Slashdot Mirror
Beginnings Of The Metaverse For The Gaming World
narq writes "From the world of Counter-Strike comes an interactive 3D environment for online interactions. Users will be able to accomplish productive goals or just waste time. I can't wait for the sword fighting algorithms to start to take shape. Here is the post at Counter-Server."
i think i just snow crashed....
Yes, I've finally found the solution to my fear of people! I can now interact in a fully 3D world without having to get rid of my security keyboard! This is actually kind of cool. If you chat and waste time a lot. I wonder what cybersex extensions they will put in. (eeks?)
Well, this isn't new, but it is great that someone is finally actually doing it. I hope I don't offend gamers, but I think there are some places where discussions more fruitful then just about games. I think e2 would certainly benefit from having a 3-D city to interact in.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Now all I need is a fibre optic network at home and a nuclear bomb wired to my brainwaves and I'm all set.
This is just Like it
Without music, life would be a mistake. --- Nietzsche
One way of looking at this is a beginning to blur the lines between fps games and massively multiplayer games. That distinction is already being blurred a little with upgoming games such as Planetside, but it looks like the key distinction in the future will go from whether this is a massively multiplayer game or not and instead be whether it is a persistent server based game or whether it is a non-persistent client based game.
LEts have our monthly corporate board meetings
Virtual court rooms
developer meetings
AGMs
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"...Any CS player con join and converse, check out the Desert Eagle (Saloon) or visit Me and the rest of the reviewers in our building"
Not to mention that you will be able to get help with your spelling and grammer skills as well. ^^
It's just Adobe's 3D chat program, Atmosphere, with a Counter-Strike theme. Am I missing some part of this that makes it important, interesting, or even vaguely original.
So does this environment, like, allow you to use your avatars to run machine tools, or steer a riding mower, or use some kind of houshold waldo that will let you clean the toilet or chop vegetables?
And since it will be in 3D, your productivity (or non-productivity) will be dramatically increased because . . . ah . . . um.
3D! Whooo!
This is definitely a cool idea, and its just another step towards William Gibson's view of the future web (read Idoru). Its definitely more fun to actually traverse a DustCity instead of forum categories, and it certainly does better to make your online conversations more interesting.
I think it would be interesting if someone setup an open source project/community for a similar deal. Have everyone build up their own identities, instead of just being limited to nicks you can finally have 3d physical representations of yourself. But I guess that would be moving towards the idea of a virtual city, but then again that would definitely be interesting.
Would also be fun to see how people would hack such a project.
once we can get good 100Mbits, cosistent to my door,
we'll speak then. Think of it that way, tiny urbanterror levels are around 5 - 50MB. And they are not that detailed. Nevermind interfaces, if downloading takes > 2 min., I would be torturous. See you, when I can have bandwidth at 0.02c / 100G, at 100Mbits/s to my home.
There is alot of dark fiber here, in vancouver, but my guess would be that most places in north america would be luck to have 10mbit consistent everywhere.
It is still far far away. Dream on slashdotters.
p.
Let's keep in mind that this is the event of some realizm gamers finding Adobe Atmosphere and remaking their favorite maps. Don't start expecting innovation from a scene that has set gaming back years, and is singularly responsible for my not playing Team Fortress 2 right now.
Everything that was once directly lived has receded into a representation. -debord
Will I be able to sell my furniture for bobba?
How is this relevant at all?
Don't want to be flamebait here or anything, but really... this stuff has been going on for years. Like Activeworlds has been doing since like 1997. You can even build your own stuff (landscaping, buildings, even entire cities -- I did so when I was 14) in real-time. Sure, you can't shoot people in the face, but do you really want to all the time?
I suppose this is News For Nerds because Counter-strike is l33t or something. Frankly, I wouldn't want to chat with most of the CS community... I might get accused of cheating using a Chatbot :)
But seriously, this has been around for years. I fail to see why this is important. Must be a slow news day.
Lordfly
hookers and grits.
