New Mmog To Beat Sl....?

Ok, as a lot of you will know, one way to describe SL to the layperson would be to say, 'it is like The Sims...kinda'. 'Kinda', because SL is so much bigger than The Sims that the comparison hardly does it justice.

Well, believe it or not, Will Wright's work-in-progress, an MMOG called 'Spore' looks as if it could take online gaming as far beyond SL as SL is a step up from Sims!

In Spore, you guide the evolution of life from a single celled organism to a technologically advanced civilization that can explore and colonise the galaxy. Other players on other planets are doing likewise.

The game includes the kind of building techniques and trading opportunities that we love about Sl, but on top of that it provides procedural texture and animations. So, design an animal and it is realistically skinned and animated on-the-fly by the computer. Each time your creature mates, an egg is laid, and you get to tweak the design of the offspring, thereby guiding its evolutionary path. There is no limit to the kind of creature you can create, and the computer will work out how it would walk, feed, attack etc based on an analysis of its physical appearance. Not only that, but to ensure your world has a vibrant and balanced ecosystem, the game downloads other player's creatures into your world!

Imagine if Second Life was far more organic, with a complex and ever evolving ecosystem. Imagine if it was just ONE WORLD orbiting a star, and that star was ONE STAR in an entire GALAXY! Woah, just imagine if something like SETI could establish contact with an alien version of SL and make first contact. (Yes, you can do that in Spore).

Needless to say, I am VERY excited about the possibilities of Wright's new project

As i understand it, there is no actual realtime interaction between players in spore, the system may use other players creatures and worlds, but they live on your pc.
So, its not really an mmog in that sense.

Edit:In saying that, it does look awesome nonetheless

I don't think you can compare these 2 at all.
From what I've read about it, it's not a persistent online world. This is more a gaming environment than a virtual world. Not sure on this one, but I think there's not even a real coding language to program your own objects.

Does look pretty neat though.

It does bring in an idea of sorts:

Picture this, an online world where everyone starts with only basic tools, and the world itself has an actively evolving ecosystem.

Picture being able to make items like we do now, but having the gather resources to create them...

Watch as over months, users quickly evolve from a stone age level of tools to more and more advanced tools, finally allowing truly mind-blowing things! All of the user interface tools developed by people using the previous generation's tools! Tech ages!

Going from trying to figure out if rocks are etable to building replicators that make etable rocks would be FUN!

<looks up> Wait... Did my mind wander off again and leave me behind?

Well, I watched an hour long video of Will Wright demonstrating the game. You can find ie easy enough by googling 'google spore video'.

At one point, he flew a UFO into outerspace and established contact with an alien civilization, explaining, 'And this is a planet owned by another player'. He also showed how players could trade buildings, weapons, vehicles etc that they had designed. So I would hesitate to call this a single-player game, though I grant that it will probably not have the massive social opportunities of SL.

But if I have one criticims with SL, it would be this: The world of SL feels less like a real environment and more like an abandoned movie set. Wouldn't it be lovely if plants actually grew, and were pollinated by insects who were part of a web of life? Imagine if you could zoom in on the grass in SL and, instead of it turning into a blocky texture, you discovered a microworld of bugs, insects. Imagine the world of SL as alive as RL.

Or imagine a game like Spore, but with the fantastic social and business oportunities of SL. I would certainly crave an experience like that, rather than the 'We Came, We Saw, We Conquered' feel that Spore seems to have at the moment.

Linden lab have shown the social possibilities of online worlds. Will Wright is showing the artificial life possibilities in Spore. Won't it be a happy day when these concepts are brought together?

I saw that video! It was SO cool! I cant wait to try it! Evolve your creature from microscopic all the way up to an advanced civilization. Interact with others online. But yea, it's not quite the same as SL, more like a Biology version of Sim-Earth or Sim-Life.

Saw the video about 2 weeks ago.Watched it several times since as my 10 yr old keeps wanting to see it again.
He actually says in the video its a planet created by another player, not owned, and explains its like a snapshot of that world on your pc and not realtime.
I would hardly call Webspider style functions looking for spore content on other machines "trading".

Its a single player game most definately as there is absolutely no interaction between players at all.

Its basically like downloading user created content for the sims, but the pc does it for you, rather than you doing the legwork.

In the sims website, i can download someone elses house and its occupants etc contents, (which is essentially what spore does on its own) this doesnt make the sims a MMOG, and spore certianally isn't either.

