John Lindal’s Blog

OS X Dashboard Games

A few weeks ago, I was very disappointed to discover that VMWare still cannot run games very well. Even Doom, most venerable of 3D games, has a terrible frame rate. Unreal Tournament simply crashes. Thus, ended my hopes of an office LAN game…or so I thought. I just discovered the Crashdrive and ParadisePaintball widgets for OS X Dashboard. These are awesome!

Second Life

From what I have read, Second Life appears to have become the Second Wild West. Justice is, figuratively speaking, enforced at gunpoint. The only big difference is that the stagecoaches are not constantly being robbed. But I’m sure people are working on that, if it hasn’t happened already — surely a PR event Second Life wants to avoid at all costs…

Second Life

I was amused to discover yesterday that Second Life is becoming very much like First Life. Regardless of whether you buy into the theory that Second Life is one big Ponzi Scheme, it is clear that only a few will truly get rich — Linden Labs being the biggest winner, of course — and that unwholesome activities abound. This should not come as a big surprise, since every other form of communication on the Internet, e.g., IRC, Usenet, IM, dating sites, and social networking sites, has succumbed to the same fate.

But it’s still a neat economy. Producers, be they of scripts, objects, or services, do make money, even though most of them surely pay more to Linden Labs in rent than they make, and a lot of the objects and services can safely be categorized as unwholesome. Probably the only way to really make a profit is to (a) be a land broker charging more for rent than Linden Labs does, (b) have a wildly successful store so you can afford the rent, or (c) provide services without a store.

Second Life

If you haven’t already seen it, you ought to check out the new virtual world called Second Life. Personally, I’ve been waiting for this for about 10 years, ever since I started designing such a system in grad school. Second Life works pretty much the way I dreamed of doing it. It’s a social place, but it also has an economy.

Since it’s virtual, anybody can create stuff and then either keep it, sell it for whatever the market will pay, or give it away. Duplication costs are obviously zero, but you control who has the right to duplicate your creations, so you can be the sole supplier of an object — at least until somebody else figures out how to build it from scratch

The physics engine and scripting language seem quite well designed. Scripts lets you attach arbitrary behaviors to the objects that you create. The language includes the concept of state, so you don’t have to build a state machine yourself.

Basic access is free. If you sign up for a paying account, you are allowed to own land. You control who has the right to create objects on your land, so you can either build a castle and defend it against all invaders, or you can open it up for everybody to play.