Cybersex. Sod the sword fighting algorithms. :)
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
I'm going to be extremely creaped out if it turns out our interconnected 3D world started from counter strike. Though eventually we will have one. An interconnected 3D world where people can either accomplish goals or socialize. We already have it in everquest but at some point a world not more universally appieling and most likely cheaper will emerge.
I do security
So, remind me, why should I think that this matters? Adobe Atmosphere has been around for ages, and has yet to impress me, or release in anything other than winderz, for that matter. Seems to me that if someone wanted to bother, it wouldn't be hard to create a much, much better online metaverse using, say, the quake engine. Atmosphere is primitive compared to its fps counterpoints.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
I'm not sure what you could possibly cheat at with this, but I'm sure someone will do it. And they will ruin it for everyone somehow.
- Peter
Didn't you just effectively say: "Foo already exists, but I'm glad someone just made foo"?
/mike
Anyway, let's assume foo does indeed already exist in one or more forms. Got any links to them? I'd be interested in checking the alternatives out.
cheers,
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
Ummm... World War II Online? While hamstrung by a long initial 'pay to beta test' phase, it's now up and running in decent condition. This game didn't blur the line between FPS and MMOG, it IS an FPMMOS (first person massively multiplayer shooter?)
So it's a 3d universe (oops, sorry, metaverse) for Counter Strike players, but it's not even using the Counter Strike/Half Life engine. That's kind of lame.
It's just using Adobe's Atmosphere Player which has been around for a while now. I tried it a while back and it was not a great improvement over the VRML days.
Now if they'd somehow found a way for everybody to serve their own persistent locations, do their own matchmaking, and run presentations *inside* the Counter Strike engine, well, that would have been something.
Dude, *what* are you talking about? "set gaming back years" my ass! No doubt you would rather have us play some goofy side-scroller game with wizards and dragons and crap. Probably you just got your noob ass shanked on HomeLAN by some 12-year old, and you never got over it! Seriously, I've played lots of games, and I continue to buy new ones as they come out - and nothing, I repeat *NOTHING* comes close to Counter-Strike for sheer fun and mayhem. CS has the best gameplay period, probably because it was (originally) designed by real gamers, not "marchitected" by lame suits. The only bad thing about CS is that it is so popular that all the cheat-programmers flock to it. Maybe when Doom III comes out and people start making mods for it, CS will fade, but it hasn't happened yet. Check out the GameSpy server stats - CS rules. Out.
about 3 years ago...and 5 years ago...and every night when i was 5 years old before i went to bed
And while you have this snazzy sword fighting algorithim taking place ala SnowCrash, just what are you going to use to control it? A joystick? Mouse? Or joy-of-all-joys: a Linux driven Nintendo Power Glove... (On a side note, I just hate using the slashdot search engine. Using the words "Linux" and "Nintendo" yielded my target 13 links down... And how many of those other links had anything to do with, or even the word Nintendo in their title? None.)
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Most of the comments posted so far seem to be of the Counterstrike sux/Atmosphere sux/etc. variety. Where's the imagination? The interesting thing about DustCity is not the implementation, it's the idea. News about a persistent CounterStrike-themed world is a good jumping off point for discussions about other possible implementations and 3D worlds in general. Why are we so quick to say "It sucks." or "It will never work."? Are we really that pessimistic?
If you don't like DustCity, talk about CrystalSpace. Talk about WorldForge. Talk about extending the Quake III engine to have similar functionality (and better graphics). There's plenty of interesting work going on in persistent 3D worlds. Why doesn't this article provoke that kind of discussion?
This
...we can make those Counter-Strike campers listen to Reason (tm).
fuck the lameness filter.
like it is the beginning of a graphical MOO. :-/
After a brief amount of time, people will dislike the rules, admins,
players, code, or (insert any factor here), and split off to create a
similar project.
Whether or not they use the original code is irrelevant, as it will develop
into its own code base, with its own array of players, which will grow to
dislike the admins, players, code base, etc...
