NASA Responds To MMO Concerns 91
Sean Hollister writes "GameCyte contacted Daniel Laughlin, Project Manager of NASA Learning Technologies, to find out where that $3 million budget for their educational MMO actually went. As it turns out, NASA still has the money — they are just planning to use it differently than we thought. Meanwhile, the 'non-reimbursable Space Act Agreement' actually allows the game developer to profit where they might not have, otherwise. 'If it were a government contract, it would be illegal to be paid twice, once by the government and a second time by consumers.'"
Now that's a good deal... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nasa wants to make a game.
They have a paltry $3mill budget to make it.
They decide to not pay the developers to make it, but let them profit from making the Nasa game.
The game developer has to make what is likely going to be a dull drab game (compared to other space MMO standards) and as a reward is ALLOWED to make money off said game.
Now is it just me, or is this utterly setting yourself up for a fall? Not only do you not get to have all the aliens and things running about in your game, you probably won't get to run about conquering and destroying, and due to budgets and the likely developers who would actually GO FOR THIS deal, you will likely end up with a B-Grade MMO that looks totally like a B-Grade MMO.
Is this really a smart step for Nasa? If you can't do it properly or well enough, sometimes it is indeed better not to do it at all.
Re:Now that's a good deal... (Score:5, Funny)
I for one can see millions of people paying $20/month for the privilige!
Wake me up when the spin doctors are done.
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Spindoctors.com [spindoctors.com]
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The bigger problem is the fact that the military gets over 1/2 our tax money.
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A bigger problem is that you think the military gets 1/2 your tax money. 1/5 of 2007 spending. [wikipedia.org] Or less than 1/3 of on-budget 2007 receipts.
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Re:Now that's a good deal... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's probably not as stupid as it sounds.
There's probably already a game company out there that has thought about implementing some kind of game based on NASA. Now with NASA offering free advice, knowledge and who knows what else, it would be an ideal opportunity for a game developer who may already have something in the works.
Not only that, but they will probably be able to get an official NASA endorsement + free advertising on the NASA website.
Could actually work out well for both sides, and we may get a cool game from it.
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Despite naming (with typos) MMORPGs like EVE Online or World of Warcraft, they are not looking to a MMORPG. A number of elements that have to feature in your game, like "measuring the learning", having specific educator access, and it's explicit target audience (kids from 13 - the legal minimum for an on-line service - to college) indicate that they're not looking to a RPG or anything but a straight
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Could actually work out well for both sides, and we may get a cool game from it.
I agree. Despite the doubts many slashdotters have about the fun of an educational NASA game, I can definitely see some great opportunities.
Firstly, don't make it an RPG. That market has been cornered, and it makes no sense whatsoever in a NASA context. Get away from the real-time first/third-person view. You want to be able to get to orbit or Mars before dinner.
I'd make it a design/build/resource management game. Maybe you've got a budget. There are a couple of easy standard missions, like get a rocket of
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On the other hand, I expect a lot of astronauts to die in this game.
That's the most un-PC and insensitive thing I've heard here in a while! Bravo :P
I'd like to see the option to build nukes and/or giant laser satellites to take out Iraq so that the government doesn't need to waste billions of dollars with their little wars, which would also mean increases in your budget!
Personally I don't think it would take 3million to build a game like that, I could probably do that in like a year or two myself (if it were my only job) even with my limited OpenGL and physics simulation e
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it wouldn't be MMO, but what you're describing doesn't leave much scope for massively multiplayer if it's all government funded, since not many countries in the world can afford that level of funding, which means only like up to 10 players per game! :P
No, I think MMO could be great in this game. You can see other players' astronauts burn up on re-entry, see space debris or even operational satelites smash into other players' space stations, etc. It could be excellent!
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Yeah, they could just pretend that every country in the world has a good enough economy to support a space program I s'pose
I suspect it's not really intended to become a simulation of national economies, but instead a simulation of the engineering involved to achieve space flight. At least that's what I'm hoping.
