[...] Raph Koster answers my question about whether SL can work. [...]

Then, you know… The wall itself got boring. So flat. Guano stains. Old, crusty cave-paintings of bison. Bleh. Let’s make a new wall! Wicked…

But if you want to make shadows of stuff that isn’t real, and you want to make it on a non-wall, you need a much, much better *idea* of what it is you want to do and why. IE, a brighter light.

We know why we wanted shadows of real things on the real wall; we had no choice. And shadows of un-real things on the real wall at least leaves us with our original contexts. As we move into shadows of un-real things on un-real walls, ask “Why?” earlier, more often and more rigorously than “What?” and “How?”

Core, supported and official will be centralized and owned by the institution. Non-core, unsupported, and unofficial will be decentralized and owned by the community.

Croquet sounds like an interesting approach to the latter.

Frank

It seemed like an exciting idea to me at the time, a way around limited computing resource problems that were much more of an issue then. But by the mid-90s I concluded that being able to guarantee high connection quality, quick processing of commands, and low latency were more important. And that distributing critical server work to user machines would mean your ability to control and guarantee quality would go out the window, and the quality of a user’s experience would be highly variable, and random.

I also have to agree with all of Antheus’s points too. Security and trust issues on a P2P game server architecture are huge problems. Problems I am happy to not be dealing with at all.

I do like the idea of offloading some things like voice chat into a peer to peer context. Or if users want to use their virtual world for file sharing. Social functions may fit with P2P better than “gameplay” type functions that demand more security, low latency, and guaranteed quality.

Got a URL? Sounds very cool

I’m with Antheus that was a good analysis, I mentioned CPU cycles because thats the argument most frequently given by P2P fanbois, unfortunatly even accounting for bandwidth, and L1/L2 cache the hardware limitations prevent maxamizing CPU.

In other words performance on any app is only as good as your worst piece of hardware (I/O) or rather a fast processor does not correlate to better performance….

You won’t “visit Croquet,” you’ll “go hang out with your friends” and then “play some of the maze game” and maybe “hack together some interesting toys and take them to a sandbox.” The spaces in which these activities are happening may be more or less game-like, depending on the activity, but they’ll be immersive by being interesting and run atop a common platform.

It’ll even be a lot more like the mechanics of the Metaverse depicted in Snow Crash than the large centralized systems. Your space runs on your hardware. You use your hardware to access other spaces using familiar metaphors, which it renders to the best of its capability. And in your own space, you can create what you want, and even play host to others. A lot of this already works today (modulo capabilities like NAT traversal). It’s just not as slickly packaged – at this time – as some of the centralized systems.

This holds for single computers as well – that’s why all the increases in L1 and L2 cache and other techniques to keep as much data as close as possible to the units that use them. If it were that trivial to simply slap 32 processors on a board to increase performance 32 times, such computers would be out over a decade ago. Why buy a P4 when 32 P2s will offer more power. Obviously, it doesn’t work that way, and there’s even no reliability issues to deal with, unlike networked systems.

P2P addresses the wrong problem the wrong way, especially in MMOs. If anything, improving the graphics port will change the bandwidth of graphics card by 2-10 times, up to gigabytes per second with microsecond access times, whereas networks still have kilobytes with 100 milisecond access times.

And under no circumstances may any logic of any kind ever be anywhere except on central server. If it can be altered, it will be. DRM hacks are proof of that. Even with strictest regulation, the movie DRM and various other technologies such as Vista authentication get cracked, hacked, bypassed and abused in a manner of days – and those companies bet hundreds of millions on such systems.

There was a game that launched last year that claimed they have no problems getting 100k concurrent users. Unfortunately, they forgot to give players a reason to log in, so not only was this number never tested, but the numbers that they did achieve would be trivially handled by any other game (hundreds or thousands of concurrent users per entire cluster)

Wouldnt the objective of P2P be to maintain the highest performance possible? (and given the variance in end user systems) And if this was the case why would a high polygon count be more desirable? (or graphical load/density)

Perhaps I’m missing something specific to game design since I’m just a DB/Network geek

I think WOW did a decent job of stylized Art, in some ways its so excellent in its execution because of its cohesion with XML.

I know if I went to login to a supposedly free game and I was locked out it would influence my opinion to continue playing. If instead I was just told that a small fee was required to play now I would probably fork it over. I guess I just like a simple “free” or “not free” rule instead of something that changes based on a always changing number.

P.S. Why does Habbo Hotel and Runescape both have much higher numbers then Second Life when they all have the same free to play plan? I’m guessing that ease of use and hardware requirements must be holding SL back. I wonder if SL was web-based with lower end graphics if it would have concurrent users equal to World of Warcraft?