What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned? • Hacker News Board

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#31

Post by cypher543 » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 3:36 PM UTC

drpancake wrote: post #30

cypher543 wrote: post #5

It's too bad almost none of the old VRML communities still exist. I wonder if there are backups of CyberTown worlds floating around somewhere...

I learned a lot from Cybertown back in the day. Hiring staff, advertising my block. I learned HTML and CSS so that I could style my block's message board and that eventually led to what I'm doing now, 14 years later. Nobody knows you're twelve years old in a virtual world. I think at one point I was head of the city's night club.

CT was one of my biggest inspirations, as well.

There are still copies of Blaxxun Community Server out there[1], so it would be great if someone could get their hands on the original world files somehow. I also tracked down the source code for an early version of the Blaxxun Contact browser plugin and uploaded it to GitHub[2]. Unfortunately, it's old enough that it doesn't include any of the community features.

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/multi-user-worlds/downloads/detail...

[2]: https://github.com/docbrown/blaxxun-cc3d

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#32

Post by cypher543 » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 4:16 PM UTC

angersock wrote: post #6

cypher543 wrote: post #5

It's too bad almost none of the old VRML communities still exist. I wonder if there are backups of CyberTown worlds floating around somewhere...

Active worlds! Apparently it got overrun with terrible people before it went away. It used to be so fun just building things. :(

I think AW is still online, although I imagine it's pretty empty by now. It became free in 2013.

https://www.activeworlds.com

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#33

Post by jarxg » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 4:37 PM UTC

sdrothrock wrote: post #16

tkiley wrote: post #7

When I was eleven years old, I discovered a star wars themed lpmud. Mudding led to creating, which led to mudlib hacking, which led to software development. I still get goosebumps when I think about the impact that community had on my life. MUDs tended to be free to play and were run by unix hippies. The line between playing and coders was thin and easily crossed; playing the game led almost inevitably to understandi…

> I feel sorry for today's generation of gamers, since there is a much larger wall between playing and creating these days. Sometimes that wall isn't as high as it seems and as long as people know that, they can still break in. For example, Minecraft (which is mentioned in another comment) has a pretty good ecosystem of mods and plugins that you can look at the raw code for, twiddle with, change, etc. I could easily…

Same with Garry's Mod. It even has it's own Lua editor included and the things you can do with the Wire MOD are just crazy.

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#34

Post by mordocai » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 5:12 PM UTC

zcdziura wrote: post #10

The MUD featured in this article, Achaea, I used to play as well way back in the day. I moved on to its sister game, Lusternia, where I met quite a few friends which I still remain in contact with to this day. It's a shame how modern games don't even come close to the amount of immersion simple text-based games offer. Even popular MMOs don't even scratch the surface on the amount of connection I felt towards these un…

I just started playing one of its sister games again this week, Aetolia. http://www.aetolia.com

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#35

Post by bincat » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 5:17 PM UTC

tkiley wrote: post #26

bincat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KoBra?

Heh, yep. Good times.

It's surreal to realize that I played KoBra 20 years ago. I still log in at times and keep in touch with a friend who I knew then.

I wish MUDs would have done better because interactive text games would provide much needed variety for brains that the currently graphics dominated games.

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#36

Post by araes » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 5:36 PM UTC

tkiley wrote: post #7

When I was eleven years old, I discovered a star wars themed lpmud. Mudding led to creating, which led to mudlib hacking, which led to software development. I still get goosebumps when I think about the impact that community had on my life. MUDs tended to be free to play and were run by unix hippies. The line between playing and coders was thin and easily crossed; playing the game led almost inevitably to understandi…

I'm sometimes surprised that this model of userbase generated code and content hasn't caught on more with modern MMORPGs. An MMO where the players could graduate to creating their own areas with player voting for the best creations could potentially be killer.

It seems like the big developers are willing to a degree (HUD coding, add-ons, interface wrappers) but not direct creation of content. Admittedly, its a lot of modularity and tools you'd need to both build into the main game, and find a way to make intuitively accessible to your players. But, that would probably drive some neat language development as well, since you'd either need to require they learn something like Lua or Python, or develop a very smooth way to write valid in-game code.

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#37

Post by leanthonyrn » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 5:59 PM UTC

Could SL world data be used in other FPS games such as TF2, Destiny, and Unreal tournament? Just place the characters in this space for random battles in an ever changing VR space. This would allow for endless reply value and use interesting use of old creations.

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#38

Post by saraid216 » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 6:20 PM UTC

I've always preferred to look upon the death of a virtual world with this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWiRetxeviw

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#39

Post by lostcolony » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 6:27 PM UTC

araes wrote: post #36

tkiley wrote: post #7

When I was eleven years old, I discovered a star wars themed lpmud. Mudding led to creating, which led to mudlib hacking, which led to software development. I still get goosebumps when I think about the impact that community had on my life. MUDs tended to be free to play and were run by unix hippies. The line between playing and coders was thin and easily crossed; playing the game led almost inevitably to understandi…

I'm sometimes surprised that this model of userbase generated code and content hasn't caught on more with modern MMORPGs. An MMO where the players could graduate to creating their own areas with player voting for the best creations could potentially be killer. It seems like the big developers are willing to a degree (HUD coding, add-ons, interface wrappers) but not direct creation of content. Admittedly, its a lot of…

I don't think you can have players voting. At least, not being the final arbiters of what gets included.

If you open up everything for players to code with, you need the devs to vet it, else you open up people creating exploits, opening up, say, tier 9 equipment for defeating a tier 1 level boss, or similar, and players may vote to allow such things even though it would lessen their enjoyment, and break the longevity of the game (thereby also reducing subscription profits).

Now, create a sandbox server, allow limited betas of content (so as to avoid everyone already being familiar with it if you adopt it), give the players a place to give feedback, but leave it to the devs to ensure it's balanced, the lore is consistent, etc, and you're onto something; that would be really cool.

Re: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

#40

Post by CodeGlitch » Mon, Jul 14, 2014, 7:28 PM UTC

I honestly think that the up and coming VR 'revolution' with Oculus Rift, etc is kind of the wrong way to look at immersion. We already have a way to provide total immersion to a player - in the form of text. It speaks directly to the brain - with none of the motion tracking / headsets nonsense.

Words FTW :)