[MUD-Dev] re: Sun's Sim Server and Gordon's 10 Reasons (the firstone :))

[ceo]

Michael Sellers wrote:

> For an example from a different but equally necessary area, I
> talked with Chris Mellissinos and others in Sun's booth at GDC
> about the lack of strong 3D solutions for Java game development
> for example, but they seemed unphased.  It's going to be a good
> year at least before Xith3D, LWJGL, the new open-sourced Java3D,
> or other similar solutions provide something really usable in this
> area -- and meanwhile the Torque engine was wowing them in the
> nVidia booth (and is available to indies for $100 or to
> corporations for $500!).

Incidentally, commercial java games developers have been trying to
get Sun's GTG (and Chris Mellisinos in particular) to see Torque and
Blitz Basic as direct "competitors" (in terms of platform rather
than just financially).

The developer of one of the recent OpenGL java games set up
necessary licensing arrangements etc for Sun to have a Torque-esque
package (using 3rd party libs) but the GTG have had no interest. So,
I wouldn't expect anything from Sun on this any time soon.

> Sun appears to be trying to foist enterprise solutions in both
> hardware and software on the game development market.  From where
> I sit at least, it isn't working.

Hmm. According to Chris Mellisinos they were swamped at the GDC by
"major games companies" who feel that Sun have finally solved the
problems of MMO games. According to him, and other Sun staff there,
Sun has the "holy grail". AFAIAA these are not the marketing dept,
most seem to be actual developers. (NB: quotes taken from Sun's
forums; the signal-to-noise ratio on this topic is very very low and
absolutely full of flamebait so I don't think it's worth quoting en
masse; the forums live on www.javagaming.org for any who are
interested)

According to Jeff, the author, his system is "the answer to just
about every need of MM games today", because:

"you could take the etnire online population of Everquest and put
tjem in one shard and allow unfettered access to any region.  A
system that uses all its available CPU power all the time and still
can have ANY of those CPUs fail without the clients noticing.

Add orthongonal persistance that makes the entire world dynamic and
ensures the entire game state is always recoverable within a few
moments of total system failure, gauranteed referrential integrity
that eliminates dupe bugs (all of which it does)" [sic]

"IMO this system has some unique proeprties and, as my third actual
attempt at such a system, is probably as close or closer to 'right'
then any of the other systems out there."

Perhaps that makes it clearer how he feels it's special.

On a couple of occasions I have asked Jeff to subscribe to MUD-DEV
and become active but perhaps he is too busy. He used to be a
subscriber (there's a couple of posts from him in the archives back
around 1997).

I noticed he also came out with this:

"IMHO it is your job as game designed to design griefless games.  If
you create lots of ways for players to harass each other then yes
you will deal witha lot of harassment complaints.  This is something
most online games though have already figured out."[sic]

...which brings up some interesting questions about where the
responsibility for handling certain problems of MMOG dev is going to
lie in the future. I take the path that commercial middleware cannot
afford to simply ignore every problem other than raw performance
(c.f. Gamasutra's review of Butterfly.net and Tera Zona, and the
overall comment that neither really did enough to help game
developers).

FYI Jeff's previous experience includes involvement in the
not-released Dark Sun Online 2, and TEN.

Adam M
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