Raph is no longer taunting us (Metaplace)

[Righ]

There are plenty of reasons as to why somebody might legitimately want to support multiple clients for the same application. The use of clients for different platforms has been mentioned (and attacked via the straw man of 'text client, lulz') but more significant are clients for different user requirements. Back when operating systems were sold to thousands of people and unsophisticated, they were built around a single user experience. As the number of people using operating systems grew and they became more sophisticated, so the interfaces became more configurable for different user experiences. Why would it be unreasonable for a game aimed at a wide market to cater to the handicapped through an alternate client, for example?

[Lum]

FWIW, the client I want someone to write is one that supports hex grid view. We don't have that yet, and I imagine a lot of folks want it. ;)

Oh, now you're just teasing.

[Margalis]

Why would it be unreasonable for a game aimed at a wide market to cater to the handicapped through an alternate client, for example?

Because it's not a game, it's a platform.

[Righ]

Did SirBruce hack Margalis' account?

[Margalis]

Lack of furry pics and tales of hot animal sex should answer that one.

[tmp]

That isn't how HTML works (more or less, I don't feel like getting into it), and there is no reason to believe that is how Metaplace works.

Disagreed. From the horse's mouth, so to speak:

"HTML uses tags such as <h1> and </h1> to structure text into headings, paragraphs, lists, hypertext links etc."

Go and argue with w3c they have no idea what their work is intended for.

And the reason to believe that is how Metaplace works is, it needs to work to begin with. So there has to be way to tell the client what the data it receives actually *is* ... cue markups. Pretty much what their programmer quoted by Raph said up there.

Because it's not a game, it's a platform.

Which absolutely doesn't conflict with the idea people are presenting, that the customized clients are created for specific games created on this platform, rather than the platform itself. This ties back to the middleware/vapourware thread -- difference between making software that's so flexible it could (theoretically) do everything and one that tackles just subset of functionality but because of specialization it does it good.

[Pennilenko]

Manishevitz

What is this...Manishevitz?

Typically served at Passover.  It is a very very sweet dessert wine.  Imagine if Budwiser or Coors decided to get into the wine business and started off with port.

Oh wait, you may actually like cheap american beer.  Imagine if Mountain Dew got into the wine business, this would be the Game Fuel of wines.

Cheap american beer is cheep.

[Mrbloodworth]

Do you rage this hard against people who complain that your pixel-perfect web designs break their non-standard browser widths?

Data is data. How you display it is up to the client. Unless you believe that *your vision* is the only correct way to display that data. Thus, the WoW mod displays I posted; they display the data (the information from the WoW game servers) in a form different from the vanilla game user interface. Which is the part of the game client most relevant to the user - if the rendering engine is swapped, but invisibly to the user, they won't care. If you went into a user's WoW client and flipped the OpenGL/Direct3D switch, very few would notice.

Another, more relevant example: a high school student in England was miffed that she couldn't talk to her friends in Second Life through her school's firewall, so she made her own light client. Same servers, same data - it just pitches most of the parts it considers irrelevant.

The only things your examples are displaying different are the UI data...Not the rendering, physics, particles ETC... And lets not forget, that there was a unified language developed Specifically for UI modification's to be placed on top. Every one of those screen shots is the same client, using the same systems that make up a "Client engine"... the only variance is the UI Display...but that again, uses the same client as each and every shot is using, to perform those modafacations.

And i think this would be the point. Standards man, Standards.

[Slyfeind]

For a moment, I imagined Blizzard gaining 1 million subscribers by marketting a text client for WOW on cell phones. (Far fetched I know, but then I like to imagine lots of things.) Then I wondered...are we so argumentative because we just don't want 1 million cell phone junkies invading our gaming space? What if it were UO? EVE? Planetside?

[Venkman]

The entire user experience on a cellphone is completely different. Consider the afforementioned Eve mobile client. You're not going to be entering massive 0.0 battles on your mobile. You're going to check the markets, manage skills, maybe manage manufacturing if you're spec'd that way. A WoW mobile client would either be for solo instances specifically designed for the mobile form factor, or just to do crafting and commerce. You wouldn't expect to play a solo adventure requiring access to 48+ icons, for example.

