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MMORPGs, Are You There Yet?
maddugan writes "CNN recently posted a story about a company by the name There and their opening of a public beta for their 'Virtual Universe'. One of the key element is that you can buy virtual Levis and Nikes for your Avatar. " Hemos & I have been playing The Sims Online- Come visit the Slashdot Charisma Sweatshop on the absolute west edge of the Mt Fuji City and say hi. I got my real nick for once too! I love MMORPGs and 'There' looks like another wrinkle on taking Sims type games online. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
This is a dupe. The original Slashdot article can be found here: "Metaverse Launched?".
"There" seems to require Windows.
Too bad, they follow only that track.
There's a project called Worldforge that has some interesting things going on. You may want to check it out.
I've heard rumors that they want to implement P2P for the game media, but not for the game itself.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Nearly all multiplayer games have rules - a multiplayer system without rules is just a glorified chat server. We expect the server to implement those rules, because we cannot trust the clients. You cannot trust the clients, because they may not be running the code you sent them unmodified and you wil not be able to tell. I can modify any code running on my PC, which makes it very easy for me to cheat.
I wrote a paper on p2p multiplayer games for my Masters degree, and this was the major obstacle to p2p games I identified. There are ways around it, but competitive p2p games are a whole different world to cooperative p2p applications like file sharing.