Wave invite like some ravenous mental man. Whore whore whore!

Has anyone seen this thing? I'm getting a little obsessed. Help! :'(

Not a suggestion or a request or anything, just something I seen which was pretty cool. We were playing around with Sims 3 modding and it works in a quite funkily way to provide plug-in support to Mac + PC.

Basically they have Mono, the cross platform .NET framework, along with their native engine, to allow for C# DLL plug-ins to be written that work on both platforms. It works really well and it's just occurred to me if, in the distant future, your engine plug-in architecture was mirrored in a Mono interface, it would allow for cross-platform engine plug-ins to be supported in a next generation language, and also in the same language as editor plug-ins would be written in.

Not even sure if this is the way you're going, or whether you're trying to faze out engine plug-ins for more powerful module scripting, which is by nature cross-platform, but just thought I'd mention it.

Intel GMA 950 has Shader 2.0.

Can't give you any specific cards, I just think it's generally a laptop thing. Conserving space on the graphics chip, stopping it overheating, who knows why, but they sometimes skimp on all but the major versions...

Yeah obviously from your perspective I can understand that changing it would be a super low priority, as it doesn't really effect most users of AGS as DX5 is a fallback, though the one problem is it cuts down the potential for D3D AGS plug-ins as obviously they are not ever going to be compatible with DX5. Especially if Nick intends to release the effects system plug-in for others to use and it ended up being in more games than TGP.

About the 2.0 / 1.4 thing, it's more that 1.1 and 2.0 are the two most standard used shader versions, and some NVidia cards in particular (especially the models found in laptops) have poor or non-existent 1.4 support. And most cards that do support 1.4 tend to support 2.0 as well, so ironically it may actually work on more machines on 2.0 than it does on 1.4. Nuthin' to do with me like, at this rate people will be in holodecks playing TFE so just throwing in some of my past experiences on it though I can't confess to being 110% confident in that it's what I'm lead to believe...

"The pixel shader shouldn't be the problem."

Hi, well that is the problem according to the error message: Problem: 'Graphics card does not support Pixel Shader 1.4'

In a test on my laptop, the game is running in windowed and is running on a PC that only supports Pixel shader 1.1 and I get the same results, as you would expect. 1.4 shader model is one of these less supported and less used shader models so as in Nick's stated case you'll get some graphics cards that'll support 2.0 and 1.1, but not 1.4 (laptops mainly) and others like mine only supporting 1.1 that would probably be fast enough to cope with AGS and Nick's particles. I guess we were just curious as to why the 1.4 was a requirement for AGS DirectX setting, there's probably a good reason but just on the off-chance it was a quick flag change in DX it's worth asking.