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Topic: Raph's Happy Metaplace (Read 94452 times)
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Raph
Developers
Posts: 1472
Title delayed while we "find the fun."
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Shared identity, currency, avatars maybe, friends lists,etc. Among many other things.
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Margalis
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12335
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It's very hard to make a video game tool successful without a product that proves that the tool is great. Especially if that tool is not a technical tool strictly for hardcore developers but more of a modding tool for everyone.
There are a lot of companies who made (or claim to have made) cool moddable engines and tools (I realize Metaplace goes beyond modding) but didn't have the game to make that tool attractive. It's a classic mistake, thinking that the community will make the content. For the 5% of games that are great and get lucky the community will make more great content, the other 95% will wither on the vine.
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vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
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Fordel
Terracotta Army
Posts: 8306
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Shared identity, currency, avatars maybe, friends lists,etc. Among many other things.
I already use Steam.
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and the gate is like I TOO AM CAPABLE OF SPEECH
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Raph
Developers
Posts: 1472
Title delayed while we "find the fun."
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It's very hard to make a video game tool successful without a product that proves that the tool is great.
Yup. But the investment climate at the time was very much Web 2.0, users do everything. I was actually cautioned against every referring to the company as a game studio, as it would affect our funding viability. We had HUGE debates about making content internally, they got very very heated.
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Yegolev
Moderator
Posts: 24440
2/10 WOULD NOT INGEST
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Having just this week been exposed to the term "data lake", I can say that Raph was ahead of his time and seems to have invented a proto-Cloud. It might be like table tennis on an oscillator by comparison to OpenStack, but I can see the resemblance. Why would I want to link my Tetris with my MMORPG?
You're just being silly. That's no reason to avoid doing a thing, unless of course no one will pay you for it. 1994: Why would I want to take pictures with my cell phone? 2004: Why would I want to take pictures of my dick with my phone? 2014: Why would my phone upload my dick pictures to the internet?
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Why am I homeless? Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question. They called it The Prayer, its answer was law Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
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Paelos
Contributor
Posts: 27075
Error 404: Title not found.
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2024: Why would I place my dick in my phone?
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CPA, CFO, Sports Fan, Game when I have the time
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Raph
Developers
Posts: 1472
Title delayed while we "find the fun."
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In fact, clouds were not really around much in 2006, certainly mo middleware or infrastructure for them when we started, so we had to invent our own.
Each "world" in MP was a standalone lightweight process that read in a world description consisting of tags in our custom markup language. The tags essentially defined the schema for everything. The tags then all referenced URLs. The server only had a tiny number of classes, and for games, it was really just three: maps, objects, and player network input. When you asked the directory for Tetris vs WoW, a server process spun up on whatever machine made the most sense, was directed to the appropriate tag file, and the server basically configured itself into the appropriate game. The directory then told the requesting client where to connect to. Took about 200ms. If nobody stayed in it, it was shut down.
Network traffic used exactly the same tags. Client fetched assets from the same place the server did. And assets could be anywhere.
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MahrinSkel
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10857
When she crossed over, she was just a ship. But when she came back... she was bullshit!
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Yeah, we liked your tech at Orbis, but we were so desperately strapped for resources we never really got a chance to do more than just look at it. We had some vague plans for combining it with the "Context Based Agents" AI systems me and John Arras were playing around with, it seemed attractive because it would let us ignore a lot of the plumbing issues while still let us be as "close to the metal" as we thought we needed to be for the actual agents (in our schema, players were just another kind of agent, they interacted with the world through a proxy that ran on the server).
Maybe we should have concentrated more on building tech, rather than chasing lightning strikes. John would have been happier, and we might have gotten a valuable asset out of it.
--Dave
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--Signature Unclear
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DevilsAdvocate25
Terracotta Army
Posts: 321
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In fact, clouds were not really around much in 2006, certainly mo middleware or infrastructure for them when we started, so we had to invent our own.
Each "world" in MP was a standalone lightweight process that read in a world description consisting of tags in our custom markup language. The tags essentially defined the schema for everything. The tags then all referenced URLs. The server only had a tiny number of classes, and for games, it was really just three: maps, objects, and player network input. When you asked the directory for Tetris vs WoW, a server process spun up on whatever machine made the most sense, was directed to the appropriate tag file, and the server basically configured itself into the appropriate game. The directory then told the requesting client where to connect to. Took about 200ms. If nobody stayed in it, it was shut down.
Network traffic used exactly the same tags. Client fetched assets from the same place the server did. And assets could be anywhere.
Wouldn't something like this make it easier for SOE to manage their stable of games? It sounds like every time they buy or produce a new MMO, it would be fairly easy for them to add it into their Metaplace stable so that existing players would always have the same friends lists and guild contacts as they moved from the current shiny to the new shiny.
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Raph
Developers
Posts: 1472
Title delayed while we "find the fun."
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It would have been, yes. I think the SOE of today would be interested. The SOE of back then was more conservative, and wanted me to work on FreeRealms instead. :)
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naum
Terracotta Army
Posts: 4262
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Really wanted to like Metaplace.
But I never could get past performance issues, Flash and Macs just didn't go together.
