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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.
Now all I need is a fibre optic network at home and a nuclear bomb wired to my brainwaves and I'm all set.
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!
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.
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.)
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?"
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).
I remember when Quake III was in development, they were talking about a similar feature, virtual arenas of players not currently playing.
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);}
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?
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
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?
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
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.
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Open Source Sysadmin
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.
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Open Source Sysadmin
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.
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