I was off traveling lately, at my dad’s retirement party, and of course there were plenty of interesting things happening that could have merited a blog post. Here’s some of them:

• Ypulse has an interview with the CEO of Gaia Online.  It gives out plenty of stats, and also gives some real insight into what the core of the service is: not in-world hanging out (there is a 2d virtual world hidden in there) but instead hanging out on forums. I suspect that this is probably true of many MMOs: that forum activity may well outweigh in-world activity for a substantial number of players.

Read More “A quick roundup of interesting articles”

Sulka Haro sends word that Mud-Dev 2 is apparently having domain troubles. So if you were looking, that’s where it isn’t.

Edit: going there seems to redirect me to http://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/mud-dev2?, but it looks like it works fine.

Another edit: Nick Koranda, the moderator, writes and tells me that the MX records are pointed to my.binhost.com, so everyone should be getting emails fine.

3pointD.com has more on that mainframe project, and I still don’t get it, because of some rather odd statements in the interview.

It will “rely on the Cell’s processor for rendering.” Uh, a metaverse with a processor requirement for clients? Or do they mean server-side rendering, which seems unlikely and a bad idea anyway?

“We see this technology moving into banking and retail and anything where the consumer is involved in a transaction of commerce that they would today do over the Web, online shopping, online banking.” Banking? Does anyone at all want to do their banking in a virtual world? What value-add does a virtual world bring to doing banking? Being able to interact with a menu on an ATM was a vast improvement in efficiency and accuracy for the typical person going to a bank.

Their big concern? “The problem is that rendering is kind of weak. We haven’t figured out how to accelerate that yet, and how to marry that to transactions.” Rendering is the weak point for online worlds? Despite the fact that it’s been shown over and over again that customers just don’t give a damn about the visual representation? On the other hand, there’s a comment about clients for mobile phones, music players, TVs, and so on. Or maybe they mean something like timeliness of rendering given latency, given their comment about transactions…

From stuff within the article, it seems that this is both a hardware solution and a product suite designed to run on that hardware — mention is made of Hoplon’s messaging and physics solutions, of a billing system, and so on. I’m not clear on to what degree you are expected to write your own virtual world atop all this, or whether IBM is planning on creating the server software too.

The International Herald Tribune discusses IBM’s new game server platform:

International Business Machine’s new video game server blends a mainframe computer with the company’s Cell microprocessors. The result is a server system capable of permitting hundreds of thousands of computer users to interact in a three-dimensional, simulated on-screen world described as a “metaverse.”

The machines will be priced beginning at hundreds of thousands dollars.

Uh, does anyone really think the future of online worlds is in Big Iron?

Read More “IBM makes a strange choice”