Weekly Update Thread, Progress Updates for SPO Options

[Noggin]

Thanks Wisty! I've been trying to post on here for a couple of days but there seems to be some strange bug which doesn't let you type in the box!

Oh well, fixed now lol.

I'm partially back on-line. I have bought 4 large servers and a SAN which are running in my house. I figure this should be enough for my own testing, and a minimal amount of external testing. The servers are only performing simulation duties, and do not have any of the game-hosting capabilities switched on. I'm trying to figure out a way of moving this function out of my 'cloud' and onto another, but I would think this solution is a few weeks off, if not months.

The hosting business has made me realise that I should look at hosting the game as cheaply as possible until interest starts to gather. The money I spend on extraneous hosting can be better spent on other things at this stage. So yes, it's not quite as grand as it once was, but even still it should be mostly functional. I can now do some of the final stages of development on the simulators, and develop an external solution for running 'modules' on hosted equipment.

Yet another year in the life of an independently developed MMO I guess, and not a particularly constructive one. I still appreciate your interest, and hopefully we'll have something to show for it soon!

Nogg

[Aziphirael]

If I put on my Dragon's Den hat on, then I would say value for money is the key thing. We've just seen the owners of the MMO APB go down the toilet:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tays...entral-11010527

I think they overstretched themselves and spent a lot of money as well as antagonise the very people they needed to promote the game IE the press. Which resulted in dud reviews which in turn didn't attract the userbase they needed to support the game.

And therein lies the interesting and perhaps important question. If the game goes commercial how many regular users do you need to sustain the game? It doesn't matter what the income model is (whether its subscription, rce or microcredit transactions) the main question is what is the breakeven point? Expensive hosting will increase that for example and in the early stages cash is going to be important. Hosting is something to think about when you start to get the cash flowing into the business. We can see games like EVE Online and even EU slowly upgrade their hosting over time as the userbase expands for example.

So yeah I think scrimping on things until you get interest is a good way to go. Its nice to have the "ultimate solution" but an 80% solution is good enough to get things going. Splash BETA across the game and the website and people will understand.

[Noggin]

You make a very good point Az. It's all too easy to get overconfident about something like this, especially when you've poured all the time and money into it that I have with my project. I've had some interest from investors, but I've shyed away from it for a few reasons. It's definitely not that I'm not willing to give up part of my company. It's more that I actually don't think what I have will be commercially successful for a few years.

However, that's not a bad thing, just as long as I can keep it up myself, which up until Xmas I was willing to do. When my hosting company went to ruin, I had no idea what I'd do. Now, I think I've figured something out temporarily, but I'm still bothered about how I'm going to host the game when I want people to actually start playing it. I simply can't do this from my home - not possible.

But compared to most commercial game developers, my costs are tiny. I have no staff to pay! My main developer works for beer/the joys of doing it. This is a very good thing when you actually get people to start playing. I'm hoping to entice people by word of mouth only to begin with. I'll work out a cost model then. The RCE will come into play at some point, but I'm sure there's a way I can get it funded up until that happens.

At the moment, I treat it like a rather obsessive hobby, than the be-all and end-all of my future employ. If it turns out to be popular, which I'm going to do my best to make enough hear about it to make worthwhile, then I'm happy. If people just don't like it, that's another matter.

This brings me onto APB. I'm not sure quite what went wrong with this. It has a great design. I know a guy who used to work with the owner on the GTA team, and he told me about it. I think they were a little investor-heavy, and didn't have their business model worked out too well. Apart from that, the game totally sucked. I tried it out a few weeks ago, and omg how I was disappointed.

The shooting was terrible - the driving was worse than EU. Considering these are the two main activities in the game, I'm amazed they let it go out like that. I think they scared away the interest they had quite quickly, investors got scared, and turned their backs. Big shame, but that's the risk you take with something like this.

The games world is pretty cut-throat like that - and people don't wait for something to flop for long. Luckily the game is an asset to them, and I'm sure somebody will be able to extract the right sort of cash from it.

