Tipa

Home Beta

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I mentioned in a comment to a previous post, and it has been said many times by others, that the world is poised on the brink of spending as much time in the virtual world as the real one. Project Darkstar was maybe the first step along the path — a shared “back end” that … Read more

Project Darkstar

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Could this be the first seed of the Metaverse? Sun has given their Project Darkstar to the open source community. Project Darkstar is a generic backend that can support any sort of game or other collaborative activity transparently allocating servers and managing data so that if your game is meant for 5 players or 5,000, … Read more

Playing together alone

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From Raph Koster’s notes on GDC… a stunning insight into the innovation WoW brought to the MMO realm… given the chance, players only group less than a third of their playtime and for the vast bulk of their playtime, like playing solo, but still chatting and being part of the community. This is why I … Read more

Changes to the Karanas?

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I was a little shocked to see, while I was running around the Karanas this morning working on my DikuMUD version, how much it had changed. Blood red skies? Creepy looking treants? What’s going on? I took a screenie of the druid ring in North Karana to use as my new header.

EQ Diku

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EQ and its related games (pretty much every modern MMO) have long been dismissed as nothing but “DikuMUDs with a graphical interface slapped on top of them”. I’ve been playing with the DikuMUD code over the last few days to get a feel for world building and to add a feature (what I call “rally … Read more