A metaverse paradigm requires a completely different way of designing the rules and content for the game. The "engine" for a metaverse has to be designed to work completely dynamically -- textures, sounds, shapes, and behaviors have to be loaded from the server whenver they change, *as* they change.
Currently, most all MMORPGs come with one or more CDs to dump pre-generated content onto your drive when you install it. This content is slowly unlocked to you as you progress through the game, and changes rarely, only as a result of patches or minor MOB changes which are sent down dynamically from the server.
In a metaverse, everything is a "mob", as in everything can move or change at any time. This means that the world has to be described in a more general sense than just "this is a vehicle", "this is a creature", "this is a tree". Instead, you have a collection of primitive shapes which behave according to a generalized coded language.
For a fully flexible metaverse, there is no pre-install CD other than for the "thin" client, because all of the content is dynamic. By the time you've pressed a CD, the world has already changed beyond recognition.
At least one early metaverse is already online (Second Life). I spend nearly all of my free time that I'm awake in SL, and I could never go back to the relatively boring and static worlds that exist in all of the other MMOGs.
Is this the same effect you get with those electronic cigarette lighters that make a spark when you press down the button?
You can get a nice healthy spark from those things, which probably has to have a good voltage to jump across the air like that, but the amperage must be pretty low or they'd be deadly =D
SL is at least two generations beyond Active Worlds.
SL has a very elegant and sophisticated data delivery mechanism (using Ogg for audio and progressive JPEG2000 for textures), a robust economy, greater customization, and best of all, nearly everything can be scripted in a language that roughly resembles C, with states and event handlers.
There are definitely a lot of Stephenson & Gibson enthusiasts on there.
It's the closest thing we currently have to the Metaverse, and probably the only place in existance which could rightfully claim to be a 3D graphical MUD.
If you've got a fast computer and a good net connection, it's definitely worth a try.
All of this commercialism stuff has mostly blown over by now. Some people are fearful that we're moving from a "small friendly village" society to something more closely resembling the Internet. What they don't realize is that the world will continue to grow, and that this change is inevitable. It's basically the same struggle many of us went through as the Internet became commercialized.
I wonder if people who are prone to seisures have neurons which are interconnected at a more regular distance than people who are not prone to seisures.
If most of their neurons are interconnected at nearly the same length, it would seem this could create electrical feedback at a certian frequency (sort of like the natural resonating frequency of most objects).
Perhaps people who are not prone to seisures have much more random neural interconnection distances, which dampens the feedback loop?
Door-to-door salesmen are learning from spammers too.
Ordinarily, I don't bother to answer the door unless I'm expecting someone, especially when I had just heard the same guy knocking on my neighbor's door.
However, I got tricked a few weeks ago by a salesman who knocked on my door, and then hollered "Hello, it's your neighbor".
I answered the door, he claimed to be someone from another building, a college student, who's group's funding was cut and needs to sell magazines to fund a trip to France. When I made it clear to him I wasn't interested in dead trees cluttering my apartment, he suddenly became a donation collector for the local hospital.
I recall reading that a system to reduce/prevent dust accumulation had been discussed but it would have required compromise of removing one of the other systems on the rover to accomodate it.
Another thing people want is content. Not make your own world type content, but real content, that they've paid for. The idea is that MMO's should be worlds built for players, not built BY players.
I agree that people want content. But why make a distinction if quality content can come just as much from the players as from the company running the servers?
I am of the opinion that a company running an MMO cannot provide adequate content *AND* good customer support. They have only so many resources that can be allocated. Some past incidents have made it impossible for players to handle customer support, so companies are left to try to handle both with a level of quality below most people's expectations.
I think that before long, you will see people driven away by mediocre content and customer support, and begin to show interest in worlds in which the users take up the task of creating content, which leaves the company with the resources to provide good custome rsupport.
The web is a good example of how user-created content can compete with for-profit business-created content.
We are building the metaverse the same way we built the Web. The old idea of company-created content will continue to exist just as television, newspapers, magazines continue to co-exist with the Web.
Some people still prefer the old media over the new. But a lot of us enjoy the freedom and flexibility of the Web more than traditional media because the content comes from anyone and everyone.
Many people will continue to prefer to play online games where all of the content is set by the host. But I think before long, most of us will start to prefer the freedom and flexibility of MMOEs which rely on their residents to create the content.
When most of us experienced the World Wide Web for the first time, we realized the potential with a bit of awe. I expect that many people will get that same feeling again when they first step into a user-created metaverse.
People who spend time in these worlds are collectively a much greater source of content than any company can ever imagine having for itself. They create a feedback loop in the system so that boredom is always kept at bay by massively parallel creativity.
Even if you never create anything in the world, you will always get to experience content created by everyone around you. As fast as you can experience it, new creations will always be coming into the world, probably faster than you can even see them all.
As it is now, there is more user-created content on the Web than you could ever hope to experience in a hundred lifetimes. No company could have done this. The same is beginning to happen in MMO environments.
