Business/Project Idea, Software engineer Help

jimmy5694

Hi

I have a Business and Project Idea, due to confidentiality I cannot talk much about it. However, The idea is particular type of online simulator much like ship sim or farming simulator but online like Runescape. The simulator will be set up with missions and scenarios for training specialized students and qualified people in a specialized field. The website will be a central hub for the user containing a forum and news feed.

I'm not a software engineer or in that area, My questions are what kind of work, building from the very start and up to a prototype for a patent and then fine tweaking are we talking? Any idea on what it would cost to build and then for maintenance?
How many people and how much time will it take? What kind of people would i need like designers, artists, engineers etc.

Thank you

NeutralHandle

You're unlikely to be able to patent it. Typically software is protected by copyright only, not patents.

Going to say it's impossible to guess how much work would be involved from what you say here, but it wouldn't be cheap. Don't expect to get a developer for less than €250 a day for a short term project, for example.

If you can't afford that, or don't want to risk a large outlay, then you could look into putting together a business plan and try to get funding from the council or privately.

There is a good bit of literature on the notion of gamification in the context of education and knowledge management. First thing you should do is research what's already been published including both actual products and academic papers (use Google Scholar for the latter).

jimmy5694

Thanks for your reply. I will definetly look into all of that.

The Corinthian

Online business training simulator with high-end UI / Graphics.

You're looking at:

• Robust n-tier architecture, able to serve up lots of information, potentially lots of users - without falling over or costing you a fortune in bandwidth and/CPU.
• High-end 3D modelling and development.
• AI - most likely an expert system, although you could go down the CBR road too.
• Custom client - either for a browser or separate executable thick client.

With regards to maintenance, you'll need to keep the whole thing from falling over, regularly monitor and fix it against security issues, as well as updating both the server side and client side applications.

You may be able to copyright or otherwise protect some of the UI processes you develop, as well as your AI modelling.

Prototyping this would be difficult because it's simply so huge and even a single use case would require the development of a lot of technical infrastructure. Realistically you're looking at wire-framing or smoke-and-mirrors demonstrations for any prototype.

All I'll say is typically what you are describing would be a multi-discipline project that would involve dozens of resources and a timeline easily running into double digit months. You'll need very deep pockets.