The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990)
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I have ideas
The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22822691 - April 2020 (1 comment)
The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850 - Sept 2014 (10 comments)
The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70180 - Oct 2007 (1 comment)
I say that because maybe you need to give it a second chance. Season 4 character payoff is some of the best tv ever period.
The pacing was quite slow, I also didn't enjoy westworld for the exact same reason, so maybe i'm just not the right kind of person.
The general technology/corporate story arcs were pretty great, but a lot of the scenes they wrote for Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) were atrocious. The writers basically kept changing his fundamental character traits every episode. Lee's a great actor and did the best anyone realistically could with the material, but it was a complete mess in terms of the writers introducing constant character whiplash. And then the way Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) was written as a romantic arc with him, I'm not sure anybody could have cared less if they wound up together or not, or never talked again the rest of their lives.
I've heard the fourth season is spectacular, and I'd like to get back to it someday, but the first season really wasn't strong enough to keep a lot of viewers, including myself.
By “generally” I’m guessing you just mean yourself?
I thought the writing was pretty weak. They kept falling back on silly tropes to force some drama into the show rather than letting the subject matter itself be the drama. It very much felt like they “jumped the shark” right from the very first episode.
Very few of those characters were believable, let alone likeable.
I do agree season 4 is better, but and the reason why is because the dialled it back on the writing and focused a lot more on the characters. Which is what they should have done from the start.
The writing for me felt a lot more like they didn’t have confidence that the subject matter is interesting enough on its own. Which is a sign of bad writing, not good writing.
That all said, there were some good moments. But on the whole it just wasn’t great. However there isn’t many shows based around this subject so I guess some geeks try to convince themselves that the show was better than it actually was. But each to their own I guess
In my case I think it's an aversion to specialized marketing. I hated Silicon Valley, too; I think it's a lack of distance from the topic which makes me overthink the thing rather than just having fun with the story.
But with HACF I didn't just dislike the topic, I thought the acting was corny and stiff and I thought that the characters were unmotivated throughout the thing, with motivation being replaced with pseudo-historical anecdote. I thought the actors were poorly cast, and I feel like they did a bad job 'convincing' me of anything.
"Of course they're doing the thing, that's who Z is!" isn't compelling enough for me to enjoy it and suspend my real personality from interjecting criticism during the watch.
But who cares what I think : i've been out of lock-step with the crowd for a few years w.r.t. media consumption. Amazon/Netflix/Disney/whoever, AMC in this case shouldn't be considering what I think when toting their bags of money to the bank.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/best-tv-shows-21st-c...
I’m really curious, if you thought the writing was pretty weak in HCF, what’s a show that you thought was particularly well written?
Amusingly, when I read that book, I mistook it for fiction. Kidder's narrative non-fiction style was so detailed I assumed it couldn't have been from notes or interviews.
Loved to hate that show in the first run. Then streamed it 4 more times (playing in the background, but still): the accuracy of depiction of technology, startup issues regarding funding, liaisons and other ups and downs, personalities in tech: thumbs up.
This too (and I know I'll get flack for this one) seemed to be the case with Jobs and Wozniak, Wozniak is an undisputed genius on both hard and software level but Silicon Valley had and has very smart engineers, it was the two of them that were needed to make the magic happen.
How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure, by Chip Morningstar, June 1993.
"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman
But the hourly charges by a service like Compuserve, especially at higher bit rates, were a lot.
The one cool thing from QLink that I miss was chat rooms where the host could control a MIDI playlist taken from endless archives of such things which played in the background while you (text) chatted. I never saw that imitated in the internet era which I always thought was a bit of a shame. Shared discovery, sharing, affinity for music, now there was an enhancement to the otherwise silent experience of BBS-dom. I consider the loss of that capability a sad victim of the MPAA/Napster/RIAA wars. I still think there’s a Spotify/competitor feature hidden there…
[2] Gibson, William (1984), Neuromancer, Ace Books, New York.
