<!-- MHonArc v2.4.4 --> <!--X-Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #288 - 9 msgs --> <!--X-From-R13: "Re. Qng" <pngNernygvzr.arg> --> <!--X-Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 19:45:47 -0800 --> <!--X-Message-Id: 200002231956.NAA69506#sullivan,realtime.net --> <!--X-Content-Type: text/plain --> <!--X-Reference: E12MoLk-0000bi-00#kanga,nu --> <!--X-Head-End--> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> <html> <head> <title>MUD-Dev message, [MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #288 - 9 msgs</title> <!-- meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" --> <link rev="made" href="mailto:cat#realtime,net"> </head> <body background="/backgrounds/paperback.gif" bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000FF" alink="#FF0000" vlink="#006000"> <font size="+4" color="#804040"> <strong><em>MUD-Dev<br>mailing list archive</em></strong> </font> <br> [ <a href="../">Other Periods</a> | <a href="../../">Other mailing lists</a> | <a href="/search.php3">Search</a> ] <br clear=all><hr> <!--X-Body-Begin--> <!--X-User-Header--> <!--X-User-Header-End--> <!--X-TopPNI--> Date: [ <a href="msg00463.html">Previous</a> | <a href="msg00464.html">Next</a> ] Thread: [ <a href="msg00464.html">Previous</a> | <a href="msg00463.html">Next</a> ] Index: [ <A HREF="author.html#00462">Author</A> | <A HREF="#00462">Date</A> | <A HREF="thread.html#00462">Thread</A> ] <!--X-TopPNI-End--> <!--X-MsgBody--> <!--X-Subject-Header-Begin--> <H1>[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #288 - 9 msgs</H1> <HR> <!--X-Subject-Header-End--> <!--X-Head-of-Message--> <UL> <LI><em>To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#kanga,nu">mud-dev#kanga,nu</A></LI> <LI><em>Subject</em>: [MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #288 - 9 msgs</LI> <LI><em>From</em>: "Dr. Cat" <<A HREF="mailto:cat#realtime,net">cat#realtime,net</A>></LI> <LI><em>Date</em>: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 13:56:18 -0600 (CST)</LI> <LI><em>Reply-To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#kanga,nu">mud-dev#kanga,nu</A></LI> <LI><em>Sender</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev-admin#kanga,nu">mud-dev-admin#kanga,nu</A></LI> </UL> <!--X-Head-of-Message-End--> <!--X-Head-Body-Sep-Begin--> <HR> <!--X-Head-Body-Sep-End--> <!--X-Body-of-Message--> <PRE> -- Start of included mail From: Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban#darklock,com> > "Dr. Cat" wrote: > > If you're going to have a limit on your population at all, it should > > be as high as possible. > > Not necessarily. What these worlds *lack* IMHO is a good in-game > explanation of why things on different worlds can't interact. Given > that, this liability could be overcome by simply making it an expected > "feature" of the game world. I don't think it's "overcome", I think it's "masked". Granted, if you're stuck with this disadvantage you should put the best possible face on it. But no cover story is going to change the very real facts that you might have friends on two different servers and be forced to choose which ones you can interact with each time you play, that the total pool of people you might meet and the size and complexities of societies that can form is smaller, etc. etc. Some people might prefer to found 20 small societies rather than one big one. But I'd rather be making that choice deliberately rather than being forced to by limitations in server design or implementation. And I think putting up walls that sometimes cut off friends from each other is generally not good. With a server design that can scale really well, if I want to encourage the development of smaller societies for design purposes, I can do it with any arbitrary set of limitations on movement and interaction between areas, while still allowing SOME contact. Having no ability to provide any contact just gives me the most minimal set of choices possible as a designer. > Distributed processing is Good. I've often toyed with the idea of > independent servers run by independent people, but with players capable > of moving between them transparently... but this creates way too many > "soft" issues that can't really be solved in software. Distribution gooooood. Independent operators baaaaad. Well it's an interesting experiment for the hobbyist mud community, but I think past efforts have shown that there aren't really enough mud admins interested in doing this to get a really huge set of linked worlds going, and I'm not convinced that there's much benefit to doing so other than proving that you can make it work. No, what I'm interested in is a distributed server operated by ONE person/group/company/whatever. The purpose of distributing the processing is to enable the mud to scale huge, with all the machines at the same site, talking to each other through a LAN. That's more efficient than a WAN connection, and you don't have all the issues that arise if you have dozens of different muds trying to have some semblance of consistency, fairness, reliable interconnection, etc. etc. At a really large scale, you may want to have more than one cluster of servers, such as one on each continent or some such arrangement. At that point, I think an approach such as Origin takes of saying the European players are in a separate world from North American players may be the most reasonable solution. Though I am a bit curious about the pros and cons of saying "You can visit this other kingdom, but you'll experience more lag when you're there". Certainly Furcadia has people