Yoicks! It's another virtual world

This is interesting... P2P virtual World...

http://www.theage.com.au/news/biztech/yoicks-its-another-virtual-world/2007/02/26/1172338546871.html

Zen

Interesting, but I gotta see the product before I form an opinion.

Peer-to-peer? Great idea until the owner of the dance floor crashes in the middle of an event. I can't see it working.

Kam

I wonder how they handle secure transactions. Will they have an in world currency? Will you have your inventory were ever you go? Will you be able to give something to someone that is not copyable, transfer, or whatever other properties? And the biggest question, will people use it?

Will just have to see what the details of it are at a later date it seems. They spent most of the time saying what they 'want' to have vs disapointments in SL. Anyone attempting to create a virtual world is brave, will be interesting to see what that one becomes.

Nay sayers................hahahahhahahaha. Sounds like something I would leave SL for if only 3/4 of what is promised is true. Someone promising more stability, control over what one might or might not have to deal with in world and noting the problems of other social networks and virtual worlds gets my attention right off the bat. Wonder if they have joined SL and visited the forums and actually read our rants? Sounds like it to me.

Now if they will just make sure customer service has the priority it deserves. We'll see "sometime this year" Well, maybe.

intersting indeed.......I liked his remark about Kazaa ahahahhah

If they intend to be a global player, I find their use of the word "Outback" rather curious. And I also believe that they have bigger challenges than Linden Lab, with this p2p approach. My money and faith stays with Second Life.

Interesting...if I understand it correctly a user is able to build his or her 'outback' on their own machine and then invite people in? That would be nice and I'd probably use it for certain things if it looks especially good but in reality it sounds more like Moove or even just a ramped-up version of IMVU.

Also, did it mention user-created content? Sure, you can make a game look better and have better performance if the software isn't constantly looking for a huge number of potential changes to which it needs to react. If the users are supplied with a library of items and those will be the only items ever seen in the game sure, you've made it look prettier and perform better but at the cost of customizable content.

My other concern is that he says it's even more simple than Second Life...because his kids couldn't even figure out how to move in SL. Firstly, while there is certainly a learning curve in SL it's not particularly difficult to get the hang of the basics. Like walking about which, I'll point out, uses the exact same keys as WoW and certainly isn't rocket science. So a game dumbed down for people who couldn't figure out WASD or the even more obvious arrow keys makes me wary.

Secondly, his mention of children makes me wonder who the actual target market will be. Personally I like the fact that SL is geared more for adult and that I often find out I'm talking to people near my own age. If he wants to make a game that grade schoolers can play then that's great (though a legal nightmare)! But it won't be much competition for anything that already exists.

If it turns out that the article was mere poor reporting (sadly, quite possible) and the game is absolutely fantastic then I suppose I'll eat my words. But until I'm proved wrong I'm not laying much hope on this project. I mean goodness...they couldn't even provide a screenshot?

Honestly, I do hope someone comes up with some sort of competition to SL. It's healthy, it gets people moving. I'm also weird in that I would LOVE to see a SL type game but with cute, cartoony avatars...not as cutsey as, say, the upcoming MySims for the Wii but geared more for the folks who prefer interacting with less realistic avatars. Alas, I suspect that the lack of 'sexy' factor in such a game would make it fail miserably. I am left dreaming.

That is very interesting. It would seem the man with a lot of influence in this project, Randal Leeb-du Toit, is keeping Second Life in mind to make this world a force to be considered in online, virtual games. He compares Outback Online to Second Life many times, and he mentions various ways to make this new world better. It's definitely something I will be watching; but in the future, I may want to get the best of both worlds.

I'm not so sure about the P2P either, for various reasons. One being as pointed out earlier... it's great until the person that owns the dance floor crashes. Also, virus problem in the making? Imagine that if Norton has a field day with Second Life, what it'd be like with a P2P.

I wonder how much thought they actually put into it, rather than just trying to make it 'What Second Life isn't.'

Peer-to-peer works on the principle that there is no inherent cost in sending data back and forth. There are plenty of European ISPs who have a cap on the amount of downstream/upstream a month, linked directly to the subscription price. In some cases, like mine, upstream is handled differently from downsteam (1€ per extra Gb down, 1€ per extra 200Mb up) and peer-to-peer will never be a viable solution in those cases.

It doesn't really matter all that much to me, but if LL spends all that effort to make a Windows/Mac/Linux client I'd guess it's because there is the userbase to make it worthwhile.

And for something that has apparantly been hyped about in the past week, I find it very odd that there isn't even a single teaser screenshot (or a decent site).

Several years of development, all on the down low, could be something big. The Sims is big. There is big. Doesn't really smell like something that will be quite on the same footing as Second Life. But there is room in this arena for competition, to be sure.