Still looks shit hot though

Is it really MMO?

I mean, I just bought my daughter a PS2 game that looks liek it's been around a while that looks like (haven't booted it yet) it's got better editing tools than SL, and mesh design, and so on. But it's not interactive, online...

But I'd sure like to have that avatar editor!

Spore might be a replacement for those who use SL solely as a game and insist no one could ever use it for anything BEYOND that purpose. For those of us who use it as a 3-D persistent online world, I highly doubt Spore will fill our needs. I don't think I'll be doing collaboritive online training in Spore.

That said, it does look pretty cool; a nice change from the typical level grinding and first-person shoot 'em ups.

Regards,

-Flip

I don't think those people exist, outside your imagination.

How many Everquest killer games came and went before WoW hit the market? And did WoW kill everquest? Not really. "SL is doomed due to <insert a noun here>" post come every few days or weeks, and the virtual sky is still above us.

Will Wright is a genius.

coco

Spore is going to be amazing. Will Wirght is a genius.

However, there's no comparison between SL and Spore at all. In his talk, Wright makes explicit that the interaction between Spore players is entirely asynchronous. I think he used the phrase "massively online single player game" at one point. That is, while player-generated assets are used to populate other player worlds, providing infinite variety, you're going to be the only sentient person driving any of those assets. The Spore sandbox will belong to you only.

The mechanisms for populating Spore are fantastically imaginative and will draw from the game's millions of players, but it's still a single player experience and doesn't really touch on Second Life's arena in the form that has been thus far described.

No it's not a MMORPG.
Yes Will Wright is a genius.
Yes, Spore looks utterly amazing.

And also, yes, Spore, or rather proving that procedural tools for animation, content and behaviour, could have far reaching implications in the future for Second Life or other MMORPGs - in fact gaming and digital entertainment in general. And Spore will be the first iteration to show that in the mainstream.

It is probably one of the most interesting and cutting edge computer entertainment developments of the last 10 years. It not only benefits developers by reducing content creation time and cost but also offers the end user a level of freedom and expression that I doubt they will have seen before.

Personally, I've been waiting for this ever since I first heard about it a year ago. It is groundbreaking and I can't wait to get my hands on it.

So far, there just IS nothing to compete with SL.

We have here three unmatched ingredients:

1. MMOG - everybody IS here

2. Custom content - we make nearly all of it (and anyone can learn to do it if they want to)

3. The ability to sell what we make to each other

Those three things just have no match yet, as far as I'm concerned. And no one of those things would be anywhere near as terrific if it weren't for the other two.

coco

P.S. "There" doesn't count for me because you can only make certain things; you have to have it approved; and you have to pay to have it approved.

Hear, hear! Right on about the potential of procedural content generation. We've got an amazing opportunity here to watch very novice computer users create very original 3D art that has all the flair and polish of professionally-developed game content. You know a given Spore asset, like a creature, will only cost about 1KB to store or transmit? This absolutely must light the way forward for the future of game content, even without the user-driven aspects.

My biggest gripe about most FPS games is that you start to recognize different props and NPC models across very different game levels. Deus Ex, very short on storage space, was especially bad with this. You'd see the same NPC models, computer terminals and keypads whether you were in New York, Paris, Hong Kong or California. Having a science of adding subtle, low-storage cost, dynamically generated variation for game scenery and NPCs is going to to be an astonishing leap forward in electronic entertainment that's going to solve a lot of problems related to immersion. Definitely groundbreaking.

Yes, what's happened in recent years is that developers have used three methods to attract gamers and extend the longevity of their offering:

1. Graphics and sound. Graphics especially have moved on so amazingly in the last 5 years or so.
2. Sheer scale. Games have gotten bigger and bigger, with more content, vaster levels, more choices.
3. Take things online so you're playing with others.

But, whilst that's been happening the core gameplay hasn't really moved on at all. Pick up the original Duke Nukem, Half-Life or Star Wars Galacies and, once the scale, graphics and online nature have been put to one side, gameplay is pretty much exactly the same. This is also true for other genres, such as racing games etc.

