(LONG) SL could take over the world if...

...we hooked up with other games like say City of Heroes or maybe Undying Tournament.

Imagine if you could portal from SL into Paragon City or somewhere else as your avatar and play a bit of CoH or UT2004 or whatever and then portal back in to SL? Wouldn't it be cool? You could have a portal in your house and click on it for a bit of fun arresting villains or whatever!

Why do this? Because right now SL is really a 100% crafting and building experience in the lingo of mmo's, without a robust adventure experience (though of course exploring is fascinating -- mostly though to see what others have crafed and built rather than to DO anything) -- at least for those of us who don't get too involved in some of the social activities in SL (like BDSM and Gor) but who might wish for adventuring, in the sense of questing and leveling and so on.

SL is a SUBLIME place -- and what I am suggesting would, I thin, really take it to an amazingly SUBLIMER level. We have the BEST world for creating amazing things. If we could portal to other games, we would really be even more amazing.

Now you might say, why not just PLAY those other games? Because it just isn't the same. Playing other games means putting down SL and then coming back, with no connection. SL has the limitations I mentioned above; hooking up with one or more mmo's would add some purpose to the game.

There are two ways to go: hook with a subscription mmo like CoH, or hook up with something that runs instances, like Guild Wars and UT2004.

For subscription mmo, the simplest way to connect would be just to stick a LoadURL thingie in an object and pull up a login webpage to the game. Then at the very simplest level if we could keep our names in the new game, we'd just log in and play -- albeit at this very simple level, we'd have to take the appearance of the new game and give up any crafted attachments from SL.

Obviously there'd need to be an arrangement with the mmo regarding subscription fees etc. if there are any and you logged into a persistent world (from the point of view of theother game, we could connect to one of their less populated servers). This is why an instance Guild Wars or UT2004 (or both!) is more practical than a subscription mmo like City of Heroes.

In the Guld Wars model, the games are instanced, meaning that you and a group play together in your own version of the adventure as long as it lasts. In the case of UT2004, people actually host the instances on their own computers as long as they want to play.

Anyhow, this is just a long-held, pet idea of mine: in games like Everquest and others, the crafting is just pathetic. What you wear looks like what everyone else wears and is designed by someone else. You have earrings and rings and bracelets but you cannot see them on your avatar. In Everguest 2 you can have your own apartment and you can make things for it, but there are a limited number of things you can make: 20 different chairs, for example, and the apartments are the same size and shape at each level of cost, and there is a limited number of wallpapers and floors to pick from. Even Sims and Sims 2 were disappointingly limited in this sense.

In this game, you can make all that stuff, but in a sense you are all dressed up with nowhere to go. Yet the lag we live with is the inevitable result of our customization abilities, and is incompatible, at present, with the FPS you need in a good mmo. No doubt there would have to be some limitation on how much stuff we could take with us.

But imagine being able to play a game like Guild Wars from inside SL!

Down the road, imagine being able to design the "map" that the instance occurs within, and even script the adventure!! And being able to sell those maps and instances inside SL?

Now don't tell me it would never work, because it could be made to work, I am certain.

This LONG post brought to you coutesy of our LONG update today!

Alright, stand back, this big bubble is about to burst...

First, portals between games are not only unstable, but a huge security risk. Second, even if they WEREN'T unstable or a huge security risk, how the hell would they even work to link? Any power you could have in CoH or any other game could be replicated for free. Third, even if you did get past all of that, you have to realize that these games just aren't compatable. I CAN say that this isn't possible because, quite frankly it isn't. If you want an example of what it would be like to try to do this, go take an apple and set it in the middle of a table, then start yelling at it to turn into an orange. If it does, then let me know because I want that damn orange. Point and case, its just not worth it.

If you want in-game social activities outside Gor or whatnot, look around. The other day I was playing a mock-up of a halo 2 level with a few friends on a low-prim sim. Fun stuff, had about 20 people out there with us.

The beauty of SL is that EVERYTHING you see is created by people inside. Its the difference between just playing a game and creating a world. Every sim is just a flat piece of land to start...its up to the creators, and the people they work with/buy from, to get things set up. You can't impliment things like that into CoH, GW, WoW, or any other game like that.

I'm going to tell you it can't work because, well...it can't.

It could be made to work, just as the games were made in the first place. But then whenever someone suggests something, always the first or second post shoots it down.

