one project that comes to mind is @raphkoster's criminally underappreciated Metaplace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace
it was a little like being able to build your own 2d graphical MOO/MUD, but strongly bent towards the web. it had a scripting language and a flash-based graphical editor. i wish there was more info out there about it.
one project that comes to mind is @raphkoster's criminally underappreciated Metaplace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace
it was a little like being able to build your own 2d graphical MOO/MUD, but strongly bent towards the web. it had a scripting language and a flash-based graphical editor. i wish there was more info out there about it.
Metaplace Postmortem (2008): "Snow Crash is a Lie"
jussst after i wished there had been some kind of postmortem done on raph koster's Metaplace, i found out that he himself presented one at GDC 2008!
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/34/Metaplace-Postmortem-Reinventing
if you're not familiar with Metaplace, I don't blame you. It was an attempt at making a web-based graphical MUD/MUSH/MOO/MMO virtual world development system that could be played online in any browser. it disappeared almost as quickly as it was developed.
what i find most fascinating about it was that it had a Lua-based scripting system called Metascript. it featured some really hot runtime behaviours like being able to load/unload scripts on any object. (which means you never needed to recompile to test your world)
although i very much appreciate this is a 0.00001% public interest bit of knowledge, i just found the web's only surviving example of MetaPlace's markup language which its MetaScript interpreted.
in the late 90s and early 2000s, data streams sent between the server and client on mmo's was almost always a handtuned custom binary stream. e.g. UO was tuned down to the byte, because the target minimum connection speed was 14400 baud at some point (which is 1.3 kb/s).
by the late 2000s bandwidth had loosened up quite a bit, so it wasn't as critical to write super compressed data streams. in other words: you could start sending entire text streams instead just like http.
while most developers today angle for json or xml, raph said these were too heavy for use back in the late 00s.
instead, his team wrote a mini tag-based markup language.
in other words: you could just connect to an metaplace server and it would start barfing a stream of markup at you. it was up to your client software to interpret the markup language into graphics, 2d tile maps, GUIs, etc.
i'm so thankful that @crwth thought to capture that text stream. it turns out to be incredibly straightforward:
https://camelpate.blogspot.com/2009/06/outputtouser.html
[O_HERE]|10013|0:308|5|4|0|0|Crwth|0:1|0| |0
[P_ZOOM]|1.000000
[W_SPRITE]|24080:135|0.375|0.140625|255|255|255|http://assets.metaplace.com/worlds/0/24/24079/assets/images/dwnbtnpress.png|dwnbtnpresspng_|2|0|.|4|0|0
in the above three examples, each line of text is broken up into two parts:
[tagname]|argument1|argument2|argument3|argument4|...
the tag name goes in the brackets, and the arguments that you want to apply to that tag go between the pipes that follow it. unlike xml or json, there is no concept of nested properties (that i can see anyway).
@vga256 @raphkoster Would people use such a thing today? In the decades since bandwidth has improved a lot, the tedium of pixels dribbling through dialup modems is no more.
@mirth @vga256 @raphkoster i think they would. of course they do use things like MMOs and VRChat. I think when something "works" and it's close enough, it subsumes the conversation because people already have these things in their mind, so it's more work, for less excitement to explain the difference. But I keep advocating for spatial social interfaces, because I really believe it helps people identify with their avatar and therefore connect to others.
@travisfw @vga256 @raphkoster I've spent some time in 3D and 2D chat systems and I vastly prefer 2D. If there were a community with enough interest I'd be happy to pitch in on the engineering effort. I come from an eclectic background but I know a moderate amount about distributed systems and getting hardware to do work efficiently.
@mirth @vga256 @raphkoster I don't know the reason for your preference, but I think 3D controls are usually a bit too much. There are several ways to make 3D interfaces less … uh … 3D. Without having the environment and avatar be 2D. Model the things one can do, and build an easy interface for that, instead of 6 degrees of freedom.
@travisfw @vga256 @raphkoster Too many degrees of freedom is a big part of it. It tends to be fussy. If text is a significant part of the experience (like with chat) then you have to deal with text in 3D and associated legibility and layout issues. Then you have authoring. How do you make art for the thing? 3D makes it quite a bit harder. There's a lot of interesting precedent to draw from, Comic Chat, Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, etc. 3D I don't understand as well, though I'm interested.