It's a never ending cycle known well to the MUD/MOO/MUSH/etc world.
I doubt ever seeing something as united as Stephenson's MetaVerse, unless it
is introduced to the populace by M$...
I think you have just provided the parent with vindication.
Fool.
I remember when Quake III was in development, they were talking about a similar feature, virtual arenas of players not currently playing.
Whats the big deal?
like it is the beginning of a graphical MOO. :-/
After a brief amount of time, people will dislike the rules, admins, players, code, or (insert any factor here), and split off to create a similar project.
Whether or not they use the original code is irrelevant, as it will develop into its own code base, with its own array of players, which will grow to dislike the admins, players, code base, etc...
It's a never ending cycle known well to the MUD/MOO/MUSH/etc world.
I doubt ever seeing something as united as Stephenson's MetaVerse, unless it is introduced to the populace by M$...
I posted this earlier by accident as AC, although this doesn't make much difference since my posts score 0. Heh.
No, Beowulf clusters can't imagine in Soviet Russia.
Huh? Why would I want to download a huge program just to make believe I'm at work?
As someone who has spent almost two years working on building, from the ground up, the technology for something similar, but having had to kill the project mainly due to lack of external interest, I think the main advantage of DustCity is the target audience. The Counter-Strike user community seems to be very strong, and of course already centers around creating 3D content. Plus, the idea of integrating clans and giving them the ability to build their own "homes" in DustCity seems obvious, but is hopefully brilliant just as well. Now, if only my home PC was powerful enough to actually do 3D things on... ;^)
;^)
Oh, and for the curious: check out the results of the above-mentioned effort, which was sponsored by one of Sweden's coolest research companies, at verse.sf.net. It's all Free Software, using a combination of GPL, LGPL and BSD licenses. Never mind the bitterness of the opening (final) diary entries.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Lets not forget the 'population' of the CS servers
That is probably the major flaw in CS at the moment and will probably be like that until it dies
You would be hard pressed to find a public server with less than 50% of them being complete and total jerks. Even so, you probably found it in its 'off peak' times, or perhaps the 'Happy Hour'
Best Gameplay? Arguable. That is if the majority of them are even doing more than just running around waving the mouse everywhere trying to get a lock with their aimbots. Though I may appear to be over-generalizing or jumping onto the anti-cs bandwagon or some other crap, I've been through it as well. I've spent months playing and honing 'skills' or whatever you may call them. I consider them to be reflexes and fine motor control and yes, I often come near the top of the scoreboard, which isn't the main focus of CS at all if you think about it. Kills are not the main focus, playing as a team and winning is the focus, and unfortunately, CS is now mostly a team DM with a round-based system outside of 'professional' tournaments
CS only 'rules' since it is the 'fad' that is going around. Yeah, I know its clearly above the rest in sheer number of servers avaliable but think about this:
If a particular game had excellent gameplay but no servers, who's going to play it? In the other point of view, if no one plays it, who's going to bother running servers for it?
Chicken and the egg scenario. Which comes first? CS has probably hit luck square in the head when it grew into the entity we have now. The original first test had barely more than a dozen people trying it out, and look where we are now: More CS servers than Q3, RTCW and other HL mods combined. Can you sense a monopoly here?
I admit, its a good game but other games are not given their chance with the blind following of CS.
If anything, CS has shown the major flaw in the HL/Modified Q2 engine:
It was NOT designed with cheats in mind. Granted, the folks as Valve have done wonders with building on the engine they've started off, and from some reports they've fixed the age old Q2 bug where minimizing the window will terminate the sound stream, but it doesn't take a genius to look around and see the widespread use of OGL hooks, see what those 'addons' can do and the basic workings of things such as aimbots. Ingenious on one hand, but utterly devestating on remaining gameplay left for those who are on the other end.
