I have considered the following concept on and off for a number of years. It can be a little confusing to describe to begin with, but hopefully I can pull it off adequately.

The Concept.
Imagine that there are an infinite number of parallel worlds surrounding us. We move through them blindly, with every action changing our balance and alignment with the world around us.
Now, imagine that we are not so blind, that we can see the adjacent worlds as ghosts. We can interact with and manipulate those ghosts, but doing so will pull us into that world and away from our own.

Making it work.
You start with ten identical zones. This is not a fixed number, but just for demonstration purposes. You start off in zone 5. You can see things in zones 4 and 6 as solid looking, but translucent objects. You can also see some items in zones 3 and 7. but they would be very 'ghostly', and mostly see through. You have a sword, manufactured in zone 5. The sword does 100% damage to anything else that is within zone 5, but only 66% damage to anything you try to hit in zones 4 or 6, and only 33% damage to those objects in zones 3 and 7.

Every time you interact with something from a different zone, you get pulled more and more into alignment with it. This would apply to all objects as well.

You see a mace on the ground, it is slightly translucent, it is an object from zone 4, so you pick it up. Just by performing this action you get pulled into alignment with zone 4 by a small amount, and the mace gets pulled into alignment with zone 5 a little. You go around, and kill some critters from zone 5 with the mace. It is only doing 66% damage to start with, but the more you use it, the more damage it will do, as it is becoming more aligned with your zone. Your actions with the mace will try to pull you into alignment with it, but as a counter you are hitting objects in your current zone, so you will stay 'anchored'. If this continues, eventually the mace will end up as a part of your zone 5.

Instead you decide to hit critters in zone 4. The mace will do 100% damage to those critters, although it will lose some alignment the more you use it. However, because you are continually interacting with items in zone 4, you will get sucked into that zone. At this point zone 5 will seem slightly translucent to you, and you will be able to see zone 2 items as ghostly objects.

Being 'attuned' to a zone would be a similar experience to how skills would work. Everything on you would slowly lose it's adherence to it's original host zone unless used on objects within that zone. Keeping a zone 4 item attuned to zone 4, while the player is in zone 5, would require you continually use it on zone 4 objects, as well as the player constantly interacting with zone 5 to stay attuned there.

Death and Taxes
The game would be full loot by design. Due the the entire 'parallel worlds' concept, we also have an easy way to deal with and explain away death. It is one of my pet issues that most games just resurrect you with no real explanation as to how. Just because you are killed in a fight, it doesn't prevent a 'parallel' you from coming too in the middle of a battlefield, suffering from a flesh wound that miraculously failed to kill you. Thus you would be transported to a 'safe' parallel location, only carrying items that are bound permanently to your soul, with everything else having been dropped where you died elsewhere, and looted by the pesky attackers. This would also help answer answer the whole issue with regards to why players would want to travel. Maybe you would just want to get back 'home' and defend your slice of the multi-verse, or to enact revenge. This is an important part of the core concept of the game design.

Skills and Levels
What levels? You learn skills, either from other players, game objects or NPC's. How you utilize and combine these is up to you. You can be a magic wielding, plate armored, psychopathic killer if you really want to. There would be skill levels of a sort, but not using a skill for a while will also cause you to lose your edge. You may have been a master swordsman last year, but this year you are out of practice as you have been using that really cool Quarterstaff you attained. Skill levels need to be actively maintained. The same for magic.

Server Model
This is the difficult part, especially as a lot of it will come down to load balance and synchronization issues. Ideally each zone would run on it's own server, but this is not a realistic possibility, and synchronization of potentially hundreds of parallel servers could bring things to a halt quite swiftly. In practice you would probably end up with a single server/cluster processing a group of between 3 - 10 zones. If things become busy, it can offload low population zones to other servers or cluster as needed, with priority being placed on keeping the adjacent zones in sync.

Hopefully this gets the basic idea across. When you start to bring player vs player interaction into things, or multi-zone groups to defeat bosses, thing become far more mind bending. Imagine trying to fight a PvP battle where you can only see half of the players...

Your thoughts would be nice, and also feel free to ask specific or general questions as to how so and so would or might work.

