Second Life and Virtual Worlds
A researcher working in the game THERE has written a thoughtful article about her findings. For those of us interested in what makes a game tick and succeed or fail it is a great read.
For those of from the Myst-Uru community it has special interest as Celia studied the community of Myst-Uru that fled into THERE when Uru closed. The result was a book: Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds
WARNING
Word is out that the nVidia 196.75 driver update has been suspended. Use of the driver reduces fan speed and can allow the card to overheat and fail. This can damage the card and other parts of the computer.
See ZDNet.
nVidia is suffering from serious mismanagement according to industry pundits. Several of the top of the line video cards, 260, 275, 280, etc. are being End of Life rated. This leaves the field open to ATI.
Those that have played the Myst games made by Cyan Worlds, Inc. (First Myst game cira 1993) will be glad to know that Myst Online Uru Live has reopened and is free to play.
The official opening was about two weeks ago. The first week was tough. The servers overloaded as thousands rushed to download the game. Both download and game servers were overloaded. Those problems have been handled and things are much smoother now.
There is a donation button on the Myst Online Play page. Donations were generous enough that Cyan Worlds could upgrade the servers. That has helped with game play being smoother. Download mirrors have been set up so one can take advantage of their high speed connections for downloading.
Download at: Myst Online Uru Live Again
Updated: 2/9/2010
Those that have played Myst and its online cousin Uru Live are rejoicing to day (2/8). 🙂 The Myst Online web site posted that they opened a new Uru Live server and made the game download available for free. MystOnline.com 🙂
Today, February 8, the servers are totally hammered and have been for hours. The Uru fan forums are exploding with speculation and impatience to get in. However Cyan warned that they are using a small registration server and it would be slow. It is. 🙁
The Second Life group D’ni Refugees has been chatting about it all day.
See New World Notes: Blue Mars Goes Into Open Beta Today for a quick summary.
Updated 12/24/09
We are up to version 0.0.6589.0. A big change is the size of the download. It has gone from 1.3gb down to 392mb. Nice. BUT… they have added a CITY BROWSER. This shows you the cities you have already downloaded and those available for download. New cities are 200mb to 500mb downloads. They download in background. One must restart the main program to access a newly downloaded city. I’m sure that will change by the end of the beta.
Various groups are working on ways to turn the Internet into a full 3D virtual world. The Guardian (UK based) has just written about one effort. One group, which the Guardian article by Victor Keegan fails to name – cause it has no name, is creating software that uses public information to make a 3D model of the entire planet in which your avatar can walk. (For a better write up than the Guardian see the same Victor Keegan’s blog: Building the planet – on a tight budget) You can see an example of it in action on YouTube video below.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tVcAuNpgk8]