Synthetic Reality - July Update
Dan Samuel
Hi!
Well, I haven't abused this mailing list since February, so for most of you this is probably the first post. Since February, I guess most of the action has been in Arcadia, with:
New Toy added - synJam, a collaborative music performance/composition game. 'Unique' is probably the best word to describe it. Like Collaboration, it has a bit of the 'performance anxiety' aspect to it, since you may feel that you "can't write" or "don't like the way you sound". In other games people generally don't worry about whether or not other people are judging their ability to 'blow something up' so these 'creative experession' games can take some getting used to.
Still, given that you could create a new account and be fairly anonymous anyway, you should give it a try. You can read about it here:
http://www.synthetic-reality.com/synJam.htm
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Old Toy Updated -- TurnAbout.
This toy started out as my 'board game engine' where you would create new games that were based on moving a token along a path and doing things when you landed on various spots. I never finished it (and it is still not done), but recent developments might make it worth a look if you are interested in stretching your programming skillz in a language you may not have used before (lua). In the end, I think TurnAbout will enable a wide variety of user-created mini-games (and maybe not just mini...) You can read more about the engine here:
http://www.synthetic-reality.com/turnAbout.htm
and about the lua API here:
http://www.synthetic-reality.com/turnAboutAPI.htm
There is not much to do in TurnAbout yet as a *player* so this is of most interest to people who want to *develop* their own multiplayer games, but don't want to start from scratch. You get to leverage off of the chat and servers and amazing graphics (heh) of the Arcadia environment.
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Warpath 21st Century loses its 20 hour time out
You can now play wp21 forever without worrying about the "20 hours or pay" thing triggering. I still sell activation codes for Warpath (this is the only Synthetic Reality game which is NOT enabled by a Golden Soul), and I think a warpath activation code *does* unlock a couple small features, but I think it's fair to say the game is fully playable in its free form.
You can get it here:
http://www.synthetic-reality.com/warpath21.htm
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MIX Enhancements
Rolling out with the next releases of Arcadia, Well of Souls, and Wp21 is version 1.21 of MIX. I think it might be significantly lower latency in general (less of the 'ping' lag will be due to it chilling out) but that may be a false promise. The main update is it now interacts with the master server in a way to help you work through issues you might have hosting a MIX server behind your firewall, router, gateway, etc. The master server, for example, knows your REAL internet address, and now tells your MIX server if it is behind a NAT.
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Arcadia Font Support Update
If you haven't been to Arcadia for awhile, you will probably notice you have to re-download EVERYTHING (which is all of about 2 megabytes :-) since I made changes to support the TurnAbout API, and noticed during that that I wasn't properly handling the 'windows desktop set to large fonts' situation. So you should see less wonky text in general, (text sticking outside of buttons, for example) and toys can now provide some more interesting fonts, colors, bold, etc. The only user of that so far is the example mini game "MiniMud" in TurnAbout -- a text MUD!
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Arcadia Schnitzel
{GS} Jon has been running a weekly Empyrion Tournament. You can read about that here:
http://www.synthetic-reality.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=000640
I realize I have been negligent in my duties of running tournaments and contests, and I am seriously thinking of trying to organize at least one event a ... month? Year? With probably a Golden Soul as a prize (hey, I get them at discount! :-)
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Arcadia Marketing
Arcadia is getting teasingly-close to achieving critical-mass (defined in this case as at least one player playing (and not afk) at any time of the day... a fairly modest goal, yet still not achieved). We have recently seen some record simultaneous user counts (there was an extremely brief occurence of 40 players on at once (spread over several servers) which was definitely a record.
Anyway, feel free to mention Arcadia on any gaming web sites you might visit, a little marketing at this moment just might push it past critical mass.
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Synthetic Reality ICQ
There have recently been some requests again for "something that shows all the servers" (WoS, Arcadia, Rocket Club, etc) which I continue to ignore (A bunch of people looking at a list of empty servers, doesn't encourage anyone to actually join the server, hence it stays empty, hence people still see a list of empty servers).
I think what people REALLY want is something more like this:
* Run this small widget
* It has an interface that lets you indicate what you would be 'willing to play, if you could'
* This would be cross-spectrum, like "Wos World X" and "Arcadia Toy Y" and "at least 3 players"
* A master server would maintain lists of people who were currently interested in these categories
* You would get a beep when people joined lists of interest to you
* There would be some sort of button for "hey, I would host a game for us, are you really interested?" which would send a packet to all on the list
* This would beep a different beep to members on the list
* they would then be able to accept/reject/ignore the invitation
* if the launch criteria were met, then the host would (automatically, I hope) have a MIX server created, it's address would be sent to the list, and everyone would launch the appropriate game which would auto-connect to the appropriate server, and auto-load the appropriate toy/world. (and remove those players from the list)
Now, given THAT, it would also be ok for this widget to be able to periodically fetch the server lists as well (and give you a one-button launch yourself to that server), but I still resist that as the primary rendevous metaphor.
This would actually be a substantial amout of work, since I would also have to modify arcadia/wos to be launchable with pre-selected server/world/toy, and there are lots of firewall/gateway/etc issues to consider.
But it could be generally useful and I think it actually solves the real problem which is "there may be people interested in playing empyrion, but they are unwilling to sit in an empty server waiting for other players, which leaves the server empty, which provides a negative feedback loop"
This way, you could wait elsewere, but still efficiently know exactly when a game was available.
ANYWAY, no promises, my plate is already pretty full, but this could be useful.
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Well Of Souls
Development continues here. The recent introduction of 'missions' has opened a lot of world development possibilities and, in fact, there were a LOT of world development features added in releases A90 and A91, which was a nice break from the usual hacker-detection crap which I have had to waste so much time on in the past. Hacker bans are generally getting more effective, though sadly that has not sunk in enough yet to prevent silly people from getting themselves banned. And I don't like banning people, because that's fewer people to play with.
A92 I think will have some pretty big PKer changes. (world-selectable, of course, nothing is being fully removed). I think this might be the release where I finally implement the "Melee Arena" I have wanted to do for awhile. This would be a little like Synthetic Reality ICQ where, while playing WoS, you would indicate an interest in taking part in a melee arena battle. If one was already available you would just be dropped into it, on the team which needed more players. If you wanted to pick your team, you would need to wait until there was room.
The overall idea being a large battle scene (probably a wide scene) with a lot of people just chaotically attacking each other (but team vs team) for good old melee chaos, but not just 12 on 1 snerting. I want to try to create a 'fun' PKer area with a little less of the tear-generating antics. Feel free to post ideas about this on the WoS Development Topic
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Slightly Older News
* Empyrion got bots a while back. They add a little variety to the game.
* Rocket Club got a big update a while ago. Try making a happy centaur and then riding it (ooh! ridable animals!) Weapons can shoot (but not hurt), first cut particle system (try 'snow' from the debug window), a new car (the red one) with better modeling and texturing (and also heavier than water so you can drive along the bottom of the sea without floating), general enhancements to snapping things to nodes, and a few new models/crystal plans. Still not a game, but slowly getting there.
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Anyway, thanks for subscribing to the mailing list! Feel free to share any of the above with friends and/or web sites. If you want to leave the mailing list (which can hardly be considered spam at the current rate of email generation), I'm sure google adds a link to this email... which suddenly I realize I was about to send from the wrong mail account... I wonder if this is going to work.. better copy and paste it just in case... So.. if you get two copies, you'll know I am still an idiot :-)
Thanks again!
- Dan
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Dan Samuel
President and Local Deity
Synthetic Reality Co. "No Check is Too Small"
email: mailto:d...@synthetic-reality.com
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