Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Well, they spent a lot more time thinking about how to get the data to 
> and from the client and run sims on servers, than they did making the 
> client work. I would have imho, done things more the other way around 
> (or found someone that had a clue to work on the front end, while I 
> worked on the back). 

No question it's a difficult problem. Making a 3D world with physics 
that you can have multiple players manipulating stuff they themselves 
created and wrote the interaction code for? Awesome.

Business model where you're actually selling what costs you money and 
enlisting the aid of people paying you to create more value? Awesome.

It's just really hard to program some sorts of things because you *have* 
to deal with the physics, and their security model sucks. Everything is 
independent once you create it - you can't have two parts of one object 
communicate with each other except by actually talking out loud within 
earshot of the other part. There's no simulation of "wiring" or "radio" 
or anything (I know about the channels - not the same thing), and things 
have to move by actually moving at some fixed maximum speed. Plus, as I 
said, since they're independent, there's no good error recovery. You 
can't, for example, make a button on a machine that changes a picture 
from a plus sign to a circle when you push it and also causes some other 
object to run a script without the player being able to overhear the two 
items whispering back and forth.

Plus, to prevent abuse, they had to make it a PITA to affect any player 
with any sorts of restrictions on what they could do. They should have 
had a mode where you get prompted once "can I take over your character?" 
If so, then the script can do whatever it needs until you issue some GUI 
command like "take me home", at which point you go back to the state you 
were in when you gave permission to the script. *Then* you could do cool 
kinds of interactive fiction/story, rather than just having interactive 
environments.

That's why the vast majority of everything interactive is either dance 
balls or vending machines selling dance balls.

I wanted to build a jumpman type game, but there was no way to make it 
work - no way to set the weight of the character, or keep them from 
flying or setting teleport points, or etc.

Altho some of the costumes were really awesome. :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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