MMO – Ciaran Laval

November 6, 2015

Can Virtual World Ventures Learn Anything From Blizzcon?

Blizzcon 2015 has started, a celebration of all things Blizzard related, including games and a movie. The opening ceremony was broadcast free to watch, although you wouldn’t have got caught up in the atmosphere like those in the Anaheim Convention Centre if you watched it via a stream. This means that many people who haven’t even got a virtual ticket have been able to view part of Blizzcon.

Blizzcon gives fans the chance to meet developers, artists, voice actors, view cinematics, engage in sports, cosplay and apparently there’s a tavern there too. Linkin Park will be making an appearance too, so it’s a costly affair to put together and I can’t think of a virtual world conference that would even scratch the costs of Blizzcon. However that doesn’t mean that virtual worlds can’t pick up some tips from Blizzcon.

The first point to note came to me whilst I was watching the opening ceremony via a Twitch stream. As noted earlier, the opening ceremony was a free to view affair, so it wasn’t a dodgy stream. As we all know, when it comes to Second Life, Twitch are the bad guys. However Twitch does have a rival in the shape and form of YouTube Gaming. Second Life has an auto generated channel there, but there’s also an official Linden Lab channel too, although I’m yet to see any live streaming from that quarter, but there is potential.

So why would you want to stream a virtual world conference via an external service? Well for a start, as much as we love being in the virtual world, watching a virtual world conference via a stream is likely to be more comfortable and less crashtastic than trying to cam in from a neighbouring region because the region where the conference is taking place is full. This should also leave room for me in said conference region to take photos as part of my role as the seeker of truth and justice!

Alternatively a live stream could be viewable on YouTube Gaming and also in other regions via media on a prim type solutions, so regions could share the load but have more people inworld watching the event.

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June 3, 2015

Gamefly Enter The Streaming Games Arena But Only For Amazon Fire TV

As many of us know, it didn’t end well for OnLive as they attempted to bring streaming gaming to the market. The service had potential and a lot of people enjoyed it, including those of us who utilised SL Go to enhance our Second Life experience. However OnLive were never able to turn that potential into profit and eventually they sold a lot of their IP to Sony and the ship sailed.

When it comes to a replacement for SL Go, Bright Canopy have been at the forefront of developing an alternative. However an alternative to OnLive’s gaming service hasn’t yet appeared.

However The Verge have reported : GameFly’s new streaming service wants to be Netflix for games :

We still don’t have a true Netflix for games, but that isn’t stopping companies from trying. The latest is GameFly — the rental service that sends you games in the mail — which today is launching a new video game streaming service. As part of the announcement GameFly revealed that it has acquired streaming company Playcast, which will power the new service.

Now to be clear, this is not OnLive 2, electric boogaloo, for a start, the service is currently only available for Amazon Fire TV, which I’ll be honest, I’m not really familiar with. However the service currently offers packages bundles of games for $6.99 a month, each bundle contains around seven games, The Verge article states.

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May 29, 2015

From Second Life Merchant To Improbable Technology

I’ve talked about Improbable before, Improbable is an exciting looking technology, still shrouded in a degree of mystery that could offer a solution for virtual worlds and MMORPG’s as well as much more.

When I blogged before I mentioned that one of their employees was Dave Hillier, once worked for Second Life. However now I’ve discovered another link with Second Life, albeit from a merchant angle.

Pammy Olson has published an article on Improbable over at Forbes : Meet Improbable, The Startup Building The World’s Most Powerful Simulations. This article expands more on the progress Improbable are making. Improbable’s founders, Herman Narula and Rob Whitehead feature in the article, they met at the University of Cambridge and the article provides some interesting background on the pair :

Narula wanted to code, teaching himself to write in C++ at 12. While studying computer science at Cambridge he met Rob Whitehead, a Liverpudlian who had paid his way through college by selling weapons on the virtual-world site Second Life.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t realise there was that much of a market for weapons in Second Life! There’s also the fact that both of them, initially at least, were very interested in creating a virtual world :

They began working on an ambitious virtual-world videogame in which you could drop an object, then log back in the next day and find it still there. When they couldn’t find software to help them scale up, they built the tools themselves.