I am absolutelycertain that I could use loadURL to call up a web-based log-in to any game that uses one, and play the game in a separate window from the SL window. I am certian that I can have two different games running on my computer at once, and I can play both in windowed mode and switch back and forth between them, because I do it all the time.

What I am suggesting could be as simple as that. Mostly the advantage is having the same group of people playing in both worlds, and being able to interact with that group in both worlds, rather than the two worlds being completely separate.

I am of course not saying that I could take my SL avatar into Paragon City and play CoH, or bring my CoH avatar into SL, because that obviously won't work.

What I AM suggesting is that linking up with some adventure games would be totally cool, and I believe that a company had something like SL combined with an adventure game, it would be an unbeatable combination, because you'd have really unbelievable crafting/building combined with adventure roleplay gaming.

BTW: the beatuy of everything being crafted (which I also love) comes at a high cost in performance. That is why it would most likely be necessary to instance the adventure game, to reduce graphical lag. And if you are going to do that, well then, why not team up with a company that already has an adventure game running, and log into their world? A "portal" is just a fancy way of loading up a server, afterall.

...I betcha somewhere in the SL world, what I am suggesting already exists.

Seems like a connection to steam ( http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php? ) is worth exploring.

Possibly this is something we can do ourselves: set up steam servers, play games, develop mods for the games, and connect to them via loadurl abilities within SL.

I'll be exploring it.

EDIT: note the number of players and the number of servers they run! http://www.steampowered.com/status/status.html

Although a nice idea, it'd require millions of changes to both games to make them compatible with each other. This would likely degrade the quality and performance of both games and would be really complex to add in such a feature that is likely not to be used to a great extent.

If I understand what you're suggesting, it's really not feasible.

Games rely on exchanges of packets between the client and server which update both the client and server on player movements and actions.

A game such as Halo 2 has completely incompatible packets to Second Life's packets, not to mention Second Life is OpenGL and the Halo series runs on DirectX. Which is likely to present problems as well as the differences in physics engines.

Imagine a player in Second Life wants to move and have it reflected on Halo 2.

Firstly, an appropriate map, the exact size of a sim would need to be used in Halo, now just because we can measure in metres in SL doesn't mean we can just say:

"We'll make a 512x512m Halo map."
A great amount of fiddling and experimenting would be needed to find a unit of measurement understandable by both games.

SL would have to send the position packets to the Halo server where they'd have to be converted to an understandable format. No easy feat. The same would have to be done by the Halo packets to be converted to Second Life's format.

All this additional packet exchanging and server communication is likely to increase lag to crazy proportions.

In order for something like this to work with Halo for example, Linden Labs would have to work incredibly closely with Bungie Studios, and anything affiliated with Microsoft is likely to be controlled by them, meaning they're not gonna budge or do anything that is likely to cost them money.

Just because you can Alt-Tab between two games and have good performance doesn't mean everyone in SL is capable of it or has a decent enough computer.

If you're just looking for a way for your SL friends to play with you on other games, get Xfire, Teamspeak or some other similar program and tell your friends to get it too.

The only likely thing I could see being done between another game and SL is to have game chat being fed between both game clients which wouldn't be very hard to implement.

Build options would have to be turned off, essentially removing any SL experience in the games.

All of this seems a little bit of a waste of time, money and effort for something as simple as the end-user buying the game or downloading gaming networking programs.

I think people are misunderstanding what I am suggesting. I'm not suggesting to make it so Poppet can log, as Poppet the avatar, into another game and be the exact same avatar only playing in another game. Because obviously that won't work without massive development effort.

Having said that, I do believe that it would be possible to achieve something like that eventually.

But right now, something not unlike that seems entirely possible: suppose there is a game that permits people to have any name they choose and affords some degree of customizability of avatar appearance. In SL, one could set it up to start the other game (providing the player had a copy of the software and computer able to run to independent games at once) and then you could pass back and forth between SL and the other game, running totally independently, just as you can now transfer back and forth between SL and photoshop or IE or whatever. You would be an SL avatar in SL, and the other game avatar in the other game. You'd have the same name, and a sense of continuity with your SL self, while in the other game world, and you could (if it were a multiplayer game) go there with SL friends. I hope that is clearer.

I am just suggesting that we find a way to connect with adventure games from within SL.

Here is ONE way, which I just posted as a question to the Lindens (still awaiting a reply from Lindens) /139/f6/137701/1.html.