What you say about NPCs is so true. Play World of Warcraft, hover over the enemy and, depending on their name you can say with near 100% certainty whether they'll stand their ground and use magic, whether they'll run away and in what direction and, if they do run away, whether they'll bring somebody else with them. You'll also know if attacking one will bring out others at the same time. There's simple rules going on here, rules that really don't differ from game to game to be honest. It gets repetitive very quickly, and WOW concentrates on it's sheer scale (which is big, both in terms of space and variety of enemies!), graphics (which are superb) and online nature to keep the attention. There's no doubt that online games enhance gameplay - by being able to group with others etc. - but what you end up doing as a group is basically just the same, with the same fairly simple gameplay, as you would have done in a traditional offline game of the same genre.

Basically very little variation and it very quickly becomes obvious what's going to happen. You start a fight with an enemy and hold a phone call at the same time. I'd like to be more engrosed than that.

Procedural methods will no doubt change this and provide a way for gameplay to catch up with the rest of the package. I'd like to pick on a creature in WOW and have to pay attention to what I'm doing - I'd like it to take me by suprise. I'd like it to look slightly different from the last 50 Bloodrage Haripes I've killed and act differently.

And that's just one example.

There's something else to say about Will Wright as well, which trancends the technical aspects of Spore. He has this unbelievable knack of tying up the most complex, involved ideas into the simplest, most accessible interfaces. The interface for Spore looks so simple a 3 year old could use it and rapidly understand what does what. That is one hell of an achievement with something that gives such flexibility.

You can tell the guy is really excited about this - he's like a kid in a candy store in the videos I've seen See, artifical life geeks have so much to offer!

Ok, well after getting many replies with a 'this is not MMOG' theme, I decided to check the Google video again (have you seen the new one that is an hour and 15 mins long?) and I heard Will Wright say:

'By the way, this is not a simultaneous multiplayer'.

So yes I was wrong to call it an MMOG to beat SL. It is more like a single player game with downloadable content. But even so the procedural techniques he demonstrated might possibly be used to provide an ecosystem for SL.

Now, if I were to go completely extropian, as I tend to do for obvious reasons, I would like to imagine a time when all worlds like Warcraft or Quake Wars or SL actually do co-exist inside a massive Universe. I think it would be kinda cool to go to Jessie, see signs saying 'Impeach Bush...' uh, I mean 'WE NEED RECRUITS TO FIGHT THE STROGG' and you equip yourself with guns and armour and take off in a ship to fly to the planet, drop down and kick some?

Or, it would be cool to go to an observatory in SL, point the telescope at a star, see a planet and be told 'yes that's planet Everquest'. Hey, you could even zoom right in ALA Google Earth and watch the goings on.

I mean, when you consider that molecular computing will cram 100 million times the power of a human brain into a space not much bigger than a sugar cube, and then imagine billions of these linked to the internet via an optical network card for speeds up to one thousand times the speed of cable or DSL....

Well, I can imagine some pretty cool stuff with that kind of power.

That's high for a prim, I suspect, but cheap for a custom avatar mesh.

This is what is going to blow everyone out of the water.

The Second Life software needs either the ability to fully customize the user interface (and be able to provide that interface to others)

or

have Linden Lab provide an optional, additional, slick and simple interface that the casual user can instantly grasp and use right away. And keep the traditional interface available as well.

That is so cool. I can totally imagine that. Bring it on!

Heh, yeah--of course sometimes when this happens, the plot contrivance that's used is that there's one monolithic multinational ubercorp that owns all the computer systems... which is why they all look the same. But that doesn't explain the NPCs!

Human brains are very good at pattern recognition. So more of these subtle variances are really welcome, if just to tweak the mind, "Hmmm... looks kinda familiar... but NOT a clone of Soldier #2086!"

It would but it's actually not that easy to achieve. There are some people, like Will Wright, who can apply the subtle nuances of thought, the lateral macro thinking whilst taking care of the micro, that are required to create a truly all-encompasing, yet inherently simple and easy to understand user interface, containing unbelievable complexity at the same time. There are theories to follow, advice to adhere to, principles to take into consideration, but the ability to engineer a system with such a simple, yet powerful, interface whilst appearing straight-forward and obvious in hindsight is one of the most difficult things to achieve in reality. It is a discipline and talent in it's own right, whilst requiring such a cross-section of proficiencies and understanding, that it is not at all obvious until the obvious is presented.

It's almost like a kind of voodoo. And that's not a joke.

I don't doubt it. Simplicity isn't easy. It takes a lot of time, energy and thought to whittle that diamond out of the rough.