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Blue Mars beta

Jesse Barnett
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04-20-2009 15:10
I think I will stick with this recent definition by ZDNet:

"ZDNet Definition for: Virtual World
A 3D computer environment in which users are represented on screen as themselves or as made-up characters and interact in real time with other users. Massively multiuser online games (MMOGs) and worlds such as Second Life are examples. See MMOG, MMORPG, Second Life and metaverse."

From all I have seen while searching, the ability to create and change the environment around you is above and beyond the definition. If there is another term to describe what you have defined then it would still be cloudy. If I am not mistaken, WOW allows uploading content?(I haven't ever played it)
"If it doesn't allow every resident of the world to create content based only on the limitations of their own skill..."
The limitations part is key because everyone can create content. But then again, many in SL do not create.

Cost in no way can be construed as part of the definition. Even LL charges $L10 for uploads and yet it is a "Virtual World".

To me, there needs to be a new definition to describe this magical place we call SL. But whatever that term is, it would still apply to Blue Mars.
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From: someone
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Ordinal Malaprop
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Join date: 9 Sep 2005
Posts: 4,607
04-20-2009 15:16
The thing is that WoW, while not allowing direct uploading of assets, _does_ have persistent effects on the world caused by players, since they are able to form groups and communicate.

Any situation where one can do this provides an avenue to persistently affect the world concerned. Social content is content; user-generated social content is why people _visit_ sites, be they virtual worlds or anything else, unless those sites are run by people who generate enough new content on a regular basis to interest people, which is rare. This is something which designers really do forget.
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Ordinal Malaprop
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04-20-2009 15:17
Having said that I am really not very interested in Blue Mars; I don't want to sit around "generating user social content" also known as "chatting"; I can do that already in forums and whatnot.
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Argent Stonecutter
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04-20-2009 15:58
From: Jesse Barnett
I think I will stick with this recent definition by ZDNet:
You're welcome to use any definition you like, but if there's any meaning to the term a virtual world needs to be a world, not just a game-board.

MMOGs are not worlds, they're games. What happens in an MMO is controlled by the people who run the servers, the players are nothing but the audience. They are no more part of the world than the reader is part of a book, or the viewer is part of a TV show. A world is made up of the people in it, they are all, at least in potential, producers as well as consumers, meaningful participants. That's what MUDs were ... no, are... like.
From: ftp://ftp.lambda.moo.mud.org/pub/MOO/papers/DIAC92.txt
Three major factors distinguish a MUD from an Adventure-style computer game, though:

o A MUD is not goal-oriented; it has no beginning or end, no `score', and
no notion of `winning' or `success'. In short, even though users of
MUDs are commonly called players, a MUD isn't really a game at all
.

o A MUD is extensible from within; a user can add new objects to the
database such as rooms, exits, `things', and notes. Certain MUDs,
including the one I run, even support an embedded programming language
in which a user can describe whole new kinds of behavior for the
objects they create.

o A MUD generally has more than one user connected at a time. All of the
connected users are browsing and manipulating the same database and can
encounter the new objects created by others. The multiple users on a
MUD can communicate with each other in real time.

Sixteen years later, replace "Computer game" with "RPG", and "MUD" with "Virtual World". MUDs are *text-based virtual worlds*. The characteristics of a MUD that distinguish them from Adventure Games are the ones that distinguish a virtual world from an MMO. It's not even necessarily multi-player... the program I wrote in '82, before I ever heard of a MUD, was single-user: one person at a time could dial it up, you took turns moving around and creating places objects and leaving messages in lieu of chatting. It's the cooperative and shared nature of the environment itself that distinguishes a virtual world from a game, not whether it's text, or 2d, or 3d or even an MMO.

The people who wrote that definition in ZDnet have no basis for defining the term... virtual worlds are older than Ziff-Davis, and probably older than the people who picked the most superficial distinctions that aren't even shared by most of the virtual worlds over the past 30 years.

From: someone
Cost in no way can be construed as part of the definition. Even LL charges $L10 for uploads and yet it is a "Virtual World".
The question is whether the money, the investment, the resources, is a gatekeeper... does it keep people out. You don't need to apply for approval as a developer, you don't need to upload anything if you don't want to... you can create amazing things using nothing but the Library textures... and not just slightly different combinations of clothes, like in Kaneva, but things never envisioned by Linden Labs.