[Nozzy]

Right.. Been along time since I've posted here, hut after receiving emails about updates to this thread, I simply had to come on here and see what the story is ;)

In regards to the hosting, I concur that starting minimalistic is the only real option for success, even more so as this isn't exactly a cookie cutter product which is a clone of a clone derived from another clone. I do have to comment with regards to the APB & RTW saga though, as there is a lot of misconception and it is a project that is very dear to me, because of this I have made a lot of research into the whole deal, and I would like to inform you, even if the relevancy may not be of the most importance :)

First of all. APB was, and still is, a rather good game with an astounding amount of potential if played out right. Thing is though, it is NOT perfect, and far from it. Unfortunately this comes as a direct result to an incompetency from the 'great' man, the CEO AND Lead Designer of APB, Mr. Dave Jones. From the very beginning his attention has been fragmented, couple this with a lack of planning ahead and apply a proper direction, with a hint of: 'we'll see where it goes' and you get a game like APB, with its stellar concept, over-ambitious feature set, and broken and fragmented gameplay, not to mention lack of play testing to get rid of the bugs.

Fact of the matter is, you cannot run things both business wise and game developing wise and still expect to not fuck it up even more than it was to begin with. RTW was also very over-ambitious, they burned through a 100 million US Dollars in the development of APB, again, this was done because they did way too much trial and error, a lot of which could have been avoided, with proper management. I could rant on about other mistakes that was done relating to this, gameplay wise, but I'd rather talk the marketing model side of things.

Contrary to popular belief, the business model for APB was quite well done, and it worked better than any MMO business model before it, I will tell you why in a moment. The downfall with this though, was that it was too complicated for the average Joe. They had not simplified the system, and instead the customer had to jump through hoops to be able to pay AND play. As I said, despite the complication of the payment system, this was a sucess beyond anything seen before it. APB netted about $3m per month since it's release, small figure in the grand scheme of things. What makes it so outstanding though is that those $3m boils down to a whooping $28 on average per player per month. Only other game that has ever managed such a high profit would be our ol friend EU. And until recently that wasn't officially a game.

In conclusion, APB, which is in administration to be sold is a ticking timebomb of gold waiting to go off, it is however, a diamond in the rough, and it will need a solid home with a lot of qualified devs that will nurture it and polish it. On almost any front I believe RTW's incompetency or lack of experience and direction is to blame fir what has happened. Luckily though, there seem to be interested parties that would like to buy APB and brand it their own, I for one, will ve crossing my fingers as deals are being discussed as I write this.

Anyways, my rant is over, and hopefully we can stop with the rumours and use the facts instead :P

I am glad to see that this project is still going, and that there are active bystanders out there, I for one, Noggin, wish you the very best with this onward. I know you've invested years of blood, sweat, tears and money into this, it is truly awesome, and I am very much looking forward to a day where it will bare fruit!!! ;)

[Wistrel]

Wow Hello!

The forum woke up! =D

Well heck totally surprised about APB. The ava creation looked awesome and vids of game play ok. So reading Nozzy's stuff (how come you know so much btw?) it sounds like dispite "not being finished" (show me an MMO that is!) it was doing alright but more the debt of development was too much dispite the huge income following release.

I'll go read the link in a sec.

Noggin glad to hear you are finally on "Wistrel style Frugality" with SPONG =D Have to admit, when you told us the outgoings I was kinda shocked how much money was going down the drain on hosting a project that:

a) generated zero income and almost (just us) zero interest
b) wouldn't generate any interest for a long time (when you decide to tell people) or any income for even longer after that!

Definite running before walking going on there.

Az is right, the questions he poses are valid. If you can cut the expense back to server purchase, beer and electricity for now though you can avoid thinking about such things for a while yet though.

Soooo.....

Where are we actually at? You have all new servers and a large box buzzing away under the stairs....

what is it doing? Are we back generating a planet again?

You mentioned your "development plans" which I need to pm you about. While you arn't actually spending time coding on the project (I assume you have no time currently) are you ok to carry on the gen though?

