Popularity: 12% [?]
Archive for the 'Opinion' Category
Since I first asked the question "How many people use C:SI?" on this blog last September, the Combat: Samurai Island community has grown by more than 5000 new active users, and more than 1800 new regions where duels have been fought. Not all of those regions are active, of course, like Meiji with over 188000 duels at the time of this writing or Samurai Edo at over 100000, but there seem to be quite a few very active regions that I’ve never even heard of.
As an example, looking at the "Most Active Sims This Week" portion of the C:SI Weekly Stats page today, I see that I’ve spent a decent amount of time in only two of the listed regions and have never even heard of two of them. The rest I’ve either been to only a few times at most (I just started visiting Bloodlines, for instance, and it’s in the top 10 this week) or simply have yet to get off my duff and visit them :
In a way, this is pretty gratifying. Part of the satisfaction of being a C:SI developer is seeing how many people use your weapons, and how frequently. It’s pretty neat to think that there’s just way too many places out there where the weapons are being used to realistically expect to visit even most of them, let alone all.
On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I’m missing out on some neat stuff 
So what I’d like to do, and I don’t know how many people are going to take me up on this but I hope that at least a few people are interested, is offer everyone the chance to send me an article about their favorite region for C:SI combat, which I will publish (with full attribution of course) here or on the Combat: Samurai Island website (or both if you prefer).
You don’t have to be a great writer (just look at me, for example, just pitiful hah) or particularly articulate, just enthusiastic enough to write more than a paragraph or two :) I’d really love to hear about your favorite region and why you think it’s so great. Screenshots are encouraged, of course, and a teleport location would be appreciated.
If you are interested, feel free to drop me (RobbyRacoon Olmstead) a notecard in-world with your article, or email me at this domain (Robby at DaikonForge).
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I read the Game Politics blog, which this morning featured an absolutely awesome video about Jack Thompson that I just *HAD* to share
If you don’t know who Jack Thompson is, you can think of him a bit like the Prokofy Neva of the legal world. He’s such a deluded, self-righteous, crazy, busybody pain in the ass that the Florida Supreme Court had to bar him from filing motions with the court.
Anyhow, even if you don’t know who he is the video should still be kind of funny, it’s just funnier if you do
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Virtual World News had an article a couple of days ago on IBM’s announcement that they had built a 3D data center simulation using OpenSim, which I found particularly fascinating because I have long believed that the potential of Virtual Worlds like Second Life® and OpenSimulator was far larger and with potential for much broader application than what we are currently seeing. Take, for instance, this comment by an IBM researcher on the topic:
"Viewing information about your data center in 2-D text — even in real time — only tells a data center manager part of the story, because our brains are wired for sight and sound," said IBM Researcher Michael Osias, who architected the 3-D data center service. "By actually seeing the operations of your data center in 3-D, even down to flames showing hotspots and visualizations of the utilization of servers allows for a clearer understanding of the enterprise resources, better informed decision-making and a higher level of interaction and collaboration."
Visualization is extremely important, and the ability of virtual worlds to enhance visualization and make use of our visual/spatial processing abilities (using the concept of space as a memory cue and productivity enhancer) is absolutely fascinating and intuitive. We are quite simply built to work in a 3D world with maximum effectiveness, and evidence suggests that people have been formally taking advantage of this astounding ability since before 85 BC. IBM obviously believes that this has practical business application, and while some may question whether there is truly any practical benefit to using virtual worlds in this way, I strongly believe that we will discover over time that it’s one of the most powerful and effective uses of the technology - for business or otherwise.
I remember back in high school more than a decade ago, while reading a book about computer graphics programming in class one day I came across a quote (likely only half-remembered now) that really struck me powerfully : "Computers may be great at business and calculations, but graphics is what they are for". I doubt that the author of that book (it may have been Michael Abrash, I cannot recall after so much time) could have envisioned how powerful commodity graphics and general-purpose computing hardware would become in less than 20 years from the time he wrote that, but I’m willing to bet that he’d feel similarly about 3D technology and virtual worlds : It’s what computers are for. How exciting to be able to use a system like loci by actually building our own 3D representations, and then to use that representation to manage extremely complex real-world systems that are difficult to truly understand in a flat printout or 2D program.
Popularity: 57% [?]
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