Horizons, those copycats!

Just because Kotex advertises on Cartoon Network does that mean Kotex products are a cartoon? Saying something is something because of where it advertises is rediculous. SL advertises on gaming websites because thats where alot of the key market is, SL also advertised on So-There forums, and other various virtual world oriented websites.

I can't disagree about DarkLife not being around, doing a project like that is very time consuming and can be stressfull. And I basicly said what you re-stated, it Can be done, but the projects don't survive, mostly because people become dis-interisted or other issues come up. Its often *very* hard to get group projects going in SL, its rare when they become successfull.

But DarkLife wasn't a proof of concept, it was a striving project thats been halted, it was a great success. It did prove that RPGs can be done in SL, but thats not all it did.

I don't even get what the main arguement is anymore?

Any 10 year old anything is going to have more something than a 1 year old thing (SL went public in 2003 keep in mind). Show me a 10 year old mud where I can make a 3D FPS in though. I'd say Ut2k4 has more FPS content than that 10 year old mud.

And you're contridicting your own statements, do you want SL to be a game or not? You seem to complain that there isn't enough MMORPG content in SL, then you seem confused if SL is really a game or not... seems to me you answered your own question before you asked it.

Archaegeo, SL *can* do a full RPG, it just takes *alot* of work. You could easily do Avatar<->Avatar interactions, you would however need each of those avatars to be wearing a script that watches for said interactions. While you can't do very major server emulation in SL, you can pull off some server abilities. But nowdays (didn't have this with DarkLife), it'd be better to host the information on each avatar or on a local prim, then export it regularly (say every night) through Email to an actual server handling the backend.

With enough scripts though, you could pull off some server emulation with LSL only. It just might lag the hosting sim

Horizons was pretty neat when it first came out, i re-played it for a few days just to be a lil' farie :)

<3 torley :))

Mmmm, well, I for sure want Second Life have a game. I also see SL as a platform, like the web or Windows. But SL just won't reach its full potential without guided gameplay being available.

I agree that DarkLife was a nice proof of concept. And considering when it was developed and by how few people it is certainly great achievement. But it has never reached critical mass in terms of features and content.

There is also no point in copying Horizons or any other game. I'd also not limit it to sword and sorcery or rat killing.

The kind of guided gameplay I envision would lead a new player through many different places in Second Life, let her discover secrets hidden in places that we know, may it be clubs or malls or existing castles. The storyline and quests would both entertain and make the player more familiar with the world of Second Life and some of its residents and social groups. Instead of just looking at a building, the player would be able to explore its history and meaning, may it be real or fictional. After every completed quest there would be a sense of achievement and new quests would become available giving new goals and sense of purpose.

We'd also have to free ourselves from the mage-fighter-thief thinking about roleplay professions and advancement path. While it would certainly be fun to have those in Second Life in some way, there are other thing Second Life could offer that you can't find in most available roleplay game. Why not have a fashion designer guild and fashion designer quests? Or the path of devotion and the path of power for aspiring kinky sub/dom? Why can't Club Elite have a compelling background story and quests that lead an aspiring dancer through exciting adventures? How about quests by an architect guild? Or a merchant guild? Or the Kaneojin? Or even the SDF?

We have many tools now. Links to real central database to have persistent state, even the possibility to do complex computation outside Second Life. There is communication between prims. We can custom animate our avatars.

The question is if there are people willing to program robust, expandable and easy to use game/quest engine so others could add game content as easily as we can now create t-shirts and build houses...

Very interesting, Ansche.

Full immersion.

What kinds of organization, with regards to sims and builds, do you think will be necessary to pull something like this off? (Not to mention other things)

I believe there are enough underused sims and builds available. If land and locations would really be the issue I myself and several other people I know could most likely help out, assuming a functioning game/quest engine exists.

The really tough issues I think are not builds or land, but developing a robust and easy to use quest engine, to create standards and to do quality management. A person or group of people would have to decide what content/quests qualify for the game. Is the quest working? How many experience points is it worth? Is part of the content/story maybe insulting towards a SL resident? But, well, even thinking that far ahead might be premature: the very engine and tools to create and run quests might take many many steps to develop and refine.

So, I think you would need some kinda project management team to define scope of project, decide which features to include and not (yet) to include, to make design decision and define content guidelines. Sponsors or investors could be beneficial to provide resources and prize money. Parts of the project implementation could then be done via contests. Think of X-Price competition or the Second Life games competition. Only that instead of a spaceship the goal would be a robust and open quest/game engine. And once that is achieved prizes could be awarded to content based on that engine until dwell / player traffic would be enough to drive further development.

