So my vision for years, ever since maybe a few months of Everquest, is to have a MMOG/MMORPG, something remarkably similar to Everquest, but where players can physically modify the world.
I BugReported this to Everquest for ages, but obviously it's so incompatible with the eq engine currently in existance, that the requests just fell in the void.
My vision is that players could use spells to create trees and new zones and so on. The spells would use mana, which would be the brake to prevent people going crazy and just filling up the world with rubbish. Creating a new zone would require maybe 100 people all meditating together for a good hour so in order to create a portal to the new world. Something like a major guild event.
A few years ago I tried to convince some friends to get together to create such a game, but I'm not really a leader person, just a humble developer, and so no-one really seemed blown-away by the idea. There was a certain amount of doubt about whether it would actually be possible to stream stuff over the Internet at all, and back-of-an-envelope calculations didnt look encouraging.
Cut to SL. We have streaming technology! In theory the platform could be used to create exactly the kind of world I'd love to experience, and thus began my own personal addiction to SL.
The problemette is that this vision of things is not necessarily compatible with the vision of SL envisioned by, well, SL. In theory this doesnt matter in the least since, in theory, you can create anything you want within SL, by scripting it or whatever.
In practice, the focus within SL is with providing maximum functionality to do stuff and socialize, and efforts to allow the kind of control over subgames that would be required to make a convincing and absorbing subgame are fairly low on the priority list. It wouldnt be too great to spend hours with a guild of 100 fighting through the Swamp of Saranendon, and when you get there there's like 5 people named Chaos firing Pushguns at you, trapping the monsters with toruses, and editing your vehicles so the Dragon eats you.
So, after a year of exploring SL I'm sortof starting to think: is SL the platform which is going to provide my vision?
And so, what I'm wondering is, to achieve this vision, should I:
- wait for SL to mature enough for this to become possible?
- wait for some other company to create this?
- try to find a group of talented people who would be interested in creating this?
On the whole, I still believe that SL is the way to go, because it would be quite a lot of work to recreate a similar platform, but I dunno.
Azelda
P.S. Random after-thought: could it be possible to rent the streaming technology, rendering technology and server-management technology from Linden? That would provide a huge boost in any such project, depending on pricing structure.
P.P.S. Ok, so I'm sortof having a negative moment here, it happens