From: someone
To me, there needs to be a new definition to describe this magical place we call SL. But whatever that term is, it would still apply to Blue Mars.
The term is "virtual world", and whether it applies to Blue Mars or not is yet to be seen.
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Jesse Barnett
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Join date: 21 May 2006
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04-20-2009 16:09
Then once again, post a link to a definition like you are describing because I could not find one. I have shown backup for what I am stating.

"You're welcome to use any definition you like, but if there's any meaning to the term a virtual world needs to be a world, not just a game-board."

Aren't you the one that is defining it anyway you want?

Blue Mars and WOW are not game boards. Common sense dictates that the term "Virtual World" applies to a world that is virtual, nothing more and nothing less.

Not really trying to give you a hard time. Really was curious and I went through a few Google search pages looking. I do understand what you are saying and what you want, our wants are not disimiliar. Actually I would push the boundaries even more. I want something on par with an OS but that I could afford. Just not sure the name was applicable. As it stands, unless it is nearly free I will not be able to get much of anything here or there. Seems the wind of change blew through the workplace today. Did not loose job but my income is going to be severely limited for a few months it looks like.

But I will keep internet and will continue to do as I have been doing, scripting, building, playing here and now I will also be able to brush up on my skills and play with the SDK tools and see what it looks like in the sandbox for BM and in a few months have another place to explore.
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Argent Stonecutter
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04-21-2009 04:28
From: Jesse Barnett
Aren't you the one that is defining it anyway you want?
I'm the one who's been writing and using virtual world software for over a quarter of a century. I've been Argent in virtual worlds since before Snow Crash was published.

From: someone
Blue Mars and WOW are not game boards.
Blue Mars isn't yet anything, it has neither residents nor players, what it is... a virtual world like SL, a 3d chat system like IMVU, a game like Entropia... is potential only.

WOW absolutely IS a game board. The game is the purpose to Warcraft or Everquest or Eve or Entropia.

SL is a stage where the actions of the actors are what creates not just the play but the scenery and the theatre itself. Like the real world, there are merely actors with greater and lesser resources, not a caste of directors managing a theme park full of tourists.
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Briana Dawson
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04-21-2009 04:37
From: Argent Stonecutter
I'm the one who's been writing and using virtual world software for over a quarter of a century.



Argent during the Ice Age long before the interwebz:

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Qie Niangao
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Join date: 24 May 2006
Posts: 7,138
04-21-2009 04:56
On the surface (which is pretty much all we can see now) this seems like yet another attempt at a virtual world designed by game developers, and as with all the others one is left wondering what part of the Web did they not understand.

But there's a glimmer of hope, I think, if those with developer licenses can permit anybody they want to develop for them and import content without any impediments that introduce cycle time in the creation loop. Any barrier to that is fatal to the project's ability to compete with SL, although it certainly may succeed in cannibalizing the old-style VR gaming market.

It's really not a simple question of "some residents like to create, some like to consume, this is for consumers and professional creators." That (sizable) market is already well-served and largely saturated, so the money to be made is in luring customers already in that market to the Shiny New Thing. Those economics are zero-sum compared to a model that removes all barriers to entry for new content creators, new content, and new reasons for new consumers to be engaged.
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Lord Sullivan
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04-21-2009 05:30
From: Briana Dawson
Argent during the Ice Age long before the interwebz:



That made me think back to my Senior school, in 1975 when we had only a computer club and computing wasn't taught in the mainstream and i took an RSA III Digital computer appreciation exam after school and we used a PDP 10 DEC system 8 Mainframe to learn on with paper punch tape and cards and a Teletype terminal with a huge roll of yucky paper in the college we used with a 2400 modem the size of a small case and time had to be booked at the college to access the teletype and Mainframe to run your programs you spent ages writing in BASIC with so many lines to do the simplest of tasks :)

I can still remember having to send the sysop messages via the teletype to load a specific mag tape drive that we have saved our programs on and then going to the polytechnic and seeing for the first time that huge class fronted room where the mainframe was housed, where we saw the ops as gods then lol how things have changed, i wonder where PC and PC power will be in the next 30+ years based on the differences now :)

Dam that shows my age :)
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Brenda Connolly
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04-21-2009 06:06
From: someone
I'm the one who's been writing and using virtual world software for over a quarter of a century. I've been Argent in virtual worlds since before Snow Crash was published.


