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Have you gone back and actually played Doom I or II recently? Compare that to almost any modern game and tell me it looks just as good. Many parts of Doom were up to the player's imagination (remember the "Suburbs" and "Factory" maps in Doom II?).

The real limiting factor is development time. The more stuff you build into each level, the more time and money it takes. The brown boxes in Doom were pretty easy to make, but these days they won't do at all. You need to add details like windows, roofs, etc... to make your maps compete with the rest of the industry.

That said, there are things that work better with raster graphics than they do on polygons. You can draw in lots of details like ammo packs, cigars, and the like when doing raster graphics that just look bad when plastered on a polygon.

However, there is a catch. As development tools get better and better you can create more complex scenes with less developer time, so over time the situation should improve. In fact I'd argue that this is already happening as you see games that look way better than stuff from even a couple of years ago.

One final note: If you really want to see what happens when you give your deveopers unlimited time to work on maps, check out Second Life, which is sort of a MOO with graphics. The world is almost entirely user created and the build system is powerful enough for people to do some fantastic things.

It sounds like these players ought to give Second Life a go if they've never tried it and are looking for a massively multiplayer online world (and community) that accepts anyone, however they want to be.

Linden Lab deserve their money far more than Blizzard does - Linden have managed to cultivate fantastic diversity in their online population and to sucessfully police their community for harassment - of any sort - to other players. Their single most important community rule is to be polite to other players - and it works brilliantly.

If Linden can prevent players from abusing each other, Blizzard also ought to be able to do that. Instead Blizzard makes excuses because they can't be bothered. I'm guessing it's cheaper for them to make the GLBT guild go away than to police players to prevent abuse.

Of course Second Life isn't much of a Fantasy MMORPG (if that's what you were explicity trying to play), it's a virtual playground with diverse user-created content - although I hear there are a couple of pretty good games that players have created.

Check out Second Life. Their currency is actually tied into US currency - as much US currency is put in the system, that's how much virtual currency there is. Items there are player made, and not just like normal MMORPG crafting - these are actually modeled and scripted by the players.

Really interesting.

Well, I will not reply "If you want more power look at Second Life" http://secondlife.com/, because I think that SL falls in another category of games. Actually EVE Online gives you quite a lot of power. The economy is 99% player driven, and in "non empire space", politics, resource control, land (starsystems) control is completely in the hands of the players. The other half, the "empire space", is still in a good part managed by the NPC and their policemens (The Concord)... or the Devs if you prefer, but this piece of space is dependent, resources wise at least, to the non empire one. But are really players demamnding for more freedom and power in MMORPGS? I don't think so, or players would play more A Tale In The Desert (where you can also design and propose laws that, if voted, will be scripted by the devs) and EVE Online tha World of Warcraft.

Larger bandwidth will drive the creation of new applications and content that can make use of that content. Consider the complexity and attractiveness of websites today as compared to 1999. (And don't give me the "simple websites are better - look at all this crappy flash stuff. I fundamentally agree with you, but people shop at attractive websites for the same reason they buy designer clothing. It's where the money is, so business will go there. Nerds like us can deal).

Meanwhile, have you ever used Second Life? There's as a clear demonstration I've ever seen that existing broadband throughput is not high enough.

If we want customizable virtual worlds -- and any geek who has read Snow Crash does -- we will need a couple orders of magnitude fatter pipes.

I don't know if there is room for a sandbox only game. Compared to the standard leveller games that are EQ and WoW. The sims is a sandbox game and it sold amazingly well. Its online version did not. Can a mmo "the sims" work. I think so but you need to design a true sandbox game and not some weird hybrid. A true sandbox game is not about levelling up. This is hard as levelling is easy. Just ask the korean games. They can easily fit 250 levels into a game. It is no suprise SOE and Lucasarts want to go that rout. Just a pity for the sandbox people.


This whole paragraph screamed "SECOND LIFE" to me. I liked your post by the way.

I would like to see a big open ended Virtual world where killing each other off wasn't the goal.

http://secondlife.com/

http://www.there.com/

http://www.activeworlds.com/

It sounds like you might want to check out Secondlife (http://secondlife.com/).
While not exactly an RPG, it is versitile enough to let you create your own little fantasy subworld and invite other people in for some leveling up on orcs and trolls. While I don't play it, I'm thinking of signing up sometime soon, it looks pretty fun.

