For reference Raph Koster wrote "the book" on game design, and was the lead designer for Ultima Online (among other things) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster
Raph was the lead game designer on SWTOR a game that was way ahead of it's time and one of the most enjoyable sandbox mmorpg's I've ever played. I'm working on a new game that will take inspiration from lessons learned there.
I remember when Raph was working on Metaplace[1], which was a kid-targeting, programmable (Lua dialect), virtual world/user generated content factory that was contemporary to the launch of Roblox ca. 2006-2007. I wonder quite often what things might be like if Metaplace had gotten to the scale and scope that Roblox wound up achieving.
What was interesting/worked about it's design (and why did the players care?[1])
Was it resilient to the, uh, many, many well-documented problems that the genre pushes players/itself into?
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[1] There's a lot of ideas in this space that sound interesting on paper to nerds bikeshedding, but often fall flat in actual implementation. I'm curious as to what were the ones that worked.
Game was SWG, not SWTOR. Launched in 2003 and was sunset in 2011 when SWTOR launched.
SWG set out to be something like Dwarf Fortress in terms of depth to the worlds physics; for example, gunsmiths could tinker on all parts of a gun and maybe get a lucky roll to unlock +N more damage or -N recoil. Same with land vehicles and bioengineered animals, droids. Parameters to noodle all the way down. Some under user control, others random to foster sense of a chaotic physical world.
As the in game object economy was entirely propped up by crafters this fostered economic PVP.
Lucasarts of 2000-2003, when the game was developed, did not understand MMO, and 3D games take much longer than 2D adventure games and shoved it out the door 2 years too early.
It also suffered from 90s OOP heavy software development patterns. Devs had difficulty managing it and updating over the years.
Ultimately it failed at being a Star Wars game. PVE was just "kill a nest of bugs" and failed to leverage storylines and characters. Players with nothing else to do ended up ruling the economy or whatever. Could have made them compete against Star Wars power brokers, IMO. Jabba sabotaged your factory, or something. Once a player was kitted out they had nothing to do.
Some have spent the last 10+ years implementing a server emulator, various tools and mods. An emulator built around the original release is here: https://github.com/swgemu
I tinker on a modded private server now and then. Initially added in random world events, to generate things to go do and replacing odd design decisions like mission terminals with NPC models to talk to in that seedy back alley, to foster more in world RP vibe.
When WOW launched SWG was redesigned to play more like that. Typical MBA "copy paste what they are doing" project management.
It truly was ahead of its time, I don't think any one game has come close to implementing such a rewarding group of systems and economy in an MMORPG, except maybe EVE but that is a very different game and admittedly I did not find EVE fun.
The most exciting systems to me had very little to do with combat, but especially as it pertains to this article, also couldn't be as rewarding without it. It was all the player run economies, homsteads, towns and cities, player shops, craftsman and markets. The fact that materials mined had quality which impacted item stats, on and on.
To get good gear, you had to know a guy who made it, they had to know a guy who'd mined good quality minerals, and that person may have found the minerals through another player who had prospected it.
It made sense to be part of a player city, so you could put your house in a known market area for people to visit.
It all mattered because people needed the equipment to go do the quests, and so it was a really symbiotic set of systems that made crafting and economy matter.
To me I really liked the fact that when you made your character in SWG (1 per server too), you are just a civilian. There's no light/dark side or rebellion/imperial choice to make, you're just a regular person in the galaxy. You are NOT the hero.
The skill tree system was so nice compared to the rigid class systems of other MMORPGs, too.
The fact that player towns just emerged was really cool.
It was such a shame the space expansion was so ... flat. Neither space nor ground had a storyline to follow, but space wasn't an open world, and had no real element of choice in skill paths.
I enjoyed the new aspect ships brought to crafting, and there's something special about walking around your own ship while it's in transit. But otherwise totally agree, it was kind of just space combat arenas and not much more.
I had a collector's edition 3-man transport ship, but IIRC the novelty of standing on the ship while in transit wore off before the beta ended. Cool, but too shallow on its own.
I can't figure out if the open world game was fun enough just on its own that an open space game would've been chef's kiss, or if it did need some kind of story telling too. It's too long ago to remember well enough, for me.
PVE was indeed awful. Especially given the back drop; it should have been full of adventure across the galaxy, established characters messing with players, but was merely "run here and kill 6 kobolds". NPC AI sucked.
Would love to strip from my private server, NPC generation as-is as implementation is static and does not allow dynamic responses. Replace it with modern agents to connect like players and train them to build out the world like players can.
