Will Harvey On Virtual Worlds, Technology Curves 94
CowboyRobot writes "Slashdot's former editor Chris DiBona has an interview with videogame creator Will Harvey over at ACMQueue. Harvey has had a hand in lots of stuff you've used, from Zany Golf to Adobe AfterEffects, and now runs There, a kind of online 3D 'virtual world' game. Their conversation covers games in general, as well as specifics of the challenges that There is facing. From the article: 'You have to project the curves: the rendering curve; the CPU speed curve; the money spent on the Internet on online games curve; the number of people who play online games curve. I think we guessed right on almost everything, but we underestimated Moore's Law and we overestimated the low-end graphics capability'."
And in the darkness *bind* them? (Score:1, Insightful)
Sounds good
One small step... (Score:1, Insightful)
Music Construction Set (Score:5, Insightful)
Goddammit, I KNEW I recognised that name. Music Construction Set is one of the best apps I've ever seen, on any platform. That thing was amazing.
and... learning curve? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: your logic (Score:2, Insightful)
I was saying if someone is gonna ask for your help and you're money, well... that just doesn't seem quite right...
hey bob, fix this computer for me, and while you're at it, give me $20...
come on
Re:Second Life (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The same prolem for all new MMORPG (Score:1, Insightful)
I wouldn't even put RPG into There's label. In my opinion, it's more of project to divert consumerism from the real world into their own virtual construct. Style has no prerequisite of material goods; you're simply buying status when you purchase designer labels. All There did was remove the material goods and keep the status. It already has in-demand designer labels--some of the hottest labels are even starting up real-world production efforts. Typical MMORPGs and social games like There are different beasts altogether...
Re:The same prolem for all new MMORPG (Score:1, Insightful)
I understand it's somewhat 'hackish' to ocassionally capitalize words for Added Effect, but you've gotten carried away.
Re:The same prolem for all new MMORPG (Score:3, Insightful)
Player driven economies seem wonderful in theory. I love the idea, and that's what used in the perfect MMORPG that exists in my head as I guess it does for all those who have played MMORPGs and been disapointed. In practice it doesn't work because there simply aren't enough players online at any time to run a working economy, plus players don't like the money sinks that are needed (such as paying rent) if you break the economy by having unlimited money sources (such as monsters which drop gold when killed and when killed spawn again a short time later with more gold).
Such a player driven world would work well if you managed to get the right kind of players. However, intelligently enough most people/companies when creating as exepensive a game as a MMORPG want to attract the large bulk of players who just want to hack-n-slash.
MUDs were nice because they were reasonably low on resources (at first with few players) and easy to develop for with free (as in beer usually) engines easily downloadable. That let university students run them on university machines (and hence good connectivity) and other university students play them. I'm sure the university's didn't like it much, but that's how all the good MUDs I played started - created by people who wanted to play such a game and not by those who wanted to be paid by others who want to play such a game.
Machine's with good connectivity are cheapish now, and open source code is fashionable so maybe players will start writing MMORPGs. Of course creating the pretty graphics is harder than writing the networking code or the object scripting which I suspect is the current sticking point. Of course MUDs are still just as fun.
Companies like player created content because it is cheaper, they don't have to pay as many people to come up with new content if players are paying them for the priviledge.
Player Created Content for The Sims (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe that one of the major reasons that The Sims Online has failed (in stark contrast to EA's expectations, and the success of the offline version), is that The Sims Online doesn't support player created content. It's been promised, but EA never executed on Will Wright's vision.
The Sims was originally designed to support player created content. Thanks to the enormous quantity of player created content [google.com] (on the order of millions of unique skins and objects, many of them excellent quality [simfreaks.com]), The Sims is anything but bland and empty.
I know people who actually make a full-time living and support their real families, by creating original, high quality Sims objects. There's a thriving cottage industry [ultimatesims.com] of publishing Sims objects and skins on many web sites [ultimatesims.com], and selling subscriptions to Sims players who love to pay for downloading all kinds of original content [8thdeadlysim.com]!
But "bland and empty" does accurately describe The Sims Online: once you've played for a while, you get tired of the sparse selection of character skins and objects to buy. But that wouldn't be the case, if The Sims Online supported player created content like The Sims offline, as EA has promised but not delivered.
Player created content makes the economy richer, interesting, dynamic and personal, because it enables creative players to bring actual VALUE into the economy, and truly invest in building the virtual world.
Contrast that with The Sims Online economy, which has been flooded by Simoleans generated with MazeBots by people selling them on eBay. 100 million more Simoleans dumped into the Sims Online economy isn't going to improve the game play or the richness of the environment one bit -- in fact it just makes it worse.
But enabling players to add new skins and objects to The Sims Online would substantially increase its quality, while earning the creative players respect and Simoleans, and entertaining everyone.
If the enormous amounts of energy that players were putting into implementing MazeBots and generating Simoleans to sell on eBay, were put into implementing content creation tools and generating skins and objects, then The Sims Online might someday be even more successful than The Sims Offline.
It doesn't require "extensive tools and abilities" for players to create content. And it's not necessary for the tools to be built into the game itself. The content creation tools should be factored out into an SDK [donhopkins.com] and released, so third party developers can extend them and integrate them into other tool chains and web services.
The Sims Transmogrifier [thesimstra...rifier.com] is an external tool for The Sims, which enables players to create their own objects, by cloning existing objects and repainting the 2D graphics with programs like Photoshop. It doesn't require 3D Studio Max or any advanced 3D skills. Lots of kids and adults use it every day to make their own objects.
But it's certainly possible to make useful content creation tools that are easier to use than Transmogrifier. After all, not everyone knows their way around Photoshop, but many people want to make objects with pictures [donhopkins.com] they download from the net or take with digital cameras.
I've developed an easy to use tool called RugOMatic [thesimstra...rifier.com], which enables players to create rugs for The Sims by simply dragging