He had to read SnowCrash while walking six miles to school uphill. Both ways. And then had to write a book report on it on the back of a shovel.
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Lord Sullivan
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04-21-2009 06:26
From: Brenda Connolly
He had to read SnowCrash while walking six miles to school uphill. Both ways. And then had to write a book report on it on the back of a shovel.


In blood with a quill pen :P

From: someone
Monty Python - Poor

"Who would have thought thirty years ago we would all be sitting here drinking Chateau de {Chassiley?} wine, eh?"

"In them days, we were glad to have the price of a cup of tea."

"Aye, a cup of cold tea"

"Without milk or sugar"

"Or tea"

"In a filthy cracked cup."

"We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper."

"The best we could manage was a sock or a piece of damp cloth."

"But ye know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor ..."

"Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me 'Money doesn't buy you happiness'."

"He was right. I was happier then and I had nothing! We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof."

"House, you lived in a house? We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, half the floor was missing, and we're all huddled together in one corner for fear of falling."

"You were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in the corridor!"

"Oooooh, we used to dream of living in a corridor. It would have been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish [heap]. We got woken up every morning to having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us. House? Uh!"

"Oh, when I said house I meant a hole in the ground covered by a piece of twig. It was a house to us."

"We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go and live in the lake!"

"You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road."

"Cardboard box?"

"Aye"

"You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down the mill fourteen hours a day, week in, week out, and when we would go home, dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt."

"Look, [sherry?], we used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work for twenty hours at the mill every day for a tuppence a month, come home, and dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle ... if we were lucky!"

"Well, we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and lick the road clean with our tongues. We had one handful of freezing cold gravel, work at the mill for twenty-four hours a day for four bits every six years, and when would get home, our dad would slice into us with a bread knife."

"Right!"

"I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of dry poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down at the mill, and when we got home, our dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah!"

"You can't tell the young people of the day that. They won't believe you."

[Chorus of no's and nays]

All credits to the Monty Python players.
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Rock Vacirca
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04-21-2009 07:11
From: Argent Stonecutter
If it doesn't allow every resident of the world to create content based only on the limitations of their own skill... not mining for fish or hunting for sweat or whatever the Entropia platform uses as its basis for crafting, it's not a "virtual world", it's a "3d multiplayer video game".


Arrant nonsense. Do you have a single link to back up your definition of a Virtual World?

And for your information, and you do seem to be in need of some, CRD is simply being built by Entropia. The way the CRD VW will work will be very different to Entropia.

So, you are wrong again. There will be no "fish mining" or "sweat hunting" in CRD. Care to shift your position once again?

Rock
Rock Vacirca
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04-21-2009 07:14
From: Osprey Therian
I'm unclear as to whether Creative Kingdom, China Recreative Dreamland, Next Island and See* are all just additions to the existing Entropia Universe storyline or might be separate in concept. I started playing Project Entropia when it was new, and while it amuses me once every six months or so, I have always found it chillingly cold and cutthroat.

* All mentioned in press releases.


Creative Kingdom will be an extension, just a different platform, the CryEngine2. CRD is a different concept altogether, Entropia are just building it on behalf of their client, the Beijing Municipal Government, who plan to create a virtual economy within the world that is fully convertible in and out.

Rock
Rock Vacirca
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04-21-2009 07:18
From: Briana Dawson
This sounds like a definition from the later 90's.

With a definition like that, a Virtual World can be anything from: The Palace to Everquest, including SL, and The Palace and Everquest look silly compared to SL when speaking of "Virtual Worlds".


The definition is from the Virtual World wiki entry, last updated 17 Apr 2009.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_world

If you disagree with the definition you are free to amend the wiki accordingly.

Rock
Brenda Connolly
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04-21-2009 07:28
From: Rock Vacirca
Creative Kingdom will be an extension, just a different platform, the CryEngine2. CRD is a different concept altogether, Entropia are just building it on behalf of their client, the Beijing Municipal Government, who plan to create a virtual economy within the world that is fully convertible in and out.