You can do that in Second Life. It's very easy to script, say, a grenade, so that when it explodes the land is dented underneath it.
If you use my referral link I will get some extra linden dollars which I can then pass on to you.
http://secondlife.com/ss/?u=e64b39e515cccfd795ada5 5d4a0f8bc3

Second Life lets you create arbitrary content.

Second Life

Well exgf

She is hooked on Second life. She has her own business so she only needs to work 1 or 2 days out of the week. The rest of the time is playing the game. I dont mean a few hours a day. Its all day long, all night long, to the point of exhaustion and falling asleep at the keyboard. When I talked with her, on the phone, in game, chat whever, everything was about second life. There was no first life for her.

She would change her work schedule to fit around it. Quit working some days to "get things done" in second life. Her interactions with her children (late teens) is only in game. The list goes on actually.

So it can be real imo.

Expect a massive VR resurrgance in a few years time.

You mean, like this?

Do you mean someting like this?

Too bad it doesn't work with the new version of secondlife.

. . . which means that his "investment" is tied to the whims of the company that owns the game. If they suddenly decide that, for reasons of "game balance", they need to devalue the currency, then he's screwed.

I vastly prefer the model used by Second Life. It has a floating currency, with competing markets for exchange (although there have been some worrying developments lately in that regard). There are hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of players with a very real financial stake in the game and control over the game's market; the owning company has a very real interest in keeping them happy.

I am actually sympathetic to the basic idea here: New platform.

I'm newly skeptical of the approach of endlessly creating side-systems on the web browser.

There are amazing things that are possible when you make a new platform for integrating ideas.

For example, we can envision a world where you can watch people writing blog posts as they write them. We can imagine working on documents together with others in real-time. We can imagine social networks, we can imagine shared web browsing. We can imagine going to a web page, and seeing other people who happen to be browsing the web page at the same time as well. We can imagine looking at them, seeing what their affiliations are; There are all these things. We have seen voice communication. Within 10 years, good voice synthesis will be coupled, and we'll be able to look and sound like anybody.

Now, what we haven't seen, even in our imaginations, is all this stuff working together. Integrated into one platform.

Doing this stuff piece-meal, a little bit at a time, on the edge of the network, isn't going to work. It's just not. It'd take forever. Building new standards into the existing network just takes forever. There is no design team. Nadah. Nothing.

Where we see the cool stuff happening, really, is in these large behemeouth new platform.

Now, sure, we can get some milage out of AJAX. We can do sophisticated things with that.

But are we really going to make a 3D world with live document editing, voice & synthesis, presence, infinite versioning on everything, avatars, the whole thing, yadda yadda yadda, using just AJAX? Within 10-15 years? Hell no! It takes at least at least 5 years to make a new specification pretty much standard amongst users. Even RSS aggregators have only 10% penetration amongst blog readers.

What does this mean? It means that a new platform is in the works. Whether you know it or not, a new platform is in the works. Which of the new upstarts is going to be it, remains to be seen.

Sure, sure, sure-- there will be gateways between the world of Vanilla HTML + AJAX into these new worlds.

At some point, you can make a computer render pictures of the new world, and ship them off in AJAX. You can even play Lemmings in the browser now. (Well, you could have...) But the new world is going to be built in the new world. It's not going to be built piecemeal out here in weblandia. When we use browsers to access it, it will be a window into that world, but it will not be that world.

DRM is a lot worse than that. One day people will distribute physical objects made from programmable matter. When that happens you will find that a few rare objects are free for you to copy if you have some programmable matter of your own. You could even recycle some objects into programmable matter that you can use for whatever purpose you like. Except that is, the objects that have DRM. They won't let you copy them. They will have biometrics technology built into them and, if the creator has so chosen, no-one else will be able to use the object except you. Or the object will only be good for a set period of time and you'll have to return it (or if you're lucky recycle it) after its use-by date.

This has to happen. Otherwise the scarcity that our society is based on will be threatened. If you wanna know what it feels like to live in a world of artificial scarcity, go play Second Life. Where every object has DRM.