meeting and making friends from all over the world, which is an important step in reducing the amount of prejudice and war in the world. It's harder to hate and kill a group of people if you actually know some of them personally! I also have a very nice dolphin sculpture that was given to me by a young lady in Austin who's now engaged to a fellow in England that she met on Furcadia. So I guess it's good for something. > > Mind you, I should admit that voice chat changes all the math, and that I > > think voice chat will be ubiquitous and necessary to be a major > > communications app or multiplayer game in the future. > > I would disagree here, because I think it would be rather difficult to > maintain a role that way. I can "talk like a girl" all I want, but if > you heard my voice there is positively no way you'd take me for anything > but a big middle-aged man. (I may only be thirty, but I *sound* a lot > older and bigger.) Most people don't play games to be themselves, and > when I was much younger I adored the way I could act like an adult on a > text-only medium... Most people play Bridge, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Backgammon, Hearts, and various other games entirely for the purpose of being themselves and socializing with other people who are also being themselves. Roleplaying is still a small minority of the game-playing that the human species involves itself in, though I think that percentage will continue to grow. More to the point, playing games is only part of what people play MUDs for, and I think that percentage will decrease as MUDs/VR/whatever reaches more and more of the general public. Even MORE to the point though, most people don't talk to far-away people to roleplay OR to play any type of non-roleplaying-oriented game either. They do it to stay in touch, to make new friends, to socialize. And they want to do it an awful lot more than the stuff people on this list generally talk about. Computer and video games and arcade games are somewhere in the vicinity of a 10 billion dollar a year industry. Television, last I heard, was pulling in around 40 billion a year. Local and long distance telephone services that year, added together, amounted to about 160 billion. That's a pretty hefty hunk of change. The demand for one-on-one conversation with somebody that you already know will probably be provided by things like phones, and a next-generation successor to ICQ. (I'd sure like to be the person that writes that - I think somebody could well become a billionaire if they grab that market with a really good product.) For meeting new people, and for group activities - online parties, chat rooms, and yes, even roleplaying, people will do their talking through something that has mud-like aspects to it in many cases. If a few thousand or a few million people don't like not being able to change their voice, the billions of people wanting voice-enabled apps will still dictate that such apps will exist, and will be the dominant form of muds. When I say "Major communications app" I'm not talking about things as big as my current favorite text mud, which gets 500 players online at once, I'm talking about things like ICQ, which is passing out new account numbers in the sixty-million range now. Yes, text muds will still exist, just as radio still exists. Though I doubt they'll ever be as popular as radio, which has a very easy user interface that most of the six billion people on this planet can handle pretty well. Quite apart from the huge number of people that can't read written text on this earth, typing is a really massive barrier to entry. Of those six billion people, how many of them can type at all? How many of the ones that can have to hunt and peck with excruciating slowness? That covers most of the earth's population already. Of the minority that remain, there's the ones that consider typing to be an unpleasant but necessary nuisance - they'd hardly consider it their preferred form of chatting if they could talk instead. Then there's those that don't mind it so much, but it's taking a noticable amount of mental effort to perform the task, and if they're talking on the phone it's easier, they're more relaxed, and putting more of their attention and energy into conversing rather than a task that requires both physical and mental effort. > It's interesting and > instructive to be someone else for a while, but video and voice would > doom all of that... so I think the benefits of text channels far > outweigh the liabilities. People were playing face to face D&D before the first multiplayer online dungeon games popped up on systems like Plato (and later the first text muds - yes I know, history will always remember MUD as the "first", but being obsessed with computing-history and gaming-history I'm compelled to keep gratuitously mentioning that there were earlier games). I suspect that the majority of roleplaying is still done face to face, sitting around a table. There's also people that do live action roleplaying games, getting around the voice and the "simulated video" of seeing the people you're playing with, somehow. Yes, people who prefer all text will continue to use it as they do now. Some people will continue roleplaying on IRC even, rather than using a more full-featured MUD. I asked a friend recently, someone who fell in love over IRC, why he doesn't prefer having "sets and costumes" on a social mud instead. He explained that he uses IRC because it's simple, and the MUCK I use was too much work to figure out. I think for most people ease of use