Being an avid (far too avid) Everquest player, I can attest to the fact that EQ has problems when too many people are in view (or even in the same zone) at once. The Bazaar, a zone for buying and selling where the player can leave his avatar unattended in merchant mode, generally has between 300 and 500 people in it at any given moment and the video lag is so bad that most of us set our video settings to the lowest useable parameters before entering the zone. If we forget, it can sometimes take literally 5 minutes to turn in a circle and leave the zone.

There are lots of interesting issues to be had with a massively multi-player game like EQ. The players are constantly coming up with activities the designers never envisionsed. For instance, it is possible to find scripting programs online to allow one to automatically hawk your wares in the bazaar. This is incredibly annoying as the same message scrolls past your screen over and over again.

Someone discovered that if you cast the levitation spell on the offending merchant and then bump into them over and over again, you can actually maneuver them down the aisle of vendors into the "arena" where player vs player dueling rules apply, and then kill them.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Alan Kay" Alan.Kay@squeakland.org To: squeakland@squeakland.org Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 4:54 PM Subject: RE: A Question about Croquet's Philosophy on Multi-user 3D Environments...

Hi Darius --

This email list is for parents, teachers and children who are concerned with the "etoys" part of Squeak. Croquet stuff can and should be discussed both on its own list and on the squeak.org list.

To answer your question: remember what has happened to the "Victoria's Secret" website on the occasion of special promotions they've done, especially connected with TV. At some point capacity gets exceeded. So there is nothing new here. The first practical limit in Croquet is in the number of polygons that can be displayed by one's own 3D accellerator. This limits both the scene complexity and the number of people who can be in view. This is why Everquest, even with its farms of servers, trys to spread visitors out over the world so there are never more than a few in view at any given time.

Cheers,

Alan

At 1:28 PM -0800 2/6/03, Darius Clarke wrote:

...

Hello Everyone,

Just curious... Have Croquet developers and Croquet users considered what effect "flash crowds" might have in Croquet in terms of avatar space and multiple users simultaniously moving the same 3D object?

Definition of "flash crowd":

"Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story "Flash Crowd" predicted that one consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds materializing almost

instantly at

...

the sites of interesting news stories. Twenty years later the term passed

into

...

common use on the Internet to describe exponential spikes in website or

server

...

usage when one passes a certain threshold of popular interest (this may also be called slashdot effect). "

http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/f/flash_crowd.html

-----Original Message----- From: Kim Rose [mailto:Kim.Rose@viewpointsresearch.org] Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2003 09:41 AM To: Andreas Raab; 'Alan Kay'; 'Dave Smith'; 'David Reed' Cc: darius@inglang.com Subject: RE: A Question about Croquet's Philosophy...

...

This has been a very interesting discussion and certainly reminds one of the many layers (computer architecture, social, economic etc., etc.)invovled in building a shareable, open space like Croquet. thanks, Kim

--

Sebastian,

I read "The Planiverse" when I attended university (UC Irvine)? had found it in our university library.

"The Planiverse" is well written and thought provoking. It?s a morality play as well as a treatise about how physics, biology, & society could work when one of our most common assumptions (a third dimension) is removed. His premises and explanations are smoothly woven into the narrative. The narrative maintains a good dose of humor.

The book?s best use is to teach how one can extrapolate many interrelated implications from an unfamiliar set of rules in a closed system. I?d say that the target age group for such reasoning would not be any younger than 14 years old.

Some major points in the book:

? Just as miracles in our world could be explained by a multi-dimensional intelligence manipulating multi-dimensional objects through a three-dimensional world; so to, three-dimensional people like us, if we could interact with a two-dimensional world, could appear to perform miracles in that world.

? The seeming omnipotent power of such control could lead to moral dilemmas.

? The time needed for a physical change (chemical, perception, information) is a function of surface area, which is *drastically* reduced in a two dimensional world. Consequently a 2D object requires a vastly larger size to increase its surface area to the point where meaningful interactions can take place.

? Even with the increased size, the number of parallel events that can occur in 2D is restricted. Most interactions must be performed in a linear time sequence.

"In terms of eToys in Squeakland":

? eToys & Morphs are layered 2D objects which imply: 1) a (very limited) third-dimension, and 2) The 2D objects are observed by someone positioned orthogonal to the 2D objects so that their inside contents can be perceived (like papers on a desktop, surprise, surprise). [I?m still looking for a tool that fulfills the paperweight metaphor for my desktop metaphor. ;-) ]

? One could simulate the "Planiverse" in eToys but most of the functionality of the Morphs would not help. A new set of rules and a new set of 2D "physics" would need to be created by hand. This would need to include the dynamic distortion of a 2D object?s shape per the influences on it. Many changes in shape are required to replace what equates to the change of position in a 3D world.

? "Planiverse" requires gravity while Abbot's "Flatland" resembles a world seen in a microscope slide. "Flatland" might be easier to simulate in eToys. In "Planiverse" gravity must replace structure for holding most 2D objects together.

Cheers,

Darius

-----Original Message-----

From: owner-squeakland@squeakland.org [mailto:owner-squeakland@squeakland.org] On Behalf Of Sebastian Hergott

Sent: Monday, February 24, 2003 09:38 PM

To: squeakland@squeakland.org

Subject: Flatlanders and The Planiverse

In terms of eToys in SqueakLAND, has anyone read this book? thoughts?

The Planiverse. Computer Contact with a Two-Dimensional World

Author(s): A. K. Dewdney

Publisher: Springer

ISBN: 0387989161

Format: softback

245pp

Price: ?15.00, $22.00

Review Date: March 23, 2001

Review: This book, first published 16 years ago, follows in the genre of Edward Abbot's nineteenth century classic Flatland. The story is written in the style of an academic - in the computer lab of a large university a group of students and their

professor are working on mainframe, modelling an imaginary two-dimensional world. Suddenly one student notices that the world that they are building with their graphics program is inhabited! They are soon entranced by a universe in which astonishing tiny

creatures, 2-D Ardeans, exist solely on an x-y plane. This mental puzzle invites the reader to imagine how a two-dimensional world might work.. An appendix includes readers' contributions made to Scientific American , following an article about the 2-D

universe, from the viewpoints of physics, chemistry, planetary science, biology, astronomy and technology.

Source: http://www.booknews.co.uk/Books/1806.htm

The more I discuss Squeak with folks, the richer I become. Thanks to C. Matthews for this.

_._._._._._._._._

Sebastian Hergott

Teacher/Intermediate Program Coordinator - CyberARTS

Arts and Information Technology Convener

ASA (Academic Services Associate)

Don Mills Middle School, tel. 395-2320

17 The Donway East, Don Mills, Ontario, M3C 1X6, Canada

sebastian.hergott@tel.tdsb.on.ca

Is the "Dixie Bears.004.pr" project that we saw last Thursday available for download?

Cheers, Darius

Folks,

The Dixie Bears project can also be seen in Dan Ingalls' (archived) talk at Stanford in 2001 (as part of the Computer Systems Lab Colloquium). For those who are interested, point your web browser to http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ay0102.html and click on the camera icon on the third row.

In the first hour of the presentation, Dan talks about Smalltalk history and features. After that, he talks about Squeak and shows some cool stuff (including Dixie Bears). I am looking forward to seeing Kay/Papert archived webcast.

Best,

Antonio Barros

Darius Clarke wrote:

...

Is the "Dixie Bears.004.pr" project that we saw last Thursday available for download?

Cheers, Darius

Point your web browser to http://209.143.91.36/super/146

There are three versions there

Karl