That's not to say it's a bad idea of course. There's already some MMO activity in the mobile space. And there's enough time in a current fan's day when they would want to access even a portion of their experience when they otherwise cannot (commuting, meetings, etc).

[Kaa]

... but suffice to say that they are basically ALL "display only" for data coming down.

Hmm... So that basically means the client is nothing but a remote rendering device. Are you sure you're not reimplementing XWindow for the n-th time? 

Finally, IMHO, you could do WoW raiding in a text client. I submit to you that many of the high end raiding mods effectively try to do this anyway. ;)

True. Actually, I think you can play the whole WoW, not just raiding, on a text client, with some assistance from botting code. If you can run unattended bots, you can certainly grind controlling a bot with text commands :D

MetaMarkup is literally what the name says - it is a meta-protocol.

That's interesting. So MetaMarkup is not a protocol per se, but rather a framework for defining app-specific protocols? Is there an implication that each non-trivial world will have to define and implement its own protocol for talking with the client and, by extension, effectively need a custom client?

Kaa

[Krakrok]

For a moment, I imagined Blizzard gaining 1 million subscribers by marketting a text client for WOW on cell phones. (Far fetched I know, but then I like to imagine lots of things.) Then I wondered...are we so argumentative because we just don't want 1 million cell phone junkies invading our gaming space? What if it were UO? EVE? Planetside?

I'd run around and plant mines in Planetside on my cell phone.

[Ixxit]

I'd run around and plant mines in Planetside on my cell phone.

So will the cell phone version of Vanguard require a 17gb SD card?  My cellphone exceeds the minimum requirements, will it still run choppy?

[Alkiera]

It sounds to me like MetaMarkup is a combination of the various techniques that makeup what is called 'AJAX' in web development.  It does client content setup (Put interface element X here, UI elements a - f here, like HTML), client appearance management (use this graphic for this location, render the world like so, etc, like CSS) and then defines a standard for transmitting application data between the server and this constructed client; I believe this is usually done with Javascript on the client side, with XML used as the actual data transmission protocol.

MetaMarkup is designed to do all those things.  Define the UI and it's appearance, which may vary depending on the connected client.  Then define the communications elements, which may be similar for all clients of that game (after all, MetaInternetHearts is going to have a different set of information to discuss with the client than UOWithPrecastingBiyotch), and may be different if the client in question has a significantly different purpose(like the EVE skill/Market checker); then it uses the defined protocol to push data to fill the defined UI with the current world state, and accepts actions on that UI to send messages to the server.

The web browser analogy is appropriate, to a certain extent.  The web browser is for playing generic games... but say you have a game that uses the same protocol, but with a different desired interface.  So you build an app that can talk to the web server, but identifies itself as CustomClient1.0 instead of the normal thing.  The web server passes that to the game server, which sends specially formated HTML/XML that the CustomClient is built to parse, to get the data it displays on it's custom windows.  It's another client to that web page; it just does a different thing with the data when it gets it.

Consider Firefox's GreaseMonkey plugin.  I for awhile played Kingdom of Loathing, a web RPG thing.  It had a somewhat reasonable interface.  Someone linked me to some GreaseMonkey scripts which improved it, though... it added a middle layer of javascript and HTML that added a tabbed interface, and changed the layout some.  Like a custom client, it interpreted the same HTML, but did something different with it.

MetaPlace is just designed to do that with one set of standards, the MetaMarkup Language, instead of needing DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and XML.  They'll have a couple different 'browsers' with different purposes.  It sounds like they've got a Flash and maybe a Windows Native executable version now, maybe more.  All of them will be capable of handling the same kind of 2D-based info neccesary to display a game.  They've said something about a 3d client, I'd guess that would end up detecting that additional functionality on the server side, and sending different info; similar to detecting 'ah, you have FireFox, so I can use cool CSS tricks that I can't use on IE6'.

--
Alkiera

[Margalis]

Disagreed. From the horse's mouth, so to speak:

"HTML uses tags such as <h1> and </h1> to structure text into headings, paragraphs, lists, hypertext links etc."

Go and argue with w3c they have no idea what their work is intended for.

Like I said, I don't want to really get into it. Trust me, I deal with this shit every day. The W3C likes to retroactively pretend that HTML is data markup and that CSS is UI markup but that's simply not how HTML actually works. HTML has tons of tags like CENTER and IMAGE and B that are UI markup. Nowadays the W3C puts out HTML 5.0 and XHTML 2.0 and nobody gives a shit because the real world is totally disconnected from the W3C.

