Slashdot Mirror

Perma cultures are not used for wheat.
They are used for fruits and vegetables.
After all you want to drive around with a harvesting machine to harvest wheat.
Also: bushles? In what age do you live? What is a bushel? How many breads can you bake from a bushel? Just kidding I can read that up ... but who in his sane mind uses bushels as a metric for wheat yield when every harvesting machine simply strips the grain out? (Which is measured in tons per acre)
The term bushels I only know from http://www.battlemaster.org/

Your mistake was making it available for free, asking for donations and not offering anything in exchange.

I have two different experiences with voluntary payments, both very positive.

One, I've been running an online game for 12 years now where you can donate and in return you get an in-game title and an additional character slot. Nothing that provides in-game benefits and it's mostly for vanity. But it is something. As you can check yourself because I am transparent with it all, players are donating a few hundred Euros every month and have been for years.

Two, I sold a toolkit / extension for the Unity 3D engine on a "pick your own price" model, where you could buy the same product for anywhere between $10 and $50. Only half the buyers choose the cheapest option. Again, I was honest and open about the why and how, including that the package is absolutely identical at all price levels, and that I choose that model because I understand that $50 is too much for a small hobby developer playing around for his own fun. I ended with "this tool will save you many hours of work, you decide what your hour is worth".

People are willing to spend money. But they also want to get a value in return and they want to feel engaged. Allowing people a free download and then asking for a donation does neither. It gives them the value for nothing and doesn't make them participate in the process.

"You are STEALING content! How do the content creators get paid?!?"

Content creators do not have a right to have their business model work out. Besides, most ads pay per click, not per view these days (though both kinds still exist).

There are many other business models. An online game of mine (BattleMaster) runs entirely on donations, for example. I'm very proud of having been able to run this game for 12 years now, and there has never been a single banner or pop-up ad on the site. Not in the game, not in the wiki, not in the forum.
Does it allow me to quit my day job? Nope. Does it pay for its own bills (hosting, etc.)? Absolutely.

There are Freemium models, there are subscription models like The Onion where you get a few free articles and then they ask you to subscribe. And, of course, there is the old "You want something? Pay up and you get it." system. You know, the one that mankind has been using for a few thousand years?

The Internet has been and still is experimenting with various ways of making money. If yours doesn't work out, stop whining and start taking the possibility into consideration that your business model is flawed.

And if your app works on Firefox and Safari without any hacks, it'll run on Opera as well.

Not necessarily. There are a number of quirky behaviours in Opera that screw things up—sometimes just UI glitches, but sometimes worse things.

Don't have any examples handy right now, but on the web game in my sig (of which I'm a volunteer developer), we've run into issues with Opera.

Dan Aris

Contrary to popular opinion, people do change. Their friends, their habits, but also their browsers.

How do I know? I've been running this website for the past eight or so years. As soon as it got the first CSS bits like six years ago, I decided to not support IE at all, no version of it. Instead, I captured IE users and told them when they were about to access a page that wouldn't work on their browser, told them why (e.g. no support for transparent PNGs, buggy CSS implementation, whatever) and gave them a link to access it anyways (e.g. in case they were using a real browser just masquerading as IE).

My browser statistics show that usage of IE dropped sharply, while user count has steadily increased. Since this is a trend constant over several years (IE is currently at 15.7%) it isn't an anomaly, either.

The summary of it is that if you give people a reason to change, they will. Most people use IE because they are lazy. It came with the system and they aren't really familiar with this com-pu-ter thing, so installing a different browser frightens them somewhat, no matter how easy it is. But give them an incentive and they'll do it.

I'm certain the same holds true for moving them from IE6/7 to IE8 (or any alternative).

I currently play a modernized MUD Which does just this. Death is a constant thing, but your family name carries on. As you fight in battles, your "physical age" goes up - that is, how beat up your shell is. As this happens, you have less "time" to play - you just can't get around like you used to. Older characters then either go hero-ing and die in a blaze or glory, or move into bureaucratic roles where they don't see much combat.

Your family has Fame and Gold, which is based on the efforts of all the previous/current members. If some new kid shows up, you can check out his family history to see if that family is a force to be reckoned with, or some no-name family.

In a large-scale MMO, you could easily work this in, with either karma (enough family members in peasant roles) or something even more complex. Grinding as a non-hero could then be rewarded, as once you had enough family members, they would be able to equip your main character. Want a new sword? You need a family member to make it for you. If you don't have one, then you don't get a sword.

This would help with persistence, as now death is not the end for you - when the next kid takes up the sword, there is a family infrastructure already behind him. It will also help make new quests - if someone doesn't like you they will have to have their FAMILY attack your FAMILY - there is no major benefit in just killing the hero. Now you might have to protect and defend your family, and balance that with adventuring.

Check out BattleMaster

It's kind of a mmorpg web-based feudalism simulator.

And most impressive of all, he codes and runs Battlemaster!

The best massively multiplayer online game I've seen or heard of, bar none, is Tom Vogt's BattleMaster. (Said Tom is actually a Slashdot regular, too, and with a 3-digit UID ;-) ) While it is not perfect (as what can be?) and is more or less in a state of perpetual beta (which I find a great deal of fun, but others wouldn't), it does a great job, in general, of dealing with the powergamers who want to turn the whole thing into a numbers game, and does its best to give even casual gamers the chance to participate meaningfully (ie, invest ~15 mins/day, and keep up pretty well with those who invest 15 mins/hour).

BattleMaster is a roleplaying strategy game, where the player has a small family of nobles who can command troops in any of several different classes. The real key here is that in BattleMaster, there is precious little centrally-provided content: the interaction between the players is, essentially, the whole game. Which isn't to say that it's pure, text-based roleplaying (though the game is entirely text-based, aside from the maps); it has a relatively comprehensive system that helps to model a medieval European setting, complete with diplomacy, battles, wars, etc. But all the story is created by the players.

