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."

Comments

Mirror

[Account 10]

Alternative location for the patent. Uspto is notoriously slow.

And to clarify the story ... it was just issued. nVidia filed it 18 months ago.

Looking at the patent...

[jmd!]

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.

I think it's been touched on before...

[OneFix]

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...

S.W.A.G.

[Picass0]

There are two reasons I can think of that Nvidia would do this:

1. They are greedy cocksuckers. Pardon my French.
2. It's a pre-emptive strike. Nvidia sees all of they whacked-out patents being issued on technologies that impact the PC market, and they are working to secure technologies that impact them directly or indirectly. They may not want to rape other companies for money. They just don't want to be raped.
3. They really are just greedy cocksuckers.

Clarification

[Rampant Atrocity]

Let me clarify what Nvidia is actually patenting, as the Slashdot headline and blurb are misleading.

Nvidia acknowledges that they didn't invent Gaming Servers. The patent reads:

In recent years multiplayer, online video games have become popular...See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,841,980, entitled "Distributed System for Communication Networks in Multiuser Applications"; U.S. Pat. No. 5,823,879, entitled "Network Gaming System"; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,838,909, entitled "Reducing Latency When Synchronizing Access to a Multiuser Database over a Network.

Nvidia sees the following problem in prior art multiplayer gaming servers:

A problem arises in that the players often have differing skill levels and game attribute preferences. For example, one player may want to play "Quake" only against other players having a skill level at least equal to his or her own skill level.

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.

Prior Art?

[VValdo]

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

It's not actually that bad.

[WasterDave]

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

Another crap patent

[studerby]

Based on the patent abstract, this looks like another crap patent.

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...

Some MORE Clarification

[Nos.]

Some previous commenters have clarified the subject of the article, but I'm going a bit farther. Read the article and have a look at the key points.

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.

Re:Some MORE Clarification

[Nos.]

Depends on how the skill calculations are done. On my DoD server, I run a program called FastStats (see http://faststats.sourceforge.net). In any case, your skill is based not solely on your kill ratio, but on the skill of your victimes (and anyone that kills you). So, if you're killing people with no skill, your skill isn't going to change (or change very little). However, if you're being routinely killed by somebody with low skill, your skill is going to drop rapidly while their skill rises quickly.

Back to your scenario, lets say that everybody on your 5:1 server has about the same skill level (skill matters, not K:D ratios). If at the end of a few hours of gaming, everyone is sitting at about 1:1, then chances are, nobody's skill really changed that much.

However, the read advantage comes in when you go onto one of these servers and do really well. Your skill level is going to climb. Whereas you go into a server with people half your skill level, your going to find your skill level not changing or possibly even dropping!

Gamespy?

[jsimon12]

Seems almost to be a patent of Gamespy? Did nVidia buy them?