Gamasutra – GameTap Shuttering Myst Online: Uru Live
It lives, then it dies, then it lives again, then it dies again…
“The decision was a very difficult one and was made for business reasons…”
One wonders what the minimum sustainable population of paying users is for an MMO these days, and why the overhead seems to have gotten so high.
MMO gold trading akin to prostitution, says RuneScape’s Jele // GamesIndustry.biz
The logic given is that it isn’t the activity that causes the problems, but the organized crime that builds up around it. Of course, the opens the question of whether legalization helps or not… And at the end of the article, there’s the oft-heard comment “and if the game were fun enough, this wouldn’t happen” — something I increasingly disagree with.
I had a headache today. Fell asleep multiple times. My son’s got a fever too, has had for a few days. Blah. I’m ready for illness to stop going ’round. Anyway, caught intermittent pieces of a documentary on the making of Herbie Hancock’s Possibilities CD. And the experience of drowsing off the music while headachy got me this:
Herbie Hancock on a Headache
The thundundering of the duhduhdurums,
The lashing of the cymbal crasharashing.
Piano diddledaddle flatting fives and nattering,
The bass boom thrumming thump thrump on.
Play the drum head, pound that skin,
Send jolts of timbre dazzle down my spine.
Blow my mind, bounce the skull, a countercoup,
Ivories xylophoning tickles in a line.
But the music, music, music ocean sloshing close,
Washing-whipping, whirl-a-looping, a vortex
Vast and varied with snatches of a song;
In fugue I fade before too long, the scribbled charts
Rocking me to sleep, eleventh for a pillow,
The tang and ride a blanket muffling me to dark.
Edit: in case it wasn’t clear — this was a “sneak preview” sort of thing; we are not live to the public, it was just for a few hours. 🙂
Well, we didn’t make a big deal about it, but Metaplace has now officially been played by actual players, and not alpha testers. Today we did a dev chat using Metaplace itself as the platform for the IRC-like text chat, and in the middle of it we also showed off a little bit of a more graphical space with avatars. It was a chance to both talk to folks and also to shove a high number of people at the server and client, including guest logins, to try to stress things a bit.
It all went spectacularly well, too. We expected things to blow up, but nothing did. Extremely low CPU usage, even with over 80 simple avatars walking around and chatting in one relatively small space (small enough that there was no real network culling going on). That’s a decent achievement for any virtual world system. 🙂 Bandwidth was a bit high, but we know things to work on there that are easy big gains. Seems like fairly few weird browser issues — which is easily the biggest bugaboo with doing something so Web-based. I have seen that a few folks failed to get in at all, and we’ll try to track down why…
We’ll be posting the official chat log with our next blog post, probably. But in the meantime, a few of the VW-centric news sites were in:
Our friends over at the Electric Sheep were also on hand. And of course, there’s blogs by bunches of folks who attended, like TBowl, Feeding Change, Oh No, Aliens!, Cooking XP, and Dr. Offset’s. Edit: Dr. Offset’s has a little bit more, and there’s Emergent Future’s take here.
A couple of those have pics of the (brief) graphical demo. Everyone’s only one avatar… we’ll have to save character customization for another day. 😉
Half dev chat, half stress test. 🙂 It’ll be at the Metaplace website, so watch there for the link to pop up very shortly.