If you use HTML they way they suggest you still end up with a nasty mix where half the styling is in CSS and half is in the HTML structure itself.

A good example is the "select" tag. In can be rendered as a listBox, a comboBox, or a set of radio buttons. Show me ONE BROWSER (PC) on earth that renders it as a radio button group. Or that renders a size 1 single-selection select as a listBox.

[Slyfeind]

That's not to say it's a bad idea of course. There's already some MMO activity in the mobile space. And there's enough time in a current fan's day when they would want to access even a portion of their experience when they otherwise cannot (commuting, meetings, etc).

Then there's the other side of the coin which I was hinting at, where we get a rise in undesirable elements. Consider gold farmers, not needing computers to operate from anymore, each farmer running a dozen cell phones.

[naum]

If you use HTML they way they suggest you still end up with a nasty mix where half the styling is in CSS and half is in the HTML structure itself.

Um, that's defined as "separating content from the presentation" and is entirely valid…

[Alkiera]

If you use HTML they way they suggest you still end up with a nasty mix where half the styling is in CSS and half is in the HTML structure itself.

Um, that's defined as "separating content from the presentation" and is entirely valid…

I think you misunderstood what Margalis said; that said, www.csszengarden.com.  Same 'content', dramatically different styles.  It's not THAT hard to do...  At least if you can program for one specific browser.  If you try to write for more than one, and the standards are different, it's a little harder (IE6 vs. Firefox/Opera)

The problem with HTML is that it was originally written to be a language for adding links and layout hints to plain text documents.  Then it got popular and people wanted to do more and more complex layouts; frames, then tables, lately ghastly sites written entirely (or almost entirely) in Flash.  Nowadays people want HTML websites to look like magazine layouts, with pixel-perfect alignment;  but there's a reason Dreamweaver and InDesign are two different apps... with a website, you really can't control the client, so you can't control how big/small your page is, what size the fonts are, which fonts they are, etc.  You can offer suggestions, but the client retains the right to completely ignore them.  Pixel-perfect pages are for printers and PDFs, not the WWWeb.

That said, it sounds like what Araea is building would be a standard built from the ground up for pixel-perfect 2d (and maybe 3d) work.  You ask for a 2d space of X by Y size, you get that.  You say put image X in location 0,0, stretching to 100,100, it does that.  If you put the next image at 100,0 going to 200,100, then it'll line up perfectly, assuming the client is written correctly.  If it's not, the beauty of open clients is you can fix them.  If someone attempts to connect with a text client, you either detect that, and send them text or deny access, or you don't, and send the IMAGE codes anyway... the client should either error out (received tag I can't handle!) or try to wistle along like everything is fine... but I wouldn't be surprised if you couldn't play a graphical game with the text client. (asciiDOOM isn't a text client, it's a graphical client, it just has a really big pixels.  8))

--
Alkiera

[Yegolev]

Like how the spell-checker and tag-adder on f13.net uses some Java thing that doesn't work on my corporate laptop.

It doesn't.

Whatever it is and whatever the actual reason, it does not do these things on my corporate laptop.  I said that because when I hover over the Insert Image button, for example, it says javascript: void(0) in the status bar and I momentarily forgot that Javascript isn't Java.  This probably still reinforces whatever point I was trying to make, although I can't be bothered to check.

[Margalis]

Um, that's defined as "separating content from the presentation" and is entirely valid…

That's the theory but in reality it doesn't work that way. And really that isn't the theory, that's only the retroactive theory.

HTML is not a content or data markup language. It's a hyper text markup language. Separating content from presentation is great but that isn't what HTML does, despite belated attempts to shoehorn it into that. For example there is no way to denote tabular data in HTML without the use of the table tag, which is a presentation tag that lays the screen out in a certain way. HTML began is as purely a UI markup language, and the attemps to better separate out the data from the presentation have not worked particularly well.

Edit: For many HTML designers the key concern is making it so pages do look exactly the same in different browsers.

[Salamok]

Yegolev, I seriously hope your avatar isn't from The Endless Forest.