Rock


Lovely. The ChiComms can now dominate the Virtual World economies as well.
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Argent Stonecutter
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04-21-2009 10:05
From: Rock Vacirca
The definition is from the Virtual World wiki entry, last updated 17 Apr 2009.
I put stuff in Wikipedia all the time. I know exactly how reliable it is for stuff like this. Quoting wikipedia as an authority is the last gasp of a failed argument.
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Argent Stonecutter
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04-21-2009 10:07
From: Rock Vacirca
Arrant nonsense. Do you have a single link to back up your definition of a Virtual World?
I already gave you one.

From: someone
And for your information, and you do seem to be in need of some, CRD is simply being built by Entropia. The way the CRD VW will work will be very different to Entropia.
Tell me how it will actually work then. You can't. You have no idea. You just have the word of a bunch of marketeers.
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Briana Dawson
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04-21-2009 10:55
From: Argent Stonecutter

You just have the word of a bunch of marketeers.


The same marketeers that say BM will hold 7,000,000 users online at once with no lag. :rolleyes:

That will be interesting to see.
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Nikki Inventor
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04-21-2009 11:03
I think what is nice about the Blue Mars's model is that BM technically provides the equivalent of ISP or web hosting service, and it is up to the web-host provider to decide the rules and policy for the end-users.

So different CityDeveloper may have different rules, so it will fit all kinds of clientele, be it education, PG or R rated content, it is really not BM's business to regulate. Rather it is up to the Estate Owner to decide the content issue.

This will give a lot of freedom and leeway to a great variety of businesses. That will completely avoid the problems of LL in terms of liability and technical issues that are related to policing the content of end-user's activity.

That will free BM of the policing and AR that is not worth the time to deal with, and spend their time and resource to develop a great engine for the users.

I think the draw is how pricey they will mark up their product and service, and the limitation of Vista, which is really the problem with CryEngine 2's implementation on Vista. Windows sux so bad, why do stick with it?
Nikki Inventor
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04-21-2009 11:10
From: Briana Dawson
The same marketeers that say BM will hold 7,000,000 users online at once with no lag. :rolleyes:

That will be interesting to see.

Why not? When they can "shard" the servers, keep mirroring them on demand, and use a load-balancer to route the traffic to the right server, that can be done. That is how the real world website works to accommodate traffic volume too. Do you ever see lag in google's servers?
Argent Stonecutter
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04-21-2009 11:18
From: Nikki Inventor
I think what is nice about the Blue Mars's model is that BM technically provides the equivalent of ISP or web hosting service, and it is up to the web-host provider to decide the rules and policy for the end-users.
That's what Linden Labs does, and even with the new "Adult Content" farrago they are STILL more open than other VR platforms. We don't know what Avatar Reality will actually allow or not until they're open and have been in operation for a while.
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Briana Dawson
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Join date: 23 Sep 2003
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04-21-2009 11:18
From: Nikki Inventor
Why not? When they can "shard" the servers, keep mirroring them on demand, and use a load-balancer to route the traffic to the right server, that can be done. That is how the real world website works to accommodate traffic volume too. Do you ever see lag in google's servers?


Google doesnt have 7,000,000 users connected streaming a 3D virtual world to most of the connections - yet.
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Milla Janick
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04-21-2009 11:19
From: Nikki Inventor
I think the draw is how pricey they will mark up their product and service, and the limitation of Vista, which is really the problem with CryEngine 2's implementation on Vista. Windows sux so bad, why do stick with it?

Probably because 90% of the desktop computers connected to the internet run some version of Windows.
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Argent Stonecutter
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04-21-2009 11:20
From: Nikki Inventor
Why not? When they can "shard" the servers, keep mirroring them on demand, and use a load-balancer to route the traffic to the right server, that can be done. That is how the real world website works to accommodate traffic volume too. Do you ever see lag in google's servers?
Google doesn't have *any* avatars online, their servers are virtually stateless. Most web services are. In a VR environment, there is an enormous amount of shared state.
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Briana Dawson
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04-21-2009 11:22
Hmmm, 2nd post ever and in the BM thread.

I smell a plant, and it is not a ficus.
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