f13.net

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4800298

Bruce

Nothing like catering to the LCD.

And instant messengers are so hard to write... honestly, I don't understand how a professional programmer (who has worked with internet programs before) could possibly find one hard to program.

So. Damn. Easy.

It's all about the money isn't it? There's a kickback there somewhere, I can smell it.

Definitely not hard, but depending on the protocol, it's a pain in the ass. At least picking apart XML snippets in a memory efficient way is a PITA (my Jabber library).

Well at least has the potential to get rid of the need for:

/tell name
/retell name
/reply name
/guild blah blah blah
/etc

The new reality today is that I have teamspeak to talk to my guild, I could use an instant messenger to maintain a list of private contacts in the general public, and then just need some basic chat channel to deal with joe blow player.

It's nice to know AOL/Time Warner will survive the coming apocolypse of the machine takeover.

I can see it now in Agent Smith's voice "Neo357, you've got mail".

Bleh.

Xilren

AOL Time-Warner owns AOL. They own the Matrix property.

Sounds like a synergy of suck to me.

Does this even matter?

You know how sometimes you are granted the gift of foresight and you call tell in your gut that something is going to fail? Not fail after a valiant effort (see: the Alamo, RL not the movie...) but a just total black hopeless failure? (see: Gigli, the Buffalo Bills)

Well, I have been granted this gift of foresight when it comes to the Matrix Online.

And my God, is it going to suck. I went into the reasons in another post, but I have the gut reaction here that this game will go nowhere, if it even gets released.

This AOL idea, maybe its good but it will buried under the load of crap that will be this game.

The idea aint new.  Remember the EQ Messenger thing? God did that suck.  Although cross server tells was kind of cool.  Cross server chat channels was even more interesting but this stuff kept getting 'fixed' as bugs when people would figure it out.  I don't think the thing exists in any form anymore.  It was originally going to be a couple buck a month adder and free for legends people.

Also, wasn't AC2 chat based on some MSN Messenger code that Turbine could never get working and then blamed on Microsoft for their failed communication software?  They may have been right that the problem was MSN, but I can't believe they could not have worked around it during development.

Finally, isnt the AOL/Time Warner thing breaking up?  I thought Time Warner was looking to sell off AOL.

MMO+AOL=Death.

Although the ironic twist of combining the Matrix and AOL adds a bit of humor.

Chat channels, cross-server and otherwise, are still in-game, and work much better than they did the first few months.  There are occasional issues, but rarely.

As far as EQIM, it's still there, it's still buggy, but it is maintained, in a 'if we fix this minor issue then our inbox won't fill as fast' sort of way that means months after the fix is needed, it gets fixed. (Bristlebane's hardware changed in some significant way, and we were unable to log into BB characters via EQIM for awhile)  However, there's a sourceforge project, teqim, which is a plugin for Trillian Pro which connects to the EQIm channel server, and they also have a somewhat lame command-line client, which is alot more stable and better maintained than the SOE one.

EQIM is useful to me because I can look to see who, of my friends, is online, before spending the several disk-churning minutes of loading EQ, especially only to find no one is on, so loading the game would be pointless.

To be fair to Turbine, another game came out around the same time, Impossible Creatures, also published by MS and they were forced to use the MS DirectPlay portion of DirectX...and they had all sorts of problems as well. People not being able to join games, people getting stuck at the "joining game..." screen forever without timing out or cancelling, etc etc etc. (The last time I looked at DirectPlay it was horrible, but that was a while ago)

So...having MS force you to use their latest and gratest feature can be a bad thing. My understanding of AC2 was that they had a separate chat server + protocal that was fundamentally all messed up...sounds like whover wrote that was the same person who wrote DirectPlay...("Wait, what is this 'router' device you speak of?")

The MSN multiuser chat protocol is the IRC protocol with a MSN specific authentication step in the login sequence. Maybe some other quirks here and there, but it's basically IRC. Unless you want to tell me that my packet sniffer is trying to kid me. Don't know about regular messaging, didn't check that yet.

I could be wrong here, but isn't this a good thing?  I don't mean using AOL in particular, but to have a service that goes outside of the actual game is something I've wanted in an MMOG for a long time.  

I hate being forced to get ingame to talk with my friends or be forced to cut communications with friend outside of the game while ingame.  Maybe, I'm assuming too much but I thought that is what would be the advantage of using AOL's instant messenger.  They would basically have a huge structures IRC that already exists.  I hear the programming of this type is easy (from a programmers point of view) but it isn't easy to make that program as popular as AOL Instant Messenger.

Sorry if somebody repeated this up above, but I didn't see it.

Yeah, it's a great thing because I want my immersive game constantly injecting animated gif's selling me Spy Camera's, random Shitheads sending me messages about Pr0n sites, and my name on AOL's "Spam This Guy" lists.

It's going to help me remember that I am a free thinker and not controlled by the market economics for banana slugs manafesto.  I hate Reality TV shows.  I hate chemically crated foods.  I hate Coke and all the other high pressure brand impressions I recieve every day.  I am Neo and I shall not be controlled by The Man....

But I'm playing Matric, owned by AOL and suffering their propaganda... yes... interesting twist.

Obviously the End Game for Matrix Online is to cancel the game, and go shoot Steve Case in the head with a rocket.

I'd pay to watch that before I'd pay to play this game.

I'm sensing an opportunity for carreer change.  Imagine, I could finally do what I want to do for a living.


As a former AOL Neverwinter Nights guy I'm a huge anti-SteveCase proponant.... maybe you could tell.

Worst thing about AOL that ever happened to me - I was on Kuaii enjoying my honeymoon with my new wife.  We rode ATV's under this neat tunnel and into this totally cool canyon.  Guide tells us - They filmed many movies here.  They worship the gods here.  This is paradice.  This is undisturbed pristine Hawaii.  Yeah, oh man, that's great.  

... and it's all been made possible because Steve Case bought it and wont let anyone mess with it....

I nearly puked.