Even more impressively, Second Life's world is a grid. Each 256x256 meter region of virtual land is controlled by a server, which talks only with it's four neighbors to negotiate things moving across boundaries seamlessly. Despite the grid topology, the world does appear continuious to the casual observer.
The region servers currently limit people from entering the region once it starts to get "full", but the world itself will scale easily to support more people as more regions are added.
This grid system is far superior to the "shard" system of most MMO environments, as you at least have a chance of meeting anyone else who is in the world. This increases your odds of bumping into people you get along with, since people with the same interests will all be in the same world.
I can't help but think this is like bringing the metaverse to reality.
Much of this reminds me of how people behave in the Second Life MMO environment, though some things are still present for "symbolic" reasons, (ie cars, houses, communication devices) but they really have no practical use.
Someone once mentioned it's a lot like lucid dreaming while awake. Too bad I probably won't see this in my lifetime =/
Isn't the term 'elements' really a misnomer now that we've quite clearly realized that all 'elements' are really composed of subelements themselves (leptons, baryons, etc)?
I'd like to see hardware that handles LOD calculations, so you can throw hundreds or even thousands of times the polygons at it than normal hardware can handle, but it's smart enough to know how to balance out the LOD so everything keeps it's detail when looked at up close, but the frame rate is still good when looking at the whole scene.
like a world as complex as "our" world.. now that's slightly scary no? requires some advance in AI no?
Not AI. Just an emphasis on user-created content, and the ability to freely build and script everything... See sig for an example of just such a place =)
I'm just trying to figure out why the person who wrote the article felt the need to make a running gag of having the bold titles reference the previous number half the time.
It's like they got the number off by one or something...
I laughed the first time, snickered the second and groaned by the third time...
And eventually some executive will say, "Hey, wait a minute. Maybe it's not worth alienating all our customers to squeeze an extra million out of our already 100 billion dollar profits."
Don't expect those words to pass anyone's lips until they can Eisner. Words like that probably result in an instant termination (and I don't mean losing your job) =P
Slashdot Mirror
Just keep one thing in mind...
Metaverses are not simple.
A metaverse paradigm requires a completely different way of designing the rules and content for the game. The "engine" for a metaverse has to be designed to work completely dynamically -- textures, sounds, shapes, and behaviors have to be loaded from the server whenver they change, *as* they change.
Currently, most all MMORPGs come with one or more CDs to dump pre-generated content onto your drive when you install it. This content is slowly unlocked to you as you progress through the game, and changes rarely, only as a result of patches or minor MOB changes which are sent down dynamically from the server.
In a metaverse, everything is a "mob", as in everything can move or change at any time. This means that the world has to be described in a more general sense than just "this is a vehicle", "this is a creature", "this is a tree". Instead, you have a collection of primitive shapes which behave according to a generalized coded language.
For a fully flexible metaverse, there is no pre-install CD other than for the "thin" client, because all of the content is dynamic. By the time you've pressed a CD, the world has already changed beyond recognition.
At least one early metaverse is already online (Second Life). I spend nearly all of my free time that I'm awake in SL, and I could never go back to the relatively boring and static worlds that exist in all of the other MMOGs.
Is this the same effect you get with those electronic cigarette lighters that make a spark when you press down the button?
You can get a nice healthy spark from those things, which probably has to have a good voltage to jump across the air like that, but the amperage must be pretty low or they'd be deadly =D
SL is at least two generations beyond Active Worlds.
SL has a very elegant and sophisticated data delivery mechanism (using Ogg for audio and progressive JPEG2000 for textures), a robust economy, greater customization, and best of all, nearly everything can be scripted in a language that roughly resembles C, with states and event handlers.
There are definitely a lot of Stephenson & Gibson enthusiasts on there.
It's the closest thing we currently have to the Metaverse, and probably the only place in existance which could rightfully claim to be a 3D graphical MUD.
If you've got a fast computer and a good net connection, it's definitely worth a try.
All of this commercialism stuff has mostly blown over by now. Some people are fearful that we're moving from a "small friendly village" society to something more closely resembling the Internet. What they don't realize is that the world will continue to grow, and that this change is inevitable. It's basically the same struggle many of us went through as the Internet became commercialized.
You mean like from the Savant for a Day article in NYT?
Striper
Is that the people who put the lines on the roads? =P
These are excellent programs; I was just about to recommend them myself before seeing your response =D
I wonder if people who are prone to seisures have neurons which are interconnected at a more regular distance than people who are not prone to seisures.
If most of their neurons are interconnected at nearly the same length, it would seem this could create electrical feedback at a certian frequency (sort of like the natural resonating frequency of most objects).
Perhaps people who are not prone to seisures have much more random neural interconnection distances, which dampens the feedback loop?
Door-to-door salesmen are learning from spammers too.
Ordinarily, I don't bother to answer the door unless I'm expecting someone, especially when I had just heard the same guy knocking on my neighbor's door.
However, I got tricked a few weeks ago by a salesman who knocked on my door, and then hollered "Hello, it's your neighbor".
