Slashdot Mirror
The Sims Online & "Open Source" Gaming Models
One of my old friends sent me a recent story from Business2 that talks about online gaming, combined with The Sims Online and community involvement in a game. It's not a very substantive piece, but a good discussion starter.
It's not a very substantive piece, but a good discussion starter.
Similar to this story submission.
Apart from the "good discussion starter" part.
How about giving us some reason to want to click the link.
Might as well post cool stories here, check 'em out!
Interesting article but think participating in a online game is a world apart from participating in a massive open source project. I might consider wasting an hour online playing a game after work but after programming for 8 hours I don't fancy going home to start programming again (well not all the time).
Why in this day does everything online have to be compared to something else online regardless of the differences?
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
When, according to this article, you can GET A GREAT DEAL NOW ON VISUAL STUDIO.NET!!
Really, it said that.
Hey! the ultimate on-line sims. Totally free (well apart from taxes). 6 billion installed user base - it's called real-life.
It's open source too (just read a physics book)
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
One day we won't be concerned with physically being in the same location as those we interact with. When reality and personal presense can be simulated like a telephone call or a holodeck in Star Trek, we aren't going to be concerned with our physical location in relation to others for anything except manual labour.
We'll even live in different countries from our partners.
The future is arriving.
The internet is a MMORPG.
This can be the great new marketing engine for 21th century. You saw the McDonalds affair at SIMS online.
Cheaters can delay the success of this scheme, but I think it will find it's way sooner or later. Everquest platinum may be virtual, but there are auctions at e-bay that move real dollars.
This is maybe a bit offtopic, but this reminds me of something I read here at slashdot: some people justify the bans micro$oft put on modded-Xbox users because modding your Xbox can allow you cheating on-line. Maybe an interesting topic: completely closed devices to make it impossible to cheat online - maybe next big justification for closed software-hardware (and bundling).
How many of you use Mozilla as your Web browser? OK, both of you can put down your hands. Mozilla, you'll remember, was the super-cool open-source version of the Netscape browser that was going to take over the Web because thousands of programmers from around the world, all committed to building a better browser and countering the Microsoft behemoth, would pool their talents and create the greatest browser ever. More than four years later, Mozilla has generated far more press releases than products and has done nothing to help the Netscape browser retake any ground from Microsoft. This was one massively multiplayer project that never took off.
Great Journalism Jimmy, quit breakin my balls here
It's not a very substantive piece, but a good discussion starter.
Come on admit it, you're just happy a non-geek source mentioned the Sims Online so we could get away with talking about it some more!
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
TROLL?
Are you HIGH?
Jesus Christ. Do you disagree that SEX is better when your partner is cohereant and awake?
Jesus. What a fucktard.
SUICIDE
IS SELF EXPRESSION
to win, is to release a 1.0 project. many fail. those who do are crippled (i.e mozilla)
The article basically says: Open Source Development projects and Online Game Mods both foster community - perhaps we can make one more like the other. Who knows what might happen! Tim Berners-Lee certainly doesn't!
I say: Sourceforge has done 100 times more for Open Source Development than Sims Online ever will. Making incremental improvements and getting something out there is going to be more effective than Blue Sky dreaming.
Great games
The Sims Online could turn into something really big... just imagine.. A huge multiplayer world where all these people are... living.. life? What a concept! I can't wait to join my local sims Linux Users Group and start developing for my Sim Open Source community and posting on Sim-Slashdot.. Has the word "Sim" lost meaning to you yet? It sure has to me!
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
"Someone somewhere must be dreaming of a massively multiplayer redo of Tetris"
lol... personally i'm waiting with baited breath for the next development, TETRIS - The Movie!! starring: a load of bricks i found in the back yard, some of which were inexplicably T- and L-shaped ;)
Did it? Really?
Oh, I guess that lizard thingie laying on my desktop is just an explorer glitch then.
I think that the author of course doesn't give a damn about quality, but quantity. This is exactly the same debate as 'quake 1 sucks, no one plays it.'