It's a heck of a lot of fun, and I've been playing it for the past 3 years and more. I don't explain it too well, so take a look at the site, linked both above and in my sig.

If someone were to take the concept and make a commercial MMORPG out of it, I dare say they could do pretty darn well--at least, once they had enough players signed up to populate a large area. The fun is directly proportional to the complexity of the system, which grows out of the number of people playing...

Dan Aris

I think Hawking's been stealing from the internet: http://wiki.battlemaster.org/index.php/Light_of_Fo ntan#No_Space

Since you asked for it:

        Firefox Nein 2001451 58.5 %
        MS Internet Explorer Nein 1059985 31 %
        Opera Nein 179838 5.2 %
        Mozilla Nein 89402 2.6 %
        Safari Nein 31450 0.9 %

This is October data. As you can see from the numbers (we're talking 3.5 mio hits here), this is not a tiny site. As you can see from the site itself, it's not a Linux, Free Software or Firefox site. I've got plenty of AOL users, hotmail users and other "dumb", average, random Internet users as players.

History: Firefox was at 50% in January, 46% in October last year, 34% December 2004 (my oldest data).

J. Allard had a chat with Edge magazine about the launch lineup of the Xbox 360, and makes the claim that they have the best launch lineup ever associated with a console.

Hey, I don't blame him. It's not like he's biased, or anything. If Edge magazine were to ask me about, say, web-based multiplayer online games, I'll make it a point to mention that BattleMaster is certainly one of the best. And that has nothing to do with the fact that it was made by me or anything...

Actually, combine either EV (which I love) or Freelancer (never played, but have seen) with something like...

http://www.comfortablydumb.net/aatrade/faq/index.p hp

I've started playing a few BBS style games recently, and enjoy them a lot (of course, I also play Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Red Alert 1 & 2, and SimCity 2000; I'm not much for fast-twitch recently).

Others I've gotten into are... Legend of the Green Dragon http://lotgd.net/home.php?

and Battlemaster http://battlemaster.org/

I think some very useful ideas for mainstream MMO gaming could come from each of these, especially BattleMaster's continuing efforts to keep gameplay balanced (including exploring the possibility of having an area where cheaters aren't banned; it gives the creator a chance to see what they'll do, and work against it in the regular areas.

BattleMaster is designed to be a light-weight game. Most online games require that you spend hours every day if you want to achieve anything, and reward only the most dedicated players, which usually means those with nothing else to do with their day.
BattleMaster is meant to be played alongside your other activities, and you will not gain much advantage from spending more than the few minutes a normal turn takes.
BattleMaster is also a game under active development. New features are being added and gameplay and balance are constantly tweaked to improve the game further.

You might want to try http://battlemaster.org. You RP a medieval noble, recruiting men, fighting for your kingdom. It doesn't take a lot of time to play, if you just stick with the basics. If, however, you really get into the game, then you can end up as a battlegroup leader, general, duke, king, etc, and reading messages, answering questions, and giving orders can get much more involved.

There are two turns a day, one every 12 hours. You can only do a small amount on any given turn - and then you have to wait for the next turn before you can do anything else (other than read/send messages.) You have to play regularly for weeks/months in order to really be successful.

It's free to play, and the developer is still working to make it better.

Well, poster, all the stuff you listed is major publishing mainstream content. It is widely known that usually, and even more so in times of low sales, slow economy, etc., mainstream publishers will shun any and all risk and put out nothing but surefire titles, i.e. either sequels or stuff with a movie license.

So if you look for originality, you're simply looking in the wrong place.

Some of the original games I've bought and/or played (some are free) this year:
(note: I'm Linux-only, so these games are as well, you might find even more in the windos or console world)

Marble Blast
3D roll-marble-around and complete puzzles game.
Originality factor: Combining marble games with FPS and turning it into a fast-paced, thrilling action game.

Bridge Construction Set (only played the demo on this one)
Build a bridge game. Simple, fun, addictive. It is a sequel to an older game of the same kind, by the same guy.
Originality factor: I don't know any other games of this kind, the idea is brilliant.

Orbz
Shoot-yourself-around-the-track game. Somewhat tricky to describe what exactly it is about.
Originality factor: No other game of this kind exists, AFAIK.

Scorched 3D
3D Clone of Scorched Earth.
Originality factor: While the idea is old, this is one of the few games really benefiting from the 3rd dimension, and it was done greatly. It is one of the few "clone" games that are actually more original than most of the "original" games you find which just rehash a basic idea (FPS, RTS, ...) without adding anything new.

Savage
A blend between RTS and FPS.
Originality factor: Combining two genres in a unique blend. No, it wasn't done this way before. It's not an RTS with first-person perspective for the commander, it actually is a full-blown FPS for all the non-commander players.

BattleMaster
Ok, shameless plug, this is my own game. I do, however, honestly think that it's quite original.
(it's a turn-based, multiplayer strategy game)

You will note all of these games come from small or independent developers.

Games are really like music in that regard: If you are looking for originality, look to the small and unknown. If you are looking for polished, perfectly produced, know-what-you-get stuff, shop in the mainstream.

I've been completely and totaly addicted to BattleMaster It takes me back to the good old days of BBS door games. Long live Nostalgia!

I ran across this game, BatleMaster, a while back. It's a light-weight online RPG - you just log in once or twice a day, and play for 15 minutes, max. Fun, and quite addictive.

Takes a little getting used to, so stick it out for at least a few days, and you'll be hooked.