Also started a project to make a new client using video and segmentation, gen AI to recreate initial game engine entities as Godot scenes to have full control.
Too little time for either, initial code has sat untouched for years.
> Also started a project to make a new client using video and segmentation, gen AI to recreate initial game engine entities as Godot scenes to have full control.
That sounds fascinating, I've been working in godot for a few projects now. I'd be interested to know how you would integrate the Godot scenes into the current engine, or if it would be an entirely new client.
My plan was/is entirely new client, mapped client state to SWG emulator server.
Godot is a pain given my workflow is pretty cli heavy though. Since I last touched that project I looked into switching to Wicked Engine. Just include C/C++ headers rather than Godot.
But job got interesting (am an EE in hardware development land) and I have to spend free time diving into AI model architecture to keep up. Both SWG projects have sat idle for 10-12 months now. shrug
I've come across this kind of comment elsewhere, and the recommendation was that "the book" is Designing Games by Tynan Sylvester (the author of Rimworld)
Also your style. Game design is influenced by the mind of the designer. Some take a systematic, methodical approach to it. While others treat it like a painting, designing as they go from a core of an idea. And others go full ad hoc, with multiple prototypical designs until they find something that hits.
This is oversimplifying, most designers fall into a bucket of mixed styles; but the point is, no "book" will be perfect for all. Same as with software engineering, graphic design, etc.
Tynan's book is popular, but in my limited experience the first book most people recommend for anyone looking into design is Book of Lenses. Mind you I think both are worth reading. Lenses is just a more systemic and deeper dive.
That's why I put it in scare quotes; personally I don't believe The Book has yet been written. There's not an Art of War for every subject yet, and game design is one of those subjects not yet mastered, at least in writing.
Emoji in text is annoying, but this isn't a page of text, it's a UI element, and that can make something clear especially if you're connecting a device whose name is unknown, but you know it's a speaker, or whatever.
So having the option to enable / disable is better than taking away the icons, in my opinion.
Absolutely this. Particularly when there might be a few unnamed devices, but you know your devices is a particular device class, you can guesstimate the correct device based on its class, and the icon is extremely useful for this!
But that has nothing to do with the development, maintenance, or enforcement of the standards, since the corporations have no involvement in any of the standards, and are probably opposed to their existence at all.
It's a great counterexample to "corporate money and influence are required to develop, maintain, and enforce standards", because it shows that it sprang up on its own in the absence of money and has persisted for decades.
Theoretically if I were to type into an LLM "Write a novel compression algorithm for images that is at least 25% smaller at the same speed and quality as ___" and it did, and I ran the code (which I didn't understand) and it worked, wouldn't that count?
The odds of that working, though, are of course pretty near 0. But theoretically, it could happen.
As you say, the odds of this happening are very close to zero. But suppose for a minute that this was possible. Did you learn anything? Do you really have a discovery? Was this done using a novel method or applying something that already exists? If you give this to somebody else, should they believe it works? Is this result even understandable by human beings? You'd need to answer so many questions that in the end even this would NOT be a discovery by the machine but by yourself.
Scientists discover things that I don't understand every day.
A sufficiently advanced discovery in, say, mathematics can only be understood by other mathematicians. Does that make it less of a discovery? So what's wrong if a machine discovers something that can only be analysed and proved by other machines?
The mathematicians understand the discovery, so what's the problem? With "AI", nobody understands it. If you ask, the AI may say it understands the results, but it is probably lying.
It's interesting, though, even if it doesn't apply to you. It's something to think about, and something I do think about with some regularity -- how I'm going to schedule all the additional eating I'm going to have to do if I start a real exercise regimen at my height and weight.
I had a kindle with buttons once, and it was good.
Then, I bought a touchscreen kindle paperwhite, and found out that every time you change books it complains that it cant find the cloud, and won't let you categorize anything unless you register it and be online.
That's enough Amazon for me, no point in finding out a second time for hundreds of dollars that they still piss me off.
Make sure libreoffice is included, and ublock origin. Show them how much faster it is, with fewer ads, and no subscription to Microsoft required just to write a document.
The business customers might want to know that databases are a lot cheaper on Linux, especially for small business.
Literally spoke to an automation company the other week that told me "we have to delete a bunch of stuff every time the database gets near 10GB or we'll have to pay Microsoft".
Plus there's no license cost for linux itself either.
This stuff might not be viable for hundreds of employees in a business where MS is already entrenched, but for a small business it absolutely is a better deal.
Probably an unpopular thing to say here, but in my experience pushing non-tech people to use libreoffice as part of a Linux transition is a fast track to getting them to hate Linux.