[3] Bruce Sterling, ed. (1986), Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, Arbor House, New York.
Sci-fi author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Do Not Create The Torment Nexus
He also imparted the sage wisdom that premature optimization is the root of all evil.
What amazed me is that they were able to cram a graphical client into a Commodore 64. Now that was a cram job. I could see doing the world on minicomputer servers, but the client!
Those early 2D metaverses not only predate the consumer Internet, they predate AOL. They were all superseded by things that looked more like the early web.
Round 2 of that was when 3D Second Life was overtaken by mostly-text Facebook.
Recently we had the Web 3 "metaverse" debacle. You can build it, but will they come?
These things are fun, but they're a niche, like games.
Success exists outside the success criteria of Google and Meta.
https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending
It let users create and upload content like text and pictures, so it had a nice image uploader component and content management system.
That didn't work out, so they took the image uploader and cms and pivoted to making an app called "Flickr", which Yahoo bought.
Later on he redeveloped a new version of GNE in Flash called "Glitch", that was a whole lot like Habitat, in that it had these long horizontal areas you could walk left and right around, and chat with other people with avatars, and do fun stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)
That didn't work out either, so he took the rooms based chat messaging back-end, and pivoted to an app named "Slack".
> There were two sorts of implementation challenges that Habitat posed. The first was the problem of creating a working piece of technology -- developing the animation engine, the object-oriented virtual memory, the message-passing pseudo operating system, and squeezing them all into the ludicrous Commodore 64
The authors seem to have some opinions on the venerable C64.
I wonder if IRC could’ve been built on Habitat’s backend equally well as the other way around is easy to imagine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat
Games should only be multiplayer. Real-time action multiplayer.
And they should NEVER have cutscenes.
They also can't have music (except live) because 3D sound is paramount.
And they should be open-source or source-available so we can improve and modify them.
Habitat said all that and I think the article didn't but... you know... down votes without comment incoming!
I too believe gaming should be more about humans interacting, but there's millions of people out there that disagree and value the story of games.
Linear things destroy your mind, because you become a passive consumer.
Producing is the only meaningful purpose in existence, but not for someone else, for yourself.
Now it's too late, people are used to sitting on their ass and be entertained and pay for that by "working" for an "owner". Down votes without comment!
Get off that couch and into a chair with a keyboard and mouse, then download a compiler and get cracking! It's not hard once you figure out that only Windows and linux can do it. And only linux on Risc-V is meaningful in the long term.
We only explored 10% of the action MMO so far, PUBG has been the limit with it's janky controls and buggy/slow performance.
Imagine a 1000 player 3D Mario, it's totally doable. Just do it!
Some comments are factual; corrections, links, additional information, etc.
But people do expect HN to be polite, and "that's your personal take" is the polite way to say "you're a loony ideologue who sees everything through bi-color (BW) lens".
Massive Multiplayer is hard to do research on, you can not whip something up and have 20k players evaluate it for you. Just getting 10 people to consistently test something is hard. I guess we could work on improving the MP of generic games like Minecraft/Minetest and skip the game logic.
Well, I think the phrasing does a lot.
Your post sounds like you deal in absolutes rather than exposing an opinion.
MM used sprites for animating characters (severely limiting the number in a location at once) and it used characterset remapping for scrolling backgrounds and magic slipping maps to provide a sense of depth.
Habitat was a 2.5d renderer where every forground object was seperately rendered each frame and every background object was rendered each state-change. Any objects could be in front/behind any other objects at any time. Sprites in Habitat were used only for UI elements: The speach-bubble "quip" and the proto-pie-menu/cursor for commands.
So communication is hard because humans have a tendency to warp things.
"1000 player 3D Mario" should paint the picture in your head.
I mean action with animation and physics movement.
It doesn't necessarily have to be realistic, but it needs acceleration, sustain, decay and momentum. Also needs friction and collision.
This game is not a video game... it's a networked cardboard game.
No way you can get presence in there without youth levels of imagination or chemicals involved.