An online version of Ticket To Ride is available as part of a trial free month at Skotos -- they also have online versions of Fist of Dragonstones (an auction game), Queen's Necklace (a card game), and Gang of Four (a A**hole variant card game).
You can also play these online if you a supporting RPGnet member.
www.skotos.net does this now with the 11 games that it has. It charges $12.95 a month, but then allocates the royalties to all the games based on usage.
However, the calculation is more complex then a simple percentage of hours used, because that only incentivizes game designers to create games that consume user hours, rather then necessarily good games.
So they measure game interest based upon how many hours a player spends in the game, how regularly a player plays the game over the course of the month, how long a player has been playing the game over many months, and how much he says he likes the game. It's a calculation that's intended to be fair to lots of different games, not just the ones that encourage players to play 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Actually, at the conference the buzz-word is not DRM, but RMS i.e. Rights Management System -- that is what several companies are calling their DRMs.
I'm not sure why marketing departments are re-framing DRM as RMS -- it is only removing digital and adding system. Maybe digital is now just a noise word? Or maybe they want their RMS to do more then digital rights?
It appears that www.skotosnet is possibly a good place for games like these -- they currently have 10 games, including to 90's era games Meridean 59 and Underlight.
As I understand their business model, they can be less expensive for the smaller 'niche' games because they handle all the backend stuff.
One other issue is that the "Sound Blaster Wireless Music" device only supports optical digital out, whereas the Squeezebox supports both optical digital and an rca jack for coax digital. This means that you can use the Squeezebox with inexpensive but high quality computer speakers with a digital connection.
My biggest issue with all of these per-song services (iTunes, MusicMatch, the upcoming new Napster) is that you are paying relatively full price for lower quality.
I much prefer Magnatune("we are not evil") who allows you to download wav and lossless.flac versions when you purchase a song or album.
My second problem is that my tastes are rather eclectic, and using iTunes to find albums to my taste hasn't been working. For instance, I'll pick an album that I really like, and look at the "people who buy this album also buy" and discover I don't like any of their suggestions. But I don't buy much popular music, so it may work for other people.
Related, the 30-second browsing is often not enough for me. Supposedly the new Napster per-song service will allow you to preview the whole song. I know that I bought some Magnatune album recently because I could browse the whole album.
I suspect your problem may be your cable service -- I've heard from some online gamers that cable-based ISPs have more inherent latency. Latency is critical to online gamers, and VoIP would have similar latency requirements.
I've used Vonage for a couple of months on DSL and haven't experienced any latency issues. However, I've not done any overseas phone calls.
I've twice been responsible for creating small offices of the caliber of Joel's vision -- it is hard, and the compromises are never obvious until you've lived in it a year.
The biggest design program is the "closed door" problem. Ever programmer needs it to concentrate, but it makes making the place more pleasant far more difficult.
My biggest simple advice is a weird one -- install a washer/dryer someplace where it will not disturb people. Even though we worked hard to keep a 40-45 hour work week, it was still the most used 'perk' of our office;-)
Some easy tips:
* There are some really nice drawer sized dishwashers (ours is from Fisher/Payel) -- it is perfect for the small office where it is hard to make everyone responsible for cleaning up the office kitchen. The small drawer size means that you can wash with fewer items, more people take responsibility as it is easy.
* Windows that open -- you may not want to very often in some climates, but it really makes a difference.
* Ventilation -- consider two systems -- one for your HVAC, a second that is nothing but circulation with a little intake some exhaust. I forgot the number, but I think they recommend 10% fresh air an hour as a good compromise for efficiency and good indoor air quality.
* Avoid composite materials -- they outgas for months. We decided not to glue the carpet, it worked fine.
* Design desks for two trash cans -- there is never enough room for recycling and trash if you don't, and people knock them over.
* Steel white walls are nice for each office and common areas, great for writing but also using magnets to hold stuff up. We had over 5 linear feet of white walls per person in the office! To save money, you can get porcelain over steel material for restaurant fridgerators cheaper then from office supply places.
* There is never enough storage space. We designed our storage space around the standard banker-box sized boxes, which made storage much easier. We also crammed storage everywhere, under stairs, over low-ceilinged spaces, etc.