The CSR route is very similar how I got my current role with DarkSpace. I joined the game Staff as a Moderator (mall cop), and slowly progressed to the point where I am now one of the head honcho's in both CSR and development. I would love to be able to define my role more clearly, but there is simply far too much to list.

The main difference with my position and the above article, is that this has been done entirely from home, on a voluntary basis, for less than peanuts, as a hobby, while trying to hold down various full time jobs. I may be a fool for this, but I do get a twisted sense of satisfaction in knowing that I have helped our service survive for so long, and it looks pretty good on the resume too.

You get to see the best and worst in people when dealing with CSR, and as for Tubgirl... that's not even scratching the surface of internet depravity.

Would I do this as a full-time job? I honestly couldn't say. I certainly wouldn't mind getting paid for what I do, but then that brings a whole new series of expectations and commitments.

It would be fun to find out, though.

Quest bangs.

It is not so much how to get rid of them that matters... the issue is with explaining away something so incongruous within a historical or fantasy setting. Magical fantasy would have an easier time of it, and in some ways the implementation would not be that difficult - you only need to look at today's technology (and that of the near future) for inspiration - bluetooth style alerts, job boards, GPS systems and 'enhanced' reality, etc. Each of the aforementioned could be adapted into a magical universe to help 'explain' the bangs, instead of removing them.

Historical settings are another kettle of fish entirely... maybe have little pet monkey that skitters over to nearby NPC's and begins dry humping them if they have quests to offer, or will guide you back to them...

1) DarkSpace
2) GuildWars
3) Everquest
4) WarHammer Online
5) Tabula Rasa

Reasons:

DarkSpace
I have been involved with this title for a number of years now, starting out as a newbie like everyone else, and ending up as one of the main developers and senior GM's. Obviously I love the game and the community, even though (like any title) it has it's share of issues.

GuildWars
This game and it's development team deserve a lot of respect. For PvP it is probably one of the most balanced games out there, and has forced WoW to adapt. I loved the storyline for Prophecies, and have great memories of the early beta days, and the adrenaline rush to complete the Krytan missions before the beta's ended. I don't play it any more, mainly because they started pushing grind (titles, heroes, armor) and that offers no fun for me.

Everquest
This is the first MMO that I ever played, and I lost 6 months of my life to it with leading a guild and the general social aspects.

Warhammer Online
I have played this for a couple of months, although it has lost it's attraction to me, mainly because I am stuck on EU servers, and most of my friends are on the US servers. The PvP sieges are quite good and now have some half-decent rewards, although this was not true in the early days. I like how quests give a general area to go to, and not a precise location. The concept and overall design is good, although some of the feature implementations are questionable, to say the least. Scenarios... need I say more?

Tabula Rasa
Plagued with overambitious system requirements on release, a plethora of bugs, and many other problems, I actually liked this title. The combat system was a refreshing change from other MMO's, and I think this was actually very well done. I also liked some of the CP area's and concepts. However, it did lack for content after the first few zones, and the actual character progress felt very limited, with little replay value for creating a new character.

Anyway, that's my two cents (and then some).

P.S. Wizard101 deserves an honorable mention. It is a great game concept that is well designed. It pretty much nails it's target audience. I also know that Kingsisle are working on another project, although what exactly I haven't been able to fathom as yet. It is certainly a company to keep an eye on.

Haha! Nice video.

Kudos to the person/people that created it.

This is a very simple question to answer.

Is the experience of playing a given game worth more or less than the equivalent value in fast food and beer?

None? :-(

Each art style has it's place depending on your game concept and target audience.

It is like trying to compare chalk and cheese.

Mine simply has to be DarkSpace. Primarily because I started out like anyone else, and have now ended up as a Developer for it.

Now that's what you call character development :-P

P.S. The game play is fun too.

Hopefully getting your download added is just a simple matter of making sure GameGravity has it...

What about the option of adding Developer approved torrents?

---

Originally posted by rturja

---

Originally posted by pprllo

Man, I was clearly oversimplifying it. I guess this game uses UDP packets, the only MMORPG that uses TCP packets is WoW AFAIK.

