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."
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?"
about 3 years ago...and 5 years ago...and every night when i was 5 years old before i went to bed
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
I remember when Quake III was in development, they were talking about a similar feature, virtual arenas of players not currently playing.
Umm, wasn't the economic stratification/Northern-vs-Southern Cal stuff more _Virtual Light_? And although it wasn't much of a plot point, Idoru did include some Internet-as-VR-chat-room stuff (ie the Walled City, and what's-her-face's VR-chatting with the Lo-Rez fan club). Mind you, saying that about a Gibson (or other cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk/whatever) book is like saying "That Heinlein book had some spaceship stuff in it," where "That Heinlein book" != _Glory_Road_.
As far as Dust City vs CounterStrike goes, I'd have to question whether an action game, no matter how detailed, could be considered a "virtual world." The contents of a game level, after all, exist only in relation to the game and whether or not the're useful to the player in winning the game. Mind you, I haven't played CounterStrike (or any other game modern enough to require a 3d vid card), so I may be making unwarranted assumptions. But the shooter game as virtual reality thing has sort of annoyed me ever since the Doom days.
Thought here: We've had the tech to build a non-goal-based, non-game-like virtual world of sorts ever since Quake. So why hasn't one been built and taken the world by storm a la the Web in the late 90's? Why am I typing this into a 2d text box rather than into the mouth of some snazzed-out avatar in a VRML scene? Maybe it's the lack of a killer app. Or maybe EverCrack et al is the killer app and I'm just full of shit. Who knows?
Click here if you just like to click on shit.
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?
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