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sorry sorry sorry sorry, honest mistake on the gigabytes. Yes i did know about gmaes being in gigabytes. I meant 100's and 100's of gigabytes, is it testlabytes? tessabytes? what is that word?

Terrabytes.

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Nothing is impossible

Fly to my house, using only the power of your mind, and I'll believe that. I know what your saying, aiming high is a good thing, and produces progress, but you may have to scale down your design somewhat at least until there are technological advancements made that will allow the idea to work in its complete form.

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As for UBER weaponry, why does there have to be uber weaponry?

If you're going to allow players to create thier own content, there will be uber weapons. Some sort of screening process could deal with this. An example of this type of idea would be checking a players equipment when they enter a server, and stripping them of anything that would severely unbalance the region (or take another action such as nerfing the item). This would however, upset any players that had earned very powerful equipment in a legit fashion.

I have to go right now, but I have more to say on this later.

I toyed around with this idea for a while, thinking that it could be 'the next great thing' but knowing programming as i do, i couldnt find a great way to derive a game from web content alone, abstract data doesnt neccisarily equate to a game, so while the idea of 'currently updated and community based' game data is a good idea, i think polling random data from the web wont result in much.

I would like to see the technical issues resolved first,

just my 2 pennies =D

Alright, I'm back for part II of my replying

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And when i say seemlessly, i mean all downloading is done in game, in the background. Your character is told to come back in however long, and to go and explore somewhere else.

Alright, this is better than what I was first picturing from the term 'seemless' (My mental image of that was ingame downloading on a per tile/block of terrain data basis), but is still quite problematic. The idea of telling players to come back later, and starting to download an area isnt such a bad one, but needs some refining. A few things to consider:
-Players will start off with almost no areas presumably, and therefore will encounter these 'come back later' scenarios everywhere they go. This could be quite annoying, and many gamers would probably ditch the game rather before waiting for some content. This can be overcome by some extent by providing some sort of skeleton world where theres something to occupy new players until they've downloaded the content for additional areas.
-Players will be told to come back later, and will go somewhere else for a while. Chances are they'll come across another area they also dont have the content for. This gives two choices - now start downloading content for both areas at once, or ditch the first and start downloading the second (perhaps a good place for a player option). If both are downloaded at once, players could end up with many areas queued, and would therefore recieve the content for all of those areas slower, or in order, meaning they must visit them in the order they're aquired. With the second option, you break the storyline to some extent, because the 'come back later' message would have to be repeated, in spite of the fact that the player had already waited.
-Different areas will have to be tied together in some way, either through similar terrain, or a plotline device (ie. timetravel machine to access primitive area, etc), and this will create additional work.

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Obviously each world would be screened. Theres no way youd let 12 year olds making shit ruin a top end game. Each world would have to be developed in a professional manner, and then put forward to a screening committee.

That'll cost you a large marketshare - all the 12 year olds who cant develope and play with thier own content. ;)

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So...it's free, but requires massive amounts of resources, both in personel and in equipment. Who's footing the bill? Advertisers?

Thats a very valid concern you'll have to address. Not only do you need server hardware, and a good internet connection, but you'll also need to employ your review board, and any other staff needed to run the game. That would be a hell of a job for volunteers to do, so some sort of pay would most likely be required, and the hardware would of course also have running/maintenence costs.

I'm not just trying to be difficult and flame you here, I'm just trying to point out issues you'd need to address for such a game to work.

This has been cross-posted in the design area btw.

i am thinking quite similar, as you can read in my thread Virtual Universe

so why not combining synergies and making that *simulation*?

the modding aspect of some games today should be rule in this one!

A lot of us are looking for the next big idea, and it is true the technical limitations can make implementation of those big ideas where the rubber meets the road in this business.

I'm glad to see there is so much rounded thinking about it, and I suspect it keeps us more occupied in thought perhaps more than we realize. Who wouldn't love to have a breakthrough title.

This is another echoing of the call to revolutionize once more all things game. Tall order, many trackers, hot pursuit.

revolutionary games writing, keep after the dream game, but take the good advice offered by the community and test your game idea on their indications. Nothing makes the word iterative come home quite so true as this.

[Edited by - adventuredesign on July 29, 2004 4:37:45 PM]

Hey I'd just like to say that this idea has some really good value in it. It was tested before and it worked beatifully. There was a game called Graal Online, and before it went pay-to-play they had a really good system: building levels and creating scripts was a breeze, so lots of kids built stuff and submitted them. A crew would find a spot for the level in the main game server (it was a MMORPG), and put it there for everyone to play in it. It only worked because the economy didn't really matter in this game; there were no stats, and the inventory consisted of a list of weapons that you can't drop, and 2 counters: one for arrows and another for bombs (when you run out of them you just slash 20 bushes until you find some). So balance was not an issue; this was more like an action game where people would go to socialize and have fun playing mini-games. They also had very strict rules to accept a level. Turned out pretty well until they started creating alternate servers that you pay for, and removing features from the classic servers... really good concept though :)

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There was a game called Graal Online,

Graal Online was quite a bit more simplistic than whats being discussed here though, and thats what allowed it to work. To get some great features, you often have to sacrifice others, at least until you have the experience and resources to build the ultimate game.

Second Life. I say no more.

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Original post by frostburn Second Life. I say no more.

-Second Life cannot be played over a dialup connection, which is one of the potential limitations I listed above. Even with broadband usage becoming more widespread, excluding dialup cuts out a significant marketshare at the current time.

-Second Life is not free as is being proposed here. The pricing isnt however overly expensive - rates can be found here. Some sort of funding is required in order to setup and maintain the required servers, etc.

-Land within the Second Life world can be bought and customised by players; this requires actual, real world money however, which once again is a requirement of operating a game of this type.

See this article about enabling player-created online worlds for a discussion of how Second Life achieves some of its functionality. As you can see, Second Life is somewhat along the same lines as the concept being proposed here, but has been constrained by many of the issues pointed out in this thread. This does however demonstrate the feasibility of the model, and gives hope that when the technology has caught up the full potential of this type of game can be realised - until then its important to keep developing smaller scale games utilising a few of the proposed features, to continue pushing the boundary forward.