The title says about as much as saying "$25 a month, isn't a bit stiff for a web host?" (sic).

You can get a free account which you can use to explore and create content just like anyone else. The free account is quite sufficient for all but the most full-control-obsessed land owning requirements.

If you need to own land for your project, you can still keep your account free and rent land from other players (on negotiated terms), or you can upgrade your account to pay a monthly hosting fee to own land. You can own as little as 512 square meters for $7-10/month, or one or more whole regions for $195/month.

Keep in mind too, the company that runs SL isn't creating artificial scarcity with land like so many people assume. Each region of land (65,536 square meters) requires one server-unit of resources to be maintained for running things such as:
- the simulator itself
- the Havok physics engine
- local asset storage and transfer
- synchronizing updates to active agents within and near the region
- running hundreds or even thousands of user scripts

The result is each region requires a decent piece of hardware to run without noticably lagging the region's simulator (incurring "time dilation", slower script execution, etc).

So the title is wrong. You can enjoy SL for free. And even if you pay, there are many pricing tiers between free and a full region. According to their Land FAQ, it is $25/month only if you absolutely need to have complete ownership control over 4,608 square meters of land.

PS: BTW, An odd quirk in the current economy makes it actually profitable to buy a minimal (512 sq m landowning) annual subscription, assuming the virtual currency (L$) value holds above a L$1000:US$3 ratio. The landowning accounts receive a weekly grant of L$500. At the end of a year, that comes to L$26k, which is currently valued at more than the price of the US$72 annual subscription fee.

Second Life access is free ($0 a month) - you can visit the entire world and build objects in the public sandbox (you just won't have any permanent place to keep objects other than in your inventory).

With a monthly subscription at $9.95 a month, you can own up to 512 square meters of land. It's tiered above that, though, so you can spend quite a bit if you want to rent a huge plot of land (but you can easily sublet to groups of friends if you want).

See these three pages for details:

http://secondlife.com/pricing/
http://secondlife.com/vland/cost.php
http://secondlife.com/vland/fees.php

You can even buy an entire virtual island for $195 a month should you wish - if you wanted to build a virtual theme park... or whatever you want to use a huge plot of virtual land for. Think of it like renting a private server in other games like Battlefield (which can be equally expensive).

Second Life access is free ($0 a month) - you can visit the entire world and build objects in the public sandbox (you just won't have any permanent place to keep objects other than in your inventory).

With a monthly subscription at $9.95 a month, you can own up to 512 square meters of land. It's tiered above that, though, so you can spend quite a bit if you want to rent a huge plot of land (but you can easily sublet to groups of friends if you want).

See these three pages for details:

http://secondlife.com/pricing/
http://secondlife.com/vland/cost.php
http://secondlife.com/vland/fees.php

You can even buy an entire virtual island for $195 a month should you wish - if you wanted to build a virtual theme park... or whatever you want to use a huge plot of virtual land for. Think of it like renting a private server in other games like Battlefield (which can be equally expensive).

Second Life access is free ($0 a month) - you can visit the entire world and build objects in the public sandbox (you just won't have any permanent place to keep objects other than in your inventory).

With a monthly subscription at $9.95 a month, you can own up to 512 square meters of land. It's tiered above that, though, so you can spend quite a bit if you want to rent a huge plot of land (but you can easily sublet to groups of friends if you want).

See these three pages for details:

http://secondlife.com/pricing/
http://secondlife.com/vland/cost.php
http://secondlife.com/vland/fees.php

You can even buy an entire virtual island for $195 a month should you wish - if you wanted to build a virtual theme park... or whatever you want to use a huge plot of virtual land for. Think of it like renting a private server in other games like Battlefield (which can be equally expensive).

It is called SecondLife, check it out here - http://secondlife.com/

I'd agree in many cases, however, there's one place I'd really LOVE to have voice capability, and that's in SecondLife! http://secondlife.com/ I'm a resident there, and a crappy typist, and I'm crazy about the MST3K/Home Game that happens there every couple of days, but since SL is typing/chat-based, I'm pretty screwed on putting my timely (and often funny) comments.. Voice would be great here...

I'd ask why there still isn't a resolution if it's been considered so long and so meticulously?

