vw history

  • Live concert dual-streamed to Metaplace & Second Life

    Hours Categories Gamemaking, Music
    Comments 12 Comments

    Is this a first? I dunno, but it’s darn cool! 🙂

    Earlier today, I had asked Grace McDunnough if she could help out one of our users, Fredriksson,  try out live concert streams in Metaplace. Grace jumped in with both feet, and after we got it working (using the off-the-shelf guitar I made a while back!)  she mentioned that she had a concert this very evening…!

    So at the very last minute, with no prep, Grace suggested dual-streaming the show, and Fredriksson volunteered his folk music cafe… and a few hours later, there we were, listening to live music played in two virtual worlds at once!

    A few folks even watched the show in both worlds at the same time… here’s screenshots taken by one of them:

    Watching GraceMcDunnough’s live performance in Metaplace and then on Second Life!

  • Twitter, status, and /tell

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 17 Comments

    Hasn’t It Always Been About Status? is a little article tracing the status update mania (such as Twitter) to AIM status messages.

    I have now spent two days with Twitter, and I have decided that it is basically guild chat in Internet-the-MMO. It’s a form of /grouptell, and we’re all out slaying bookmarks instead of orcs.

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  • ‘Rogue Leaders’ excerpt on Habitat

    Hours Categories Game talk, Reading
    Comments 9 Comments
    Rogue Leaders
    Habitat title screen

    Gamasutra is running an excerpt from Rogue Leaders, a new book on the history of LucasArts. The excerpt in question is about Habitat, which is of course one of the seminal virtual worlds. It’s short and worth a read, especially just to marvel at the reason givn for the project’s shelving: fear of success.

    Essentially, if 500 users were so committed to playing Habitat that they remained online long enough to eat up 1 percent of the network’s entire system bandwidth, a full-run production that could attract Rabbit Jack’s Casino numbers could boost that bandwidth number to 30 percent. “The way the system was built, the server software wasn’t capable of hosting that population while still being successful,” recalls Arnold.

    Ultimately, these business challenges caused Habitat to be cancelled after the launch party, but before it had gone into full production and reached retail shelves. It would simply be too popular, and the necessary server fix would be too expensive to make the project viable. And so this massively original, inventive, and cutting-edge project was shelved for U.S. release.

  • Saving mud history

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 11 Comments

    After the whole Threshold deal with Wikipedia and losing mud history, a new Wiki was created on Wikia in order to preserve mud history.

    I’ve put up a detailed LegendMUD entry with a bunch of citations. Yeah, it’s a conflict of interest, and I am sure I am misremembering stuff or letting my bias show. But it’s also the only way some of this history will be preserved.(And wow, I had forgotten a lot of this stuff!)

    Go there, and jump in, and help. And hey, if people do the hard work of finding sources and the like here, then some articles can maybe migrate back to Wikipedia.

  • What is a Diku?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 47 Comments

    I wish someone who has a good memory of these things and was there, would document that the key game design features of a DIKU are, if everyone is going to refer to MMOs as DIKU derivatives.

    — a comment from Daniel Speed on Broken Toys » Wikicrap.

    Glossing much here… Edit: this article is getting updated on the fly as people add comments and reminiscences.

    DikuMUD was derived from AberMUD, which was similar mechanics, but had more of a scavenger hunt mentality in some ways.

    At its core, it is a class-based RPG with the principal classes being fighter, healer, wizard, thief. (Later codebases added more). It was heavily based on the combat portion of Dungeons and Dragons. Advancement handled by earning experience points through combat, reaching a set amount of points, returning to town and “levelling up,” which unlocked new abilities. Classes were immutable (though eventually systems such as remorting, etc were added). Rewards for killing things also included equipment, which affected your stats and damage capability. If you reached the maximum level, common cultural practice was that you were invited to become a game admin (this practice dates back to much earlier, and existed in some form in MUD1).

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