Jason T Clark.net

There are times when nostalgia can spark new ideas for video games. You know, like World Wars, Civil Wars, Tribal Wars, and Star Wars (remember, the first one came out in the seventies). In my case, nostalgia has spark up the idea of creating a video game based on a dice game that me and “the fellas” used to play on the floor in my apartment (or on the street corner for some of them), and that game is called Cee-Lo. No, not the guy from Goodie Mob, or most recently Gnarls Barkley, but Cee-Lo the dice game.

Now, it goes by alot of names, like Headcrack, Tripps, and my personal fave, 456. Although there are games out there where you can play a number of dice games, such as craps, I have yet to see anyone implement a 456 game. When I was introduced to it, I thought it was much “cooler” than craps, since there were so much slang used around playing the game itself. Terms like, “Aced Out”, or “Rolling Box Cars”, or “Trips”, or “Tracey Lee” which means you rolled 3 for your point (I think it stemmed from a play on the word “Tre” which means three in loosely translated Spanish).

At any rate, my idea is to design a 2D video game, much like the Microsoft Games that are installed on your PC by default, possibly leveraging XNA to eventually offer it on XBL to the masses.

Meet Verdelizaro.  He’s a dark green carnivore made by…well, me…in Electronic Art’s newest out of this world platform, Spore.  I created this being with the Spore Creature Creator: Trial Edition.  The UI was fairly intuitive, even though it didn’t have all the features that the full version has.  Now in my opinion, I think EA got this right.  For some virtual worlds, when you create an avatar, you feel like you are simply creating a representation of yourself, whether it’s a human-like avatar or not, you’re creating YOU, or as Morpheus would say “the mental representation of your digital self.”  In Spore, it felt more like I was creating a new inhabitant of a new world, but that did NOT represent me in that world- almost like creating a virtual pet.

Now here’s where the novelty comes in- from the Creature Creator you can create a video of your monsters, and upload them to YouTube- nice way to share what you done with the rest of the world. Here’s is Verdelizaro in all his glory, with one of his youngsters:

All in all, it’s worth the download if you have the time to play around.

It’s Friday right? Ok, I can tell you about this then…..

Somehow I stumbled upon a very interesting MMORPG called “Rohan Online: Blood Fued” out on the MMORPG.com website. You see, I’ve been looking for a really good RPG to test since I beta tested Guild Wars during their open beta a few years ago. Now that Guild Wars has been released and is doing quite well, I haven’t been compelled to try out anything, just because I was so biased about the concept behind Guild Wars- you know, the whole FREE concept? Yeah, that’s a good one. Now I know that there are several MMOs out there that charge a fee, but unless that RPG is unequivocally the best thing since pants pockets, I don’t see why I would pay somebody every month to play it. Now, don’t comment to me about why it’s important to have play-to-play platforms, I understand the idea of that perfectly. Still, there are other ways to use micro payments besides simply paying to login.

Now all of that was said to explain why Rohan Online is so intriguing. From my vantage point, it seems like the game could be free to play when it’s released, but at the same time they have released and Item Mall and an Exchange Market, which is web-based, and can be used to buy, sell, and exchange items in the game. Players have been creating fansites for this kind of thing since the birth of MMOs like WoW and Everquest, but this is one of the few that I’ve seen where that is the point out of the gate. Second Life and other virtual worlds environments have this too, but Rohan does it with a slight spin- these are weapons, and items that AID you in your quests- not flashy AOs (animation overrides) or scripted bling. I’m sure that with enough looking around, I’d find more little known MMOs that are doing the same sort of thing.

Ok, so the download was quick, the patches were a applied in the same swift fashion, and I was up and running within a matter of a few patient minutes. I was impressed with the fluidness of the environment, especially since I’m not running the hottest GPU on the market at the moment. With decent graphics, particle effects, and a well laid out UI, I think I’ll be tinkering around with Rohan for as long as I can.

Experimenting with Multiverse continues…..

To make a long story, short- SampleWorld is up and running. I checked the forums, found the IRC channel, and asked my questions there. A guy in the channel said, “put the JDBC jar in with the other jars- in the other folder under Multiverse’s application directory.” Tried it, and it worked. Not sure why, but hey, let’s go with it.

Sampleworld took awhile to finally load in on my Vista machine, and when it did, I couldn’t “see” anything. the Multiverse logo stayed on the application window. I could hear the “Welcome to Multiverse” video running, but I couldn’t see it. Frustrated with how it ran on my Vista box, I tried on my XP laptop. Ironically, it worked a lot better on that system than my so-called “beefy” Vista machine- more on my gripes and pains with Vista later.