is far more important than having the maximum amount of expressive power. Though I'm working hard on trying to develop tools that will alow people to be more expressive while still being pretty darn easy. It's a tough thing to accomplish. -- Start of included mail From: Ola Fosheim [Gr_stad] <olag#ifi,uio.no> > Are you by "dead reckoning" suggesting implementing all the physics in > the client? In a word, no. I'm a big fan of server-based logic for security. What I'm thinking of is a solution where the clients are continuing to estimate the positions of things based on the last known information, and the server is modeling not only the authoritative model, but the dead reckoning models of the various clients (or at least the parts that matter, the close-together people/vehicles/whatever). Decisions on when to send a packet aren't based on "every N clock ticks", but on looking at the amount of error the server expects the client to have, and whether it's over the acceptable threshhold - or is expected to be over that threshhold by one typical ping-time in the future. For example, a server might think "This player thinks this rival player's hovercraft is 3 inches to the left of where it really is, and that's ok. I'm expecting I can usually get packets to him in 400 milliseconds, and by then he'll be off by about 5 inches, and that's ok too. But in two seconds he'll cross over my threshhold of 12 inches inaccuracy in positioning of rival hovercrafts, so I'd better send him a packet in 1.6 seconds or sooner". You can mess around with using assumptions closer to worst-case latency rather than average, assuming the inaccuracy is based not on the very latest packet you sent to the client but the one before, to be more resistant to dropped packets, etc. Anyway, the Battletech and Red Planet games at Virtual World Entertainment were moved to a scheme like this, and my friend that coded it told me it dropped the bandwidth requirements between the cockpits far more than he was expecting. Often they could wait five seconds or more between sending packets, rather than sending a constant stream of "Hey, this guy is almost exactly where you already think he is" information. This was of a little benefit on a LAN that was perhaps already getting a bit saturated - and provided lower latency for the packets that really mattered, rather than potentially getting ethernet collisions with unimportant data. But it also dropped the bandwidth down to where they could very easily run games between centers in different cities over their private WAN, without requiring a great deal of bandwidth either. I do think they may have been running a peer to peer architecture in their case, by the way, I don't remember for sure. But there are cases where that architecture may be more appropriate than client/server - in their centers all the hardware was owned and controlled by them, so hacked client software wasn't an issue. > Competing with the big telecoms is not a good idea. They have the > skills, the technology, the money and own the infrastructure. You could have said the same of the first companies to offer cellular phones, companies like MCI and Sprint that started competing with AT&T in the long distance market, or ICQ (which lets you send a voice message to another user after all, and whose founders sold the company to AOL for over three hundred million dollars). I'd be very content to carve out a hundred million dollar obscure niche in a hundred billion dollar market, or to start developing a technology way ahead of the big telecoms and then sell the company to them a few years later when they decide they want to get in, and that it's a better strategy to buy out a company than to develop the technology from scratch. I can accept "I'm too busy with other innovations" or "I wouldn't enjoy doing this" as excuses for me to stay out of a field, but "there are huge companies in it" isn't going to necessarily persuade me there's nothing I can accomplish. (In some industries it would, sure. You wouldn't see me trying to break into any commodity industries like food or toothpaste or toilet paper, I have no business being there.) -- Start of included mail From: "Justin Rogers" <justin#mlstoday,com> > Text to speech is becoming quite a technology nowadays and speech > to > text is even more inevitable than text to speech is. So the option > could be > inline to transfer the speech to text for command purposes and also to > use > that generated text to be put through a text to speech processor where > the > user can choose his voice. Text to speech and speech to text both make errors. A regular speech to speech conversation like a telephone call introduces no errors, usually. For the vast majoroity of users, I don't think there are any benefits to going through speech to text and/or text to speech when chatting with other humans that would outweigh the downside of the added errors. Also you lose all the nuances of inflection and mood that a person puts into their voice. Not to mention, when two people are *not* roleplaying and want to hear each other exactly as they sound, there's sentimental value in the fact that it sounds exactly like them. I'm not sure how prevalent text to speech and speech to text will be for various other applications. But for chat it'll be pretty rare, I'm confident, if anyone uses it that way at all. -- Start of included mail From: "John Bertoglio" <jb#pulsepoll,com> > Message: 8 > Reply-To: <jb#pulsepoll,com> > To: <mud-dev#kanga,nu> > Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] voice