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Massively
Multiplayer Game Development
I became fascinated with multi-player gaming in university (or,
as my wife likes to call that era, the 1980’s). The UofC had a policy
of giving free CPU time to students interested in building games, I think on
the theory it would keep the hackers doing something almost useful, for a
change ;-) The main computer we used was a six-processor Honeywell system
running Multics: about $6M worth of hardware at the time. When I joined the
group, Brian Brookwell had an amazingly complex real-time strategy game going
that supported up to 30 gamers. “Universe” alone added a few
years to my degree, while "StarBattle" provided night after night
first-person, multi-player frag-fests, albeit with ASCII graphics. Thinking
back to the eery sound of a Multics terminal beep-beep-beeping danger as Alan
Dewar strafed his way in still brings gets that ol' heartbeat cranked up...
I largely stopped playing computer games after
I left the university. The Unix games "NetHack" and
"Empire" scratched my itch when available, but ‘386 PCs just
couldn’t compare to multi-player gaming on a super-computer. And from
an esthetics viewpoint, I’d rather have ASCII graphics than low-res 2D
sprites. Bridge and Go took over my gaming time, or social games like
"Settlers of Catan."
Many moons later, the
advent of 3D accelerator cards really changed my view on PC gaming. The
visual quality was still low, but the growth curve looked phenomenal. I then
came across Ultima Online, and knew I had to get back into gaming. The
maturing broadband and 3D technologies were clearly going to provide high
levels of multi-player action. Meanwhile, games like Ultima Online were
drawing from MUDs, to add social systems and community management. Many forms
of persistent virtual worlds were clearly on the horizon and I wanted to be p
part of making it
happen.
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