Um... I'm still not following what you are saying. You want to just be able to play both games at once? Then.. um.. just open both games and play them.
You want your SL character to have the same name as your character in CoH?
Um. Register with the same name.
Other than that, it has been explained, very well, I might add, that they are just not compatible. At all. Everything is different. It's not a case of putting a Ford motor in a Daihatsu, it's a case of putting a ferryboat motor in a Gremlin. They are not only not compatible, they just don't go together at all, even though they're both vehicles.
The apple/orange analogy pretty much sums up the easiest way to get SL to work with CoH or WoW.

If I'm still missing the point, would you be so kind as to elucidate a little more?

Well, to be fair, this basic concept already exists -- it's called the metaverse.

In theory, at some point in the future it should be possible to link carious virtual worlds together and travel from one to the other in much the same way as we presently go from one website to another.
Hang in there.

P2

Another Point Out to you is that CoH is a mmorpg that is like every other mmorpg out there a locally stored game. Second Thing...... SL wasnt designed as an Action mmorpg or an mmorpg for that matter. To link the games would take alot of work and would require SL to run completely differently or CoH to run like SL does. Another thing the engines used in both games are nowhere near close to one another. Also steam is a system to make sure you have the game installed its still stored locally and you still need the data on your computer to play it'd be pointless to be running SL at the same time as its just pulling resources to do it.

The extent of my knowledge of gaming goes a bit beyond that of your average gamer but thats because i have a degree to make them. It is a feasible thing to do but at the same time there really isnt a point to doing so. If you wanna play Counter Strike play counter strike as itself why would you wanna run SL in the back pulling computer resources and slowing it down. Also the odds of these companies wanting to do something like that officially would be very very slim. If your in SL for an adventure there are places for it but this isnt a hack and slash mmorpg.

Exactly! This is simply one axpect of the metaverse that SL is aiming at, and llLoadURL is just a really simple thing we can do which, as simple as it is, does not exist in most games.

It's not that I just want to play both games at once. separately. Obviously I can already do that.

What I want is an immersive connection between SL and other mmo's, one that is an integral part of the game, and one that all residents can access from within our world.

If I just play another game, clearly that's not the same thing. And yet, achieving the connection between SL and other worlds can start out in a fairly siomple way that does not involve tons of development effort.

This is yet another thing that we have the freedom to create! Not all people will take advantage of it, any more than everyone takes advantage of social things like Gor. I don't choose Gorean roleplay, but I have been playing mmorpgs for a long time, and for me, the ability to access mmo gameplay from within SL is simply something I'd really enjoy.

I hope that clears up the confusion. I was hoping to find out if people have tried this at all, of if others are interested in joining in an effort to do something like this (provided that it is legal within the SL rules). I realize that many people will not see much point in doing it, and I am not really writing this for those people.

Um.. I'm still not getting it. CoH, WoW and the rest aren't even immersive across their own seperate servers!
You want to be able to, let's just say, click on a telephone booth in SL and be transported to CoH, right? Am I on the right track?

And you want to be able to have your friends click on the same booth and be transported to your same location in the game so you can all play together. Right?

If I'm on the right track, then read on, if not, hit the reply button and straighten me.

So, you want to be able to link up Second Life to a completely non-existant grid of servers for CoH. Which would entail CoH to completely rework their whole model of how they run their stuff. Then, you want two completely seperate companies to link up their memberlists, billing information, as you'd have to be linked to both in order to have the characters synch.
Which brings up another point. Free accounts in SL. Do they get to play CoH, too?
Both CoH and SL would have to make serious changes, business-altering changes. Complete paradigm changes to how they do everything in their business. (There. You made me say paradigm. I hope you're happy. *grin*)

Then they'd all have to agree on a platform, in order for ANY of this to work together, which would lead to people bitching in the forums about said platform within a day. Within two days, some ass will have figured out an exploit where you click through to CoH from SL while wearing a wig made of 734 flexiprim cylenders twisted to exactly 76% and when you get to Paragon, you have the ability to shoot lasers out of your butt and destroy every NPC in a 12 block radius regardless of level, gathering the exp from all of them.
In four days, someone will figure out how to port from MarioCart to SL and we'll have Yoshis shooting turtle shells at the Button Men, screaming "Stop stealing my kills!" and "NOOBLOLZ". In 6 days, some other company will come out with a platform that is far more stable that this huge conglomeration of games, but you can't link to any of them... thank god, 'cuz if Duke Nukem orbits me one more time... but it's pretty stable and you can build and sell stuff and customize things...
yadda yadda...