Using Google Docs has been much more welcoming in my experience. Something about libreoffice doesn’t resonate with a lot of non-tech people.
Couldn’t agree more, if you’re pitching Linux to a non-technical user, you need a gentler off-ramp, not a cliff dive. LibreOffice is a UI time capsule..more archaeology than productivity. Most millennials would think they’d accidentally opened a flight simulator.
I was confused about this because last time I used LibreOffice it wasn't that bad. Turns out, it's really just a normal UI? I guess the biggest difference is it doesn't conform to Microsoft's design but to call it a time capsule is a bit dramatic.
I think by default after fresh install it suggests the "old" layout akin to Office 2000, but you can just select "tabbed ribbon" and then it really isn't half bad.
You know we are living in crazy times when people actually actively ask for the ribbon interface instead of making fun of Microsoft for it. It's one of the worst things ever conceived in UI design.
Both have their issues but having 50 uncategorized icons (I just looked up default libre office ui screenshot and counted...) is something only a power user can love. They can keep their classic ui as an option.
Categorized ribbon is an improvement for most people. Especially new generations who simply can't enjoy the effect of shared conventions with other software.
I’m relieved to see I’m not alone. I expected my comment to be downvoted because speaking against LibreOffice triggers some people
> LibreOffice is a UI time capsule..more archaeology than productivity.
I agree. Seeing the comments here claiming the outdated UI is a good thing, actually, brings up one of the big problems with a lot of open source and/or Linux soecific software: The resistance to UI change is huge among die-hard users so the projects tend to get stuck in whatever UI language they had a decade ago when they started
When I introduce people to open source versions of different software I find myself starting with “The UI has a steep learning curve, but…”.
It would be so much easier if we could give people apps that were targeted at familiar UI patterns of today, even if it angers a vocal minority who want every UI to look like it came out of the 90s or early 2000s when they first discovered their love of computers.
>The resistance to UI change is huge among die-hard users so the projects tend to get stuck in whatever UI language they had a decade ago when they started
Oh, worse: stuck in whatever weird, half-baked UI decisions that were made because someone had a great idea that they did not test at all, or because they hated the industry standard approach that everyone else uses. It's no secret that Blender adoption exploded when they added normal menus, and then made right-click select an optional function, and then finally added an auto Maya-like interface option.
But that's one instance where we lucked out. Not just because they fixed it, but also because the thing that needed to be fixed was in users' face and obvious.
I don't think it's that people want a certain nostalgic UI. It's that most of these applications are built by volunteers, for free, and are already understaffed. From an individual's perspective, it's much more important, and possible, to fix bug #155 or implement a new feature than to try to overhaul the entire UI. In order to do that, you'd have to get everyone on board and everyone would have to agree with the changes. A lot of projects are too flat as organizations for this to go smoothly.
I'll grant that it's personal preference and OP should do what his customers prefer, but what you said is a good thing. UIs have sucked for some time now, so something which deliberately uses an older style is generally far superior.
OnlyOffice might be a better option here - its UI is similar to MS Office, and it has a much better MS Office file format compatibility compared to LibreOffice.
I've never heard of OnlyOffice, but that really looks quite promising. I'll have a deeper look at it later, but even though it's all webapp based it can't really be slower than libreoffice...
I usually take moments like this to relate my experience of OpenOffice (LibreOffice, prefork) blanking several of my documents, courtesy a bug that may or may not still be in LibreOffice. But this leads me to the reason I'm bringing it up now: the incre~dibly uncomfortable and unwelcoming experience of trying to pry 1) What happened, and 2) How to fix it out of the OO/LO volunteer support community.
My understanding is that the issue is the way OO/LO and the OS work together to handle file writes, which will not be changed because Linux distros do it right and Windows does it wrong and too bad that I was trying to use OO on a Windows PC. But I can't get a straight answer, and even if I were to, it wouldn't fix the bug - because the bug would be that I was using Windows. And now that I know that this is something that happens, I don't have any real guarantee that tomorrow the problem won't be the particular distro that I use, or whatever weird personal ax-to-grind led to the design decision that would now be giving me a headache. And that probably goes doubly for your average Windows user who doesn't really know what they're getting into.
Obviously, Google's support situation isn't any better. They've also had their share of catastrophic data loss fun-times. I genuinely don't know what the answer is.
I agree with this despite being a libre office user. The introduction should be gentle, not dogmatic. No harm in using a browser based web application for this use case.
I can't imagine trying to replace MS word with libreoffice for businesses. I respect the project and the complexity of the task, but it's just not there for even light professional use.