“Eventually we realized the tech we were working on was bigger than the game,” says Whitehead.

This is not an unusual development, quite a few products have started life aiming to be one thing and ending up being another. However it’s interesting that the technology they’ve created is being welcomed by those who want to build MMORPG’s and it also appears, on the face of it at least, that it’s a technology that could be used for virtual worlds.

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April 3, 2015

Remnants Of Earth Sci-Fi Roleplay In Second Life Attracts The Attention Of Kotaku

I took a brief look at Remnants of Earth back in February when I boldly went in search of Science Fiction action in Second Life. However it’s worth revisiting again because it’s now being discussed by a wider audience, even beyond the Second Life blogsphere.

Remnants Of Earth is a cyberpunk roleplay game in Second Life and was recently covered by Hamlet Au over at New World Notes : Remnants of Earth, a User-Made MMO in Second Life.

However now news of the world has gone beyond Second Life, thanks to Hamlet Au’s post, Patricia Hernandez of Kotaku has noticed it : Players Built An MMO Inside Of Second Life, And It Looks Wild.

The article consists mostly of screenshots from the Remnants of Earth website, which is an impressive website on its own, although be warned, it is quite bright and has some flicker.

So first of all, just what is Remnants Of Earth?

Remnants of Earth is a cyberpunk-fantasy role playing game within the metaverse of Second Life, with a heavy basis around classic pen and paper RPGs elements, like; dice rolling, stats, monster fighting, story driven events, MMO-like adventuring, and gathering. RoE is the first second life pen and paper table top game in SL, while still keeping the core features of any other roleplay sim. Players can interact with NPCs and other players to accomplish goals, and even engage in heated PvP faction wars. We even have a full crafting and mining system! Think of RoE as a fully functioning table top game in SL, like Dungeons and Dragons, or ShadowRun.

The world is extremely photogenic and has a definite cyberpunk feel to it. However as I haven’t engaged with the world properly, therefore I am unable to review the game mechanics.

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March 7, 2015

Could Improbable Technology Make Massive Virtual Worlds Possible?

I have just read an article on Endgadget : Better than ‘Destiny’: Studios now make massive games in just months. The article centres around technology from a company called Improbable and this sounds very interesting indeed. The CEO of Improbable, Herman Narula, is quoted in that article as saying :

It’s about having no game server. What you’ve always seen has been game worlds where there’s one server for one region and another server for another region, these very neat lines. And the servers are actually just the same game engine that’s running on your computer. … But what if you didn’t do that? What if, instead of that, actually you had thousands of tiny, very limited processors — call them mini servers, like a swarm of insects? And what if, instead of having boundaries, actually they all moved around many, many times a second, migrating to deal with simulation in a particular area? And they’re all able to work together to model a world much bigger than any one of them could understand.

Whereas the focus in the articles I’ve read on the Improbable technology have been about games, I’m pretty sure these concepts could also apply to virtual worlds. Indeed one of Improbable’s employees, Dave Hillier, once worked on Second Life, so the company have someone with knowledge of virtual worlds on the team.

The Endgadget article explains a little bit more about what Improbable is and isn’t :

Improbable isn’t just a series of servers. It’s cloud-based, but it’s not cloud rendering; it’s almost an operating system. It follows in the fresh footsteps of other studios crafting large worlds with just a few people.

What they seem to be talking about is a potentially huge world that reacts in a permanent fashion to player actions, talking about the game Worlds Adift, the article states :

the game world reacts in permanent, persistent ways to players’ movements. Build an airship and drop a boulder overboard, knocking down trees and crushing players below. Come back to that same bit of land months later, and those trees will still be knocked over, perhaps with other plants growing around them, or with other players harvesting them for resources. Real persistence, real in-game consequences to physical actions. This impacts not only mechanical moments, but also the story that Worlds Adrift tells.

Those are the sort of concepts that make me ponder whether this sort of technology would be suitable for a virtual world environment, because in virtual worlds, especially user content generated worlds, changes are largely persistent.

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