CS has in many ways, advanced gaming by a fair bit, and has even spurred an arms race int eh cheat/anti-cheat camps with counters to each other's advances; but it is now swamped by far too many people who do not understand basic manners or social behaviour, whether they pretend to do so or not. I am not asking much in terms of manners, but I cannot stand those who spend most of their time either badmouthing other people, claim to be far superior to others while blatently cheating, cheaters in general who don't care about the consequences to their actions and probably those who make it their top priority to piss people off.
For those still playing CS, I find that GENERALLY, FF servers contain the better groupings of people, infact, you amy find servers that have people who are clearly not belonging to the rather immature rabble
I'll end my mindless rabbling now. I don't expect to persuade anyone but I just needed to give out my thoughts on the matter
Unless the world has a game element, it will not be used. Why? Because IRC/IM systems are far more flexible.
When we enter a communication area, we prefer to use it to eliminate spatial boundaries which impede communication in "meatspace". If the spatial boundaries are present, there had better be a damn good reason (such as "it's good to be far away from people who are trying to shoot me", or "the areas are very pretty and it is challenging to pass through one to get to the rewards of the next", or "I built my own custom area, come and see it.") If the space is purely oriented toward communication and collaborative work, the space must integrate with the purpose of communication (such as a collaborative 3d map builder.)
Attaching a non-interactive world area to something like a chat room has been tried before ten million times, and no one is interested, as it defeats the purpose of both elements (wastes time walking, and why bother?)
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
There's even a language (VRML) for such virtual worlds.
And on the other hand, there's the oblivious massively multiplayer online RPGs - Asheron's Call, Ultima Online, Everquest..
However, it seems that they all seem to faltering, or not seeing any substantial growth. Possible reasons?
Noone else is using it, anyway
It maneuvers like crap
There's alternatives much simplier than virtual reality
Basically, people aren't using it because there's no advantage of doing so. Those that are using it are, from what I've seen, much more social than the typical geek.
When will we see a world that provides both quality, as well as a reason to stay? Only MMORPGs seem to be providing it today.
(Then again, I haven't stepped into a chat-oriented world in a few years, so I don't know of any particular trends.. YMMV.)
Yeah it was mostly Junk Science gone bad, but it DID make me think a lot about the nature of viruses...
Everytime I see a joke about how Windows is really a virus, or get a catchy tune stuck in my head I think back to that book.
What's the definition of a good book then? If not the fact that I still make quiet mental references to it even 10 years after-the-fact?
-- Büt Theñ Âgåîñ, Whåt The Fück Dö I Kñöw?
I was reading today about Doom 3's new editor being integrated into the engine, and was thinking if you developed a BSP tree server you could assign permissions to nodes on the tree and allow people to infinitely edit spaces they "own". I'm not sure if BSP would allow such a thing. ie. would the BSP tree not put rooms in a building below the cube representing the building itself? But all in all i think BSP would be a good technology for building a real time editable metaverse. If you could break up the tree into multiple files you could put it up on a CVS server that at the end of the night would compile all the changes and update the metaverse.
Tons of other engines exist.
CS is based on a really cheesy one (Adobe whatever) and the big other player (Id) won't commit their best tech.
Script kiddies will mess everything up.
Previous attempts, from C64 days to now have always failed.
Navigation sucks.
Boy, if I didn't know better, I'ld say you're mostly a bunch of losers more interested in off the cuff remarks then in substantive responses. Naw. Couldn't be.
So, from the top, let's go back to Snow Crash and see what it actually says made the Metaverse succeed. Hmmm.....
-Close linking with sophisticated and micropayment-friendly commerce engine. Nope.
-Ability to seamlessly exchange data (such as the virtual business card containing the Snow Crash virus) without breaking the metaphor. Nope.
-Navigation and motion precisely correlated to actual full body physical motion (think how Hiro practices). Nope.
-Detailed and nuanced renderings of facial expressions. Nope.
-Stripped out, bare universe in the beginning, allowing early "settlers" to make their mistakes *years* before newbies are let in. Nope.