I'd certainly be willing to sponsor such effort very substiantially under certain conditions. Which would be that there would need to be strong interest and dedication from developers in the community, especially programmers, story writers and visionaries who are 200% crazy about the idea and know how to motivate people. And for every 1 L$ I sponsor at least 3 L$ would have to come from other sponsors, like Avalon and Linden Lab. If people like Fizik and Philip and a significant part of developer community are thrilled by such project it could work

Just be aware that this might be huge project and people might have to be motivated for many months until we see people scripting quests as if they were designing t-shirts

Money has nothing to do with in Anshe. People don't want to embark on large projects unless they know LL will help the devs. They need to set some examples before dev's will trust them to invest years of effort into something free.

Well, Jack, this is only true in part. Of course money and prizes are an incentive if the prize money is really substantial (6 digit L$ figures). But I agree that this alone may not enough to motivate the right people long enough for such project. This is why I mentioned that there would have to be strong interest from the community and support coming from other sponsors, including Linden Lab. And developers themselves should bring some own motivation.

You need motivated people to make the project work and people must believe that the project will work in order to become motivated. You need a game to attract gamers to SL, but you need game enthusiasts in SL to make a game.

I think alot of group projects fail because of:

- Lost lack of interest, sometimes that great project just doesn't seem as great a month later.

- Confliction between members, not everyone agrees on an idea.

- Over stressing, sometimes certain members will take on too much, or have too much put on them and just can't take it anymore.

- Real life issues, always a factor in anything online.

- Lack of motivation, as stated by Anshe.

- Other random reasons.

Honestly alot of projects don't need Linden support or even money, but different people are motivated by different things, so some might. The only definit reason you'd need either of those things are if you don't have the nessisary resources to get started (for land mostly).

I think good projects are ones that everyone agrees on the same basic direction, someone takes charge as organizer and director, and also someone that is constantly motivating all members to participate. You must have enough members to handle each thing that needs to be done, but not so many that people are stepping on eachothers feet, also each person should be kept up to date with what they should be actively doing. This is hard to accomplish however as everyones different in most cases and its rare to find such a good mixing group.

I agree pretty much with everything Anshe has said so far in this thread.

Moving on to why people dont create too many MMOG games in SL, it's actually *easier* to write the game from scratch in C++ than to write it within SL.

That sounds unlikely at face value, but my own personal experience suggests it is true.

The fact is that when you write in C++:
- you dont have to optimize much because it runs so fast
- communications is easy, because you have things like #include files - so direct function calls between modules - and XML libraries
- config management is trivial and easy, eg CVS
- there are lots and lots of libraries out there and tutorials (http://gamedev.net is a biggie) to do most anything you want
- you can tailor what you write very precisely to what you want to do

By comparison, if you write in LSL:
- you run out of memory *fast* in a module
- inter-module communications is a nightmare because:
-- asynchronous
-- really slow
-- you always have to serialize and deserialize the parameters, and there's nothing like TinyXML to help you
- config management takes up *huge* wodges of time
- libraries: diddly, or certainly not anything near as available as for C++
- you're locked in to the functionalities available in SL. Want to lock down a sim? You cant. Want to animate an NPC? You cant.


Add to this that writing a game in C++ is much lower risk, since you know that C++ is not going to shut down or change it's API overnight.

The single and only advantage of SL is marketing. For a smallish project you can tap directly into a base of 4000 users so if you assume a 10% uptake rate, thats 400 users straight off.

That said, for a largish project, the available consumer market in SL is both too small and mal-adapted. People who play SL currently are *not* looking for MMORPGs otherwise they would be playing one. That doesnt mean that SL couldnt provide MMORPGs, neither does it mean that MMORPGs couldnt become popular in SL in the future, but it certainly doesnt help. Theres a big hysteresis towards purely "social" functionalities in SL.

Azelda

Remember also 90% of RL small businesses fail. (In America)

I'm sure we'll see even higher attrition rates for SL ventures. That sort of blanket explains all the different reasons we see things breaking down.

Supply and demand, though... once people start pioneering, making money, more will do it.

Well, although this may be true now, it will change very soon. I have been working on a project with a very small development team for the past few months, and I am very close to swinging my doors open to the general SL resident population.

It has most of the missing elements outlined here plus some. It has not been cheap to produce, and it certainly has not been easy to manage, but it will bring something distinctly different to do in SL.

For those of you who yearn for a Dark Wood type experience in SL, I offer you SimCast Entertainment...