MMOW

I dream about Massive Multiplayer Online World. Last year I started thinking about a game. I have a lot of ideas but I don’t have experience so at the moment those are only pure ideas.
At the moment we have a lot of games that simulates adventures in some kind of a world. Let’s take 3 types of game for example.
Danger From The Deep, FlightGear and America’s Army.
They’re quite different, but bases on the same rules (ideally) – current world of science. It would be awesome to create some kind of World Standard Language probably based on XML that would be used to describe the world.

It would probably base on a structure similar to current file systems to hold tree structure of files describing parts of the world and rules of the world. Any game would work like web browsers work today. As a client to the world, with its own engine and UI, but thanks to open standard it would be able to play in the common world. So for example one would play a submarine simulator, one would play in flight simulator, and one would play as a soldier, all of them connected to one server and playing as one team (or not). Should be funny, eh?

I see a lot of problems starting from the one, that it’s absolutely impossible to make such game server today. Our technologies are way to slow – CPU, hard drives, networks – to give user ability to play in such world with a pleasure. We are also extremly week in terms of physic engine. There is no physic engine in the world being able to show a walking man!!! All what you saw in games/movies are prerendered sequences of animation – cheats. We are more or less able to show dead body, simulate water (but not any kind of reaction water – something else) and so on. No real physic in any kind of fog, clouds, rays, human move/fight/balance and so on. This world is so unmature yet – exciting area 🙂

But I believe that we should start thinking about this now, to be prepared once out technologies are.

I’d like to start from trying to setup such server for a small room. The whole world of such game would be a small room with 4 walls, two chairs and one lightsource. We should create a language that would be able to describe such world with ability to make it more complex in the future staying backward compatible. For such world we need some kind of LOD (Level Of Detail) in this language. So one game can ask for “house” because player see it from long distance, and the same thing described as a single object “house” would be in real a very complex structure describing all walls, windows, doors, textures, and so on. Then we need to create for the beggining two kind of games. A human simulator and mice simulator. Then we need to give 4 users ability to join such game – two as a human, and two as a mice. If we will reach the level of quality when those humans would be able to do whatever they want in this “world” and those mices would be able to do whatever mice can, I think that we will be almost ready 🙂

I’m more than sure that sonner or later such thing will be created, I hope to see it free of any patents, and I hope that such article can help somehow to prove that it’s a free idea before someone will try to monopolize the market.

What do you think about this overall?