* Consider not totally finishing out ceilings -- acoustic tile and other approaches really don't absorb enough sound. Instead, have spaces where the rafters show, mixed with some normal ceilings. This causes sound to baffle, both into the open spaces of the rafters, and from there into/above the fixed ceilings. Much more effective for deadening sound.
I made just short of a terabyte of storage using an external ATA RAID storage device from Promise Technology and 8 of Western Digital 120JB (special edition) hard drives. The device emulates a single SCSI drive to your own computer, so you don't need any special drivers.
Over a year ago it cost me about $5K, including a SCSI card. Today it would cost me a lot less and I could have more then a terabyte.
Both the Promise RAID box itself has been reliable, and I am quite happy with the WD hard drives.
There are also some interesting rebuttals/conversaion by Richard Bartle responding to Dave Rickey's Engines of Creation column at Skotos in the Skotos Forums.
In that, Richard says:
The crux of Dave's objection (as I see it) is that I'm developing a "theory" of virtual worlds that is neither provable nor disprovable, therefore it's not a theory. Well strictly speaking, from a Science standpoint, all theories are not only provable but are actually proven; anything else is merely a falsehood or an hypothesis. Dave is therefore correct: it isn't a formal theory.
However, I wasn't speaking from a Science standpoint, I was speaking from an Art standpoint. I was using the word "theory" in the same way that it's used in "Film Theory" or "Theory of Art". These aren't theories in the scientific sense, but they are in the Comparative Studies sense. The idea is that an individual wishing to understand a work of art subscribes to one or more individual theories (which may or may not be consistent with other theories - or indeed one another) and applies these to "read" the work of art. You choose the theory you subscribe to based on criteria such as its relevance to your interests, the compellingness of its derivation, the degree to which you are convinced by its conclusions, the similarity of its judgments to your own aesthetic sensibilities etc..
First, I format the key fat16, so it can be read by the most operating systems.
It has:
* a bootable DOS partition and a number of DOS tools for disks, etc. It doesn't boot with many BIOS'es, but it does for some.
* I have a couple of floppy disk images and floppy disk tools.
* I keep PGP installers for a variety of operating systems.
* I have a small PGP disk that I have a current copy of my contacts, and some other private files.
I use IMAP now for email, so I don't need to store email on it, but I have in the past and it works with both Outlook and Outlook Express if you know a couple of tricks.
The column tends to be more technically focused then the other columns at Skotos, with topics including issues of mud text parsing, code inheritance and heirarchies in muds, methods of generating quests, etc.
Kelerain wrote: > The telco's for example know better than to pull a stunt like this. I know of few if any > DSL providers that stick you with the full modemn cost (somewhere ~$250), and most have > constant 'special promotions' that include a 'free' modemn. The cost of this comes back > to them in the monthly fees.
Actually, it turns out there are good economic reasons to have up-front box costs that has little to do with profits from those boxes.
What the online game companies have discovered is that you have to get the player to play long enough to become hooked into the game. They have found that the up-front cost forces the player to commit to that first "free" month so that they will overcome the steep learning curve.
Thus online games companies that have allowed you to download the clients for free have a much more difficult time getting people to play long enough to see if they like the game.
This looks like moving to a cable-style subscription model is becoming a trend. For instance, Skotos (www.skotos.net) instituted a 'many games, one price' subscription plan last year, which they now currently have 7 different games for $12.95 a month, and more on the way.
I guess this makes sense as who the online game industry really competes against is the premium cable industry. They want you to watch 80 hours a month of their programming, but instead you play 80 hours a month online games.
It is curious that they are excluding Star Wars Galaxies -- is that only because they can't because of LucasFilm licensing?
I know that in the case of Skotos that they have a fairly elaborate royalty model to allow the royalties to be shared by multiple games including those not produced by Skotos. Sony can do a many games/one price easily because they all own their own games. My guess maybe EA will offer a similar multi game subscription with Sims and UO soon.