1) You don't hear about the ones which are caught early before anyone notices. Most companies don't exactly report every time there is a dupe bug.

2) I think most games let IGE and the like continue to operate as long as they are creating a net positive value (ie their behavior brings in more players than they chase off, and/or it costs less to let them continue than to spend man-hours tracking them down).

3) Not all MMOs are like this. For example, the MMOE Second Life explicitly grants ownership of the IP to the creator, and encourages you to sell your creations for real world profit.

What some game companies can't understand is, they make the games, we have fun, they get money

That's the point. Everquest is a subscription game. This server emulator allows people to play Everquest without paying money to Sony.

some people have more fun creating than fighting and leveling up

If they really want to build bits and pieces of somebody else's MMO world, they should go and play Second Life (which is essentially a sandbox designed to host whatever you create, the have Windows and Mac clients, a Linux client is apparently on the way) - or they should simply roll their own MMO client (and when, in a sad twist of irony they decide to charge people to play it, I shall laugh).

They do directly sell land by auction (can't link because that portion of the site is subscriber-only). They also have an option where you can own an entire server. The 256K sq. meter option is an entire simulator (they call it a "sim" for short).

I have no idea of how much CPU and memory running one requires, but considering the game utilizes Havok Physics and most functionality is programmed in the Linden Scripting Language, it probably takes a respectable amount of each.

The bandwidth use is probably hefty as well, because network updates between X players concentrated in a small area are on the order of X ^ 2. The game animates everything your avatar does -- if you type in chat on your keyboard, your avatar indicates you are typing with an animation and particle effect. If you mouse over something in the game, your avatar turns its head to look where you're pointing. If you click to interact with a game object, your avatar gestures. All those little updates amount to a lot when you have thirty people close together all doing them at once and every action is broadcast to the other 29.

They do directly sell land by auction (can't link because that portion of the site is subscriber-only). They also have an option where you can own an entire server. The 256K sq. meter option is an entire simulator (they call it a "sim" for short).

I have no idea of how much CPU and memory running one requires, but considering the game utilizes Havok Physics and most functionality is programmed in the Linden Scripting Language, it probably takes a respectable amount of each.

The bandwidth use is probably hefty as well, because network updates between X players concentrated in a small area are on the order of X ^ 2. The game animates everything your avatar does -- if you type in chat on your keyboard, your avatar indicates you are typing with an animation and particle effect. If you mouse over something in the game, your avatar turns its head to look where you're pointing. If you click to interact with a game object, your avatar gestures. All those little updates amount to a lot when you have thirty people close together all doing them at once and every action is broadcast to the other 29.

This is not a scam.
Second Life is just like the web, but wrapped in a pretty 3D virtual world - it is primarily a place where you can create and host content for others to enjoy (and purchase).
Land is a metaphor for server space. The money you pay is for the server resources. There is a finite amount of them per server (65536 sq.m.)and if you want, you can even buy your own server. Some people own more than one! Even major RL corporations are starting to hit SL - if you're a student, or unemployed, you could get yourself a real job!
Artist? Programmer? Just plain bored? Join Second Life - I've been there for over two years and will never look back.
You can build just about anything out of simple geometric shapes and make it come alive with a powerful, yet simple scripting language that uses C/Java style syntax and an event-driven paradigm.
Check out the language reference and see for yourself!
Second Life even includes a full fledged physics engine called Havok, which is rapidly becoming the industry standard.
It is truly a geek's dream come true, and no one on SLASHDOT of all places should dare criticize it - we have a whole section devoted to LEGO and SL is at the very least LEGO on steroids :)
Heaps of screenshots

This is not a scam.
Second Life is just like the web, but wrapped in a pretty 3D virtual world - it is primarily a place where you can create and host content for others to enjoy (and purchase).
Land is a metaphor for server space. The money you pay is for the server resources. There is a finite amount of them per server (65536 sq.m.)and if you want, you can even buy your own server. Some people own more than one! Even major RL corporations are starting to hit SL - if you're a student, or unemployed, you could get yourself a real job!
Artist? Programmer? Just plain bored? Join Second Life - I've been there for over two years and will never look back.
You can build just about anything out of simple geometric shapes and make it come alive with a powerful, yet simple scripting language that uses C/Java style syntax and an event-driven paradigm.
Check out the language reference and see for yourself!
Second Life even includes a full fledged physics engine called Havok, which is rapidly becoming the industry standard.
It is truly a geek's dream come true, and no one on SLASHDOT of all places should dare criticize it - we have a whole section devoted to LEGO and SL is at the very least LEGO on steroids :)
Heaps of screenshots