-HUGE telecom company with billions of dollars worth of computers and the power to overthrow governments backing the project (remember who owns the black cube in the desert, folks). Nope.
Yeah, you're all of you right. This is *exactly* like the metaverse and so proves that such a project will never work. Oh dear; I'm going to go home and cry now.
Maybe not.
Doggone, pathetic, defeatist, ignorant, shallow, grumble, mumble, bitch, moan . . . . .
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
This reminds my of one of the interviews he gave when Quake III was finished.
From what I recall he said that he was surprised not many people were interested in metaverse type worlds.
He said that if enough people would be interested he would think about giving it a shot.
Now this guys are using his code (quake II engine) to try and implement it.
I bet he will be interested.
By the way, there are a couple of projects along the same line using the free (LGPL) 3D engine Crystal Space ( crystal.sourceforge.net)
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
I don't know - something like this?
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Users will be able to accomplish productive goals or just waste time.
I dispute half that statement.
Just wondering...
PS. Yes actually. Nice ideas, nice story, but I got pissed of with the constant references to really basic computer science (for example, long winded references to base 2 as if it is in some way magical).
Cryptonomicon, now that's a story (more like 5 actually).
What do you think your average gamer would do given those two choices?
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
I am with you on this one. I personally think that the metaverse is not only feasible but could be achieved within our lifetimes. Or atleast something pretty close to it.
There another book with a similar world called "A point of honor." It's a little less insane than snowcrash.
One thing I am really looking forward to is a decent swordfighting simulation. As of yet the closest thing I've seen was that crappy game where you controll the guys sword arm with your mouse.. It was produced for ealy 3dfx and thus sucked major ass.
I think the following would be a good first milestone for a "metaverse":
- An enivroment in which routines can be loaded into a standard input and output resource which contains simplified and efficient laws of existance, physics, and other basic elements of reality.
- A client which allows the user to efficiently observe and manipulate said environment.
I think the key to the advacement of this project would be open development. People need to have the ability to load scripts or whatnot freely.
I think that the metaverse would make a good OS.
Quit bickering amongst yourselves, naysaying.. and get to work. I want to have a swordfight duel in the metaverse before my life is over! I spend my life persuing adventures such as this in online games. For a good visual record of some of my creed's accomplishments check out http://www.spleens.net
As far back as I can remember in my clanning days (Q1, AQ2 and CS) we had mappers create conference rooms and training areas for clan use as well as server side code to facilitate better communication and a whole bunch of 3133t kicking/banning routines for additional policing and/or entertainment value. I'm positive that others were doing it at the same time as well. How is this any different?
meeting people in a fake 3d RPG world is exciting....
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
3d interactive social/building program... its a bit behind the times though, but quite amusing non-the-less
Anyway, let's assume [virtual reality online chat] does indeed already exist in one or more forms. Got any links to them?
Here's a list
Will I retire or break 10K?
Does anyone have a working link for me to download Adobe Atmosphere without having to get an account with adobe?
ok ok this sounds cool and all but CS is the last thing that needs this element in it. I use to play CS. I stress the "USE TO" part. Everyone knows that cheating/hacking/8 year olds playing on daddies computer are the bulk of the CS community now. You cant find a player that has the default configuration anymore. There is always some semi legal script that helps them shot or run or something. And now the CS world gets this psuedo - MMPORPG feel thing to it. How long till this gets hacked in some fashion so that people can start spraypainting porn on the city walls or something lame like that. Granted CS was one of the most popular mods ever created and its insanely fun to play but its become a realm of script kiddies and lamers. Are these really the type of people you want talk to in your spare time?
This post brought to you by my K-12 teachers.
For example, you can see everybody wandering around, but can't tell who is who. Unless somebody explicitly does the moon walk and says "Look, I'm the guy in the T-shirt doing the moon walk", then you can't relate the text-based user names to the GUI. But then there are probably 2 other guys in T-shirts doing the moonwalk at the same time.