Ok, so in review, I’m able to connect to the demo worlds with the client without incident, the server application running on Linux doesn’t take that long to configure, and I can connect to my server instance from a remote client by changing a short “one-liner” in the world_settings file. My only issue now is the performance. I don’t know if there’s a way to improve the performance of my server instance, and hosting it on the ‘net somewhere I’m not quite ready for. I’m wondering if that video is a stream that’s eating up bandwidth when I connect to the Sampleworld- who knows. Still, I think this platform is worth of trying to create something of my own on. Deciding what to create becomes the next question. Ok, here’s my ratings for initial impressions of Multiverse:

Experimentation Ratings for Multiverse:

Client Installation: A

Server Installation: B+

Documentation: B+

Support: B+

Stay tuned for the next episode in the series, when I start creating my own world with Multiverse.

“Experimenting with Multiverse” continues…..

OK, so I downloaded both the server application, and the Multiverse development tools. Installing the Multiverse development tools was a breeze, although when I began using the Multiverse World Editor, defining an asset repository for it was interesting. I went with the SampleAsset repository, downloadable from the Multiverse site. Thing is, it kept complaining about there not being a “Misc” directory in the asset repository. Two things: change the manifest, or create an empty “Misc” directory. I went with the non-destructive option by simply creating a false Misc directory in the SampleAsset repo just to satisfy the requirement. Once I got passed that, The World Editor loaded up nicely. I tested out loading up the Sample World file, which again, loaded up as expected. I’m not sure how intuitive it is to use this world editing application, maybe those of you out there who have played with it can key me in. It’s seems a bit lackluster at first glance, but as I get more involved, it’s possible that feeling will dissapate.

OK so satisfied with getting the tools working at this point, I decided to tackle the server. I am an avid Ubuntu Linux user, and if anyone tells me that Ubuntu is too difficult to use shouldn’t be walking on their hind legs. Anyway, I was impressed from the fact that this app installed strangely without any hiccups as well. A couple minor things, such as making sure my symbolic link to java was pointing to the correct one, setting up the database, etc. etc. Nothing a web developer couldn’t handle. I’m at the point where I’m ready to try to connect the client up to my server running the sample world……..

…….after configuring my server as suggested, alas my first problem- the MySQL/J Connector.  For some reason, when I look at the server logs, the server is not finding the JDBC driver.  I’ve triple checked the multiverse.properties file and provided the correct path.  Still no party.  Well, I guess I’ll stop here and figure out how to deal with that….off to check the forums!

The title alone was a mouthful! But you heard it right- announced on the ExtJS blog a couple days ago was the posting about ExtJS support for Nintendo Wii’s embedded Opera Browser. As the article discusses, when creating web apps for the Wii, you have to account for the difference in screen resolution, font size, and limited input sources. Nonetheless, a nifty idea to have ExtJS now support applications optimized for use on the Wii.

Take a look at the Wii Forum Reader. As you will see, it’s typical ExtJS functionality, but compacted to the Wii browser layout, but on the Wii is fits quite nicely.

One thing I’d like to start doing here is sharing my experiences with the masses- to not only share news from external sources, but to also share with you my own “news” in the form of discoveries, technology evaluations, and explorations of virtual worlds and interactive media.

So with that said, I spent some time over the last few days exploring Multiverse; a development platform
for creating virtual worlds. First impressions are lasting ones, like the scent of a woman- pleasant or unpleasant, and my first measuring stick is how the environment looks. I know that’s a shallow one, but hey, it’s how I’ve always been- what’s pleasing to the eye can certainly be intriguing at the least. I downloaded the Multiverse World Browser and Registered for an account. My first interest was to see the Time Square Demo World. If they can get that right, there’s certainly potential for the platform yet. After the installer ran, and the patches were applied, I proceeded to login. The first thing I noticed was the Axiom.dll updates, which means the graphics rendering is done with the C# flavor of OGRE. Not a bad choice- it’s one of the leading graphics rendering engines in open source, and the scene management is fairly straightforward.

Once I logged in, I was quite impressed. The default avatar held a slight resemblance to the avatars in Entropia Universe, which isn’t a bad thing, and the overall environment was sleek and trendy:

The UI was quite basic, but what do you expect from a demo world. As I’ve seen in screen shots the UI can be updated. After walking around the virtual streets of Time Square (listening to the Fresh Prince), I decided to load up the Fantasy World demo. This test for me is to see if I could see myself playing a game based on this platform. Once the world loaded up, I created my avatar/character. Again, not to many choices but not surprised. I dropped in the world and immediately saw a few scripted wolves running around. Again the environment although not as advanced as say, Crysis, it could do the job for a basic virtual world solution. One thing I missed was the shadowing. I didn’t see where that was implemented, but maybe that’s in the works. It has the potential to aesthetically a step up from Second Life and/or Active Worlds, but maybe a slight step down from CryEngine-based Entropia. Intrigued enough by what I saw, I went ahead and downloaded the server, and developer tools. Check out my next post on Multiverse as I take a deeper dive.