February 2007
- [Design] Personal virtual worlds Lachek Butalek
- [Design] Personal virtual worlds Mike Rozak
- Old MUD-Dev mailing list archives Nick Koranda
- Old MUD-Dev mailing list archives Raph Koster
- [ALL PLEASE READ - FROM MODERATOR] Nick Koranda
- [Design] Avoiding the uncanny valley: cartoons and animals Mike Rozak
- stock market mechanisms in muds Johnicholas Hines
- stock market mechanisms in muds John Buehler
- stock market mechanisms in muds Acius
- stock market mechanisms in muds Daniel James
- stock market mechanisms in muds Matt Chatterley
- stock market mechanisms in muds Johnicholas Hines
- stock market mechanisms in muds Chapman, Greg
- Imaginary Realities mirror Richard Tew
- Imaginary Realities mirror Michael Hartman
- Old MUD-Dev mailing list archives Peter Harkins
- [DESIGN] AJAX Client/Servers? Phillip Lenhardt
- [DESIGN] AJAX Client/Servers? Morris Cox
- [DESIGN] AJAX Client/Servers? John Bertoglio
- [DESIGN] AJAX Client/Servers? Morris Cox
- [DESIGN] AJAX Client/Servers? Jeremy Noetzelman
- [DESIGN] AJAX Client/Servers? Alex Arnon
- [DESIGN] AJAX Client/Servers? Squid
- Old MUD-Dev mailing list archives Ghilardi Filippo
- Old MUD-Dev mailing list archives Darryl Woodford
- stock market mechanisms in muds Raph Koster
- [DESIGN] AJAX Client/Servers? John Bertoglio
- [Design]Characters moving between worlds [was Personal virtual worlds] Mike Rozak
- [Design]Characters moving between worlds [was Personalvirtual worlds] Michael Sellers
- [Design]Characters moving between worlds [was Personal virtual worlds] Caliban Darklock
- [Design]Characters moving between worlds [was Personalvirtual worlds] John Buehler
- [Design]Characters moving between worlds [was Personalvirtual worlds] Michael Sellers
- [Design]Characters moving between worlds [was Personalvirtual worlds] Jeffrey Kesselman
- [Design]Characters moving between worlds [was Personalvirtual worlds] Caliban Darklock
- [Design]Characters moving between worlds [wasPersonalvirtual worlds] Dave Scheffer
- [Design]Characters moving between worlds [was Personal virtual worlds] Jeffrey Kesselman
- Old MUD-Dev mailing list archives Ghilardi Filippo
- [Design] A rant against MMORPG installs and initial user experience Mike Rozak
- stock market mechanisms in muds Matt Chatterley
- stock market mechanisms in muds Peter Keeler
- stock market mechanisms in muds Johnicholas Hines
- [MUD-Dev2] Michael Sellers
- [Design] A rant against MMORPG installs and initial user experience Jeffrey Kesselman
- Mailing List Alternatives (was Old MUD-Dev mailing list archives) Morgan Ramsay
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Mike Rozak
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Lachek Butalek
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Jeffrey Kesselman
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Mike Rozak
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Sean Howard
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Mike Rozak
- genre vs creativity [was: Rant against Vanguard] cruise
- genre vs creativity [was: Rant against Vanguard] Jeffrey Kesselman
- genre vs creativity [was: Rant against Vanguard] Jeffrey Kesselman
- genre vs creativity [was: Rant against Vanguard] cruise
- genre vs creativity [was: Rant against Vanguard] Sean Howard
- genre vs creativity [was: Rant against Vanguard] Jeffrey Kesselman
- genre vs creativity [was: Rant against Vanguard] Damion Schubert
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Jeffrey Kesselman
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Sean Howard
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Adam Martin
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Sean Howard
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants cruise
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Damion Schubert
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Dana V. Baldwin
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Amanda Walker
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Dave Scheffer
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Phillip Lenhardt
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Caliban Darklock
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Vincent Archer
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Michael Sellers
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Caliban Darklock
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Dana V. Baldwin
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Caliban Darklock
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Michael Hartman
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Dana V. Baldwin
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Richard A. Bartle
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Richard A. Bartle
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Richard A. Bartle
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Richard A. Bartle
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Vincent Archer
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Richard A. Bartle
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Richard A. Bartle
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Richard A. Bartle
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Michael Hartman
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Richard A. Bartle
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Richard A. Bartle
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Damion Schubert
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Damion Schubert
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Matt Chatterley
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Damion Schubert
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Richard A. Bartle
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Amanda Walker
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [TECH DESIGN] Next Generation Infrastructure Phillip Lenhardt
- [TECH DESIGN] Next Generation Infrastructure Lachek Butalek
- [TECH DESIGN] Next Generation Infrastructure Jeffrey Kesselman
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Adam Martin
On 01/03/07, Amanda Walker <amanda@alfar.com> wrote:
> On Feb 28, 2007, at 5:23 PM, John Buehler wrote:
> > To break out of this pattern, it's going to take things like
> > inexpensive
> > graphics engines that will let every Tom, Dick and Harry Developer
> > take a
> > shot at the graphical genre the same way that printf permitted the
Those have been around for years - I'd suggest going to gamedev.net
forums and have a browse, see what the latest and greatest is. And to
find out quite how many people there are who are more than capable of
writing rich powerful 3d engines in their spare time :). There's a
huge community of soon-to-be indie developers there, a rich mixture of
extremely keen and creative highschoolers trying to write games from
scratch, highly skilled non-games industry people (programmers,
artists, etc) writing games for fun, and mainstream games devs who
just like to do some game dev work as a hobby without the stresses of
commercial dev.