The most exciting point the Adobe help files state is: "Users that are exploring the same world can see representations of each other called avatars, and converse with one another by typing messages in a chat window."
Get it? ... "typing messages in a chat window" -- which can be done without the GUI.
The fun GUI stuff to do (even though it doesn't relate to chatting is): learn to jump, jump off the edge of the map, learn to do the moonwalk, tell other people how to jump and do the moonwalk. And of course the non-fun stuff also doesn't relate to the chat.
By the time you're finished playing with the 3D GUI you have not said anything meaningful at all ... thus, anti-chatroom technology at its best.
But get people into a meaningful conversation, and they will ignore the GUI altogether.
It seems to be useless technology right now -- hopefully Adobe will create some linkage between the chat and GUI. Or maybe in the same vein, they should throw together a chat box and a screen-magnifier utility. That would go over just as well in its current incarnation.
A lot of comments about metaverse-like worlds seem to center around the 3D engine and the quality of the graphics. But is that really the crucial aspect of the metaverse that we find appealing?
/.
One of the most fascinating parts of the metaverse was the way it offered an interactive version of the Internet under a single paradigm. Instead of having the wide range of protocols like HTTP and IRC offering a limited range of interactivity and services, it was all integrated. With the Net right now we can find interesting flat (or semi-interactive) documents on the web, we can play interactive games, or we can engage in primarily useless chatter on IRC.
The metaverse in principle combined all of these principles into a single paradigm. You could go to a library and while reading a reference book, you could engage in mindless chatter (or interesting discussion) within the context of the library.
I think that's a big key--keeping the context. That's what makes blogs with discussion areas (like slashdot) so interesting--we can discuss over the context of the article. But we really need an overlying metaphor, like the metaverse had, for unifying all the information, services, and forms of interaction.
3D is not the key. It's just the glossy exterior that could bring such a paradigm to the next level IF such a paradigm really existed.
If you're interested in that kind of thing... get in touch with me via msg on
byroniverse
Wow I dont think my point could of ever been expressed without the correct puncuation and grammer. Thanks for posting anonymously. Now I can just laugh in general instead of focusing it at one poor person.
After pursuing many of the links mentioned in the comments sections for legacy 3D communities, I was disappointed to discover that almost all of them only worked on Windows. Aren't there any cool Linux accessible 3D communities?
MAC | A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Clearly the thing was severely hardware-limited. But the idea seemed sound, and it scaled up well. Gradually, the hardware got better, the software got better, and by the days of VRML 97, things pretty much worked in 3D. Yet nobody cared. Surfing the web had come along, and that was more useful and more fun.
VRML is little-used today. Almost all the VRML companies have tanked. But with a broadband connection and a modern graphics card, it works very well. But the support infrastructure is dead.
[Tk]Assassin: WHERE ARE YOU!! STOP CAMPING and COME OUT
|AMG|n00b-killa: Hold on, almost done...washroom near bomb site B...
I read a lot of gibson books one summer and they all sorta ran together. I guess I thought the walled city was a Virtual Light concept or something. D'oh.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
http://www.lametaverse.org
Actually, probably the fact that TF2 has not yet been released is the main reason you're not playing it.
Why have virtual reality communities largely failed? Because people need a compelling reason to drop face to face communication for another form. A virtual reality while sounding cool to some technophiles, doesn't do much for the most of the people out there. What exactly about a 2d representation of a 3d avatar who does a horrible job of lip synching your text appeals to people over just the text? Communities aren't something that you can really design from the ground up, they're something that grows out of something smaller. Halflife is a really big example. CounterStrike in particular. Its a good enough game to motivate people to talk about it and make connnections between players. People form clans, etc. Recently voice chat has been added which has really improved leadership and team performance. Its slowly growing out of the game that was released so long ago. There are even small projects going on to create a meta game of sorts, a sort of mercenary system in which you gain reputation by playing which bars you from playing on lower servers and ruining the game.