Read back. See the Apple/Orange analogy? That's more likely to happen. Probably be easier to make happen, too.

Im pretty sure most everything has been said.. but i would like to point out two things,

1 the required pc resorces to do such a thing.. to be honest, if you did do it.. you computer would have to have a soft of quasi second life running in the background of this other game.. and i dont know if you have notaced how bad any of those games can bog down a computer, but having two or three of them on stand by would be cpu suicide for anyone that wasnt top of the line.

2 Coh and WoW are both independant pay for play games made by compleately, and frankly rivel, companys that im pretty sure dont want to give up ANY of their potental funds to ANY competer. So that being said if they did do that, you would more then likely see a skyrocking monthly rate to make up for potental profet loss to the competition.

and lastly a third thing thing thats just personal.. and that is i dont want people on sl to know my log in names on other games.. second life is a get away.. and if i want them to know.. ill tell them.

In mmo's, many people like crafting and building. Many others like adventuring. Most like doing some of both.

What we have in SL is an ability to create things which is the crafting/building aspect of mmos. Indeed once you've created things in SL you can see how dim and limited crafting and building is in mmo's and I think I can never be happy doing that again after spending time here.

But that's all we have. There is a sense of purposelessness in SL to one who had spent time in mmo's -- all there is, is building, crafting, selling and buying. One gets the same feeling in Sims games: what are we making all this cool stuff for? Is it really just so other people will buy it? Thus it would be nice to have some purpose. mmo's have the opposite problem: they are ONLY purpose, only leveling and moving ahead, with crafting/building aspects not fully developed. And once one hits the level cap, there really is not much more to do.

My dream is to have both aspects in a single game: the incredibly robust creation ability in SL combined with adventuring of games -- not just either/or.

The impossible dream is to have a crafting/building ability in an adventure game that is as amazing as what we have in SL and an adventure game that is as absorb as any out there - warcraft, half-life, whatever you care to play. But of course there are terrible technical barriers: for one thing, the degree of customization we have in SL is a big performance hog and truly makes instancing almost inevitable, until we can get a couple of orders of magnitude faster cpus and gpus or miraculous code enhancements.

There isn't time for the SL developers in this game to build an adventure game, since they already have their hands full. And likewise for the developers of mmo's: there isn't time for them to develop a crafting/building game that is as robust as this one's since they spend all their time developing the adventure game. Yet there is this idea of the metaverse, and so it naturally comes to mind somehow to connect to mmo's outside SL so that we can have our cake and eat it too: wonderful, robust world of crafting/building, and the ability to join with other residents to go on adventures together.

so you ask: why not just play those games and not worry about connecting them to SL? One reason is simply that it is a different group of people playing other games, and so this world and that are disconnected, so being able to connect this world with another is simply a way to have continuity between them. Another reason is the metaverse itself: surely one goal of the SL metaverse effort is to be able to connect to every other kind of thing on the web, including mmo's. And so it is simply interesting to figure out how it might be possible to create a connection between this world and another one.

But I have already said most of this, or implied it, and like Dr. Phil says, you either get it, or you don't.

So now you're changing your definition and then saying that we don't get it.

Now you want more adventuring in SL because you can't find anything to do, or more building in the others.

I guess we're wasting our time here, since you keep moving the goalposts.

Have fun dreaming about linking up these games...

OH! I have an idea, why not figure out how to do an adventure game in SL? Hmm?
Since you've such an incredible grasp on how these things work, why not set this up yourself, as it is oh-so-doable, or find people to help, instead of attacking folks who spend time trying to explain to you the impossibility of your first post?

I'm sure there's a way to find something for you to do here.
My guess would be, based on your posts, that you've only ever been to a couple of gorean sims and... well.. not sure what else. Go look.

I posted here because I hope that there are people who are interested enough in the idea of linking SL to other online worlds to discuss it in a constructive way, rather than assuming I meant something that I didn't mean and then saying it won't work.

I'm not talking about all the things that won't work. I'm trying to brainstorm about how to make it work in a cool way, and even how to define it in the first place. It's not a fully formed idea, which is perhaps why it seems like a moving target. The basic idea is: connecting SL to other online worlds.

You're right, it's unproductive to argue about whether or not it's worth doing. If you think it's not, that's your right. But surely there are some others who do share my vision and would like to talk about it and think about the ways it could be done.

I'm not saying that it's not worth doing, I'm just saying that it's pretty much an impossibility. Your vision is fine and it would be nice if it were possible, but it's completely unrealistic. I, and others, aren't arguing, we're just trying to explain why it's impossible.