If not why not? Sure we'd all like to know ;)

Glad you are posting again
Wistrel

[Nozzy]

Writing this from my mobile, so I'll keep it short :) the information I provided is the sum of a lot of articles and ex-rtw employees exposing the situation. The game was indeed doing good, and had RTW been living up to their responsibility there wouldn't be a real problem. Because of the lack of direction APB was finally forced into releasing from it's investors (who had upwards 100m us dollars invested) although it was obvious for both the devs and the beta testers that it was far from ready. After release RTW also failed in many ways as a company, so even if the company hadn't been forced into administration, they would still have a problem... Here's hoping though that the story will gave a good outcome! The game has immense potential, and despite it's shortcomings and flaws, it is still incredible fun and addicting.

[Noggin]

Sorry, wasn't very clear was I!

First of all, when I started hosting the servers originally, I did it more out of necessity. At the time, there was absolutely no way I could have generated a planet with that kind of equipment at home. It's too big, too power hungry, and I don't have anywhere to put it really, especially somewhere that meets the cooling requirements.

Mind you, this was a while back, when I actually thought we'd have the game running by late 2008 at the latest. As it turned out, the last stage dragged on beyond anything I intended, and I've ended up paying the hosting costs for a couple of extra years without anyone playing.

I now have a minimalist grid comprised of two servers loaded up with AMD's finest whirring away in my air-conditioned study 24/7. You'll be pleased to know I have solar panels on the roof, and that this time of year the servers run by the power of sunlight (most days, anyway!).

The servers I have simply run the grid, and basic game simulations. They have the capacity to switch on a full simulation, but not the power to introduce avatars into the mix (not more than one or two anyway, and certainly not making big changes). I'm using a backup of the planet generation XIV as my 'working' planet, as this planet seems to be perfectly acceptable. I don't see the need to do another regen, and as it turns out, I couldn't even if I wanted to!

I'm currently working on code to enlist the Amazon EC2 Cloud on-demand, to look at the viability of extending the Grid into this to perform simulation tasks, with a view to having the front-end of the game hosted on some generic webservers (making it easier for me to buy into a normal hosting company).

When I first started hosting the servers, a lot of this technology wasn't about (and the Cloud was pretty expensive and early days), so I guess it's quite good in a way that I've had to re-evaluate my hosting.

As far as the actual game status - I'm looking at making the back end even more flexible, so I'm taking a lot of it back into development to try and make the infrastructure very portable indeed. I'll post a bit more info when I have formulated a plan!

[Wistrel]

The servers I have simply run the grid, and basic game simulations. They have the capacity to switch on a full simulation, but not the power to introduce avatars into the mix (not more than one or two anyway, and certainly not making big changes). I'm using a backup of the planet generation XIV as my 'working' planet, as this planet seems to be perfectly acceptable. I don't see the need to do another regen, and as it turns out, I couldn't even if I wanted to!

Ok the Story so far from idiot wistrel POV.

Noggin: Hi Guys I'm making a final gen of the planet ready for the game - whee!
Noggin: Oh Shit oh shit oh shit. Its Toxic and killed everything... bugger!
Noggin: OK well I rejigged some settings and code and stuff and I'm now going for another gen...
Noggin: Right the first stage went really well and 2nd stage underway now, things are looking promising
Noggin: Second stage of regen progressing...
Noggin: Arrrgh! The host shut down and can't get to my servers - MY PLANET NOOOOO!!!!!
Noggin: Phew! I ramraided the building and got the servers complete with half generated planet out
Noggin: <SILENCE>
Noggin: <SILENCE>
Noggin: Hey I sold half my servers and am going to do some more SPONG coding for various purposes
Noggin: Hey I bought some more servers and am now running things from home
Wistrel: OK so the planet that was half generated before?, you continuing to generate that again now?
Noggin: <some stuff I ddn't understand regarding planet code numbers>

Some questions:

What is "The grid"?
Define "basic game simulations"?
Define "a full simulation"
Which planet is planet XIV (nice name btw) in reference to planets since the toxic one?

Sorry if I'm being thick =)

Wistrel

[Noggin]

Lol sorry Wisty.. it's sometimes hard living in Noggin world for this long and suddenly having to come out and explain things to normal folk!

So.. since "Arrrgh! The host shut down and can't get to my servers - MY PLANET NOOOOO!!!!!"...