Economic simulations can be fun too, but I don't think it's really NASA. I think they want to educate people in engineering and space flight, not economics and administration.
'Debris' eh? Oops, I accidentally decompressed my garbage out at 900mph into the side of your space station, sorry! The return of the BFG! (Big Fuckin Garbage launcher)
900mph is nothing. There's tons of decommissioned satelites, last stages of rockets, loose screws and bolts, and other man-made hazards floating
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Since when does the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many? Is it just a case of whether you're on the "right" side or am I having a humour bypass moment?
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You can't make a B grade MMO for 3 million (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe someone could clue the NASA folks in. "Hiya guys, MMORPG has costs approaching that of programming control code for the shuttle." "Gadzooks! Why, $3 million wouldn't cover the header file on the system clock function!" "Yeah, its sort of like that. Except minus the defense contractor slush fund. But mostly like that."
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I see it as more of a wake up call. (Score:2)
When push comes to shove suddenly its "unreasonable" or will result in a crappy product unless lots of money are spent.
Which is it?
I guess some NASA upper crusts bought into all that forum bragging as if it were meaningful.
* Oh, for reference go look up any story here on World of Warcraft or Diablo... I am still waiting for all these "bette
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It's about "scratching an itch." Nobody in the Open Source world has that particular itch, to "develop an educa
Mod Parent Up (Score:2)
I think it's even worse (Score:4, Interesting)
You could make the Pine of single player RPGs, maybe.
Now take the costs for designing quests, landscapes, dungeons, etc, for that and multiply them by at least 10.
No, seriously. SP RPGs are aiming for anywhere between 10 and 100 hours of gameplay, with the curve actually peaking near the lower end of that. A MMO, I don't know the latest WoW figures, but back in the day of Everquest Sony had figured that the average player stays subscribed for 6 months. (Of course, like with any averages, not everyone is the same. Some quit after the free month, some stay for 4 years, but the average was half a year.)
You actually have to provide some content for them for 6 months. They have to actually keep finding stuff to do for that that long. Way past the point where a SP RPG player popped the DVD out and moved on to something else.
Six months is about 180 days. Let's say only 150 until he finished everything and got stuck in the endgame raid grind. (You don't want that to happen _too_ early, because a lot of people give up.) Let's also say we're not even aiming for 150 days of an unemployed obsessive gamer who puts in 16 hours daily. We're aiming for it to last 150 days for a borderline casual guy averaging 4 hours a day. (Which can also mean less than that on weekdays and a bit longer on Saturday and Sunday, so it's not as obsessive as it looks.) The 16 hours-a-day maniacs will, of course, then finish the game in a little over a month, but, oh well. So, anyway, we're up to 600 hours of gameplay already.
Even if you do go heavier on the time sinks than in a SP RPG, there's only so much time sink percentage you can have before most people find it non-fun. Taking a wild guess based on WoW's design, at the lower levels you want almost no time sinks, while later it gradually increases. But even that boiling-the-frog model lets you rise the bar only so far. So let's be generous and assume you managed to make a whole 50% of your game be time-sinks, and somehow you din't lose 99% of the players because of that.
That's still enough content for a 300 hour SP RPG you need to have there. It's more work than it sounds.
Second Life, Croquet (Score:5, Insightful)
Another NASA-ish thing to do might be to build something on top of Croquet (www.opencroquet.org)... they'd be supporting a neat platform, and for $3m, they could probably get the Croquet people quite interested and get something better out of it than paying a game company to develop a new MMO from scratch.
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Croquet? It's got a user interface from 1976. Sure Smalltalk was one of the first window based user interfaces (not "the first", if nothing else Xerox had Interlisp-D and their office automation software as well as Smalltalk) and Squeak and Croquet still use the same oddball design.
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Yes, and whatever they are trying to achieve with these $3m, they can build on top of that and make it better.