---

Actually quite a few MMORPG's use TCP as connected protocol incorporates already lots of stuff needed. Reinventing the wheel and using homerolled packet validity checkers isn't usually worth the hassle. Only exception using UDP that I am aware of is Asherons Call which uses very wacky twoway implemetation. Some games might theoretically have both UDP and TCP connection to the server for transferring different data but haven't seen this so far.
The games usually using UDP are the shooters and such.

---

That's what we do for DarkSpace. UDP is generally used for 'non-critical' data such as movement updates as we can afford to drop a few packets on occasion, although this would not necessarily work for other titles. If the server detects any issues with the UDP stream, it falls back to using the TCP protocol for all updates.

If you have a decent firewall operating, you will be able to use it's monitors to see that there are a number of popular titles which use both UDP and TCP streams for active game play.

Click on the little map to choose a location...

Now needing some industry...

http://drafland.myminicity.com/ind

Check the location. I cannot help being British :-(

http://drafland.myminicity.com/

Enough said, I think...

P.S. Now needing some industry...

http://drafland.myminicity.com/ind

Palestar wishes to invite everyone to come and participate in the DarkSpace experience for two weeks, gratis. This is in addition to the 14 day game time coupon you will receive upon creating an account, and does not restrict your ability to continue playing in the limited mode after the free time expires.

It's easy - simply go to www.darkspace.net and complete the registration process, then download the latest client from one of our list of download mirrors, and you could be shortly blasting your way through hordes of space pirates, decimating the opposing factions in an attempt to gain universal dominance, helping to stem the invading tide of the dreaded Machine Intelligence, or simply whittling away your days attempting to construct the most awe inspiring orbital defense network known to man-(or alien)-kind.

Of course, the enemy has it's own plans, and will surely be hunting you like a dog throughout.

This offer expires 03/08/2009 at 20:00 CST.

We look forward to seeing you...

- The DarkSpace Development Team

Would be unprofessional of me to mention DarkSpace here.

Oh well :-(

With the latest update to DarkSpace, there are a few significant tweaks and changes that have been implemented.

The most significant to users in terms of game play will be the reduction in "Resources Lost" on ship destruction. To explain: whenever a ship a player is piloting is destroyed, the value of that ship is added to their game profile as the "Resources Lost" stat, which in turn is deducted from their prestige (experience) calculation as a negative modifier.

Reducing the amount of "Resources Lost" applied to a players profile therefore decreases the prestige penalty whenever you die. Prior to this update, players piloting smaller ships were losing a much higher proportion of their prestige value for each death than was intended, and this was causing a significant barrier for new players in terms of actual prestige gain.

Players piloting Cruiser class ships and above were also losing slightly more prestige per death than we were happy with and in turn this was felt to be discouraging PvP, although we still need to maintain a significant penalty for each death in order to encourage the use of the smaller class vessels for experienced players. So although the same 75% reduction has been applied to these ships, the basic spawn cost of these hull types has also been scaled up as we feel is appropriate. Overall, the death penalty is lower, but only by 10-20% for stations, and scaling to 75% for destroyer class ships and lower.

We have also reworked torpedo damage values, which will bring them back into line with the primary cannon weapons. In terms of average DPS versus static targets, torpedoes now do around 15% more damage compared to primary cannons, although damage per volley is between 2-3x more than primary cannons.

You will also find that weapons on smaller ships should be more efficient than their larger counterparts in terms of real-term damage output, although they still do less damage per individual volley. This makes fleets of smaller ships much more effective than before, as a group of scouts with the equivalent weapon capacity of a dreadnought will actually be able to out damage the dreadnought and avoid most of its weapons fire, although individual ships will not be much of a threat.

As always, we hope these changes help everyone to have more fun.

Enjoy.

- The Development Team

P.S. The full list of changes can be found in the Development Log, as usual.

I'm on a boat!

Too many rules there. I am playing the hardcore version.

RULE 1: You are playing The Game.
RULE 2: Whenever you think about The Game, you lose.
RULE 3: Loss must be announced.
The objective of The Game is to forget that it exists.

That's it.

P.S. I lost gain :-(

P.P.S Maybe this actually belongs in the Pub...