[Kaa]

That said, it sounds like what Araea is building would be a standard built from the ground up for pixel-perfect 2d (and maybe 3d) work.  You ask for a 2d space of X by Y size, you get that.  You say put image X in location 0,0, stretching to 100,100, it does that.  If you put the next image at 100,0 going to 200,100, then it'll line up perfectly, assuming the client is written correctly.

I do continue to wonder why it's happening "from the ground up". People have been writing remote display protocols for ages -- XWindow, Display Postscript, etc. etc.

And there is an interesting question of how that's going to work with hardware-accelerated 3D rendering. Will the protocol just send down a huge binary blob saying "this is your geometry", another, even bigger binary blob saying "these are your textures", and now go render..?

Kaa

[Raph]

That said, it sounds like what Araea is building would be a standard built from the ground up for pixel-perfect 2d (and maybe 3d) work.  You ask for a 2d space of X by Y size, you get that.  You say put image X in location 0,0, stretching to 100,100, it does that.  If you put the next image at 100,0 going to 200,100, then it'll line up perfectly, assuming the client is written correctly.

No, not quite like that. :)

I do continue to wonder why it's happening "from the ground up". People have been writing remote display protocols for ages -- XWindow, Display Postscript, etc. etc.

Because we're not doing a remote display protocol. :P

[tmp]

And there is an interesting question of how that's going to work with hardware-accelerated 3D rendering. Will the protocol just send down a huge binary blob saying "this is your geometry", another, even bigger binary blob saying "these are your textures", and now go render..?

I'd expect it to send url's for both as part of description of game entity, and leave it up to client to decide if it wants to fetch these and utilize in any manner. Since they are trying to do it 'like web' and well, it'd make some sense. Geometry doesn't need to be sent in binary form either, think it was the last version of ID's Quake/Doom/something that used xml-like text to describe both their geometry and levels?

[Akkori]

Can I sit?

[Abelian75]

I must confess I am becoming increasingly intrigued by the ol' Meatplace.  I admit I'm pretty skeptical of user-generated content (well, at least of complex user-generated content, wherever that line is drawn), but the inner geek in me suspects he'll have a lot of fun with this.  Admittedly my initial reaction was something like "Oh, Raph and your wacky dreams!" but the concept is growing on me.

[Margalis]

The primary appeal seems to be to inner geeks. Which is fine, it's just weird for people who claim to be chasing casual CokeMusic dollars.

I'm expecting something slightly more casual than CoreWars.

[Kaa]

The primary appeal seems to be to inner geeks. Which is fine, it's just weird for people who claim to be chasing casual CokeMusic dollars.

I'm expecting something slightly more casual than CoreWars.

Heh. I bet the Areae's motto is "Let a thousand flowers bloom"

Oh, and part of the way they'll be making their money would be through licensing tools and services to companies which would make CokeMusic worlds.

Kaa

[Venkman]

Can I sit?

No no no. Can I jump? :)

[Drogo]

I do not think I have understood even three posts on this page. I hope Meatplace is successful for Raph's sake, but I guess this places me firmly in the play the games rather than create the games category because I have no idea what anyone is talking about.

[Slyfeind]

I do not think I have understood even three posts on this page. I hope Meatplace is successful for Raph's sake, but I guess this places me firmly in the play the games rather than create the games category because I have no idea what anyone is talking about.

I think it has something to do with "Windows is an operating system!" "No, Windows is a shell!" That kinda thing. And sitting is in there somewhere. Or jumping.

[Sky]

Can I sit?

Yes, but you'll hover two feet in front of the chair.

[Soukyan]

Can I sit?

Yes, but you'll hover two feet in front of the chair.

 

[Hellinar]

Edit: For many HTML designers the key concern is making it so pages do look exactly the same in different browsers.

For some users, a key concern is making the page not look like it was designed to look. When my Adblock kills all the ads on your page, I still want the page to look reasonable. Which with most current HTML pages, works quite well. I have a huge amount of control over color and contrast on a page too, though in that case I wish there was some way of seeing the page, or world scene, as the designer intended.

I think Raph is going in the right direction with allowing people to write different clients. It allows people to see the world in a way that suits them.

[Raph]

BTW, MMOGamer interview with answers to some of the stuff in this thread:

http://www.mmo-gamer.com/?p=273