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.
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.
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 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
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.'
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
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.
I know.. a lot of us do.. I would have liked him to do more research on this instead of simply writing this article like he was still on the high school newspaper team
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.
I'm sure you already knew that when you wrote that comment: what you suggest isn't practical. It _is_ possible to build software like a house, but such an undertaking would be purely academic. You build a house _after_ someone has made a plan. In contrast to that, building software _is_ building the _plan_. A plan of steps that tell the computer what to do.
What you suggest is what Niklaus Wirth suggested 40 and even 50 years ago: stepwise refinement. First draw a rough sketch, then fill in details, then fill in the details of the details. The problem with this is that it doesn't work any longer. You can't test a half-finished appliaction this way, because half of your routines are still pseudo-code. Rumours go that Wirth never executed any of the code he wrote, and they aren't that far away from the truth. It didn't matter for his little example Pascal programs, because he was clever enough to see they'd work. But modern software is too complex, the correctness of a program is hardly ever proved. Instead, you try it out, see if it works.
Of course, you _could_ test a half-finished program that's built with stepwise refinement. You'd have to replace every bit of pseudo-code with test stubs and drivers. But change the architecture just a bit, and you have to throw away that test code and write it anew. This approach is very, very hostile to state-of-the-art techniques like extreme programming, agile software development etc.---which are actually quite popular and common---maybe even necessary---in OSS development.
> If OSS implmeneted that kind of
> design/implemtation practice then you could
> write software with everyone laying down a
> brick at a time.
People _are_ contributing little bits _without_ taking such a tedious, error-prone approach. What they don't do, for good and obvious reasons, is divide the work of writing an application core in a way that would either require dozens or hundreds of people to know everything about each other's work, or some kind of super-genious who thinks of every detail beforehand and is just too lazy to write down the respective lines of code.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
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.
I know that sounds ridiculous to any reasonably sane individual, but that's exactly what playing EverQuest is like, and it's doing quite well. Gameplay in any MMORPG consists of doing some boring and repetetive taks (i.e. killing monsters , making arrows, or selling hamburgers) until your character gets tired (or low on hp), at which point you have to lay down for a while, and wait. People tend to be satisfied chatting or, trying to sell stuff, or getting a group together while they do this, in EQ.
You also have to remember that The Sims is mostly played by non-technical women. These are people that are likely to hang out in a chatroom, anyways, so that's not idle time to them; it's fun.
Even if the damn game does inexplicably manage to sell and retain players, it doesn't offer anything new at all to the genre.
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps a better way to look at it is that it will have a profound effect on the chat room industry, and the game industry is an innocent victem caught in the cross-fire.
Money I owe, money-iy-ay