I noticed that Skotos www.skotos.net has 7 games now for a single montly subscription price. These games include two 3D graphic games, three 'prose' games (two are MUD-like, one is MUSH-like), a strategic space war game, and a multiplayer card game. They have also announced more on the way, including a horror game called 'Lovecraft Country'.
The first month is free, so you can try all the games before you commit.
You should take a close look at open source TWiki (www.twiki.org) -- from what you've said, I think it might be perfect for you. I personally have been using it with large groups of people for several years.
TWiki is a Wiki variant that adds RCS for every page that is editable, the ability to have access control lists for different pages, yet like Wiki has an "edit this page" button, and is very accessible to those you are not familiar with HTML. TWiki also has a large base of "plugins" that allow you to some very complex structured documents.
One of my favorite features as a manager is the "changes" button -- it gives me a list of all the documents in a particular section that have been changed recently, and with an additional click, I can see in 'change bars' what exactly those changes were. This allows me to get a snapshot of the activities of my group very quickly.
One of the co-authors, Jessica Mulligan, has a bi-weekly column on online games called "Biting the Hand" which can be found at www.skotos.net/articles/bth.html. Last week's columnThe April Fools Spring Clean-Up is about what has been happening with the big online games in the last few months.
The Skotos articles website has quite a few other interesting columns and articles on online game design at www.skotos.net/articles with several new articles going up weekly.
I have some experience with using musician rackmount racks with computer hardware which may help those trying to do the reverse.
I like to purchase musician rackmount racks because they are cheap (at least compared to computer racks) and come in a variety of "packable" sizes.
I have two 'fuzzy' ones that I use in my office -- one has a 1U power distribution, a 1u ethernet switch, a 1u KVM switch, and a small 1u server. This leaves 1u for cable management and a 802.11 router. The other contains my 1.5u Tivo Series 2, a 1u video switch, an 2u amplifier, a 1u DVD player, and a 1u power distribution.
I have a 3rd hard case, with front and back 'lids' that cover the the faces of the rack, that lock with a padlock and are shippable. I use this for conventions.
First, be very careful with the screws -- the screw holes for musician racks may be compatible with those for computer racks, but they appear to use a different size threading. You can ruin your rack by forcing the wrong type of screw.
Second, musician racks typically are far too shallow to use with most computer equipment. Be sure to order the deepest you can find, which typically with be 17" -- even that will not be deep enough for many computer rack-mounted devices, in particular rackmount PC cases which tend to be much deeper then 17".
I think that game subscription services for multiple games will be the wave of the future. Who wants to pay $12.95 a month each for 5 games that you either don't have time enough to play, or will get tired of?
What online games really compete against is cable television, so increasingly it will be priced like cable television. You'll get the "basic" games channel with a number of games for a flat fee each month, some people will want their premium "hbo" games channel for more sophisticated games, and some people will pay-per-play.
Skotos (www.skotos.net) is one online game company already moving in that direction. They have 6 games currently for a flat monthly fee, and say that they are adding more.
It's on Friday night. Most Friday night shows seem to fail. Firefly is the best show that I never watch. Why? I'm usually doing something that night, and I'm the idiot who always forgets to program his VCR, comes home at midnight and slaps his hand against his forehead.
In my montly TIVO spam I noticed that Firefly was second most 'time-delayed' show of 2002 season. This says to me a lot of people wanted to watch it, but couldn't watch it Friday at 8pm.
Based on the good stuff we heard here on SlashDot we bought 4 Shuttle S25's to use as servers for our office, and we were pleased with how the worked...at first.
However, over the last 6 months we have now had power supplies go bad 4 times and required us to get new power supplies from Shuttle with many weeks of delay. Even one of the replacement power supplies flaked. Of the original 4 shuttles, only one still has the original power supply.
Fortunately for us, one of the 4 shuttles was designated a cold spare, so we didn't experience much down time, but it was quite annoying to have so many power supplies go bad. We don't have time to move the servers over to more reliable systems, so for now we have purchased some spare power supplies from Shuttle.
Right now we would be very hesitant to buy more modern Shuttles until we understand more about why there was such a huge rate of failure on the power supplies of their S25's.
I suspect that this product specs are based to meet some bid requirements of various governmental organizations.