Croquet? It's got a user interface from 1976.
You don't know what you're talking about. Squeak uses a user interface and toolkit designed in the 90's that has little to do with the original Smalltalk UI or toolkit. The Squeak UI provides standard scroll bars, titles, and menus. In addition, it provides some new user interface element
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OK, they added optional scrollbars and titles but they still have the context menu on the middle button, and the right button (which everyone else in the world uses for contextual menus) pop up a bunch of floating icons around the window. This has clearly taken root in Croquet, except that the floating icons are always there.
But you can't use Squeak "just like your Mac or PC (or X11
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Well, I think $3m ought to cover that turning the "swapMouseButton" option on by default, with $2.9999m left for all the other stuff.
I'll take your word for that, I quit playing video games on a regular basis... oh, probably about the time my kids started school.
Your loss.
But based on my previous experience that's an awful low bar to beat.
Well, it's the bar
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Have you looked at the API? It's a kickass API for building low performance simulations that distribute amazingly well, but think about writing a physics engine that supports a few thousand objects that has to run every interaction through that event loop... even if it wasn't written in an interpreted language.
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Sadly, that's probably a lot more than those who would bother downloading a NASA MMO...
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NASA IS in the space and rocket technology business. This is 'advertising', just like any business might do. The pay off for this advertising isn't in products purchased, but in public demand for more missions.
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I can see organizations like Second Life stepping up to this challenge by investing some man-hours into setting up a server for NASA. Heck, they could even use the same client and just change the branding. This would be a huge advertising oppor
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So the game might be dull, but the physics engine might be top notch and the developer could license that to other people making games.
That should be (Score:1)
Could be agood deal. (Score:2)
cheap labor? (Score:1)
No one would want to? (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Gratis" is a valid word in many languages, including English. It's in the Oxford English Dictionary. In Slashdot terms, it means "free, as in beer". The word comes from Latin, where it means roughly the same thing.
So, you don't need to be Dutch to say "gratis".
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I'm an American, and I use gratis every once in a while.
it's pretty much set up to fail, though (Score:2)
Second, making a high-quality MMO just takes a lot of money. A small startup game developer would have to be extremely well funded by venture capital to do so.
Third, I think you m
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SimMars (Score:5, Informative)
Maxis was working with NASA on SimMars [wikipedia.org], while I was there working on The Sims.
It was eventually canceled after The Sims shipped and sucked up all the resources into the franchise.
But some of the ideas from SimMars ended up in one of The Sims expansion packs and Spore.
From wikipedia:
-Don
In the immortal words of Ed Harris (Score:1)
Does Laughlin know nothing about game development? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Does Laughlin know nothing about game developme (Score:2)
If it worked with the pyramids... (Score:2)
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Who wants games when U can have a standard (Score:2)
Where there is a will... (Score:1)
I suppose that is technically true but defense contractors do it all the time. They sell weapons systems to other countries that were developed under government contracts. Do the HUGE proceeds go back into the taxpayer coffers? No. So they are getting around it somehow. How should this be any different?
NASA as the secondary product (Score:2)
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It would be NASA's best interest especially for good publicity, because right now it seems downhill...They want a free game to slap their name on?
Do they honestly think a "for profit" company that provides it will actually keep the original reason for creation in mind? Seeing how said company is technically not contracted or restricted to keep the game from havin
Earth Orbit Station (Score:1)
there is a lot of potential for game play.
Certainly there's no reason to build a Diku type MUD/MMO where each player is a character. It probably doesn't have to be a persistent world either in the sense of going in and moving around, but persistent in keeping track of what projects you have attempted.
They could easily simulate multiple countries or companies racing for obje
What does the $3M cover? (Score:1)
Why not extend a current MMO? (Score:2)
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What a deal! (Score:2)
Re: Being paid twice (Score:1)
This is not true. There are many ways to write a gov't contract and, although the general policy is that anything bought by the government becomes public property, there are common exceptions.