I got my servers, I extracted as much as I could from them, and moved the server Grid (the multi-node processing platform which runs across all the servers) to a smaller subset of servers, sold some of the older non-GPU servers off, and the remainder are currently sitting somewhere very secret (my garage, don't tell anyone! shhhh).

These particular ones are not currently plugged in, thus my processing power is inhibited somewhat. I invested in a couple of extremely powerful desktops a while back, and they worked out very nicely in terms of the amount of data they could crunch through, especially for regen. I managed to do a deal and swap these desktops for some similar machines, except this time in server chassis, each managing two 6-core processors each, along with four overclocked nVidia GTX460 cards. So, in all I have quite a bit of both standard and Floating Point processing capability, which can be easily scaled.

I decided to put these servers to good use, and run enough of the game back-end services on these machines in order to continue development. I don't know if you recall, but I actually managed to get a complete regen done after my disasterous one. I wasn't 100% happy, so I reverted back, changed a few things and continued from stage 2. This was shortly before the whole hosting fiasco.

Looking back on the completed regen however, I decided it was good enough to 'give it a go'. There are a few problems with it, but it will give me a chance to improve the tooling to fix minor issues with planets to prevent having to regenerate them all the time to adjust small faults.

EDIT: <decided to cut out a WHOLE BUNCH of waffle about the data structure of the planets>

So here we are, a planet I'm 90% happy with, a couple of servers to develop on and a much smaller amount being leeched from my pocket every month. The servers I have just about have enough juice to 'run' the planet, just as long as it's held in a sort-of stasis. Simply having the planet alive will enable me to expand my computing grid over other platforms which are not necessarily owned by me.

Think of it as allowing us the potential of hosting SPONG anywhere in the world on a completely dynamic system.

It's similar to when I talked about running parts of the grid on your machines. This is a much cut-down version, simply allowing your PC to process user-related changes and submit them into the grid. What I'm talking about here is a true computing cloud, which could allow SPONG to act as one big sprawling 'brain' across the internet.

Once I've developed this technology, I see quite a lot of commercial potential in this alone, and it's likely I will market this to fund game development and hosting. If successful, we immediately have a marketing platform for the game. I think it's a pretty cool idea anyway.

If you like, I'll post the (fairly) waffle I cut out in another post. It's kinda interesting if you're geeky, and it's a pretty fresh way of thinking in terms of data processing.

I hope that makes it a little bit clearer, although I fear once again I haven't done a great job of it :o

[Wistrel]

ah ok yes I must have missed the regen after "the toxic one", that was mostly ok.

So to simplify again. You gave up on the "perfect regen" that you were doing when the host went bankrupt and went back to the completed one that was more or less ok. This was the one that came after the toxic one.

(I'm still amazed I missed a 90% ok regen being completed but ah well...)

So now you have "Planet 90% perfect" running on some 6core servers with mega graphics cards and these are efffective enough for the planet to "exist on a day to day basis".

By "exist on a day to day basis" you mean sun comes up and down, plants grow, water flows, wind blows... in short, "shit happens" - correct?

You DONT however have enough processing power on this rig for more than 2 or 3 avatars (the ones needed for you and the others to work on development things) to wander about. No one can therefore see this new planet you have created.

You are now considering that "hosting" in the traditional sense is too expensive for a game that makes no money for a very long time so you are converting your "processing distribution" code to work with whatever platform that amazon offer.

I have some questions:

1. This platform (SDK/whatever) is possibly a moving goal post? (this is a serious question)

2. This conversion will take a long time? (thus exaserbating point 1?)

3. In the mean time you don't need to do any big processing any more? (the planet is generated and processing power, over what you have already available, is only needed for coping with the influence of more avatars)

4. You have servers in the garage that are sitting idle. What do you plan to do with these? (given you want to use amazon in the future for processing)

5. How much is amazon going to cost compared with what you were originally paying? (specifically how much would a beta test with say 50 players cost for 6 months say as aposed to your old hosting setup?)

In all I'm concerned...

I can be as critical/patronising sounding (sorry if this happens) as I like since we don't know each other (but I like to hope this is a breath of fresh air/reality check maybe too?).

