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Comment by n00b101 | Hacker News Reader

I read Snow Crash when I was 13. Then I lost countless hours trying to "live the dream" with Active Worlds [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds

I once toyed around with the idea of making a browser based virtual world for 4chan when I still used it regularly (~2008ish). Heavily inspired by Gibson and Stephenson. Each board would be it's own green wireframe building off a main avenue with shape and size corresponding to the volume of content - and thus would change over time. You would be able to fly around the 'city' and enter buildings to view the threads. I wrote a lot of notes, but no code... Of course, being a teenager I named the browser 4skin :)

This has me giggling. I guess one never really grows out of being a 14-year-old, ultimately.

A bit like the Jurassic Park OS.

Similar story for me. I think I didn't read it until I was 14 and by that point I had experienced quite a few of the "virtual worlds" including Active Worlds, the good old text BBS games, and research-grade virtual reality caves. Despite all of those experiences the book had a profound effect on my expectations of the future.

To me I saw multi-player FPSs as virtual worlds. Second Life was intriguing when it came along but I couldn't figure out how it deserved the title of Metaverse any more than Ultima Online, or others, did.

The author is right about shared virtual reality. When I dropped the DK1 over my eyes for the first time, something clicked that hadn't happened to me since 1996. The true sensory deprivation of the outside world will make virtual reality meaningful. You will know the other person is there and paying attention, at least until Facebook begins streaming live animated alert notifications.

Likewise. I missed Lucasfilm's Habitat, but tried most of the virtual worlds after that, from MUDs via telnet in the early 90's, Worlds Chat in 95-96, Active Worlds right after (my company spent $1,500 buying a server copy), The Palace, Second Life, WoW, and more recently DK2/CC, etc.

We're getting close from the technology perspective, but the storytelling and the "massive" portion of an MMORPG is still not there. Visually impressive, but the social interactions are dull and unsophisticated, without emotional depth.

It's funny to look in hindsight. What Habitat has apparently nailed in the 80's [1] is what is missing, 30+ years later.

[1] http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html

> We're getting close from the technology perspective, but the storytelling and the "massive" portion of an MMORPG is still not there. Visually impressive, but the social interactions are dull and unsophisticated, without emotional depth.

However ambitious MMOs and virtual worlds get, I worry that they'll always run into the same barrier restricting their potential past a certain scale: the MMO experience is made out of people, and a whole lot of people are awful.

Snow Crash actually deals with this if I remember correctly. When you go out onto the street you're likely to encounter people in the shape of Penises (etc).

Most chat and social apps deal with this already by limiting your interactions to selected people that you whitelist.

That shouldn't be hard to replicate into VR.

Yeah, that's kind of the problem I mean. MMOVR promises vast and intricate human worlds, but past a certain critical point you wind up self-filtering down to a few dozen people so you're not overwhelmed by assholes.

I think you can solve this by limiting anonymity. You won't see people dressed in penises once you're connected to your FB friends.

I know there's valid arguments against forced real identities to be used, but it's always a trade off between signal and noise.

>but the storytelling and the "massive" portion of an MMORPG is still not there Thats because of hardware and network limits. MMOs are optimized to reduce latency and expensive computations. Having too many people concentrating on one place creates a huge stream of data that has to be broadcast to everyone in range. A few players in one area/instance don't need that much bandwidth(since most of world is loaded locally, only the changes are needed).

What are "DK2/CC"? I've not heard of them.

In this context the parent is probably referring to the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 and the Oculus Rift Crystal Cove prototype (which was very similar)

"Massive" does exist in some worlds. Eve Online has been pretty remarkable in shying away from programmatic content in favor of building an architecture for people to compete on their own terms; And it has 50k simultaneous users on one shard.

Oh dear god. I'm working on a virtual math world video game, and so I was obliged to check out Active Worlds which you linked to.

It truly feels lost in the 90s.. I can't say I could appreciate the UX. I probably won't be dabbling there. :/

Still, it's pretty cool that it's the oldest online multiplayer 3D world and still apparently has a friendly user base! (They helped me out when I started spouting wwwwwwawsd in the chat whilst trying to move my avatar)

"In the summer of 1994, Ron Britvich created WebWorld, the first 2.5D world where tens of thousands could chat, build and travel. WebWorld operated on the Peregrine Systems Inc. servers as an after hours project until Britvich left the company to join Knowledge Adventure Worlds (KAW) in the fall of that year. In February 1995, KAW spun off their 3D Web division to form the company Worlds Inc."

It's really odd to think that NCSA Mosaic had just been released a year earlier - and if you go back to 2D, rather than 2.5D, the first persistent multiplayer virtual world launched in 1986, several years before even non-graphical web browsing was a thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)

One of the key things that made Snow Crash so appealing was that participants in the world also contributed the code that made it work. It was sort of semi-open source, I guess. I wonder if there's a way to make that practically work in a real-life metaverse. The book sort of skips over the obvious governance issues.

Actually, it was distributed. Your code ran on your system. So long as it spoke the Steet protocol, and you had the real estate, you could run whatever you wanted.

I read it at the time when domain name ownership conflicts were the hottest topic and we all thought that any business based on a dictionary-word dot com domain would have an unbeatable competitive advantage (oh, how wrong we were!).

The idea of early adopters sitting on coveted real estate close to the origin of The Street struck me as a perfect prediction of the domain name rush. In hindsight, we matched the "prediction" to the wrong part of the internet: coveted early adopter real estate is not found in the domain name system, it's in the allocation of IPv4 subnet blocks.

I read the book when I was a MUD addict in the 90s, and MUDs had a similar mechanism.

If you became high enough level in many MUDs, you became a "wizard". Wizards weren't players anymore, but they could edit code, creating new areas in the game for players to explore. Changing the code of a running game from within it was pretty cool, and so was the programming language (LPC, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPC_(programming_language)).

I read it much later so I think I missed some of the ability to be swept away as an imaginative teenage (sad).

I did spend a month trying to be as efficient and awesome as Seven of Nine though. Sleeping standing up didn't really work though.

Interesting how "new" build your own reality worlds have just started reappearing after an 8 year drought. VR has brought them back, but VR is just a new interface to the same way of creating things.

It was Cybertown for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown

I spent many, many hours building things in Cofmeta and mars. :)

AW was ahead of its time, but internal shenanigans basically stunted and killed it.

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