While I'm def excited about this game, when I thought about it, how is this not just the second half of Second Life by Linden Labs? Second Life already offers an MMO with object creation (Minecraft) and scripting (0x10c). While the sci-fi story line is more appealing to me, the concept of building thing and coding their workings in a 3D MMO doesn't seem novel to me... Unless I completely misunderstood something.
Notch's next game is an MMO
131–140 of 264 posts
Re: Notch's next game is an MMO
#132Re: Notch's next game is an MMO
#133"We are going to emulate all computers and physics even when players aren't logged in." I built a prototype trying to do something similar, inspired by a text-based RTS/MMO that kept running while you were asleep. For me this was an unrealistic goal, if the simulations are complex enough you can't operate at a price point users will pay for. Even if you can, because the game is now CPU bound, far less players fit on…
If OnLive is viable, I don't see why this shouldn't be.
Re: Notch's next game is an MMO
#134I like the way he explains the 'too long in stasis' problem - they should call the game 'Oops'....
Re: Notch's next game is an MMO
#135I was a developer for the ill-fated Perpetual Entertainment's Star Trek Online MMO (which was later sold and successfully launched by Cryptic Studios). Star Trek Online's #1 most common feature request from beta testers was "ship interiors." Players didn't want to play "WoW in Spaaaace " game. They wanted to play "The Sims meet Star Trek" and relive their favorite Star Trek TV episodes. That sounds like a pretty cool…
This is the core problem with MMO design in general. Everyone basically wants to make WoW (or EQ, or Diku MUD...) reskinned (or not) when there are a variety of other game designs that might not be billion dollar games, but could be very strong niches. A real Star Trek MMO (not WoW in space, or EVE even) is one of those niches.
Re: Notch's next game is an MMO
#136Reminds me of an MMO version of SunDog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy).
Re: Notch's next game is an MMO
#137Wouldn't it just be simpler to use an x86 CPU and qemu? Or a sandbox'ed process, etc, etc. I'm sort of thinking that if you used an x86 CPU there are so many existing tools that could be used for it instead of having to write new compilers, etc.
That would be incredibly slow if you wanted to run more than a handful of CPUs...
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Re: Notch's next game is an MMO
#138"We are going to emulate all computers and physics even when players aren't logged in." I built a prototype trying to do something similar, inspired by a text-based RTS/MMO that kept running while you were asleep. For me this was an unrealistic goal, if the simulations are complex enough you can't operate at a price point users will pay for. Even if you can, because the game is now CPU bound, far less players fit on…
Really? Given what Notch plans (2,000 DCPUs per machine - which is certainly doable), let's assume he's running a high-cpu instance (large) at Amazon for those 2,000 DCPUs. That's $500 per month for the machine. If he can't get that much money out of 2,000 players, he's doing it wrong.
Assuming you allow for eventual instead of atomic consistency, and allow for loss of CPU for several seconds if an instance goes kablooey, the load distribution is really not that hard. (And your spaceship really doesn't need five 9's. It's a game, so just blame it on "an ion storm". Or "a space monster" if that floats your boat ;)
Partitioning does not need to be too clever if you can constrain the number of ships per region - certainly something you can impose via game design.
Lag only matters if you interact twitch based. Notch's plans lend themselves to indirect agency via the simulated ship's computer instead, so if everybody perceives the world as it was a few seconds ago, not much is lost.
It's certainly a doable task. Notch's mind is in the right place to pull it off. No doubt, it'll be hard - but it'll be interesting to see what he comes up with.
Re: Notch's next game is an MMO
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not an expert in this but can't many physics calculations now be offloaded to modern GPUs which are designed to parallelize much more neatly?
Physics/vector math aren't getting off-loaded, a virtualized 16 bit processor is.
What would it take for the average i5 or i7 to virtualize a 16bit processor? Could it run on a separate thread from the main game?
Could you run part of your MMO server work as a distributed-computing setup on client PCs? (but how would you get that working in real time?)
Maybe the players that are online at a particular time could be doing some of the extra processing - the game client could run 1 or 2 extra 16-bit virtualizers in the background, along with the virtualizer for the player's own 16-bit cpu and the game thread. So 4 threads running on 4 separate cores.
Re: Notch's next game is an MMO
#140I was a developer for the ill-fated Perpetual Entertainment's Star Trek Online MMO (which was later sold and successfully launched by Cryptic Studios). Star Trek Online's #1 most common feature request from beta testers was "ship interiors." Players didn't want to play "WoW in Spaaaace " game. They wanted to play "The Sims meet Star Trek" and relive their favorite Star Trek TV episodes. That sounds like a pretty cool…
This is the one thing stopping me from reaching 100% rabid-fanboy-mode about this news. We already have Quake in Space, WoW in Space, and Spreadsheets in Space: I hope this doesn't turn out to be "Assembly Programming in Space". This quote gave me hope: > A cloaking field, for example, might require almost all the power from the generator, forcing you to turn off all computers and dim all lights in order to successfu…
That would be pretty awesome. To have different sizes of ships that require different amounts of crew members.
To have a big ship, you'll need lots of friends to perform all the jobs, and you can take shifts in flying the ship (or set it to autopilot) or cleaning the space showers.