I've been playing Second Life http://www.secondlife.com/ for a while now and it succeeds by satisfying all of the requirements that you think are a problem. The world is, for the most part, built by the players and the main sources of interest are in building or socializing with each other. It is true that most players put a bit of hard cash into the game. However, since this is an over 18 game I don't see that is a problem - pushing four bucks into the game every so often is nothing to an adult. So, what's not to like with these goals? Second Life is growing by leaps and bounds, precisely because socializing and building are more interesting to many adults than the usual time-consuming level grind.

I disagree, Doug. I have to make these choices in life -- I play games to escape life. That's what you guys have been doing WRONG this WHOLE TIME. Make a game where I can escape into a terrific story that lets me showcase myself and MY PERSONAL TALENT. I'll pay for THAT game. Not your moral ethics quandaries... they are simply boring to me.

If you can stand sharing a game world with a lot of other people shocasing themselves (including a lot of furries and goths), you should try Second Life.

or read the scripting language wiki

The scripting capability is what hooked my interest in trying SL, so I thought I'd link to the LSL Wiki here for others who might be curious. =)

Callum Linden and I are the two developers at Linden Lab working on Mozilla embedding. Some details:

Why bother? We want to allow people running Second Life full-screen to access our web site. Right now, if you want to bid on a piece of virtual land, or read the scripting language wiki, you have to either run in a window or switch out to your browser. That sucks, so we're fixing it.

The second goal is to get to third-party web sites. I want to trade SL currency on Gaming Open Market while staying in-world. Our internal scripting language supports e-mail into and out of the world, as well as XML-RPC. Lots of people have used this to build cool web sites that tie into the virtual world. See the postcards on Snapzilla postcards and the Second Life del.icio.us tag for examples. Getting these connected into the world would be a big win.

Why Mozilla? Could there be any other choice? :-) Our competitor There.com uses Internet Explorer to do their internal web browsing, but they only support PCs. We love open source tools and use LGPL stuff extensively in both server and client. Plus, we need support for Win32, Mac and Linux.

Working with the Mozilla codebase has been interesting. It's huge, and very complex. But I'm proud to say we've found and fixed a couple bugs in Mozilla, and contributed the changes back to the Mozilla folks. I'm looking forward to Firefox 1.1 and the potential for the new Cairo/OpenGL rendering subsystem -- that may really help with embedding for 3D worlds.

So despite the linked description, Callum and I are working on getting an interactive 2D browser working first. Web pages on the surfaces of 3D objects may not ship in the next version (1.7). It'll ship as soon as it's done.

As an aside, if any of the Mozilla developers are reading this, we could use some help with embedding, specifically how to post mouse-click events into an embedded instance, please send me mail.

Cheers,

James

Here is a direct link to the item at SL. There has been voting going on for new features and this is one of the ones they accepted:

http://secondlife.com/vote/get_feature.php?get_id= 5

The Clicable Culture site has indeed bogged down. But all the info is on that SL page anyway.

http://www.secondlife.com/

What about the Linux client they promised at start? If it's good enough to run their servers, it's good enough to have a client. Specially as they use OpenGL for graphics and already have a MacOSX client.

According to the Linden Lab statement, it will be used primarily for integrating content into the environment. So yeah, it could be used for annoying "banner" ads, but the most useful applications would be for commerce or communications, or gaming. With the ability to generate HTML from a script running within SL comes all sorts of potential uses, everything from a complex web app to a quick and low-bandwidth way to render text on a sign, rather than forcing the client to download and decompress a texture.

http://secondlife.com/whatis/

"Second Life is a virtual world - a 3D online persistent space totally created and evolved by its users. Within this vast and rapidly expanding place, you can do, create or become just about anything you can imagine. Built-in content creation tools let you make almost anything you can imagine, in real time and in collaboration with others. An incredibly detailed digital body ('Avatar') allows a rich and customizable identity. A powerful physics simulation running on a backbone of hundreds of connected computers and growing with the population allows you to be immersed in a visceral, interactive world that as of April 2005 covers more than 12,000 acres and 20,000 owned plots of land. The ability to design and resell 3D content, combined with the ability to own and develop land and a microcurrency, which can be exchanged to real money means that you can build a real business entirely within Second Life."