vs. text > Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 16:58:53 -0800 > Importance: Normal > Reply-To: mud-dev#kanga,nu [Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...] > > > Matthew Mihaly > > Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2000 11:44 AM > > > > <<much cut>> > > >I don't know that much about the > > technology, but it seems to me that the client could have some sort of > > capacity to alter the sound of your voice, no? > > In the early renditions this will be an included "feature" because of the > low quality of sound. But it will quickly get better. Bear in mind that a > 6-8k bandwidth is all that is required for voice quality sound. My son would > happily give up 8k of our 768k pipe to be able to talk to his teammates in > Counterstrike. Being digital, it would be easy to make everyone sound like > James Earl Jones with preprocessing done by the client. Someone already mentioned Voxware & the fact that they've experimented with Voice Fonts - they're the leader in that as far as I know, and they may well have decided not to pursue it any more. I will just add that Microsoft bought out Battlecom - <A HREF="http://www.battlecom.com">http://www.battlecom.com</A> - and will be building it into DirectX 8. So there'll be more voice-chat enabled apps springing up like crazy, and people like me can make them without re-inventing or licensing the technology. And Battlecom had licensed Voxware, so Microsoft may well be inheriting that and providing Voxware based chat capability in Windows as standard. I don't know for sure if they will though, and I don't know if Battlecom's license included Voice Fonts. *-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------* Dr. Cat / Dragon's Eye Productions || Free alpha test: *-------------------------------------------** <A HREF="http://www.bga.com/furcadia">http://www.bga.com/furcadia</A> Furcadia - a graphic mud for PCs! || Let your imagination soar! *-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------* _______________________________________________ MUD-Dev maillist - MUD-Dev#kanga,nu <A HREF="http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev">http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev</A> </PRE> <!--X-Body-of-Message-End--> <!--X-MsgBody-End--> <!--X-Follow-Ups--> <HR> <!--X-Follow-Ups-End--> <!--X-References--> <!--X-References-End--> <!--X-BotPNI--> <UL> <LI>Prev by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00463.html">[MUD-Dev] Distribution</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00464.html">[MUD-Dev] (fwd) Re: Commercial-use Restrictions on Code Bases (was: help me find 100% free graphical mud)</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Prev by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00464.html">[MUD-Dev] (fwd) Re: Commercial-use Restrictions on Code Bases (was: help me find 100% free graphical mud)</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00463.html">[MUD-Dev] Distribution</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Index(es): <UL> <LI><A HREF="index.html#00462"><STRONG>Date</STRONG></A></LI> <LI><A HREF="thread.html#00462"><STRONG>Thread</STRONG></A></LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> <!--X-BotPNI-End--> <!--X-User-Footer--> <!--X-User-Footer-End--> <ul><li>Thread context: <BLOCKQUOTE><UL> <LI><STRONG>RE: [MUD-Dev] [Off-topic] GDC-2000</STRONG>, <EM>(continued)</EM> <ul compact> <LI><strong><A NAME="00478" HREF="msg00478.html">RE: [MUD-Dev] [Off-topic] GDC-2000</A></strong>, Justin Lockshaw <a href="mailto:jlockshaw#signio,com">jlockshaw#signio,com</a>, Sat 26 Feb 2000, 18:38 GMT </LI> </ul> </LI> <LI><strong><A NAME="00471" HREF="msg00471.html">[MUD-Dev] player persistence</A></strong>, Matthew Mihaly <a href="mailto:diablo#best,com">diablo#best,com</a>, Fri 25 Feb 2000, 06:15 GMT <LI><strong><A NAME="00465" HREF="msg00465.html">[MUD-Dev] (fwd) ADMIN: "A Classification Of Muds" [was 'In defence of stock muds...']</A></strong>, J C Lawrence <a href="mailto:claw#kanga,nu">claw#kanga,nu</a>, Thu 24 Feb 2000, 03:54 GMT <LI><strong><A NAME="00464" HREF="msg00464.html">[MUD-Dev] (fwd) Re: Commercial-use Restrictions on Code Bases (was: help me find 100% free graphical mud)</A></strong>, J C Lawrence <a href="mailto:claw#kanga,nu">claw#kanga,nu</a>, Thu 24 Feb 2000, 03:50 GMT <LI><strong><A NAME="00462" HREF="msg00462.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #288 - 9 msgs</A></strong>, Dr. Cat <a href="mailto:cat#realtime,net">cat#realtime,net</a>, Thu 24 Feb 2000, 03:45 GMT <LI><strong><A NAME="00463" HREF="msg00463.html">[MUD-Dev] Distribution</A></strong>, Geir Harald Hansen <a href="mailto:geirhans#ifi,uio.no">geirhans#ifi,uio.no</a>, Thu 24 Feb 2000, 03:45 GMT <LI><strong><A NAME="00459" HREF="msg00459.html">RE: [MUD-Dev] Next gen MUD wishlist</A></strong>, Sellers, Michael <a href="mailto:MSellers#maxis,com">MSellers#maxis,com</a>, Wed 23 Feb 2000, 18:53 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00460" HREF="msg00460.html">RE: [MUD-Dev] Next gen MUD wishlist</A></strong>, adam <a href="mailto:adam#treyarch,com">adam#treyarch,com</a>, Thu 24 Feb 2000, 03:45 GMT </LI> </UL> </LI> <LI><strong><A NAME="00454" HREF="msg00454.html">[MUD-Dev] Newbies</A></strong>, Johan J Ingles-le Nobel <a href="mailto:xvf61#dial,pipex.com">xvf61#dial,pipex.com</a>, Tue 22 Feb 2000, 22:56 GMT </LI> </UL></BLOCKQUOTE> </ul> <hr> <center> [ <a href="../">Other Periods</a> | <a href="../../">Other mailing lists</a> | <a href="/search.php3">Search</a> ] </center> <hr> </body> </html>