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Moving Castles: Modular and Portable Multiplayer Miniverses

43 points by Kinrany 5y ago

meheleventyone 5y ago
This is quite a long flowery article that mostly manages to stay away from invoking web3 but the idea of miniverses built and run by small communities sounds great. Like MUDs, BBSes or Quake servers way back when.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  Community run Minecraft servers would be the modern version.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Yup, that’s a really great example.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  I am not sure Quake servers are anything like 2nd life/miniverse/teenyverse. Sure you can meet people (even met multiple women that way) but shooting at overbright skins is nothing like maintaining a VR property. Or is it?
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    This view misses out on the wide variety of Quake servers, the rich modding community behind them and the way a static identity caused a community of players to coalesce around them. All things largely lost in the modern iteration of FPS games with queues and ranked matchmaking.
Animats 5y ago
This is exactly what Open Simulator does.[1] There are 366 known Open Simulator grids right now.[2] Some will let in anybody. Some are private. Some have portals to other grids. Some don't. All have roughly the same features as Second Life. They're full high-detail 3D worlds. Some have enough server capacity and bandwidth to run fast. Some don't. [1] http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page [2] https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/statistics/active-grids/ https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/statistics/active-grids/
BatFastard 5y ago
Sounds like a great idea, but in virtual worlds like Kaneva (anyone remember them?) people found the links that were not reliable were not fun at all. So they eventually abandoned self hosted servers. I suspect this scheme will also run into such issues.
- Animats 5y ago
  That's a problem. Few people run web servers on home machines. Running a metaverse server or game server is harder. It requires consistent round trip time on the network and consistent access to compute power, or users get totally fed up with the lag. It can't be a background activity.
  - GaelFG 5y ago
    The sad part is that a dedicated server don't cost that much. (a 60$/month rented server could handle a lot of users if the underlying engine isn't poorly optimizated). But like old time mmorpg guild basic infrastructure (teamspeak/website server) often the financial burden is on a single person.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      Things like Patreon help a bit. I still play games that use dedicated servers hosted by the community and most of them pay the bills that way. Much better than it used to be in terms of easy ways to get money for upkeep.

43 points by Kinrany 5y ago

This is quite a long flowery article that mostly manages to stay away from invoking web3 but the idea of miniverses built and run by small communities sounds great. Like MUDs, BBSes or Quake servers way back when.

vorpalhex 5y ago
Community run Minecraft servers would be the modern version.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  Yup, that’s a really great example.
beebeepka 5y ago
I am not sure Quake servers are anything like 2nd life/miniverse/teenyverse. Sure you can meet people (even met multiple women that way) but shooting at overbright skins is nothing like maintaining a VR property. Or is it?
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  This view misses out on the wide variety of Quake servers, the rich modding community behind them and the way a static identity caused a community of players to coalesce around them. All things largely lost in the modern iteration of FPS games with queues and ranked matchmaking.

Animats 5y ago

This is exactly what Open Simulator does.[1] There are 366 known Open Simulator grids right now.[2] Some will let in anybody. Some are private. Some have portals to other grids. Some don't. All have roughly the same features as Second Life. They're full high-detail 3D worlds. Some have enough server capacity and bandwidth to run fast. Some don't. [1] http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page [2] https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/statistics/active-grids/ https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/statistics/active-grids/

BatFastard 5y ago

Sounds like a great idea, but in virtual worlds like Kaneva (anyone remember them?) people found the links that were not reliable were not fun at all. So they eventually abandoned self hosted servers. I suspect this scheme will also run into such issues.

Animats 5y ago
That's a problem. Few people run web servers on home machines. Running a metaverse server or game server is harder. It requires consistent round trip time on the network and consistent access to compute power, or users get totally fed up with the lag. It can't be a background activity.
- GaelFG 5y ago
  The sad part is that a dedicated server don't cost that much. (a 60$/month rented server could handle a lot of users if the underlying engine isn't poorly optimizated). But like old time mmorpg guild basic infrastructure (teamspeak/website server) often the financial burden is on a single person.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Things like Patreon help a bit. I still play games that use dedicated servers hosted by the community and most of them pay the bills that way. Much better than it used to be in terms of easy ways to get money for upkeep.