A MMORPG Tetris-esque game could be quite fun...... Remember TetriNET? Take TetriNET.. add a master server... a server-kept ladder/clan/score tracking system... along with a new interface, free download and trial... and then charge $10/mo to play... I don't know... it might work.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
I can't see this getting kudos from slashdot readers. It starts off by saying that Mozilla is a failed project and that the thousands of developers who worked on it should take their cues from the content developers for the sims and the communities building up in the sims online. Yah. Technology reporting at it's best, this.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" whilst looking for a rock
an open source implementation of the sims, which doesn't rely on graphics or GUI.
You basically play the MMORPG from $bash. ASCII art is just as good as those fancy sims graphics. As for sound.. the pc beeps as sufficient.
We'll call it GNU/OpenSims.
Take that Maxis!
It may be open source, but the source sure is obsfurcated
After the whole of slashdot gets done visiting that link.. wait.. visiting the link.. I mean half the whole of slashdot.. I'm sure he'll be changing his tune about the "Okay, the two of you can put your hands down now"
;)
I'd like to see his weblogs
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
It looks like whoever wrote this article is a complete retard. (No offense to real retards).
He needs to check his facts, because Mozilla today is more widely adapted than ever. Oh, did I mention Phoenix? It's creeping up on IE like the black death. Left and right I see people on Windows switching to Phoenix because it offers so much more without all the bloat and constant annoying crashes.
Obviously, that guy who wrote the article knows nothing about the current state of browser wars. While the usage numbers for IE are very favorable to Microsoft, they are taking notice.
we can place our real-life friends [if you've got any, that is] on 1x1 tiles in the pool, remove the ladder and let them die?
after about two hours of playing, that was the only funny thing left in the sims...
Yet another escape from reality into reality. Its the big thing thesedays. Maybe one day reality won't exist!! (har har har.)
When you get down to it we're basically just being nosey in these things. Its no wonder aliens never have noses, the damn things will cause the end of humanity as we know it (ala the matrix).
there is a striking similarity b/w the matrix concept and the sims.. only one difference... in our world here.. we want to jump into cyberspace and go about our mundane activities ie The Sims. In the matrix however.. people were trying to jump out of the virtual world. Maybe, if the matrix DID exist.. people would have prefered NOT to jump out of the virtual world... and that's scary.. but that is where the world is heading. I can't remember the link.. but I read this article about how the internet.. or a common virtual world may be harmful to the development cycle of the world... WHY.. that's because if people are in such close/instant contact with each other , they begin to think alike. Whereas if you have segregated areas, people have the oppertunity to develope independantly.. original ideas flow.. as a result they may discover more than one way of achieving something in their respective areas..... dunno how true this is but it DOES make one think
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
If you need closed hardware to get secure and fair systems you're not doing it right
Sure, but M$ IS not doing it right. Happens that almost nobody is doing it right: look at cheat in Q3 online.
Besides, it's a security measure EASY TO UNDERSTAND for everybody. This have a huge market advantage since 99% of the users is clueless about criptography (100% is clueless of HOW it's being implemented in a closed commercial solution).
Do you want a system that only allows you to shut by an OS command? or do you prefer to have access to the PLUG that you know will power off the PC?
Not that I excuse M$ for such practices, but there are reasons for people justifying it.
Quote from the article:
> Open source is an enormously successful method of
> software development, but so far it seems to work best
> on projects in which a relatively small, extremely motivated,
> often far-flung team can piggyback on the work done by others
> and develop more tools for the next set of programmers.
The author's impression of OSS development is skewed, I don't think he ever was involved in an OSS project himself.
Firstly, it has always been the rule that the core of an application is built by a rather small group of people. Every application core has a limited number of files/components with lots of interdependencies---there can only be a limited number of people who work at those at the same time. Building software is not like building a house where hundreds of people can lay down individual bricks as long as there is some master plan that tells them where to put them. It's more like erecting a big circus tent: of the people in the center, who pull up the actual tent (as opposed to those who set up additional stuff like trailers and cages), everyone has to know what the others are doing at the moment to prevent the thing from falling on their heads. Projects with a rather small, highly motivated team don't just work better, these are the only ones who work at all.
Secondly, I object to giving people the idea that successful OSS projects are "piggybacking" on other software. It's simly a fact of life that the times in which every program was written from scratch in Assembler are over. As software becomes more complex, more complex methods of building it have to be employed. You have to use sets of tools from various sources, re-use components, build upon the work of others, instead of re-inventing the wheel every time. Just because this is more visible in OSS projects, which display credits for the foundation they use instead of paying licence fees, that doesn't mean it's different from proprietary software.