I guess my problem is that it sounds like there is a game (or at least a game world - possibly with no game available yet) ready (ish) but no bugger has seen it! You think its great but, not to be rude, you are the creator AND a programmer (and possibly a genius). This makes you VERY different from the average "player". Your idea of great is probably most people's idea of TLDR. ;)

What I'm getting at is that it seems you are about to invest a lot of time in what I'm sure is a very interesting (and maybe cost saving) conversion but (ok being REALLY mean) I can easilly foresee the following situation:

Noggin: "Hey guys remember me? I just spent the last 2 years converting SPONG to run on amazon. It took ages cause they kept changing how things worked and each iteration really interested me and made things potentially better so kept recoding for it. I also got another really massive contract for my main business and had to spend 8 months in a bunker in southern mexico so didn't really have access to my home broadband connection where the servers were running the planet. Also the cat chewed the wire and my wife didn't know how to sort it so yeh... you get the idea.

Anyhow SPONG is up running on amazon now, its costing me about 50% of what my host was 2 years ago which funnilly enough is what hosting costs anyhow now with dropping prices... ah well... gotta laugh ;) Who wants to test?"

Comunity: "Ah well kinda playing the latest and greatest now and then we got married and theres a kid on the way and of course the apocalyse came in december 2012 so we are a bit busy surviving and well you know but sure, one or two of us are still interested"

Noggin: "Great ok one or 2 is fine. Heres a client and some logins"

Community: "er... this isn't all that good, can you change x,y,z,p,q,r...... hgy,shw,poi,jjjy and xxi then it will be good enough for a beta we think"

Noggin: "Ah shit yeh you are right, man how did I not spot all those problems?!?! I'll get right on it!, heck gonna have to change so much! This will take ages. Damn, if only I'd got some folks to test it out abit 2 years ago before I spent all that time jumping through amazon hoops =_=***"
and so on....

OK I've been in the pub and this is probably sounding really bitchy. It isn't intended that way I just wanted to put over how this seems to the rest of us (or at least me) and my fear that it could all be for nothing.

We all want to see this happen Noggin but I don't think I'm the only one who is starting to doubt it ever will.

Sorry

Wistrel

[Domochevsky]

Yeah, i'm getting the same vibes as Wistrel here, so consider us reasonably doubtful.




(In related news: Duke Nukem Forever is going to get released next year. Just as a warning. ;D
The developer is Gearbox now, makers of Borderlands.)

[malouin]

I think like Wistrel and Domo. For nearly 3 years ( is it? ), we have been waiting for Noggin World, for some "meat".

From 2007 to today, 2010 sept 9th, we had a total of 2 screenshot. One of the software used for making the planet, and one of an avatar, without too much of details. We waited for a website, who didn't come, and the only reason i keep coming here is because of you noggin. I keep faith, but like everyone, i'm a bit doubtful :/

[Wistrel]

Just to qualify I was kinda feeding of Az's Dragon Den style cross examination to say "I'm doubtful now that this is ever going to see the light of day". - at least at the current rate and direction of development.

I wasn't doubting the existance of this stuff. I'm not really that fussed on screenshots or anything but I think, if there is a planet that can be interacted with now,.. why isn't it being interacted with now?

I was talking to Shinpatchi on Calypso last night and he went all mathematical on me about proof and what not.

I know what its like to have a project that you love doing. The fun is in "the doing" not "the completing". I'm just getting a vibe now that this is the case with SPONG. The closer you get to the end the more you realise its in sight. This can be a scary thing for something you've dedicated years to.

The thing is, no MMO has been released yet in a completed state. Look at MA, they declared everything was beta more or less up till last year and a year on they are still not back with all the features (admittedly I think they've deliberately ditched some but just arn't telling anyone for fear of outcry) they had before CryTropia.

It just seems that no matter what state Noggin thinks SPONG is in, finished or unfinished, it will actually never be finished anyway cause, as soon as people start to use it, there will be a million other things to do and bugs to sort out.

Spending time on a new backend for amazon hosting is nice and all but maybe seems an indulgence?

