Another SL type game?

this company seems to be working towards creating an entire virtual world just a little bit smaller than Mars. You are able to make things and such i guess. The scenery looks pretty nice. This could be a cool game. http://www.meta4inc.com/

So far it seems to be a concept. And sparsely fleshed-out. I'd like to know more about their platform, design, capitalization, services, etc. Summer 2005 seems like a stretch, considering how little they've got up on the site.

But if they're really doing what they say they're doing, then serious competition may be on the horizon. Much more than a game.

I think they need to fix the typo on the very first page of their site. "Out technology solutions"? Err, methinks perhaps they meant "Our"?

"Meta4 provides customers with a host of enabling technologies in a new paradigm of online distribution and publishing that empower gamers, entertainers, trainers & educators, advertisers, and most importantly, broadband users. We empower creative professionals with bleeding-edge procedural technologies to reduce development times, speed entry to new markets and provide cost-effective workflows."


Why do technology companies feel they have to talk complete shit? Everything is a 'solution'!!! What's wrong with plain English?

I dunno why I didn't feel so comfy after going through that site. It had a certain vibe that didn't appeal to me, because as Ewan pointed out... er... I was scratching my head and didn't feel they needed to use so many big words. I felt it unnecessary and rather yawntastic. Speaking of, why can't we have more mixed mediums? (I would like to see a computer site in ebonics without having to Snoop Doggify it. ) I DON'T need to keep seeing the silicon incarnation of Immanuel Kant, thankyouverymuch.

One thing that attracted me about SecondLife.com is 'cuz it didn't get hung up on technical jargon and appealed to my imagination directly. Simple comforts and pleasures. Which is why I'm here.

No problem, I'll translate

Meta4 provides 5 people with way too much money to burn with a couple ENABLING (omg shiny word enable! woo!) computer program in a new setting. We call this a "paradigm" because it will set a new low standard of thinking of how poorly something can be executed. We're hoping to get everyone, and I mean everyone, to give us their money, erm, I mean EMPOWER!!!!! Did I mention EMPOWER!!!??? That word was so cool that I have to use it twice in a row! Oh, yeah... so we're hoping creative people who know what they're doing will come help us out, because we're basically working 100 hours a week praying to god that our software doesn't have crippling bugs. It's cost effective because our staff is a rag-tag team of programmers who couldn't hack it in the real world and/or people past their prime who lost their jobs in the dot-com bust and haven't found a new job yet because they don't even know what C++ is, so we pay them dirt! Buy our stuff, and ... um EMPOWER!!!

Okay, I'm kidding, but the spelling error and overuse of technobabble demanded ridicule.

Next thing you know they'll be trying to sell us warp drives while shouting
"SYNERGY!!!"

Wow, they used a lot of words and stock photography to not say anything.

Agreed.
I can't stand inflated language.
My mind auto translates that kind of thing to

"Blah blah blah blah please be impressed at my wisdumb* blah blah blah"





*not a typo

20K what? Bytes?... hmm... let's see. I once invented a compression algorithm that was able to compress already-compressed-data (ZIP, LHA, etc) by 40%. Then I found a bug -- I wasn't storing a lookup table required for unpacking. After fixing the bug, the compressed size was 101%.

Either:

(a) these guys have figured out the GUT and are now using it purely for business reasons instead of to create wormholes and explore the far reaches of our fantastic real-life universe (to which I'd say "what selfish bastards!" )

(b) these guys are about as confused as the idealists who post about lossless fractal-and-other-type compression (with mathematically ridiculous compression ratios) on usenet.

Still, if they produce the results, I will be pleased to eat my hat, some crow, or anything else they think would be tasty.

I think the 20kb claim is probably true, but extremely deceptive. It's no doubt nothing but a bunch of seed values for fractal terrain generation that would be meaningless without whatever they're using to take that seed and turn it into terrain, which I'm sure is a helluva lot bigger than 20kb. It's probably something akin to MojoWorld

Agreed, Chip. The world data itself is rather superficial. What's on/in the world is why the users are really there, and that's likely to take up just a touch more data space. Plus, if in fact it works as you described, terraforming is probably out the door, which is kinda sucky. Well, I'm chucking the site in my "check once every few months" bookmark folder.

You have a Sic* [Sic] mind! , it amuses me.

--Jack Lambert

sic

adv : intentionally so written (used after a printed word or phrase) v : urge a dog to attack someone

*both versions applicable



(note: grammar ninjas will notice I actually used it as an adjective so neither version is applicable )

Hey I wanted to flame off about the same thing! I have a solution for them and IT companies in general:

USE ENGLISH PROPERLY

Smells like it'll become known as "ADVERTISEMENT WORLD"....or should I say ad universe?

Yeah, hard to get around that "you can't compress compressed items" rule. When I first started learning about encryption and compression schemes in college, it amazed me because encryption pretty much works the same principle of using a specific mathematical algorithm and a seed value to come up with a numeric representation - there's only so random something can be, and sometime encrypting encrypted things actually makes it easier to crack.