Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

  • Xemu liveblogs DICE

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 5 Comments

    I’m sitting here at home, sick with whatever nasty cold is going around again — three or four of us out of the office today in fact! — so I am not at DICE. In fact, I’ve been asleep most of the afternoon. But Rob “Xemu” Fermier is at DICE, and apparently awake even, and he’s been liveblogging the talks. Two in particular caught my eye.

    One was the Blizzard talk, which really does reveal just how not like any other company in the industry Blizzard is, or really has ever been — hardly any publisher supervision, ever?

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  • ImagiNation Network revived!

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 6 Comments

    If you are hankering for some Shadow of Yserbius action, looks like innrevival might have your fix.

    The goal of the project is to create a server architecture that is compatible with the ImagiNation Network client software that you may still have lying around somewhere, forgotten, on a stack of floppies or a CD-ROM. This goal is being pursued by reverse-engineering the client software to determine the network messaging protocol that was used. We have had great success with this process so far, and by watching this site regularly for updates you will be able to keep up with our further progress and see what we have already done.

    Looks like you will need to run an original client within DOSBox, but they have shots of a bunch of working pieces already — Boogers, 3d Golf, the Clubhouse…

  • Stuff that caught my eye

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 21 Comments

    MMO gold trading akin to prostitution, says RuneScape’s Jele // GamesIndustry.biz

    The logic given is that it isn’t the activity that causes the problems, but the organized crime that builds up around it. Of course, the opens the question of whether legalization helps or not… And at the end of the article, there’s the oft-heard comment “and if the game were fun enough, this wouldn’t happen” — something I increasingly disagree with.

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  • Metaplace’s public debut

    Hours Categories Gamemaking
    Comments 14 Comments

    Edit: in case it wasn’t clear — this was a “sneak preview” sort of thing; we are not live to the public, it was just for a few hours. 🙂

    Well, we didn’t make a big deal about it, but Metaplace has now officially been played by actual players, and not alpha testers. Today we did a dev chat using Metaplace itself as the platform for the IRC-like text chat, and in the middle of it we also showed off a little bit of a more graphical space with avatars. It was a chance to both talk to folks and also to shove a high number of people at the server and client, including guest logins, to try to stress things a bit.

    It all went spectacularly well, too. We expected things to blow up, but nothing did. Extremely low CPU usage, even with over 80 simple avatars walking around and chatting in one relatively small space (small enough that there was no real network culling going on). That’s a decent achievement for any virtual world system. 🙂 Bandwidth was a bit high, but we know things to work on there that are easy big gains. Seems like fairly few weird browser issues — which is easily the biggest bugaboo with doing something so Web-based. I have seen that a few folks failed to get in at all, and we’ll try to track down why…

    We’ll be posting the official chat log with our next blog post, probably. But in the meantime, a few of the VW-centric news sites were in:

    Our friends over at the Electric Sheep were also on hand. And of course, there’s blogs by bunches of folks who attended, like TBowl, Feeding Change, Oh No, Aliens!, Cooking XP, and Dr. Offset’s. Edit: Dr. Offset’s has a little bit more, and there’s Emergent Future’s take here.

    A couple of those have pics of the (brief) graphical demo. Everyone’s only one avatar… we’ll have to save character customization for another day. 😉