Well, actually there is one difference: OSS projects that are also free software support the modern approach to software engineering much better. You can use them in your own work, which can in turn be modified, improved and used in other projects. Proprietary software developers, on the other hand, hide their work from each other and force each other to do exactly the same tasks over and over because everyone fears that giving away stuff for free wouldn't pay off in the end. Which is absurd in a way; imagine having to develop yet another stupid GUI widget that looks and behaves exactly like that from the competition, with the only difference that the development is payed by company B this time instead of company A.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
you guys should check this out, Ryzom has its whole engine and game system open source (err something like that, GNU maybe? me not sure) even all the original content will have the source files available too I think (ie the .max files for the player models and such)
you may not have heard of it, but the graphics and art totally rock, plus the background story is amazingly original, very interesting
and very in-depth (check out the encyclopedia section they just added)
- http://www.ryzom.com/
-- quote start
At Nevrax.org you can find all about NeL including Nel's source code. Nel is Nevrax's platform for the next generation of persistent worlds of which The Saga of Ryzom is just the first.
NeL (Nevrax Library) is a toolkit for the development of massively online universes. It provides the base technologies and a set of development methodologies for the development of both client and server code.
Check out the Documentation or FAQ section at Nevrax.org to learn more about how NeL works, then hop onto the Mailing List and join the discussion.
Click here to visit the Nevrax.org.
-- end quote
here's a hint fuckoff.. if it's not a substansive pieve, don't post it, thanks for wasting my time
This "article" is so "well" written and obviously the "writer" is so well informed.
But seriously, this article is so poor that it is almost a joke and should be taken lightly.. no need to get worked up
and so is mplayer.
viva la linux!
Well, that was a shitty comment if I ever saw one. I happen to use mozilla at work, and all my clients have it installed and configured thanks to me. They happen to love it, from the simple users who hate pop-ups to the power users. I do notice that no matter what level of expertise though, they tend to blame the browser for something not working, not the page itself, that stigma is the only thing left holding acceptance back.
:)
Well, someone let me know who the other user is so I can keep in touch
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
umm no one uses NEL, they are like 4 years behind even the free engines today. Free softwares blows, RMS blows, french people blow. Open Source will never succeed until one of you fucking idiots figures out how the coders get paid...
Article: It's a given that The Sims Online will have a profound effect on the game industry...
That's garbage. I was beta testing TSO for a few weeks, and in my opinion, it's not going to take off.
Visualize this: playing a computer game... in which one's avatar is... sleeping. For twenty minutes straight, because your stupid "energy" bar is low. Meanwhile, you are forced to chat with other players to keep your connection alive because they boot you after fifteen minutes of idleness.
Even if the damn game does inexplicably manage to sell and retain players, it doesn't offer anything new at all to the genre.
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
What could you do if you had a million people helping you?
:)
Actually, I have no idea.
And that's the problem with all these people playing the sims.. they probably also don't know.
They could do something productive with their own life, create or learn something, get forward in their life.
But no, they decide to waste hours playing a game in which they have a virtual person achieving things which they'll probably never do themselves in their own life because they waste all their time.
I just don't get it.
Anyway, I've lost enough time replying here, could've done useful instead
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
well it has facial animation and manages some really amazing looking stuff, so I thought it was not such a "that blows" kind of product.
Maybe an interesting topic: completely closed devices to make it impossible to cheat online - maybe next big justification for closed software-hardware (and bundling).
Actually, with TCPA one of the points is that you can trust the program to be exactly the program you want, and not a modified one. With a TCPA OS (OSS or otherwise) + a TCPA app (open source or otherwise) you can ensure that only that application can connect.
Of course, I don't think it's very likely that an open-source TCPA app requiring a special TCPA signed linux kernel will show up, but it's theoretically just as possible.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You can build software like a house. It's just that the master plan is never good enough.
/*Master plan by oliverthered*/ ......
/*oliverthered2*/ /*oliverthered2*/
Say I produce a master plan for a few classes.
class masterplan public: {
public:
& plans(int planid);
& plans( planname);
protected:
etc....