I read this and I was like "Second life? What?" To save you lazy suckers Googling: http://www.secondlife.com/

Unless we can get full immersion like snow crash people wont use it.

Maybe you've not seen Second Life?

They have well over 20,000 active subscribers using it, and it's not "full immersion" nor is it really "The Metaverse" -- but it's probably about as close as you're going to get to it with today's computer and network speeds.

Second Life is ideal for this sort of thing.
They even have a special program for universities.
It's not just a graphics engine, it's a whole 3D world where you can collaboratively build and script stuff... it has very customizable humanoid avatars and is extremely user friendly.
It's got physics too - based on the "industry standard" Havok engine.

... has been an anathema to them and remains so to just about every other MMORPG company in the industry.

Umm, I can, think of several that are quite happy to associate in-game goods/wealth with real world money. I'm too lazy to post all the links - google it up Mr Jacobs - you're missing some important market research. ;-)

I haven't played either of these games, but I believe what you are talking about is an issue of copyright ownership, not material-like ownership. In Second Life, you own the copyright to anything you create because you came up with the model, scripts, name, etc. Likewise, SOE owns the copyright to all the game contents they created (which, in games like EQ2, is all of it). As much as many of us would like to believe otherwise, these are NOT the same thing.

You do NOT own the land you buy in Second Life; you rent it. If your account gets cancelled for whatever reason, the company reclaims that land. (And they might also charge you a hefty resale fee!) Likewise, you don't own the data you created. And I quote:

you do not own the account you use to access the Service, nor do you own any data Linden stores on Linden servers (including without limitation any data representing or embodying any or all of your Content).

However, you still keep the copyright to whatever you built in the game; it's just that it's impossible to "own" data sitting on someone else's server.

The makers of Second Life have taken a very unique approach to player rights with in the game.

In Second life, the content player create, is owned by the player and not the company .This is totally against the grain of most online games where the company owns it all.

Additionally, they have started tying in real currency to the in game currency. I know this not unique, as Project Entropia does the same thing.

I personally hope this is the way games will go--giving ownership of virtual property to the players and allowing them to use it, sell it, convert for real $$$. I find these environments more enjoyable and rewarding that environments like Everquest, where Sony pretty much owns you.

The subscription/cost model is a little difficult to understand, though. I understand that you must buy land and IP of anything you create in Second Life belongs to you (I assume they mean copyright when referring to IP - hard to tell). What about the servers, though? Until they allow interconnections and expansion outside of their server farm, whatever they say about IP and user rights go out the window if they go belly up. Which means that there is the strong chance of designer intervention and not necessarily in the best interests of the residents, if that is what you want to call them.

Overall, though, I think that Second Life is one of the more interesting concepts in MMORPG's and one or two generations later may lead to some real advances towards a Metaverse type world.

Second Life does all the physics using the Havoc engine on the servers. I can see where using a dedicated hardware-based physics engine could improve Second Life server performance.

What the Clickable Culture story missed is that today's Wall Street Journal reported that the Second Life resident has sold the real world publishing rights of Tringo to Sean Ryan's Donnerwood Media for "low five figures." They plan to publish Tringo for mobile phones and on the web. Also mentioned over at Terra Nova.

I see your point, but show me a current online game that isn't already filled with jackhole teens talking nonsense and abusing the gameworld. My rule for online gaming is, if I can't limit the players to solely people I know, I'm not playing.

Try Second Life

Just so you know, Second Life is an MMOG entirely built by its players. There are some simple building tools (everything is made of the same basic shapes, cube/sphere/cylinder/torus/particles/etc) and capable ingame scripting, although the language is less powerful than UnrealC. You then upload your own textures, sounds, etc... for everyone else to see and hear and interact with.