IMVU will be the one really crying. Anyway, I have a question. The whole "game without the game" aspect of these virtual worlds and the player's distinct lack of purpose limits the appeal of these games. For those of you who don't see the point, what are some features that would make this sort of thing interesting for you?
IMVU will be the one really crying. Anyway, I have a question. The whole "game without the game" aspect of these virtual worlds and the player's distinct lack of purpose limits the appeal of these games. For those of you who don't see the point, what are some features that would make this sort of thing interesting for you?
I wouldn't worry too much about your job yet, Emily. I went in last night and within a couple minutes I decided it was shit. The interface is horrible, I had no idea how to do anything and I kept clipping through the walls of the room which showed me a ton of whitespace. It also looks kinda ugly...
IMVU will be the one really crying. Anyway, I have a question. The whole "game without the game" aspect of these virtual worlds and the player's distinct lack of purpose limits the appeal of these games. For those of you who don't see the point, what are some features that would make this sort of thing interesting for you?
I wouldn't worry too much about your job yet, Emily. I went in last night and within a couple minutes I decided it was shit. The interface is horrible, I had no idea how to do anything and I kept clipping through the walls of the room which showed me a ton of whitespace. It also looks kinda ugly...
Yeah, I used it for five minutes. It's worthless. The only cool thing was the ability to make a virtual "television" powered by YouTube. The original Everquest is more Lively than Lively.
Personally, I'd like a combination of first person POV, directional sound, voice chat, and VR glasses. Make it a dedicated client that runs on all platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Console) with better graphics and more avatar customization. Let the users make items as well, but have it be checked so that they don't do anything malicious (something second life has a problem with). Let the creators sell their content for real money and allow users to mute other users so they don't have to see or deal with them.
I'd like it to be stateful in the sense that you can have your own rooms and furniture and have your gaming history tracked to show what you've done, but not in the sense of leveling up. If one player can do something, so should another if they are of the same skill. After that they could add missions and quests of sorts. Perhaps some sword fights using the Wii-mote with Bluetooth. And make the server and the clients open source, so people can make their own universe outside the official servers if they want.
I effectively want "The World" of the .hack universe, except, you know, without the crazy computer virus.
Personally, I'd like a combination of first person POV, Make it a dedicated client that runs on all clients (Windows, Mac, Linux, Console) with better graphics and more avatar customization.
Check.
I'd like it to be stateful in the sense that you can have your own rooms and furniture and have your gaming history tracked, but not in the sense of leveling up.
Check.
After that they could add missions and quests of sorts.
Sorta Check.
directional sound, voice chat, and VR glasses. Perhaps some sword fights using the Wii-mote with Bluetooth.
That would ROCK! But it's hard.
I effectively want "The World" of the .hack universe, except, you know, without the crazy computer virus.
Look, I think that this sort of thing would benefit greatly by not trying to implement gaming functions. Number one priority of this sort of environment should be performance. It should load nearly instantly and should be essentially lag free. VOIP needs to be integrated as well. Second to that is the ability to share information. The one thing that intrigues me about Lively is the YouTube integration. Users should be allowed to share files, audio, video, and other forms of information to other users within the environment. It reminds me of that Ghost in the Shell S.A.C episode where the major learns about the history of the laughing man within a virtual chat room, they share news stories and videos within each other right in the room. Lastly, the game should be aesthetically pleasing, but room for users to create their own content. Allowing users to modify their environment, their avatar models and textures, as well as other changes should be allowed. The more power the users have, the better.
It reminds me of that Ghost in the Shell S.A.C episode where the major learns about the history of the laughing man within a virtual chat room, they share news stories and videos within each other right in the room.
This is something that is actually technologically feasible that does not yet exist. Just make a chat room that has multimedia functionality. Sure, a web browser with a chat room that hotlinks URLs achieves basically the same functionality, but the interface is not smooth. You don't even really need the virtual world and the avatar and the whole bit. We just need a user interface, 3d or 2d, to facilitate instant group multimedia communications.
directional sound, voice chat, and VR glasses. Perhaps some sword fights using the Wii-mote with Bluetooth.
That would ROCK! But it's hard.
Well, for Windows, DirectX makes directional sound relatively easy to program. The 360 and the PS3 also have provisions for that. I can't speak for other platforms though. As for VR glasses, its my understanding that many of them appear as just regular displays to the OS. Voice chat is easy to implement as well using a system like teamspeak or vent, but the only way it would annoy everyone is if they made the volume and direction of the voice correspond with direction and distance of the people talking in relation to you. Come to think of it, maybe they should just license bits of the source engine and then fill in whats left.
Number one priority of this sort of environment should be performance. It should load nearly instantly and should be essentially lag free.
That wont happen without either a pure fiber connection from server to client, or without every texture already on the hard disk of the client.
