[OLPC-Games] SimCity for OLPC

[Don Hopkins]

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-announcement.html

Screen snapshots:
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/SimCity-For-X11.gif
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/SimCity-Indigo.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/X11SimCityDemo.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-review.html

PPS: 15 years ago, before porting SimCity to X11, I ported SimCity to 
the NeWS window system using HyperLook: a HyperCard-like, 
PostScript-centric, component-based, user-customizable gui environment, 
which I hope will inspire the design of an even more powerful system for 
Sugar and OLPC applications based on Python and Cairo:

Screen snapshot of HyperLook SimCity:
http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/HyperLook-SimCity.gif

HyperLook SimCity Demo:
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/HyperLookDemo.mov

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