As an example, I recently submitted a manuscript following standard format [0] with libreoffice. Nothing difficult, just basic professional functionality.
The only way to do it involved editing global default page styles (because custom page styles can't be used for title pages?) and other advanced features. Fair enough, at least it was possible. It's a shame the export process didn't preserve the formatting and screwed up page numbering.
I had to fix the manuscript in gdocs instead, where it was easy.
FWIW I'm not trying to interrogate you, I'm just trying to understand your perspective. From mine I just checked their checklist [1] and it's unclear to me what on that list you're suggesting required advanced features in Libre Office to achieve.
Headers were the big one. The shunn format has no header on the first page, and numbered headers on subsequent pages.
Libreoffice only allows either headers on all pages of a specific style, or no headers. So, how to apply a different style to just the first page? It supports that with the title page concept. But that menu only allows you to select either the Default and First Page styles, not custom styles you've added, so you have to modify the global defaults.
Then there's the numbering. LO requires headers to be the same across all pages, up to left/right distinction. That means you can't manually number. If you want to use the shunn "name/title/number" format you have to write "name/title/" and then enable the checkbox, accepting the slightly uneven spacing.
This is probably half a dozen menus altogether, which I consider advanced. It also confused the page numbering and tried to label the title page as the last page.
Another issue is that shunn's requires multiple alignments within a single line. This isn't directly supported in a reasonable way, but the same workarounds are required in MS word and gdocs so it's not like LO is especially deficient.
Smart quotes also don't work on copy-pasted text, only by a primitive typo correction system when typing. That's more of a personal process issue, since I was copying out of the markdown I do my actual editing in.
>
I can't imagine trying to replace MS word with libreoffice for businesses. I respect the project and the complexity of the task, but it's just not there for even light professional use.
Exactly.
Just work in the finance or insurance industry for a year, and you will see how it is part of the daily workflow to use very obscure, advanced Excel feature combined with VBA. If a proposed Microsoft Office alternative cannot handle this, it's not suitable.
I personally observe that a lot of nerds who barely use Excel in their daily workflow patronising that ... (in particular LibreOffice) is an alternative to Microsoft Office. Better first learn how the actual powerusers' workflows (in particular for Excel in the finance and insurance industry) actually look like.
> I personally observe that a lot of nerds who barely use Excel
Most people using Excel/Sheets/Word/Docs are not power users. Pretty much all home use is covered by OpenOffice and that is the majority by user count.
Totally agree. I would never use windows at home but Excel at work is the main reason to ever use Windows.
I have Libre Calc installed because I am on mint at home and even if it could do everything excel could do, I don't know how to do things the same way. Neither do most people. The personal experience and network effect is insurmountable for other software.
There's an import function in the File dropdown, with a dialog giving you control over separators. If that fails, you can paste the data, followed by Data > Split text to Columns. I work with CSVs in Google Sheets often and it's pretty reliable.
You can either complain about how Microsoft is treating or you can keep making excuses and add on requirements until there is no alternative but if you keep doing both you deserve whatever you get.
I switched from Google Docs to Libre Office a few months ago. I'm surprised how buggy LO is, because I tried it a decade ago and it doesn't seem to have gotten any better. I don't plan on going back to MS or Google, but I am very frustrated with the number of bugs in LO's spreadsheets, so I try to keep my sheets simple and CTRL-S a LOT!
Examples: [1] I selected a range of cells recently, by clicking and dragging, and when I let go of the mouse button, all of the selected cells shifted up and to the right by one cell, and CTRL-Z didn't undo it! [2] I have a workbook and when i duplicate a sheet with a chart, the chart is blank, so i have to delete it and re-insert a new one. [3] Sometimes the left-hand X-axis is cut in half, and I have no idea why, but if I create a new doc it goes away. I really, really want to promote LO, but it is very buggy. I can deal with it but I don't think others would.
Please report the issues as Libreoffice developers would like to know how to improve it. Might I also suggest trying ONLYOFFICE, it really looks and feels like MS Office. I am not a heavy Office user so I never run into issues but this one 'looks' professional.
I use LO for its word processor fairly extensively and have been pretty happy with it, but for spreadsheets I am 100% on team gnumeric---it is rock solid, less buggy than Excel itself, and supports a lot of Excel formulas and formatting better than MS's own web client.
thanks for the suggestion i just installed it (macos). it solved problem #2, I'll have to wait and see what happens with #1 and #3. I like it but it's like going to a new grocery store and everything is in a different place than i am used to thanks!