Second to that is the ability to share information. The one thing that intrigues me about Lively is the YouTube integration. Users should be allowed to share files, audio, video, and other forms of information to other users within the environment. It reminds me of that Ghost in the Shell S.A.C episode where the major learns about the history of the laughing man within a virtual chat room, they share news stories and videos within each other right in the room.
While that's great, it would be very hard to implement with today's technology. In GITS, they had the advantage of the entire environment being native and more malleable. And while I could foresee Google being able to add a floating virtual browser into the world which could access any Google service and the web, that begs many questions. What would you do about flash or interactive content? Which user would the locus of control fall on? Would every user's client be responsible of grabbing the content, or would it be collected by Google and then pushed to everyone?
Lastly, the game should be aesthetically pleasing, but room for users to create their own content. Allowing users to modify their environment, their avatar models and textures, as well as other changes should be allowed. The more power the users have, the better.
Again, while I would love that level of customizability, that brings on the problem that "the world", an actual service similar to this, has: Long loading times. Everyones avatar had to be grabbed and all the environments had to be loaded. Second life solved this by making the graphics shitty, but the problem still remains.
As a whole, we need faster and more pervasive internet to make it perfect.
That wont happen without either a pure fiber connection from server to client, or without every texture already on the hard disk of the client.
I'd be happier with shitty graphics and better performance than realistic environments that take ten minutes to load. Hell, I'd even take 80's style vector graphics if it meant awesome load times.
While that's great, it would be very hard to implement with today's technology.
Not really. The problem is that most people try to do it wrong. Look at Twitter; it's an insanely easy concept and simple, but they completely fucked up the implementation by having the service constantly query a database every time a page loads or someone posts a tweet. This is why the server bogs down all the time.
For those of you who don't see the point, what are some features that would make this sort of thing interesting for you?
Hmmm...
The only cool thing was the ability to make a virtual "television" powered by YouTube.
With this information, the only use I see is that of watching, say, ODIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN in Lively and MST3K'ing it with people across the world.
Personally, I'd like a combination of first person POV, directional sound, voice chat, and VR glasses
Heh, this is an appropriate place to bring up quite a lot of interesting discussion. There are many awesome media, particularly books and anime, that have said this well, but Brain-Computer Interfacing is awesome and so very cool, but oh so frightening.
I find it strange how people on a forum run by two guys who proudly disparage Second Live are so stoked for a clone just because it's put out by Google.
Okay... so it's already 15:30. First off, I booted into Windows to play some Tribes 2, perhaps some Legions, however for some strange reason the word Lively was stuck in my head. So I have checked it out. It looks good. And is the Logan avatar a total bastard or is it the changes I made to him? His facial expressions are awesome! Either way, it looks good, and I've now seen that Pythagoras Switch video a million times more. *le sigh*
The controlls are messy though, left is right and right is left, and up is down and down is up... But it looks nice, the animating objects are fun to hilarious, yes I'm talking about that exploding pig.
Comments
I'd like it to be stateful in the sense that you can have your own rooms and furniture and have your gaming history tracked to show what you've done, but not in the sense of leveling up. If one player can do something, so should another if they are of the same skill. After that they could add missions and quests of sorts. Perhaps some sword fights using the Wii-mote with Bluetooth. And make the server and the clients open source, so people can make their own universe outside the official servers if they want.
I effectively want "The World" of the .hack universe, except, you know, without the crazy computer virus.
That wont happen without either a pure fiber connection from server to client, or without every texture already on the hard disk of the client. While that's great, it would be very hard to implement with today's technology. In GITS, they had the advantage of the entire environment being native and more malleable. And while I could foresee Google being able to add a floating virtual browser into the world which could access any Google service and the web, that begs many questions. What would you do about flash or interactive content? Which user would the locus of control fall on? Would every user's client be responsible of grabbing the content, or would it be collected by Google and then pushed to everyone? Again, while I would love that level of customizability, that brings on the problem that "the world", an actual service similar to this, has: Long loading times. Everyones avatar had to be grabbed and all the environments had to be loaded. Second life solved this by making the graphics shitty, but the problem still remains.
As a whole, we need faster and more pervasive internet to make it perfect.
EDIT: I just saw Scott's post.
There are many awesome media, particularly books and anime, that have said this well, but
Brain-Computer Interfacing is awesome and so very cool, but oh so frightening.
Here's a screenshot of the room now. I've put a bit of work into it.
The controlls are messy though, left is right and right is left, and up is down and down is up... But it looks nice, the animating objects are fun to hilarious, yes I'm talking about that exploding pig.
This was so easy to do the comic in! The camera angles were so much fun, it was like doing a movie!
Shutting Down. (I don't hate you.)
Edit: Also the plug-in was huge and clunky and ran cruddy on most computers. There was no mac version.