For instance, I've heard that Germany is quite adamant about 100% recyclable items, and requires all companies to accept products back after their life cycle is over. I've also heard that the California has considered mandating that all manufacturers must pay a tax on sales of computer equipment to pay for recycling of the equipment if they don't accept the equipment back for recycling.
I doubt there is sufficient commercial demand for such a green product right now, but one giant order from a government or a business that does government contracts could make the product development worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
An online version of Ticket To Ride is available as part of a trial free month at Skotos -- they also have online versions of Fist of Dragonstones (an auction game), Queen's Necklace (a card game), and Gang of Four (a A**hole variant card game).
You can also play these online if you a supporting RPGnet member.
-- Herder of Cats
www.skotos.net does this now with the 11 games that it has. It charges $12.95 a month, but then allocates the royalties to all the games based on usage.
However, the calculation is more complex then a simple percentage of hours used, because that only incentivizes game designers to create games that consume user hours, rather then necessarily good games.
So they measure game interest based upon how many hours a player spends in the game, how regularly a player plays the game over the course of the month, how long a player has been playing the game over many months, and how much he says he likes the game. It's a calculation that's intended to be fair to lots of different games, not just the ones that encourage players to play 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.
-- Herder of Cats
Actually, at the conference the buzz-word is not DRM, but RMS i.e. Rights Management System -- that is what several companies are calling their DRMs.
I'm not sure why marketing departments are re-framing DRM as RMS -- it is only removing digital and adding system. Maybe digital is now just a noise word? Or maybe they want their RMS to do more then digital rights?
-- Herder Of Cats
Skotos is another small game company that received notification that they were violating this patent. They can't afford $100,000, much less $10,000.
-- Herder of Cats
There you can find lots of advice on game design, manufacturing of games, distribution issues, etc.
-- Herder of Cats
It appears that www.skotosnet is possibly a good place for games like these -- they currently have 10 games, including to 90's era games Meridean 59 and Underlight.
As I understand their business model, they can be less expensive for the smaller 'niche' games because they handle all the backend stuff.
-- Herder of Cats
One other issue is that the "Sound Blaster Wireless Music" device only supports optical digital out, whereas the Squeezebox supports both optical digital and an rca jack for coax digital. This means that you can use the Squeezebox with inexpensive but high quality computer speakers with a digital connection.
-- Herder of Cats
My biggest issue with all of these per-song services (iTunes, MusicMatch, the upcoming new Napster) is that you are paying relatively full price for lower quality.
.flac versions when you purchase a song or album.
I much prefer Magnatune("we are not evil") who allows you to download wav and lossless
My second problem is that my tastes are rather eclectic, and using iTunes to find albums to my taste hasn't been working. For instance, I'll pick an album that I really like, and look at the "people who buy this album also buy" and discover I don't like any of their suggestions. But I don't buy much popular music, so it may work for other people.
Related, the 30-second browsing is often not enough for me. Supposedly the new Napster per-song service will allow you to preview the whole song. I know that I bought some Magnatune album recently because I could browse the whole album.
-- Herder of Cats
I suspect your problem may be your cable service -- I've heard from some online gamers that cable-based ISPs have more inherent latency. Latency is critical to online gamers, and VoIP would have similar latency requirements.
I've used Vonage for a couple of months on DSL and haven't experienced any latency issues. However, I've not done any overseas phone calls.
-- Herder of Cats
One of the best things about this game is that because of the smaller server sizes (100s rather then 1000s) the community is more solid.
-- Herder of Cats
I've twice been responsible for creating small offices of the caliber of Joel's vision -- it is hard, and the compromises are never obvious until you've lived in it a year.
;-)
The biggest design program is the "closed door" problem. Ever programmer needs it to concentrate, but it makes making the place more pleasant far more difficult.
My biggest simple advice is a weird one -- install a washer/dryer someplace where it will not disturb people. Even though we worked hard to keep a 40-45 hour work week, it was still the most used 'perk' of our office
Some easy tips:
* There are some really nice drawer sized dishwashers (ours is from Fisher/Payel) -- it is perfect for the small office where it is hard to make everyone responsible for cleaning up the office kitchen. The small drawer size means that you can wash with fewer items, more people take responsibility as it is easy.