Remember, the walled city started as a filter turned inside out, and grew from there. Its a hodge podge collection of toys, not exactly a mainstream communication device. The city itself is stored in various member's houses and supported by the members. I don't think your local realtor will put up and maintain a computer to host an online office of some virtual reality. The closests and perhaps most influential technology on the idea behind the walled city would be IRC. While in itself, the various implementations have archaic interfaces, simple techophobia is less than enough to foster such an elite community, as evidenced by the nearly crushing popularity of EFnet and DALnet. Instead, consider more obscure and private IRC servers, with explicit connection permissions.
You haven't found your virtual realities because you're looking for the wrong things. There is a difference betwen visual and virtual. The reason nobody bought into the realtime rendered virtual reality is because people like you don't have the hardware, and many people, yourself possibly included, wouldn't like the result. Virtual shopping malls. There's no room for virtual coffee houses with poetry hours, unless you want to pay a cover charge to experience a shade less of reality. You may be onto something, as many mmorpgs were simply about sitting on pillows and talking to other people with text messages. The fundamental hasn't changed much: text messaging is the standard and dressing it up doesn't help much.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Every culture has their own slang, the internet is no different. Sure I'd never say laughing out loud, because if I was saying it then that would mean the person could hear me and would know I was laughing so it would make no sense to say it. However it makes perfect sense to use lol online because the person can't hear you, also hahaha is more often used sarcasticly online so how would you differentiate. As for using u and r as words, it's called shorthand and it's been arround for a long time. The reason? It allows you to say more in a shorter amount of time, and while it may not be appropriate for an important document it's fine for two friends talking. How about words like "can't" and "don't", these words are reguarly used in everyday speech but really the contraction only saves us two letters.
V
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
That's exactly why nothing "useful" will come of this. The only people who have any interest whatsoever in immersive 3D worlds are gamers. End of story.
Where are all those corporate giants throwing down the big bucks so they can have virtual conferences? Where are the calls for a new version of VRML from the business community?
As interesting as the technology is, and as cool as Gibson's early stuff was, it's basically a geek toy. It'll wind its way into the collective culture after a while - look at the success of EverSmack and its ilk. 3D visualization tools are already entrenched in many techology-driven business sectors. But will immersive worlds ever become the great tool of commerce that sci-fi has envisioned for over 20 years now?
No. Because in the real world, people matter more than pixels. Commerce is still handled primarily through face-to-face introductions, through lunch meetings and discussions about the baseball strike and the weather and vacations and family and all those other little details that actually make up life.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
i agree totally, i dont even think many ppl got the 'Make CS-cheaters listen to Reason(tm)' joke from a few posts bank, which i thought was pretty funny, but maybe im just a nerd/loser :)
:)) ... but i think you can still abandon all your friends and social events, quit your job, and just spend all your time levelling up before killing yourself. there is an option under the tools -> preferences -> takeresponsibilityforyourownactions menu. or something. either way it has me excited.
... YOUR dildo.
anyway, neocron is an mmorpg which looks like it could fit the bill of a future 'metaverse' type environment, once it finally is released. they offer the chance to just sit around and do whatever you like. which i know is the same as some of the other online rpgs, but this one is in a fully 3d environment, with real-time interaction (and presumably sword fighting
plus, it has a strip club. and its never referred to as the definate article. its always THE dildo, never
(note to morons : the fact that i have now described myself as a nerd/loser means i wont actually start crying when you agree with me, so dont waste your time)
Hell... been doing this in Everquest for years...
Zzzzzz
old news..
World War II Online is a massively-multiplayer first-person shooter, as well as a tank and flight sim.
www.wwiionline.com
I'm surprised nobody mentioned LindenLab's "LindenWorlds." It sounds a modern ActiveWorlds allowing you to build within the game. Unfortunately it will require a 1GHz minimum CPU and, of course, a broadband.
:-(
Oh, and there will be a monthly fee.
http://www.lindenlab.com
I'm working on it.
Beyond 2