Mailbag: marriages, links, China…

Hi Raph: I am not sure if I’ve ever thanked you in my visits to your site before or when you had your old site up…so here goes now! I met my husband in Ultima Online in 2001. We are still together – in fact he made me his RL wife two weeks ago in Las Vegas with our family present to give our blessings. (Had a blast – wish you were there!) So, I don’t know really, how involved you were with UO. Richard Garriott also received my thanks but hasn’t written back yet. He’s probably busy with his Tablula Rasa (which i didn’t like at all SHHHH!). Anyway…thank you for creating that world and naming a shard “Catskills.” As fate would have it thats the place we both chose and there we met. HAIL RAPH! *hugs* Thank you for bringing us together!

Well, congratulations! And take that, everyone who thought that Catskills was nothing more than an iniquitous den of PKers. 😉 Though I suppose that by 2001, it wasn’t anymore. And for what it’s worth, I am sure that Richard would offer his congratulations as well.

Man oh man, I’ve been recommending A Theory of Fun to my friends, but now I’m going to stop doing that. Your book sells for $78 on Amazon.com! I can’t turn people on to your book in good conscience anymore. Will it get another printing?

We’re working on resolving this. 🙂

EA sports games being made custom and used to train college quarterbacks how to read defenses. The idea of picturing things in your head first (from video games), then training from that knowledge is something I believe we’ve discussed before on your blog.

Yes indeed. Visualization of this sort is common in sports; seeing it via videogames is interesting and fresh, I think. Most of the exercises athletes do in thosese terms tend to be mostly mental, I believe.

sir: you don’t know me. i lurked on muddev for a goodly portion of its existence. i was just hoping maybe you or one of your frequent visitors might remember a specific mud code base that was mentioned in a post on muddev. i’ve looked through the archives and can’t for the life of me find it. probably just need the name of it. it was most interesting just to watch. the mobs had the ability to develop the area around their home base, they grew and multiplied, and they belonged to factions, which occasionally warred against each other. it was written mostly as an ecology experiment. if you know the name, or remember the post, please let me know. if not, oh well. i shoulda backed it up when i had it. thank you for your time.

I do believe you are thinking of GenMUD by John Arras.

Do you get a lot of hits from China? I’m curious to see which websites in the U.S. (or N. America or Europe for that matter) get the most hits from China. Do you know? I enjoy you blog! Steve

China ranks 9th for me. In December, it looked like this accoridng to AwStats (second number is hits):

United States 279304 1734883 41.61 GB
Unknown ip 27183 89347 3.27 GB
European country eu 14655 82205 2.56 GB
Great Britain gb 12000 88138 1.81 GB
Canada ca 6851 68306 1.67 GB
Australia au 5565 41375 1.37 GB
Germany de 3061 17218 433.38 MB
Russian Federation ru 2646 4220 75.04 MB
China cn 2354 5852 395.13 MB
Netherlands nl 1697 12169 341.62 MB

Raph, I’m curious to know how well the “Advanced Character” program and the like (gender changes et al) are doing for UO. I would imagine that they would be a revenue stream that wouldn’t be totally insignificant. As long as I’m emailing you, I’m going to shamelessly plug my bad writing in the form of my blog. It’s a great insomnia cure! Thanks. Richard

I have no idea how these programs are doing. But given the relatively low cost they entail for a developer or publisher, I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t be profitable.

Hi Raph, I’ve just opened the Game AI Forums was wondering if you could mention it on your blog when you get the chance. A few months ago, I relaunched AiGameDev.com as a blog and it’s been quite an experience — even compared to my time served as an AI programming slave at Rockstar 🙂 Anyway, thanks for your time. Looking forward to seeing MetaPlace in action! Regards, Alex

Glad to!