* Windows that open -- you may not want to very often in some climates, but it really makes a difference.
* Ventilation -- consider two systems -- one for your HVAC, a second that is nothing but circulation with a little intake some exhaust. I forgot the number, but I think they recommend 10% fresh air an hour as a good compromise for efficiency and good indoor air quality.
* Avoid composite materials -- they outgas for months. We decided not to glue the carpet, it worked fine.
* Design desks for two trash cans -- there is never enough room for recycling and trash if you don't, and people knock them over.
* Steel white walls are nice for each office and common areas, great for writing but also using magnets to hold stuff up. We had over 5 linear feet of white walls per person in the office! To save money, you can get porcelain over steel material for restaurant fridgerators cheaper then from office supply places.
* There is never enough storage space. We designed our storage space around the standard banker-box sized boxes, which made storage much easier. We also crammed storage everywhere, under stairs, over low-ceilinged spaces, etc.
* Consider not totally finishing out ceilings -- acoustic tile and other approaches really don't absorb enough sound. Instead, have spaces where the rafters show, mixed with some normal ceilings. This causes sound to baffle, both into the open spaces of the rafters, and from there into/above the fixed ceilings. Much more effective for deadening sound.
-- Herder of Cats
Over a year ago it cost me about $5K, including a SCSI card. Today it would cost me a lot less and I could have more then a terabyte.
Both the Promise RAID box itself has been reliable, and I am quite happy with the WD hard drives.
-- Herder of CatsThere is a lot more there worth reading.
Also, Richard Bartle is also doing a column at Skotos called Notes from the Dawn of Time.
-- Herder of Cats
First, I format the key fat16, so it can be read by the most operating systems.
It has:
* a bootable DOS partition and a number of DOS tools for disks, etc. It doesn't boot with many BIOS'es, but it does for some.
* I have a couple of floppy disk images and floppy disk tools.
* I keep PGP installers for a variety of operating systems.
* I have a small PGP disk that I have a current copy of my contacts, and some other private files.
I use IMAP now for email, so I don't need to store email on it, but I have in the past and it works with both Outlook and Outlook Express if you know a couple of tricks.
-- Herder of Cats
The column tends to be more technically focused then the other columns at Skotos, with topics including issues of mud text parsing, code inheritance and heirarchies in muds, methods of generating quests, etc.
-- Herder of Cats
Kelerain wrote:
> The telco's for example know better than to pull a stunt like this. I know of few if any
> DSL providers that stick you with the full modemn cost (somewhere ~$250), and most have
> constant 'special promotions' that include a 'free' modemn. The cost of this comes back
> to them in the monthly fees.
Actually, it turns out there are good economic reasons to have up-front box costs that has little to do with profits from those boxes.
What the online game companies have discovered is that you have to get the player to play long enough to become hooked into the game. They have found that the up-front cost forces the player to commit to that first "free" month so that they will overcome the steep learning curve.
Thus online games companies that have allowed you to download the clients for free have a much more difficult time getting people to play long enough to see if they like the game.
-- Herder of Cats
This looks like moving to a cable-style subscription model is becoming a trend. For instance, Skotos (www.skotos.net) instituted a 'many games, one price' subscription plan last year, which they now currently have 7 different games for $12.95 a month, and more on the way.
I guess this makes sense as who the online game industry really competes against is the premium cable industry. They want you to watch 80 hours a month of their programming, but instead you play 80 hours a month online games.
It is curious that they are excluding Star Wars Galaxies -- is that only because they can't because of LucasFilm licensing?
I know that in the case of Skotos that they have a fairly elaborate royalty model to allow the royalties to be shared by multiple games including those not produced by Skotos. Sony can do a many games/one price easily because they all own their own games. My guess maybe EA will offer a similar multi game subscription with Sims and UO soon.
-- Herder of Cats
I noticed that Skotos www.skotos.net has 7 games now for a single montly subscription price. These games include two 3D graphic games, three 'prose' games (two are MUD-like, one is MUSH-like), a strategic space war game, and a multiplayer card game. They have also announced more on the way, including a horror game called 'Lovecraft Country'.