Before Noggin was hosting 3 full racks at great expense. Now he has SPONG running on just 2 machines. A MUCH lower hosting cost right?

He probably thinks his 50MBit virgin home connection isn't fast enough for anyone to test SPONG out. I don't know what the upload is but my download here is only about 5MBit max and that is shared between 4 of us. If Noggin has say 20MBit up surely that is enough for a few people to start testing?

I don't know, maybe I'm clutching at straws here or worse still, sounding like a "gimmie gimmie gimmie newb". This isn't the case. We've been waiting around for SPONG for years now, we can wait a little longer.

With a completed planet though I'm struggling to understand why Noggin isn't shouting to the roof about it and actively trying to make people come and look.

I suppose now I put it like that... it does seem a little suspicious...

Wistrel

[Aziphirael]

Theres a good xkcd cartoon that I thinks describes this situation. Will dig it out once I get to a computer.

But taking a realistic view. Nothing is ever perfect and if you fall into the mire of perfectionism then the reality is you will never release anything. A comment from the Duke Nuken guys about why it never got released is a case in point. They were constantly trying to perfect it, yet the goalposts kept moving as each generation of games trumped what they had.

Put it this way. On this forum theres a bunch of people who are happy to play Spong no matter the state. It could just be pacman graphics for all they care. you could release 3D pong and they will still play it.

The important thing is this. Don't waste the opportunity of using those early adopters or enthusiasts.It will give you a lot of experiences and information about what should be prirotise feature wise.

[Wistrel]

Put it this way. On this forum theres a bunch of people who are happy to play Spong no matter the state. It could just be pacman graphics for all they care. you could release 3D pong and they will still play it.

Well I HOPE I will.... tbh I've been pretty bad at beta testing. Yes I'm pretty good at finding bugs when I really try but I crapped out of Fallen Earth beta'ing (ok I think PC gfx not being able to handle "outside" was a big contributor + I wasn't the only drop out, McCormick had been waiting years for the game and had exactly the same issue).

I've been really bad at beta'ing Lego Universe too, to the point I nearly considered passing my account to a friend with more interest. I have found it a little er... well dull I guess though for the small amount of time I've been there.

Just feel like I'm running around and hitting things and (more importantly) nothing I hit/smash persists as smashed so why did I bother? Should probably give it another go though...

I worry SPONG may not grab me enough to dedicate time to it. There is an issue that I only seem to be able to hack playing one game at any period really. At the moment, Calypso is kinda it.

You never know, maybe if SPONG is as interesting as it claims to be and has a workable interface I might be able to bring myself to spend some time on it regularly. If only such things weren't so top secret ;)

Wistrel

[Noggin]

Ok just a quick response, I'll be back later.

First of all, I know where you're all coming from, and this must be extremely frustrating to wait all this time and not really see the fruits of my loins at all. I'd be exactly the same, and in fact, probably the first one to say something. But I guess you're all still here and willing to read my diatribes, so I see that as a positive sign.

From my point of view, I guess I don't feel that I need to constantly provide people with 'proof' of my work, just because it is something I've invested so much of my life in, and I think to myself "why the heck wouldn't people believe it". This, I realise, is quite an oversight on my part, and in a way egotistical, and I do recognise I should pay more attention to. The faith of the folks I've involved with this is something I should put a lot more value in, as after all people's faith is all I have at the moment.

To clarify the planet thing again... I do sometimes find it difficult to paint a simple picture of the games architecture, so sometimes I over simplify, and sometimes go completely the other way.

As I said before, I've decided to use a planet I was originally going to discard. It's actually the same 'base' planet (as in stage one of regen) as the one I was working through at the time I had to take the servers down, except a few composite difficulties crept in. Given the lack of choice I had, I decided to keep this planet and 'layer' a few fixes on top of it, in the hope that I could salvage a completely workable planet.

My current home servers will host this planet, running it's base simulations.

When I say 'planet', you probably think of a huge 3D model with an incredible amount of detail sitting there waiting to be served up via the interweb. In actual fact, it's a humungous relational database linking together simulation datasets, and linking in raw data from simulations and regen.