Glad you liked it! For charts in particular, I find gnumeric to be more solid than any other spreadsheet software I've tried (including Excel)—the charts are more stable and more configurable, and there are options for more of them (e.g. histograms, which are something I frequently want and Excel just doesn't support, or at least didn't used to). Downside: once you've got a spreadsheet with really informative charts, it's sometimes hard to share, because saving it as .xlsx breaks some of them. :(
Oh, another nifty feature of gnumeric: if you save it in its uncompressed format, it's literally .xml (good both for version control and for scripting certain kinds of things)
I wouldn't recommend deploying ublock on customer machines. Or at least ask what their workflow is first. There are a ton of SaaS sites that break with ad locking enabled.
I run firefox+UBO+privacy badger on my machines, and the only sites I've had to disable my privacy extensions in the last few years for were work related, B2B SaaS apps. A few years ago I pushed UBO to user machines (Chrome on win10) at work, and had a ton of user issues. I finally had to disable it, it wasn't a net benefit to us. It's not just a 'turn it on and leave it alone' thing, and people don't always think or remember to try toggling it off and reloading the page when they encounter issues.
That said, it's insane to me to be paying MS for a database with a 10GB limit, but I've seen their price lists. I've also worked with small businesses that don't have in-house IT, and they just end up overpaying for crappy service for many of those things.
I hope this win11 migration causes more MSPs and consultants to move small businesses over to linux though, MS has been predatory on pricing for business customers for far too long and with as much work has migrated to a browser there will be way less issues switching than there were years ago.
If they don't remember the two-click procedure for toggling ublock on a website that they want to be using, they weren't paying attention when they were told or showed that, and all they need is a remedial work training session to hammer it in.
I mean, easier said than done. We pay accountants because they are good at their specialized field. They have knowledge and experience I don't, and there's certainly things that are obvious and simple to them that I don't know 9r remember.
It's really easy to just say it's the LUsers fault and make pebkac jokes, and I definitely enjoy BOFH style humor, but honestly not everyone will remember the 30 seconds of training to go into this menu and toggle off an extension if netsuite throws a cryptic error or won't behave properly. I find it's better to have some empathy for other people, not everyone thinks like a computer and connecting 'I have this error message full of gibberish about API calls' and 'the IT guy mentioned 2 months ago that if a site isn't loading, I need to turn off this thing'.
As someone who uses adblock, it is likely that they will encounter this problem every day. A massive amount of sites don't work or don't work fully with adblock. They can be trained to "whenever a site doesn't seem to work, try to turn of adblock for the site as a first measure". They won't forget it because they will do it every day.
Not defending it but for clarity: it’s SQL Server Express that has the 10GB limit, and it’s free. They’re staying under that limit so they DON’T have to pay Microsoft. Aside from the Windows license, presumably.
Thanks for clarifying. Looks like the jump to standard is 989/year (if I'm reading Microsoft's confusing pricing sheet correctly). That's enough of a jump that it would definitely be a budget item for a lot of business. And migrating to a different DB engine isn't often an easy task, but keeping a DB maintained under a size limit sounds like a PITA and prone to accidental deletion of needed data. I definitely don't envy someone having to deal with that.
> There are a ton of SaaS sites that break with ad locking enabled.
Never had one and I have been using uBlockOrigin for a decade. If a SaaS doesn't work with it, report it to them or skip it (if not already vendor locked on it).
You have sqlite, mariadb/mysql, postgres and more just for mostly traditional SQL. Then you have the others ... 8)
It's time for change. VMware have tossed themselves off into limbo and MS seem hell bent on alienating a vast swathe of humanity with W11's requirements - weirdest A/B test ever.
Yeah. I just tried LibreWolf recently and it comes with Ublock preinstalled. I think I am going to install that with some relaxed privacy settings. Libreoffice by default for sure.
The funny thing is, the iPhones are also weapon and surveillance platforms that are used against us.
Predator drones can monitor protests, but so can the phone company, only in greater detail, with knowledge of exactly who everyone in the crowd is, how long they've been there, where they came from, where they went when they left, who their friends are
What is interesting is that this system basically exists to catch the most petty criminals, since the actual baddies do not use it at all. Bin Laden didn't have a cellphone. FBI only cracked the sinaloa cartel cellphone network by managing to flip its architect, not by their own technical expertise, their partnerships with telecoms, or any surveillance technology.
In fairness, almost all of this is pure conjecture aside from Bin Laden which has had documents and accounts on record released/declassified.
We don't actually know how these entities do certain things because they don't have credibility, and it is well known that they lie to protect tradecraft.
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