Game talk

In a handy overview with chart, TechCrunch looks at Virtual World Hangouts: So Many To Choose From.

This is indeed growing into a crowded space. I predicted at a conference a while back that every single major toy brand would have an MMO within two years. Well, we’re getting close, what with stuff like Mattel announcing U.B.Funkeys, for example. Edit: and the BBC jumping in as well. And BarbieGirls.com has hit 4m users, and the toys just now hit the streets.

Meanwhile, we have EA’s “chief visual officer” saying that chasing graphics is no longer the point because it’s becoming about user content — something which even a year or two ago was heretical within the industry.

I’m going to have to come up with some new stuff to predict soon, because predicting the present ain’t gonna cut it.

Another step for serious game legitimaciness.

If you read the right blogs, you have seen all of this already. Consider yourself warned!

• Some analysis of financial services in SL
•  The Library of Congress is going to work to preserve games. How exactly they can preserve VW’s, which get patched and change, is a whole other question. 🙂
• Linden says it has a one to two year timetable to release their servers.
• The UK is looking at taxing virtual goods profits, and of course, this is the month that the US is supposed to issue a report on it.

Videos of the panels are posted. If you missed the conference, or are interested in the way new business models are hitting the industry, these are something you should check out.

My panel was “Making Virtual Economies Work.” But they’re all worth watching.

OK, that sounds incredibly geeky. And it is. Here’s what Eric Risser just showed:

250,000 unique asteroids that are each unique meshes, each turned into a single box mesh that is cheap to render, with the actual shape defined entirely in a shader.

A sky full of tens of thousands of animating birds, each animating at a different stage in their anim, flying over the Everglades, in full 3d, so you can peek up close at them or fly through the flock — done as one single mesh, a single giant cube.

A dog, standing still, with a high-detail texture and legs and everything, defined in a couple of textures and as a single cube.

Basically, what Risser just demoed is an incredibly low-poly way of doing incredibly high-poly scenes.

Very cool… but currently gated behind the challenge of having high-end shader support and knowing how to make shaders that can do something like this… And of course, any of these objects would collide as boxes, not as a high-poly dog. 🙂 Still, very cool. Usually displacement mapping is only used for making grates or bumpy walls…

Some of the stuff he showed is available here.