if let’s say Linden Labs or Blizzard know a whole lot about how to run a complex virtual world on a whole lot of servers, could they expose more of the internals of the world to 3rd party customizations and then allow the 3rd parties to run their own closed “worlds” on top of their platform?
If neither Linden nor Blizzard feel like doing this, why doesn’t anybody else do that?
I notice that somewhat similar trend can be observed in the game industry, e.g. with the Unreal game engine. But that does not seem to be a MMORPG virtual world type of thing.
You mean like open up the source code or allow 3rd party mods? I don’t think that will work. I’m sure it possible, but it won’t work. These types of worlds all have their own economies and goals that take a long ass time or a lot of money to accomplish. Players aren’t going to stand for 3rd party mods that disrupt that.
It’s fine if it’s an FPS where your goal is to simply shoot at people for a few hours. Nothing carries over. But if a 3rd party mod creates, for example, the most powerful sword in the game, you can bet that will completely disrupt the balance that the original company was looking for.
Unless all these worlds were kept completely separate and never allowed to merge, it won’t happen
no, not open up source code, but yes, kind of like 3rd party mods. To use the obvious analogy, extend the already existing practice of customizing Second Life with scripts to new levels of complexity, and do it all in separate, isolated world sectors.
So suppose I want to start a new WoW type world. Blizzard is not going to let me use their system for this purpose, obviously. But suppose I could go to Linden (or equivalent) and get a customizable world that I would then be able to reshape into the WoW type thing. It would be completely separate from the Second Life world. And it might be quite distinct from it even in terms of physics, e.g. if Linden allows me to put in scripts that would modify the behavior of the basic physics engine of the platform.
Financially speaking, I would be paying Linden for keeping it running and then charging my players. Kind of like Google Engine or Amazon Web Services cloud computing model from the provider’s standpoint.
I’m confused code_grey. Could you please explain to us why any company would not be willing to sell any product they had if it would be substantially profitable to them?
There is this http://www.reddwarfserver.org/, Eventually it could be something like what you propose.
I’m working on a online civilization-like game using it.
There is nothing to stop this from a technological standpoint and it may even happen sometime but remember this is a business. The overall goal isn’t to do cool things to please as many people as possible. It is to make as much money as possible. You are talking about fragmenting something like WoW’s user base just as an example which is bad news from a business standpoint. One of the main draws isn’t the game, it the huge number of people that play it.
The part you seem to be missing is the business aspect. A very successful game company wants a near monopoly in their own business realm and they write the write the contracts to see that users don’t get siphoned off by parasitic developers. That isn’t unique to software either. Producers of all sorts even in material goods use their power to restrict parallel availability of directly competing products. Anyone is free to make one but don’t expect the other companies involved in the particular supply chain to fall all over themselves to accommodate you when it could jeopardize their relationship with the cash cow that already produces reliably.
Linden Labs won’t operate them as far as I know, but you can totally set up a Not-SL SL server on your own server. My friend did it. He’s also pretty familiar with SL gaming, and is registered here. I’ll page him into this thread.
I don’t use “Linden” as the name of the real company here. I use it as a stand-in, notice how I said “Linden (or equivalent)” in an upthread post.
So would you argue that any company capable of doing what I have described above would be automatically better off creating and running their own world by themselves rather than renting their platform to various 3rd parties?
My WAG would be that creating an interesting new world and convincing people to come is hard work, even if you have the platform up and running. So maybe that’s precisely the sort of work that is best done by small companies catering to the tastes of small market niches rather than the best and brightest executive committee over at the huge Linden Reloaded type of outfit.
Another argument for me would be the actual existence of worlds other than SL and WoW. If other companies invest in building worlds from scratch, would they not rather invest in customizing the hypothetical platform I am describing instead?
So, yeah. Interestingly, Linden Labs was going to go down this very path. They wanted to open-source all of their technology, and just do server hosting. They managed to get to open-sourcing the viewer, before people swooped in and stopped the company from losing the only source of their revenue. (Well, that, and they’re embarrassed from the sloppy-ass coding)
However, because of that open-sourced client, it’s allowed third parties to write their own Second Life servers. At the time that I installed it, it was about as awful as <insert name of your favorite moderator>. But, after looking at the OpenSim List of Features, it turns out that it’s probably less bad.
Hell, they’ve even made their own grid. Which means that right now, thanks to the powers of Open Source, all of Second Life can now be hosted purely by someone other than Linden Labs.
However, despite all this tech, this ain’t Second Life. It’s a clone. Second Life is a game about people. It’s a game about economies, measured in dollars, and units of Drama. You can’t go out and buy awesome things easily. And with that low user base, you really can’t use those awesome things to try and impress pixels of the opposite sex.
Now that the tech gap has shortened, it’s actually somewhat feasible for Linden Labs to allow third-party grids to interface with their own. There’s nothing really stopping them, aside from matters financial.
And it’s because of that, which means that while you can run your own SL servers, it ain’t the real thing, baby.
This also means that any kind of code for the game part of things, like meters, would have to be done either by you or by a different third party. There are places that create meters that work in Second Life, but they are often buggy, what with SL not exactly being designed for, say, raiding or FPS badassery.
This would likely be the case for any engine that you could borrow. While you could perhaps get the base itself to work with, any kind of real content is going to require a whole different set of talents. Now, you could license or hire someone to do the work, but it’d require a large number of different subsets, depending on what you wanted.
By the time you get all of that together–people to design outfits, people to create a system and a viable engine for game mechanics–you’re basically designing the game from the ground up anyway. I really doubt that there’s anyone who has both the time and the necessary skill set to perform all aspects of game creation on their own, even if the basic platform is the same.
Now, you could get around this by going to a private company that could perform that kind of service. However, that if that company is going to be investing that sort of capital into a game, they’re probably going to want to do it with one of their own concepts–something that they believe will be marketable, and which they can retain the rights to. I suppose its not inconceivable that one could pay them enough money to make it worth their while, but then the entire endeavor becomes more of a commission than an open-source project. Alternately, you could hire people to do those things for you, but then you’re acting very much like a gaming company yourself.
Assuming, however, that you have the talent and the capital to do those things, it’d probably make more sense to hire a hosting service. I’m guessing, however, that there probably aren’t enough people out there with this sort of ambition to make it worth their while. Now, looking at what Frodo posted about RedDwarf–that’s probably the closest thing to what you’re going to find out there. But I doubt that we’d see anything like this out of any of the large companies any time soon, if at all. There’s no reason to devote that magnitude of resources to these kind of endeavors unless they are being paid very, very well to do so.
And d8uv: I didn’t know that they went backwards on that. Hm.
I know there are people who run private WoW servers out there; some people even run them for profit until Blizzard notices and sues. I’m sure someone has modified the code on them as well.