}
A developer should be able to work on that plan without 'assistance'
Say I decide to write
plan& plans(int planid);
well I know there needs to be a private collection some plans so i implement
protected:
vector vplans;
public:
plan& plans(int planid) excepts elementnotfound{
try{
return vplans[planid];
}catch(...){
throw (new elementnotfound("Plans",planid);
}
};
And update the master plan
class masterplan public: plan{
private
vector vplans;
public:
plan& plans(int planid);
plan& plans(string planname);
protected:
etc....
}
Someone else comes along to implement plans(string planname)
they notice that oliverthered2 may not have done the best implementation of plans(int) so they contact oliverthered(who wrote the masterplan) and oliverthered2(who done some implementation)
etc.......
If OSS implmeneted that kind of design/implemtation practice then you could write software with everyone laying down a brick at a time.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
about 397 000
sims (on Usenet)
about 611 000
sims
about 2 850 000
mozilla (on Usenet)
about 1 170 000
mozilla
about 5 400 000
Mozilla fans, verging-on-obsessive, upset that Jimmy Guterman wrote: "How many of you use Mozilla as your Web browser? OK, both of you can put down your hands."
more than bloody two!
From the article:
"Someone somewhere must be dreaming of a massively multiplayer redo of Tetris."
Seems like the journalist never heard of Netris, one of the cooler multi-player tetris clones.
Ryzom is a game (due to summer 2003) based on the NeL library ( http://www.nevrax.org ). This is free software, not open source : my distinction is merely technical rather than ideological, the business plan of the supporting company being based on this very important detail.
/. posters fail to notice that running a business and choosing a software licence are two different and orthogonal things. People always mix the two notions because they think you can't run a business based on free software.
:)
The author of the article as well as many of
Well, I'm writing free software, and being paid for it. The Nevrax team (which writes NeL) has about 30 coders paid to write free software.
The key point : our companies don't sell software, they sell service. MMORPG developers sell server access, of course, but you could run any other support (see RedHat and Mandrake for more details).
Now back to the article, the author asserts that free software is necessarily developed in a Linux way, ie. completely ditributed and out of control from any corporation. Endorsing free software does mean endorsing the 'Bazaar'. You can keep your perfect corporate 'Cathedral' and produce free software, this a matter of license.
The question is not to see if 'free software' developers do it better than non-free one, the question is about choosing a license and understanding its impact.
Now I won't explain here why software should be free, but I can tell you it makes *a lot* of sense for MMORPGs companies. And that free software is not necessarily software developed by long-beared geeks in their spare time, IBM produce a lot of GPL material and they were suits
Disclaimer: I'm _not_ from Nevrax.
Could online conferences include mods that "change" the personalities of participants? Could different sorts of agents modify documents according to a modified personality?
Translation:
I don't understand online gaming. I don't understand game modification. I don't understand open source. They pulled me off the street, stuck me in front of a keyboard and promised me liquor. I'm frightened.
Actually, the game Tetrinet has been around for a while, however the owners of the Tetris copyright sued sites that were distributing it. Some of us still have a copy of it though.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
I know! TetriNET was and still is a great game... but badly in need of new developement..
Do I see an open source tetrinet server/client project coming? I'm sure there must already be a few servers...
The problem is... the client keeps track of the player's specail blocks, score, et cetera... which lead to rampant cheating (Just basic editing of memory locations..) Which kind of ruins it..
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
If you don't know who Brooks is, he's a writer and political commentator who has spent a lot of time in the last couple of years looking at American Bourgeois life [of which he is a part] and his articles are fun and.. not abrasive like the comments most people make when they talk about society. This piece is damn interesting too.
Sex - Find It
How the guy just goes from a massive multiplayer game to open source development simply goes beyond my astonnishment. You can't compare that. He is also too negative towards Mozilla in my point of view. I don't think he really tried a release.
"Different companies have different reactions to user contribution. Cyberlife at first valued it, but later tried to commandeer it for their own profit. Maxis encourages user contribution, hence all the user add-ons that have helped make the Sims popular. Microsoft squashes user contribution like a bug, naturally."
Microsoft is not know for it's bug squashing... I think "Microsoft squashes user contribution like compatition, naturally." would have been more accurate
A statistician, who refused to fly after reading of the alarmingly high
probability that there will be a bomb on any given plane, realized that
the probability of there being two bombs on any given flight is very low.
Now, whenever he flies, he carries a bomb with him.
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