Slashdot Mirror

I'm not sure, but i would guess it works the same as MMORPGs in the US. The players trade and sell items/cash among each other, and the company has nothing to do with it. Given how much discusion there has been about games that involve financial transactions with the company in exchange for items i think we would have heard about it if there was one in Korea that had actually implemented the practice.

Dr Bartle is currently working with RedBedlam on Roma Victor at the moment so I guess this means we won't be getting voice chat in RV. Just as well - RV is a historically authentic MMORPG (set in ancient Roman times) and you just know that with voice chat, the atmosphere would inevitably be ruined.

So even if some games want it, other games won't. Horses for courses.

I could see voice chat working in something like there.com but not Roma Victor

There (www.there.com) is already kinda doing this. You can use your credit card to buy ThereBucks at like $1.00 == ~$T1030.00. In addition to this you can create products - clothing, cars ect that you can sell and make more ThereBucks.

With ThereBucks you can buy transportation things (buggys, hoverboards) and all sorts of clothing - Some of which is created by There and a lot is created by There users. Theres even an auction system.

Its pretty sweet.

As my first real forray into the MMORPG arena I was rather disappointed. My only other similar experience has been There which while never intended to be much more than a 3D chatroom still has far more in the way of content than SWG. Which is very sad.

The graphics are beautiful but for the most part wasted on randomly generated and meaningless world features. Character customization is excellent and impressive as is the skill tree. The potential seems to be there for this to be an absolutely amazing game, if they had finnished it before offering it to the public. Player generated content is a good concept, but some content needs to be seeded into the world. Otherwise you just have a lot of people paying a monthly fee to finnish Sony's job. That makes very little sense to anyone except Sony as far as I can tell.

I cancelled my subscription and passed the game on to someone else who thought they were interested. I may take a look again in 18 months or so to see if things are better.

Or to see if Kirsten Dunst the Naked Jedi shows up.

Every time I log on to America's Army, There, any MMORPG, or even Slashdot, I'd say that I'm entering an alternate Matrix. If only I could disconnect from "reality" as easily as I can from slashdot. (go go gadget meditation!)

There.

The first result when Googling for "There," I might add.

Theres an Online virtual game called There!
it uses a rendering engine which allows the effect you speak of - its great fun and the quality is good as well.
Also - the game Black & White was also in a similar format.

So when do we get the pizza delivery girls with vagina dentatas, and the macintosh-compatible version of the metaverse?

I hope soon?

has anyone seen the little line on the bottom of the page?

It actually says:
"What PC do I have to buy to run There?"

It doesn't even say: "which PC do I need to run There" or a the more geeky version: "What are the system requirements to run There?"

What's next?
A link on the Command and Conquer homepage that says "What third world country do I have to bomb to play C&C?" of on the Doom3 site: "Whose `evil minions do I have to kill to play Doom3?"

'There' is just the neolibertarian and neocapitalist version of "America's Army"! Instead of getting people to get to enjoy 'real' military action, now we're going to learn people to become happier by participating in blind (encouraged) consumerism.

And someone probably wonder why there won't be a Linux version of There...

While I agree that it is probably pointless I would at least like to try it. However according the their specs not even Win 2000 is supported. XP or nothing. IE or nothing. Maybe Mac in 2004. Come on people! Okay I can understand only supporting windows. But only one version? And how about supporting standards complient browsers? Even IE 6 almost falls into that category.

Oh well I guess they didn't read the numbers of people using XP I doubt There will here too long.

So it looks like "there" world is one that will be inhabited only by those who have chosen(?) to use Microsoft's products. According to the hardware compatability page, you can only join this real^H^H^H^H virtual world if you're running some newer version of Windows (98SE or newer, no Win95 or Win98 or WinNT). The CPU, RAM, and hard drive requirements are relatively onerous as well.

So if I use UNIX or Linux or a Mac (or all three!), I guess I'm outta luck (though they're "working on" a Mac beta for 2004 ... whoot!).

Based on what I read of the product, I think I'll take my chances in the real world instead and see how things pan out.

-rob.

Of course, if you can't find There here,
there's always their There's mirror there

(That's not informative, that's funny.)
(hmmm, less funny with the google link)

From the previous story, you can find There here.
--

People seem to forget that different levels of machines are suited to different tasks. To elaborate, I have 3 PC's at home: An Athlon 1600+, a Duron 1.3, and a Celeron 667.

I use the 1600+ for the tougher stuff - MP3 and SVCD encodes. The Duron is my movie/mp3 playback system, residing in my living room. The Celery is for the girlie, who checks her email/surfs the web, and does little more.

The Celery won't cut it for the tougher stuff. The Duron is in the same boat. Both were very good choices (based on price mostly), but neither can do what I want.

The Athlon gets used heavily for other work that simply can't be done on a lower-spec machine - 3D rendering being one.

But you want a killer app that will force us to all upgrade? Take a look at There. This thing is drawing a big crowd, but runs like crap on low-end machines (by low end, I mean my Celery, with it's on-board video). Apps like these (Sims Online, There, EverCrack, etc) are raising the bar because they appeal to non-geeks and geeks alike.

Incidently, no matter what anybody says WinXP runs like a dog with no legs on anything less than a Pentium 2. Plus, I'm not going back to Win95. Nuh-uh, not me, not ever. I like having a workstation with a weeks uptime (compared to 2 hours).

http://www.there.com

I filled out the manual survey of my hardware, so I wasn't actually locked out. I read it in the actual documentation on the site. Right here is where it says (item #4) that only ATI Radeon (*except* for VE, 7000) and nVIDIA GeFORCE and nFORCE are supported. :(

The Developer info page on their site...

Once approved, you pay a one-time initial set up cost to start the process for your item. You can then either buy a quantity of the item or put one copy of the item up for perpetual auction. In addition to the set up charge, you pay the per-unit cost for each product you either buy or sell at auction. If you choose to sell the product via perpetual auction, one copy of the product will be put up for auction at a specific price. When someone buys the product, the buyer will receive the product and the money will be taken from their account and credited to your account automatically. Then another auction will be created so that someone else may buy another product. This auction will stay in place until either you remove it or until the quantity limit you originally set is reached.

I don't think that's exactly what Stephenson had in mind, and that's not what the Metaverse is about. It looks like, in There you can code trinkets, not "the entire world" as the article suggests.

-Berj

This is why there are companies like There.com. Their job is to create multiplayer game engines solving such networking issues. They do not create the graphics or the game logic, just the multiplayer/networking part that you can then use as a drop-in solution to your game or other application.