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Google Lively To Be an Online Gaming Platform
GamesIndustry.biz recently interviewed Kevin Hanna, creative director for Google Lively, about the virtual environment's beginnings and the plans for its future. Earlier this month, he announced that Lively would open to developers, and now he says the long-term goal is for Lively to be "used as an online games platform." Hanna goes on to say:
"I'd like for it to be invisible, where, when it makes sense to have 3D aspects of the web, that everyone will have already downloaded the plug-in, it's one of the first things you do when you install your machine, and you're able to just jump around and play in a creative space. I feel like a big chunk of the games industry out there has a corporate mentality where you're first to be second, and I've been there, where they say, 'Make sure you include this aspect, and this aspect, and this aspect, to ensure that we have an 80 per cent market share.' And it's sucking the life out of what should be the most creative and innovative medium out there."
"when it makes sense to have 3D aspects of the web, that everyone will have already downloaded the plug-in, it's one of the first things you do when you install your machine, and you're able to just jump around and play in a creative space"
Everytime I hear someone propose something like this, I think of VRML and the failed (and misguided) attempt to reskin the web into something it's not.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I would love to see a 3D sandbox where freelance programmers could just be given the tools to create whatever they want and share it in a virtual world. Anyone could download a client application and navigate this virtual world like Google Earth.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson portrayed a world like this. Destinations could be anything from lavish corporate offices where company execs conduct virtual meetings, to virtual clubs (which would really be nothing more than spiffy looking chat rooms), to games, to virtual concerts with pixel shader driven light shows. Everyone could create their own avatar, or download templates, to represent themselves in this virtual world.
The problem is 'policing' the content introduced to the system. In an open ended world like this it'd be trivial for someone to upload some malicious code. There'd have to be some sort of submission system where all code is reviewed before it's introduced to the system, but even that wouldn't be fool proof and it'd probably be pretty expensive.
That aside, the possibilities would be endless.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
I just yanked this from a report on one of the sites I operate:
Firefox 63.32%
Internet Explorer 16.33%
Safari 7.43%
Chrome 6.36%
(For the record, the site is nothing that would predispose it to FireFox users over IE users. Unless you count video game players as "pre-disposed".)
For Chrome to have grabbed that much market share so quickly is impressive. So "successful" is a perfectly acceptable tag. What remains to be seen is if Google will build on that success or let it flounder.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Is Slashdot now becoming the marketing arm of Google? I swear this is like the 90th article about some new whiz-bang software they developed. There are other companies writing software!
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
Out of all the 3d user interfaces I've used, this is probably the worst. There's no connection between you and your avatar at all, and even getting your avatar to walk along a straight line is frustrating... the normal motion is to have you avatar teleport from one piece of furniture to another while you pan around at a distance.
If simple movement is so hard, how on earth do they expect people to use it for a gaming platform?
Nothing is stopping Google from turning these two applications into something better than Second Life.
Well, except that Second Life already exists, and Lively sucks balls compared to it.
Lively has no source code available, that I can find. The closest thing I could find has barely started to reverse engineer Lively, and appears to have no actual code written. And the official client is XP/Vista, IE/Firefox, nothing else.
Contrast this to Second Life, which has an open source client, with officially supported Windows/Mac/Linux versions.
From what other people are telling me, it doesn't get any better once you install -- crappy UI, and no real content creation for end-users.
Google easily could beat Second Life, if they wanted to. It's obvious from this pathetic attempt that they won't be doing so anytime soon.
One more thing, from TFA:
Over the long term, Hanna said that while he couldn't speak for Google's official stance, his hope is that Lively becomes "invisible" as much as Flash, Java or HTML are as the backbone of the web experience, that it becomes a "core architecture."
Ok, HTML and JavaScript are core achitectures. Java has a shot, being that it's now open source and reasonably mature.
But if they aspire to become another Flash, no thanks. Flash is cross-platform, at least, but proprietary, limited architectures (where's my 64-bit), slow as hell (Flash 10 will finally be hardware-accelerated), and poorly integrated (try right-clicking anywhere in Flash, vs anywhere in your browser).
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!