Really there are quite a few different possible approaches to linking SL to other games, and calling them all impossible is not only a failure of the imagination but quite simply wrong.

You're kidding me, right?

Ok. We've pointed out how it's so improbable that it might as well be impossible.

Would you please be so kind as to point out how it would be possible to get around some of the problems mentioned? How, exactly would you make this work?
The fact that one uses directx and the other doesn't.
The whole billing/login problems.
The whole "Hey, they use different engines" problem.
The whole "Hey, they're different companies, rival companies" problem.

ANY of the problems mentioned. ANY of them.

Please. Explain to me how this is in any way possible.

Give me a couple of the "quite a few different possible approaches to linking SL to other games". Hell, give me ONE!

It's not a lack of imagination, it's a lack of possibility. Just because you IMAGINE that it can be done, doesn't mean it can.

So, instead of insulting me, give me some realistic possible approaches to this.

I'm just quoting myself here to answer your questions. But let's just agree to disagree and move on.

I'm sorry. When did CoH or WoW get web-based login?
Also, that does NOT fix any of the problems. Just being able to log in to a game from SL does not give you the ability to do any of the things you describe.

Please try again.

I'm still not quite clear on your meaning. You're thinking that you'd go up to an object in SL, and click on it, and then Second Life would quit and it'd start up City of Heroes (for example), and rather than logging into CoH it would know who you were because there would be a link from your SL name to your CoH name stored somewhere?

That would be relatively simple to do, but it wouldn't create any real link between the two characters.

The reason why you can't have building like SL and adventuring together is because they're actually opposite to each other. If your capacity to "do stuff" is limited in some artificial way (such as level), then you can't build as flexibly as you can in SL. If your capacity to "do stuff" isn't limited in an artificial way, then there's no reason to adventure. In fact most of the adventure games and similar on SL are really just groups of people deciding to put artificial limits, socially enforced, on themselves because they think it's more fun that way. You can wear a combat system and "level up" but it's only meaningful because you and the others involved in the combat game have agreed that you'll use only that combat system. There's nothing really just stopping you building yourself a nuclear missile launcher except that the combat group would not respect your victories and would probably throw you out.

Probably the easiest approaches at first would involve games that don't have subscription fees, but are free to play once you own the box ~ like Halflife or Guild Wars rather than subscription mmo's like CoH or WoW.

For Half-life, for example, one could have an object that calls up the Steam URL and enables people within the game to download software that enables them to run a Half-life multiplayer server on their own computer (see e.g. http://storefront.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=getsteamnow)

Then they can host games (and develop mods for them) for their friends in SL to play. They can link their game server url to another object in SL, so that they can invite their friends to their place in SL and everyone can link to the same server and play Halflife together.

Note that the Halflife game would be playing as a separate application.

That is but one example.

If you think SL needs adventure or whatever, you are missing the point.
For starters, SL is already taking over the world just fine without needing to provide frivolous gaming experiences for the small minority of people who care about computer games.
SL is like the web, but in 3D. Shareable online 3D content.
Whatever you could do with a non-online multimedia application you can do better with SL.
Education is a large and growing market for SL development, marketing is another one. Gaming could be next, but certainly not hardcore. There are too many performance issues and complete lack of control over the environment.

I think a lot of us play SL because it permits us to explore our fantasies in a very creative manner. We don't all have the same fantasies, yet there is room for all of us in this world of SL. And we might not see the point of another person's fantasies - yet surely we can all agree that it is wonderful for us all to be able to pursue them, regardless of whether we are interested in them ourselves.

In this thread, I am simply describing one of my fantasies, something I would dearly love to see, and something that I will be pursuing. Some other people may share those fantasies, and enjoy working with me on this project, and that's why I started this thread.

The major problem Poppet is the resources drawn by Second Life: you'd have to log off to run any of the other gaming experiences you describe. An actual solution to the environment your proposing is coming soon albeit through a different venue: Live Anywhere. Microsoft is bringing the Xbox Live platform to the PC and other devices early next year which would allow a common gateway of friends to share messaging and chat solutions and move from environment to evironment. All you'd need to do is produce a simple lobby system and expand from there.

By all means keep making suggestions, and ignore Linden fanboys like Eggy who think 10,000 users online represents "taking over the world". There are more than 20 million people who enjoy gaming, and unlike Second Life, that industry has surpassed most entertainment venues in terms of revenue.