Looking for interesting collaboration.

Hi everyone!

This year I've taken a year off teaching (for the main, I'm due for one small module I've given three years running) and have been looking for interesting collaboration opportunities.

Strangely most of my time has been spent doing contracting and consultancy work, which is fun and I'm happy to do that.

But I feel like I'm going to lose a great opportunity to really start something going doing that in some way. So I thought I'd post here (you never know how many others are in a similar position).

If anyone has any thoughts on collaboration on research, development, serious games, games in general or anything else, I'm looking for projects that are "interesting".

I come from a background as a professional game developer (see my profile here) and I'm currently course leader for a Games Design BSc even though I actually teach on Games Software Development BSc mostly.

My torque knowledge is pretty much complete, apart from some really ugly code I'd rather reimplement than understand (you have to be seriously deranged to WANT to understand some of it), so I dont mind really in depth torque refactoring if thats what the project needs.

Barring anything else popping up, my current research plans (this is mostly for jollies, I'll do some course PR stuff for my normal duties) are along the lines of:

Rendering large scale cityscapes using DX10 (using TSEA)
Automatic navmesh generation from waypoint graphs (working a pet project I found whilst implementing "real" AI in torque)

Oh, while we're at it. I'm thinking of authoring a book as a sort of standard text for Games Dev courses so that they relate to the needs of the industry (another pet thing of mine). But I understand there is a degree of self-interest I have to think about (how much do you share with potential opposition). Hopefully at some stage I'll get to write some curriculum texts for GG's educational efforts too, lord knows we need it! :)

Anyway, please drop me a mail for anything torque and games and educational related if you feel like a chat. pac2 (at) bolton.ac.uk (yes, I'm in the UK).

BTW: I'm sorry if you've mailed me in the past asking for curriculum details. It's not that I dont want to send that kind of information out, its just that we are constantly refactoring the course so that its more and more relevant. As we get better at delivery we inevitably push up the level of student achievements and that filters down through the course.

Phil.