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"Should the batman kill Joker because it would save more lives?" is a fundamentally different question from "should the batman have a bunch of machineguns that go BATBATBATBATBAT because its totally cool?". ~Goumindong
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Lantyssa
Terracotta Army
Posts: 20848
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It would have been, yes. I think the SOE of today would be interested. The SOE of back then was more conservative, and wanted me to work on FreeRealms instead. :)
Oh man, Free Realms could have been even better!?! Though they should have done both. Let you build the Metaplace technology with the Free Realms' art assets. I really liked the look of the game, and being able to hop from one genre to another with the same character would have been awesome. (And now EQ Next art isn't all that different from Free Realms'. With the Next-Landmark bridge they're trying to redo something you did years ago.)
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Hahahaha! I'm really good at this!
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Raph
Developers
Posts: 1472
Title delayed while we "find the fun."
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I worked a little on at least two reboots of FreeRealms. Pretty sure there were at least a few more after that. It was a long and fraught project.
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Signe
Terracotta Army
Posts: 18942
Muse.
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You should become a professional musician. You might not make any money, but I bet you'd smile all day long.
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My Sig Image: hath rid itself of this mortal coil.
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Lantyssa
Terracotta Army
Posts: 20848
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It was a long and fraught project.
Unfortunately I'd believe that from the little bit of inside info I know. Still a shame.
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Hahahaha! I'm really good at this!
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Raph
Developers
Posts: 1472
Title delayed while we "find the fun."
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You should become a professional musician. You might not make any money, but I bet you'd smile all day long.
Oh, that is probably so very very true.
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Yoru
Moderator
Posts: 4615
the y master, king of bourbon
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It was a long and fraught project.
I do believe this describes every virtual world/MMO project, ever.
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shiznitz
Terracotta Army
Posts: 4268
the plural of mangina
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Why would I want to link my Tetris with my MMORPG?
So that you could play someone's cool version of Tetris from within the MMORPG. The way I read Raph's description the platform would let conceivably move from one online world to another without ever logging out. If you haven't read Ready Player One, then you really should.
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I have never played WoW.
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Raph
Developers
Posts: 1472
Title delayed while we "find the fun."
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The way I read Raph's description the platform would let conceivably move from one online world to another without ever logging out.
Not would, did! There were over 70,000 worlds at the time we shut it down, and you could move between all of them, chat across all of them, optionally use common avatars or common currency, common reputation & rating system...
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345
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It's such a loose definition of "world" with which to attract investors or involuntary luddites. I mean, it was all one big gameless world with which people could make their pocket hovel. Saying it's a bunch of interconnected worlds is a bit of tomfoolery given it was all yanking from one database. It's roughly the equivalent of saying a multi-content minecraft server was multiple worlds if you patched in a different set of currencies for each island. Which we both know is a pretty crap definition of such a thing.
Obviously it's a great definition for people who think computers are literally Magic.
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Raph
Developers
Posts: 1472
Title delayed while we "find the fun."
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On the backend each of those worlds was a full server, capable of hundreds-to-maybe-a-thousand people; you could also have pretty large maps. They each ran their own persistence store, too. Seriously, from the tech POV, each world really was actually a small MMO, even if all the person put in it was a hovel. :)
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Tmon
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1232
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I didn't even manage a hovel. I had a really poorly built hedge maze with a wall in the middle that had a picture linked into it.
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Scold
Terracotta Army
Posts: 331
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I dove into MetaPlace back in the day hoping to Build My Own Little MMO, but then nothing one would require to build an MMO was there. NPC/quest scripting? Not there. Combat systems? Not there.
I get why Raph and co. didn't build games with it, but they should have built the core building blocks for games at least.
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Raph
Developers
Posts: 1472
Title delayed while we "find the fun."
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You mean, you wanted most of the work done for you. :)
Which isn't wrong, I think. If we had basically built Diku for you, MP probably would have gotten much farther.
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Rendakor
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10131
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That's kinda what I was expecting from MP to be honest; building areas in MUDs was fun. Trying to make stuff from scratch, not so much.
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"i can't be a star citizen. they won't even give me a star green card"
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Lantyssa
Terracotta Army
Posts: 20848
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Ultimately there are not a lot of people with both a creative drive and the desire to build all the structure that supports it. It was a neat idea, but probably not something too useful for individuals.
Even as a MUD coder I rarely made things with a direct impact on my own areas.
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Hahahaha! I'm really good at this!
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Yoru
Moderator
Posts: 4615
the y master, king of bourbon
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If we had basically built Diku for you, MP probably would have gotten much farther.
You were a regular on MUDDEV, Raph - surely you realized that "all the work is done for you" was one of the big reasons that Diku dominated/dominates the MUD backends. Metaplace was more akin to LP - highly flexible, but only suitable for those willing to do a lot of work to build the libs. Seems more like a B2B than B2C proposition to me.
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Raph
Developers
Posts: 1472
Title delayed while we "find the fun."
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Worse, I was actually one of those who made that case the most aggressively back on MudDev. :)
It was the subject of many intense disagreements within MP though.
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Margalis
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12335
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The vast majority of games in which the users end up doing significant work for the devs are the games in which the dev first does enough significant work to attract those content creators.
Basically you have to make a good game first.
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vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345
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The vast majority of games in which the users end up doing significant work for the devs are the games in which the dev first does enough significant work to attract those content creators.
Basically you have to make a good game first.
Nonsense, since ~2012 and moving forward you only have to be able to sell a poorly structured idea.
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