> At university they had an adventure game on thier network, and doing
> right things gave you credits that you could then use in other games.
> There was a currency that crossed boundries, (Hmm that sounds a bit
> contrived I'd better try and justify it). If you collected enough gems
> in the adventure game you could sell them for credits, you could then
> log out the adventure and join a networked poker game where you could
> bet with you'r credits. It was all virtual credit so Why not.
> Our Society is based on money and that was reflected in the example
> above, Can anyone think of another method of payment in a virtual world.
> (If it was a virtual reality world perhaps you could trade planes and
> colours so you can make things, but that's money again isn't it ??)
>
This is indeed an interesting issue. How to maintain people's
interest in a virtual environment. First, it is necessary to make the
environment content rich, so that people can discover more and more the
more time they spend there. Than, make the content change often to
encourage people to come back. Finally, allow people to contribute to
their artificial world so that they have an attachment to it and a sense
of ownership.
> 3 The Need for Speed.
>
> What are your views on VRML ? I think its a good Idea but its execution
> on my m/c is soooo Slow, I think I'd need a Sun SPARC workstation before
> I could really enjoy it. Are we going to see different solutions for
> modeling 3d worlds or are we just going to have to wait for affordable
> hardware.
> Come on there must be some Techie ppl out there with some Ideas on this.
>
>
This is exactly the reason why I don't want to be limited to
current technologies on this list. VRML is horrible. I use it, but as
little as possible. I just can't any sort of acceptable performance on
normal people's machines. Then again, I was one of the first people on
the list, but at the time I'd had no experience with anything less than
SGIs on T1 lines.
Kevin