Is this the direction virtual worlds are going? I think IBM is shooting for at least one type of virtual worlds that I haven’t heard anyone really talking about yet: virtual worlds for the enterprise. Great for augmented reality environments where the physical workplace is mapped, datacenters are annotated with data layers, and remote workers can teleconference just by walking into a room with a virtual camera and a physical viewscreen.

Heh, when I was at Sony Online, I was thinking about writing a proposal for a similar virtual world. I discussed the idea with a few people in the training department, and I think Raph, too. I was told that virtual world wouldn’t fit the corporate culture.

But we’re not there yet. Until then, there is a risk of standards. Once you’ve experienced it, you won’t really want anything less. WoW is so far removed, graphically, from Orcs vs Humans.

Fashion might be part of the rising interest, as he says that for some people it’s a “lifestyle statement”. For others, it’s an expression of their environmental belief and for some it’s a way of getting themselves a self-sufficient power supply.

… people don’t build their own power plants to power their PC …

That’s not quite true… There are many people around the world that build their own power generators, such as solar batteries and windmills, for cheap renewable energy that cannot otherwise be acquired due to stringent export laws and scrimpy incomes.

I think people love white-box distributed systems because it’s cheap and it matches the requirements of instancing.

Which leads me to my last point…

Yes, “Realism isn’t driven by deep complex physics sims, it’s driven by plausible behavior.”

But, “plausible behavior” is certainly not driven by instancing.
(How lovely to see that wizard come back to life 3 seconds after being defeated, just because another player wants to complete that same quest.)

So, I dream of the EXTREME MMOG, which is made of:
- A plausible 3D world
- A plausible time dimension and progression
- Plausible circumstances
- Plausible behaviors

n players enter the world and live in it until their characters die or the world era ends.
All players whose characters are alive must be present or the game cannot be played.
So, basically, you throw n players into a biotope and see how they interact, evolve and reach the end of the world era.

Yeah, try to sell that to a publisher…

- Realism and Big Iron have little to do with one another. The thing precluding realism isn’t CPU, it’s will. Realism isn’t driven by deep complex physics sims, it’s driven by plausible behavior.

- The pressures driving current Big Iron worlds are not, barring Second Life and maybe Eve, pushing towards monolithic hardware. Current architectures are driven by commodity hardware for a variety of reasons: power consumption, heat the racks, ease of expansion, ease of contraction when the user surge fades, ease of migration to new commodity hardware as processor upgrades happen, etc. There are a myriad of things that go into the equation. Once upon a time UO ran on Sparcs, and it migrated off for very good financial reasons.

This is a close cousin of the fact that there are many many pressures driving sharding which have little to do with the max capacity of clusters.

I’m not sure why the company providing the software wouldn’t want to also provide the hosting. It’s a lot harder to get somebody to pay you for something if they have to download and install before they can even try it out. It seems much more likely that the company building the software would sell it as a service and host ALL the worlds, probably with a teaser level of service that didn’t cost anything at all. All world configuration and content creation can happen via custom clients or the web regardless of who does the hosting.

Of course all this assumes that there’s a viable market for selling reusable software for small virtual worlds. I don’t think that’s clear at all.

There’s no point in IBM designing new hardware for home users to run their Web2.0 MySpace3D hosted-on-my-own-machine world on [not where IBM competes directly anyway] (which, conceivably, you could probably already do, complete with green background wallpapers, red text and looping mp3 files harking back to the days of VRML), while there is, and will likely continue to be a demand for bigger iron for virtual worlds and other applications alike, so I don’t see the point in griping about it (other than to complain that a press release is all press releasey).

Consider this though: what sort of computers do you think run the back-end MSN, Yahoo messenger, MySpace web-servers and other services along these lines? I’m going to bet that some of the cores of those systems are powered by some reasonably hefty machines.

Eve’s Jita system regularly has 700 people online, and it’s a bit laggy, but not unbearable (as far as I remember from my last visit). That system is supposed to be dedicated to it’s own machine, but I’ve never heard any numbers from any other game with which to compare. There’s also been some pretty large fleetbattles in systems where the developers pre-reserved the system to a single machine in advance. I think that predictive load balancing is a fairly big factor in Eve (and there’s frequently threads asking CCP to work on a dynamic load balancing system) – it’s fairly easy to end up with a system in Eve that’s usually got nobody in it that suddenly has a 350 man fleet battle and just doesn’t have the CPU headroom to handle it – as the number of subscribers has risen, the average headroom has probably decreased, making it much easier for load imbalances to occur. There’s a difference between not being able to handle X people on a single machine, and not being able to handle X *more* people on a single machine.