The first month is free, so you can try all the games before you commit.
-- Herder of Cats
You should take a close look at open source TWiki (www.twiki.org) -- from what you've said, I think it might be perfect for you. I personally have been using it with large groups of people for several years.
TWiki is a Wiki variant that adds RCS for every page that is editable, the ability to have access control lists for different pages, yet like Wiki has an "edit this page" button, and is very accessible to those you are not familiar with HTML. TWiki also has a large base of "plugins" that allow you to some very complex structured documents.
One of my favorite features as a manager is the "changes" button -- it gives me a list of all the documents in a particular section that have been changed recently, and with an additional click, I can see in 'change bars' what exactly those changes were. This allows me to get a snapshot of the activities of my group very quickly.
-- Herder of Cats
The Skotos articles website has quite a few other interesting columns and articles on online game design at www.skotos.net/articles with several new articles going up weekly.
-- Herder of Cats
I have some experience with using musician rackmount racks with computer hardware which may help those trying to do the reverse.
I like to purchase musician rackmount racks because they are cheap (at least compared to computer racks) and come in a variety of "packable" sizes.
I have two 'fuzzy' ones that I use in my office -- one has a 1U power distribution, a 1u ethernet switch, a 1u KVM switch, and a small 1u server. This leaves 1u for cable management and a 802.11 router. The other contains my 1.5u Tivo Series 2, a 1u video switch, an 2u amplifier, a 1u DVD player, and a 1u power distribution.
I have a 3rd hard case, with front and back 'lids' that cover the the faces of the rack, that lock with a padlock and are shippable. I use this for conventions.
First, be very careful with the screws -- the screw holes for musician racks may be compatible with those for computer racks, but they appear to use a different size threading. You can ruin your rack by forcing the wrong type of screw.
Second, musician racks typically are far too shallow to use with most computer equipment. Be sure to order the deepest you can find, which typically with be 17" -- even that will not be deep enough for many computer rack-mounted devices, in particular rackmount PC cases which tend to be much deeper then 17".
-- Herder of Cats
I think that game subscription services for multiple games will be the wave of the future. Who wants to pay $12.95 a month each for 5 games that you either don't have time enough to play, or will get tired of?
What online games really compete against is cable television, so increasingly it will be priced like cable television. You'll get the "basic" games channel with a number of games for a flat fee each month, some people will want their premium "hbo" games channel for more sophisticated games, and some people will pay-per-play.
Skotos (www.skotos.net) is one online game company already moving in that direction. They have 6 games currently for a flat monthly fee, and say that they are adding more.
-- Herder of Cats
In my montly TIVO spam I noticed that Firefly was second most 'time-delayed' show of 2002 season. This says to me a lot of people wanted to watch it, but couldn't watch it Friday at 8pm.
-- Herder of Cats
Based on the good stuff we heard here on SlashDot we bought 4 Shuttle S25's to use as servers for our office, and we were pleased with how the worked...at first.
However, over the last 6 months we have now had power supplies go bad 4 times and required us to get new power supplies from Shuttle with many weeks of delay. Even one of the replacement power supplies flaked. Of the original 4 shuttles, only one still has the original power supply.
Fortunately for us, one of the 4 shuttles was designated a cold spare, so we didn't experience much down time, but it was quite annoying to have so many power supplies go bad. We don't have time to move the servers over to more reliable systems, so for now we have purchased some spare power supplies from Shuttle.
Right now we would be very hesitant to buy more modern Shuttles until we understand more about why there was such a huge rate of failure on the power supplies of their S25's.
-- Herder of Cats
I suspect that this product specs are based to meet some bid requirements of various governmental organizations.
For instance, I've heard that Germany is quite adamant about 100% recyclable items, and requires all companies to accept products back after their life cycle is over. I've also heard that the California has considered mandating that all manufacturers must pay a tax on sales of computer equipment to pay for recycling of the equipment if they don't accept the equipment back for recycling.
I doubt there is sufficient commercial demand for such a green product right now, but one giant order from a government or a business that does government contracts could make the product development worthwhile.
-- Herder of Cats