Strickly hype, 100% BS Tall Promises, (SL is a town We are Rome) hardly crediable. Absolutely no screenshots, Outback online is a Austrailian website promoting what else, the Outback, this is most likely a hoax.
Kaaza was mentioned, aren these the guys that are like the kings of piracy, dont seem to me that they would be protecting intellectual rights very well

IIRC, Second Life is on it's third name at the moment.

I think if they are watching what the people are unhappy about here and are making vast improvements upon it then it will be something big. At the very least, something people go to try when they get bored of SL or arent happy with the service. Compitition is a great incentive to get a company to improve its services *hint hint to sl maybe*

If a Second Life sim crashes then doesn't same thing happen?


If anything, I think Outback will probably be more stable overall. If the person with the dancefloor crashes, then the client will download it from somebody else in the world.

So if you have 10 people already in a world and you were to enter that world. Those 10 people would act as your server and your client will download the 3D data from them. You will then become a server to the next person that enters the world.

The biggest problem will be when you first open your world. If several people try to enter at once, then your client will have to try and feed them all with the world's data.

Oh, I won't argue about SL NEEDING competition. It needs it and badly. It's just that the report on it was more aimed at being, "We're gonna make this everything SL isn't." Are they just going to define it by SL standards or set their own?

Eh, wait and see what it's like, I guess. It'd be nice if it does become competition!

Another problem is that people wont join a virtual world that doesn't have content and yet content creators wont join a virtual world that doesn't have people. So it's not just about the code.

It took years to build up the population of Second Life, and it isn't that great really. My theory is that people come here because people come here.


Although to be fair, the avatars in Second Life are still ahead of their time. So I do think they've contributed alot to the success of SL. So much so, that if Outback doesn't haven't great customizable avatars then they may as well just forget it. I've not heard a single word about the avatar technology. So let's not get too hopeful

I would like to be part of a new frontier and such and yes the avatars have to be really super duper customizable or its just drab

second life is working not well but so far its the best there is because of its "newness" if they do a good job i think content creators will take a look I know I will I always look at new stuff just to see what's under the hood

Ok, Outback Online is P2p, meaning Everything i have, or need is on My computer.
Two Questions;

A) If my computer Borks completely what happens to everything i've spent Weeks/Months generating for Myself? (Assuming i'm one of those people who doesn't do Regular Monthly Back-Ups of my software).

B) Since the whole Package is on my System (No central server like TSO) I assume it would not be terribly difficult for those persons More gifted with programming skills to Tweak the program a Little and Give themselves an Obscene advantage over everyone else in the game in terms of Tools, and resources, What is to prevent this?

Angel.

Sounds interesting, even if it's still in the vaporware stage....

The p2p model will certainly appeal to a subset of SL's user-base...
I doubt I'm one of them.

Can't blame them for no screenshots, some pre-release teams get very paranoid about who they let see what.


The immediate challenges will be fun to watch shake out:

How many guests can an 'outback' support over someone's cable modem or dsl line before the lag becomes intolerable? 3? 5?


I'm surprized no one (here) has complained: "They're using a blog as their communications tool!?! Oh woe.. they're repeating SL's mistakes already!" (or did someone already and I missed it? )


10,000 avatars in a single island? (which I take to mean: within eye sight of each other and able to interact in real time) ... Not a chance. I'll deny that's possible using today's technology until I see it working with my own eyes.

"Granular age controls" .... which rely on ... credit card? Driver's licences? Who gets to see an explorer's credentials and who doesn't? Is my data being sent to some malicious hacker's "outback" server that I stumbled into by mistake?

What about content ownership? Is everything copy-lefted? If my avatar has custom content and I stroll into someone else's outback area... can they reproduce my proprietary content?

Lots of issues... it will be very interesting to see how they tackle them.

--
(obligatory naggy reminder... this thread probably doesn't belong in Resident Answers. Sorry. I had to. )

Figuring out how to walk is easy if you're not suffering from lag. Flying takes a bit more practice, but it's still not too tough. If you ARE suffering from lag, however, it can be a major challenge; the unresponsiveness of the client makes it a lot harder. Moving when your client is humming along at 20fps is easy, but when it's struggling to reach 2fps, it's a different story entirely.

Unfortunately, brand-new users are typically the worst lag sufferers for two reasons; they haven't yet upgraded their computers for optimal SL performance (the average system can get a big boost from a new video card and/or more RAM), and they spend lots of time in very busy areas. Orientation Island, Help Island, the Welcome Areas, and new resident havens like The Shelter are some of the highest lag areas in SL. Or the new resident looks up Popular Places and visits the high-traffic clubs and casinos; lagfests again.

I wonder to what extent the compution tasks will be distributed. There are systems for distributed processing like the SETI search program.

He should come up with a half decent name for his "virtual world" before he goes around claiming such "innovations". I personally wouldn't even play the game just because his name sounds like something a 3 year old would come up with...