I answered the door, he claimed to be someone from another building, a college student, who's group's funding was cut and needs to sell magazines to fund a trip to France. When I made it clear to him I wasn't interested in dead trees cluttering my apartment, he suddenly became a donation collector for the local hospital.
Scum.
has sent probes to every planet in the solar system
I guess you are one of the people who does not count Pluto as a planet?
I recall reading that a system to reduce/prevent dust accumulation had been discussed but it would have required compromise of removing one of the other systems on the rover to accomodate it.
Another thing people want is content. Not make your own world type content, but real content, that they've paid for. The idea is that MMO's should be worlds built for players, not built BY players.
I agree that people want content. But why make a distinction if quality content can come just as much from the players as from the company running the servers?
I am of the opinion that a company running an MMO cannot provide adequate content *AND* good customer support. They have only so many resources that can be allocated. Some past incidents have made it impossible for players to handle customer support, so companies are left to try to handle both with a level of quality below most people's expectations.
I think that before long, you will see people driven away by mediocre content and customer support, and begin to show interest in worlds in which the users take up the task of creating content, which leaves the company with the resources to provide good custome rsupport.
The web is a good example of how user-created content can compete with for-profit business-created content.
We are building the metaverse the same way we built the Web. The old idea of company-created content will continue to exist just as television, newspapers, magazines continue to co-exist with the Web.
Some people still prefer the old media over the new. But a lot of us enjoy the freedom and flexibility of the Web more than traditional media because the content comes from anyone and everyone.
Many people will continue to prefer to play online games where all of the content is set by the host. But I think before long, most of us will start to prefer the freedom and flexibility of MMOEs which rely on their residents to create the content.
When most of us experienced the World Wide Web for the first time, we realized the potential with a bit of awe. I expect that many people will get that same feeling again when they first step into a user-created metaverse.
People who spend time in these worlds are collectively a much greater source of content than any company can ever imagine having for itself. They create a feedback loop in the system so that boredom is always kept at bay by massively parallel creativity.
Even if you never create anything in the world, you will always get to experience content created by everyone around you. As fast as you can experience it, new creations will always be coming into the world, probably faster than you can even see them all.
As it is now, there is more user-created content on the Web than you could ever hope to experience in a hundred lifetimes. No company could have done this. The same is beginning to happen in MMO environments.
Even more impressively, Second Life's world is a grid. Each 256x256 meter region of virtual land is controlled by a server, which talks only with it's four neighbors to negotiate things moving across boundaries seamlessly. Despite the grid topology, the world does appear continuious to the casual observer.
The region servers currently limit people from entering the region once it starts to get "full", but the world itself will scale easily to support more people as more regions are added.
This grid system is far superior to the "shard" system of most MMO environments, as you at least have a chance of meeting anyone else who is in the world. This increases your odds of bumping into people you get along with, since people with the same interests will all be in the same world.
My god man, if you're not already in the movie industry, you should be =)
I can't help but think this is like bringing the metaverse to reality.
Much of this reminds me of how people behave in the Second Life MMO environment, though some things are still present for "symbolic" reasons, (ie cars, houses, communication devices) but they really have no practical use.
Someone once mentioned it's a lot like lucid dreaming while awake. Too bad I probably won't see this in my lifetime =/
Isn't the term 'elements' really a misnomer now that we've quite clearly realized that all 'elements' are really composed of subelements themselves (leptons, baryons, etc)?
I'd like to see hardware that handles LOD calculations, so you can throw hundreds or even thousands of times the polygons at it than normal hardware can handle, but it's smart enough to know how to balance out the LOD so everything keeps it's detail when looked at up close, but the frame rate is still good when looking at the whole scene.
like a world as complex as "our" world.. now that's slightly scary no? requires some advance in AI no?
Not AI. Just an emphasis on user-created content, and the ability to freely build and script everything... See sig for an example of just such a place =)
We need a blog of stuff like this, so we know what companies need a good smacking.
I'm just trying to figure out why the person who wrote the article felt the need to make a running gag of having the bold titles reference the previous number half the time.
It's like they got the number off by one or something...
I laughed the first time, snickered the second and groaned by the third time...
This is correct. As long as there's any form of I/O, someone will write a tunnel to (ab)use it to get around any filters.
It may not be fast, but if people want something bad enough, they'll do whatever it takes and take whatever they can get to get ahold of it.
I once used HTTP tunnelling to run VNC.. It was not pretty but it got the job done =D
"You are not your fucking kakhis."
If the election is contested:
is arguably the most successful astronomical project ever conducted and NASAs second most successful project after the moon landing.
As I was quickly reading through, I somehow misread the end as "after the hindenberg".
I know they're not even remotely spelled the same, but I guess the mention of NASA somehow prepped my mind's context for disaster. =P
And eventually some executive will say, "Hey, wait a minute. Maybe it's not worth alienating all our customers to squeeze an extra million out of our already 100 billion dollar profits."
Don't expect those words to pass anyone's lips until they can Eisner. Words like that probably result in an instant termination (and I don't mean losing your job) =P