> > that will put World of Warcraft to shame.
I'd like to know what a thing that put WoW to shame would look like in
a conceptual sense: what would it have to do for you to count it a
success?
> The graphics engines aren't the problem, I don't think Torque has
> been out for years, for example, and even has a 3rd party "MMO Kit".
> Irrlicht and CrystalSpace are free, etc.
...and there's much much better stuff out there for very low cost if
you're going to go commercial, or have a promising project and can get
the interest of the big commercial engine licensors.
> The problem I see for doing an indie MMO is infrastructure. It takes
> a lot of bandwidth and computing power to support very many users,
Nah, b/w is ever cheaper and computing power now for servers is
shockingly cheap - prices I was quoted last year for quad-core servers
with more RAM than any of our dev machines are lower than I was
expecting for single-core 1Gb machines. I have friends who've
kickstarted stuff on what a few years ago would have been considered
major "big iron", funded by nothing more than their own spare cash
(normal people on average programmer salaries).
For instance, have a look at people like OGSI.
> and current game engines are biased towards very centralized server
> implementations (which then biases the hardware investement towards
> "big iron" servers racked up in expensive data centers).
>
> This is not the only way to do it--the US Army, for example, does a
Indeed, it's not the *only* way to do it, but it's almost universally
the most appropriate balance of risk, cost, difficulty, performance,
security, and maintenance. In general, there's really very little
reason to bother with anything non client/server these days.
> The main barrier to doing this for a consumer game is the "untrusted
> client" problem. Once there's a distributed MMO engine that is
> robust in the face of hacked clients, life could get very interesting
> very fast.
Personally, I'm betting that will happen but disappear because the
amount of revenue being pumped into client/server systems vastly
eclipses what goes into the p2p stuff, and yet the p2p stuff has only
marginal benefits. This will remain the case until/unless the
last-mile home broadband b/w goes up by several orders of magnitude
whilst the cost of server b/w and silicon only drops by a small
factor.
/me ducks and runs for cover
Adam - [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Amanda Walker
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Adam Martin
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Amanda Walker
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Daniel James
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Sean Howard
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Sean Howard
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Richard A. Bartle
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Phillip Lenhardt
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants John Buehler
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Mike Rozak
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Sean Howard
- Re:[Humor] MMORPG Cliches (was " A rant against MMORPG installs and initialuserexperience") Mike Rozak
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants Mike Rozak
- [OFF-TOPIC] GDC (and hello all) Adam Martin
- [OFF-TOPIC] GDC (and hello all) Michael Sellers
- [OFF-TOPIC] GDC (and hello all) Raph Koster
- [OFF-TOPIC] GDC (and hello all) Adam Martin
- [OFF-TOPIC] GDC (and hello all) Jon Leonard
- [OFF-TOPIC] GDC (and hello all) Jeffrey Kesselman
- [OFF-TOPIC] GDC (and hello all) Raph Koster
- [Design] A rant against MMORPG installs and initial user experience Vincent Archer
- [DESIGN] Excellent commentary on Vanguard's diplomacy system Michael Sellers
- [DESIGN] Excellent commentary on Vanguard's diplomacy system cruise
- [DESIGN] Excellent commentary on Vanguard's diplomacysystem Michael Sellers
- [DESIGN] Excellent commentary on Vanguard's diplomacysystem Sean Howard
- [DESIGN] Excellent commentary on Vanguard's diplomacysystem Caliban Darklock
- [DESIGN] Excellent commentary on Vanguard's diplomacysystem John Buehler
- [DESIGN] Excellent commentary on Vanguard's diplomacysystem Lachek Butalek
- [DESIGN] Excellent commentary on Vanguard's diplomacysystem Raph Koster
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant for Vanguard DANIEL Harman
- [OFF-TOPIC] A rant for Vanguard Sean Howard
- [DESIGN] Music Industry teaching the Game Industry (Was: A rant for Vanguard) Nick Koranda
- [DESIGN] Music Industry teaching the Game Industry Sean Howard
- [DESIGN] Music Industry teaching the Game Industry Morgan Ramsay
- [DESIGN] Music Industry teaching the Game Industry Caliban Darklock
- [DESIGN] Music Industry teaching the Game Industry Jeffrey Kesselman
- [DESIGN] Music Industry teaching the Game Industry Adam Martin
- [DESIGN] Music Industry teaching the Game Industry Christopher Allen
- [DESIGN] Music Industry teaching the Game Michael Sellers
- [OFF-TOPIC] GDC (and hello all) Raph Koster