The aim being, in the end, is that the SPONG client on your machine will connect to the simulations, query this database, link the data composites together, and form a 'view' of the world. In effect, the 'planet' is actually a living entity, ever changing as a result of simulations running both within the server grid, and on your clients.

What I have in my study now is a mini-grid hosting the planet, bereft of any interactive simulations (i.e. player related). This allows me to log onto the 'planet' and make changes, change the base environmental simulations, and perform a number of tests to ensure the planet is in a fit state to use (something I haven't had time to do fully), and write the necessary code to allow more grid flexibility.

Please realise that all this is being done more out of necessity than whimsy - I'd have kept my servers where they were, and carried on as I was. Once I lost my hosting, I came to the realisation that I've been spending a whole lot of money that I can't really spare hosting something really quite elaborate that's not giving us any strategic benefit.

This is why I thought it best to look at other ways of hosting it, that allows much greater flexibility, and lower overall outlay, especially during the initial period of zero revenue. I've also slowly come to the realisation that my business plan needs to be severely beefed-up before I make the kind of financial commitments this game will require as soon as it goes into beta. So, yeah, I guess I'm going more carefully now.

This introduces yet more delays, and I know it's not the sort of thing you want to hear, especially after me saying the game wasn't far away. Now, a couple of years later, we're still (I think) roughly as far away from seeing the game as we thought we were back then.

One thing I hadn't realised when I embarked on this is how much you have to consider about every single little part, and how huge an effect this has on development times. I'm not trying to 'perfect' it before release. I know it's going to be imperfect, but I need to make sure it's just 'so' to prevent wasting more years correcting it. This is another disadvantage of fully procedural games.

I just want to try to appeal to you not to lose interest in this, as I know interest must be waining to say the least. You are some of the people I'll rely on to get this thing off the ground, and I hope it will be in our mutual interest to do so.

[Wistrel]

I dunno... reading this... something like hope seems to die in me...

Its beginning to sound like there isn't much of any practical use at all....

Maybe if you post that bit you cut out of the other post about the nerdy technical details of distribution processing it would help, but I almost feel like I want to say: "So long and good luck..." at this stage.

Sorry

Wistrel

[Noggin]

Not quite sure what you mean by this Wisty. Nothing of practical use? Yes, this is pretty much the case as far as you guys are concerned. I'm down to literally the bare minimum I need to continue development.

Once I've done a bit of redesigning, and come up with a viable solution to dynamically spreading the load of the grid across machines I don't actually own (i.e. a commercial computing cloud), I'll be back, and probably raving about it. I'm going to create a 'world viewer' too over the coming weeks, so if I actually get to spread the grid around the internet, you guys will at least be able to 'browse' the planet.

Who knows how long it will be until it becomes a game though.

I do understand if none of you can be bothered to follow this any more. I did originally post here with the impression the game would be fairly imminent, and that you wouldn't have to wait years for it. I just thought my group of friends here could share this with me, and be a part of a game that will be truly created by the players.

I guess it's gone on for long enough, and I still haven't come up with much. Doesn't do a great deal for my game or my credibility. I'm not going to give up though. From now I will stop my updates, and I'll just come back when there's something you can download. Hope you're still around!

[Domochevsky]

Y'know, it would already help if you had something to show for all those years of waiting.

"Pics or it didn't happen", as they say. :)

[Wistrel]

Well "disappointed" doesn't really cut it... after all this time... and the fact that there is no world viewer even... well... it could be anything really.

I think you are right though Noggin. I think the phrase you want is, "Put up or shut up" as they say. I don't think you can blame anyone for loosing faith though. Its been a long ride and you are probably right in that there isn't much more to say about theoretical stuff until you have something tangible so to speak. I think we've probably talked all we can now about what SPONG might be able to provide. Until we can start having conversations about "weird avatar behavior when we log off" or actually getting tips on understanding the world that helps people to know how to interact with the interface better, its probably best we all forget about it.

Go away, work hard, and come back when the "Egg is Hatched" so to speak.

I'm sure we're all looking forward to that

Good Luck (and I really mean that) and don't give up for anyone.

Hope to see you again back here soon

Wistrel