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nVidia Claims Patent On Interactive Gaming Servers
joeblake writes: "nVidia apparently thinks that because they have control of the computer graphics market, they can control the world. nVidia has filed a patent stating their ownership of 'Interactive Gaming Servers and Online Community Forum'. How nVidia goes from graphics cards to gaming servers beats me."
Haha. So everyone has to pay up!
I also hold the patent on rehashing tired jokes!
Alternative location for the patent. Uspto is notoriously slow.
... it was just issued. nVidia filed it 18 months ago.
And to clarify the story
How nVidia goes from graphics cards to gaming servers beats me.
... have the idea first. No more than that.
It's quite simple really
Looking at the patent, it seems they've patented a CGI ranking system. Bravo! What an invention. Who could have concieved of such a system except some brilliant mind at nVidia.
Oh, and battle.net.
And 10 year old Internet chess servers.
But it bears repeating. Many companies simply patent any ideas that their employees come up with. They don't care if it's valid or even falls into their specific realm, they simply file for a patent...
Most patents will be accepted (valid or not)...many patents will not be tested, some will be...When these "idiot patents" are brought against their targets, there are often hidden agendas...
It is really only for investors...you can say "We've had over 500 patents accepted this year"...it makes investors happy, because it at least looks like they are getting a huge return on their investment...
It's about time you damn hippies learnt who made interactive gaming servers!
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
There are two reasons I can think of that Nvidia would do this:
Nvidia acknowledges that they didn't invent Gaming Servers. The patent reads:
Nvidia sees the following problem in prior art multiplayer gaming servers:
So, their invention is an Interactive gaming server that basically "..runs at least one game having multiple levels of play and playable by a plurality of users simultaneously." (visit the site for more detail).
I still think the patent is utter crap, but it's certainly not as bad as the Slashdot headline made it out to be.
I don't know if this has any relevency (I haven't really looked at the patent) but a ton of online games used to rank users back in the day on Bulletin Boards on the Apple ][ and match them against each other. These include role playing games as well as simple online video games. (I myself wrote a few online text-based video games that ranked users in like 1985)
There was also a bulletin board system called Proving Grounds that was basically a multiplayer adventure game played online that matched you up with people of your own skill level to do battle. Not with a web server, but the idea was the same.
As I recall, numerous MUDs would have entry levels for new users to get their skill levels up to the point they could go where all the regular users were.
If any networked game says something like "is this your first time here?" and then puts you in a different game with other users as users with preset accounts, wouldn't that be prior art for this patent?
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
If you look at it, what they're actually claiming a patent on is collecting people's scores and putting them on the WWW.
Now, admittedly if this all goes ahead it's going to piss a lot of people off. Customers, for instance. I'm sure Anandtech et al would have a thing or two to say about it as well. But it's no show stopper. It's not like they're suing John Carmack for writing network games or anything.
And besides, he was the prior art in this case - the patent was filed end of August '99.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
How nVidia made lives hard for 3dfx owners
After nVidia bought 3DFX, they stopped all driver-development on Voodoo-cards, and in the end making it very hard for users who wanted to run Windows XP drivers. Microsoft would not sign the opengl and glide drivers because they found some errors in the drivers. There were rumours that Microsoft even tried to make nVidia give them the drivers, so Microsoft could fix them for free.
But nVidia claimed they were not the copyright owners of the drivers, and they also did not want any Windows XP drivers on the market. This would of course push every voodoo owner to buy a new graphic card.
This was one of the worst cases of business I've ever seen. There were a lot of protests from various petitions on-line, but nVidia never wanted to respond.
I would surely NEVER buy a nVidia card, and you should not do so either. Go for ATI Radeon instead (which are even better than nVidia).
Mythic Entertainment already has the servers post 'scoring' info onto a web server, the Herald lists players scores(called Realm Points) and updates automagically, as well as the entire realm status.
-Henry
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
Patented inventions are required to be, well, "inventive", and this looks to be a straightforward distributed app., the only "novelty" being that it's using the web for gaming. In other words, they're describing an implementation of standard technology applied to a standard problem.
I think it fails the non-obviousness test, especially in light of the state of the art on the filing date...
A classic example of the "on a computer" syndrome of crap patents...
The things they mention aren't exactly revolutionary, but they are a nice idea. I'm going to use Half-Life (DoD mod) as an example, as that's the game I'm most familiar with. In essence, I as a player, would go to nVidia's website (or whoever hosts it). I'd say that I'm looking for a server running the DoD mod. I want no snipers, normal gravity, and >30 min maps.
Because my unique WonID is registered in their database, it would also match up servers that have players of near equal skill ratings.
As I said, not incredibly revolutionary, but something I would love to see. Imagine playing your favourite game and being able to look for servers that match your preferences (something most games will let you do now), but also by the skill of the other players in that server. Now, instead of being new to a game and joining a "newbie" server that has mid-skill players that seem like experts, you actually be able to see the average skill level of players in a server and compare that to your own.
Personally I think its a great idea and look forward to seeing this become part of all my favourite online-multiplayer-games.
Seems almost to be a patent of Gamespy? Did nVidia buy them?
And that ambition seems to become absurdly amplified when people make decisions in groups, such as with nvidia, ICANN, etc.
It's all the outrages and suppressed desires that come out in these board meetings and become crystallized in company policy.
Groupthink Napoleans this world is creating. Or even Groupthink Nazis, when the companies end up incorporating killing people into their balance sheets such as a certain company that operated in Alabama.
But the interesting aspect is by far how extreme a consenus decision becomes versus what an individual might decide by himself. Is it the appeal to authority that was so prominant in the Nazi decision making process? Just following orders?
Nvidia are acting like bastards with this decision, like so many other bastards out there. I'd like to see some modern studies on how companies boards come up with such twisted ideas.
This is all getting to be old hat. I hope we don't get too used to it.