Simcast Project is Dead

The Simcast project is now officially defunct, yet another failed attempt at developing a player vs. player combat game within second life. The Herald is working on a full post mortem on the project (Herald Publisher Urizenus Sklar was involved in the project), but in brief it failed for a combination of reasons, including security issues, difficulties with scripting combat systems withing SL, constant SL updates that undermined what scripting had been accomplished, debilitating lag, and difficulties keeping a design team together under such circumstances. It is difficult to extrapolate conclusions from this one case, but from what I've seen there isn't much hope for a PvP game within SL.

Comments

[Prokofy Neva]

Uri, among the issues we're going to want to see covered is the claim that Simcast is now up for sale, with all its builds and scripts, by one owner, yet one scripter, Yadni, is complaining that he spent 500 hours coding and now isn't going to be offered reimbursement from the sales, and other content creators are crabbing too. Of course Pron Thetan is moaning the lost of more than $2k in costs for the sim itself.

http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=53671

There's all the forums drama. I do expect you to sift through this in some fair way, despite your own involvement. Painful, but instructive for all of us struggling to do projects in SL. What *would* work, if this didn't?

I know all to well what it's like to pay for a sim, pay the tier, bust my ass doing event organizing and every other kind of expense from dance machines to textures to contest prizes, and then have a neuraligic prima donna content creator waltz off in a huff, deleting all the buildings, and saying I got something "for free" that I can't have unless I "modify my behaviour" in some arbitrary and authoritarian manner. This is very very common in SL. These kinds of projects, on bigger or smaller scales, fail weekly.

Among the dispute resolution tools we need are:

o ability to make contracts that are copyable and transferrable to some kind of Arbitrarion Linden so that a true copy of an agreement is in a safe repository so that later, when memories dim and people claim chat histories are forged, that it can be hauled out

o the ability to snapshot and capture chat histories and also have them filed with Arbitrarion Linden

o have Arbitration Linden and his team, which may or may not include residents picked at random or by reputation (depending on the model) examine the facts of the case

and so forth. It's a lot of work. I don't see the Lindens taking this on.

[montserrat snakeankle]

montserrat is damned sorry.

[Tony Walsh]

Looking forward to that post-mortem, Uri. Might be a good learning tool for SL's game developers. Maybe Hamlet can use it as a case study for his long-overdue but eagerly-awaited "Failed Projects" article.

[Matthias]

Erm, Prok, one falsity right off-the-bat in your post: YadNi was a builder, not a scripter.

[Urizenus]

As far as I can tell, Prong has wiped his sim clean and given back all the simcast stuff to the builders and is on to a new project that will involve a contemporary combat sim, utilizing none of the simcast builds, scripts, or weapons.

As I said in the forums, the complaints by Yadni and others struck me as carping about nonexistent crums. The net value of the simcast remnants is less than zero because on the one hand the system doesn't work, the builds even lag out neighboring sims, and dozens of people have worked on the project and would presumably try to lay claim to anyone that somehow managed the impossible feat of taking the simcast system and making money off of it. It's like a screenplay that has had two many people revise it. No one will touch it now.

[Urizenus]

ROTFL, the simcast discussion has already been closed on the forums. Jeska.

[Doc Boffin]

There's always SIM Combat for some great PvP action. It's still very much alive and in development. If you'd like to help out, send me an IM!

[Mr Fairplay]

In order to sustain big projects as such, the main developer/builder/scripter also has to be the creator and owner of the associated land/sim. At the end of the day, money and resources does not necessarely take you far in Second Life. Mainly due to the fact your relying on people you have never met and will probably never meet. Project like these will consistantly fold due to internal team conflicts and arguments, and will prove impossible to sustain. Great idea shame it didn't make it.

p.s. I'll try and start publishing some new stories soon :D

[Apotheus Silverman]

The widely-known attempts at PvP games in SL to date have generally taken a bass-ackwards approach to their development efforts, similar to what dotcom companies did before the crash. Instead of buying (leasing) a sim (or sims) up front (why do so many people jump to buy a sim so quickly?) and paying all that money it would be a very wise decision to at least finish a proof-of-concept prototype so you *know* your efforts won't be wasted in the end.

Personally I think the traditional model people have attempted so far is not really the way to go. Not yet at least. Instead of building up a whole sim, it would likely be easier to build and market a modular PvP arena and plop a few of them down in various locations throughout SL. They don't have to be large -- it's been a long time since I've really been into FPS games (Quake 2 was the last one I played extensively), but I remember some of my favorite PvP maps were highly vertical and not that spread out.

On another note, I am a firm believer that SL is not up to snuff yet for anyone to be able to produce a FPS/PvP game of any quality. That is going to change in a big way when LSL3 becomes available. My expectation is that, come SL2.0.whenever-the-bugs-are-fixed, the functional abilities of SL in general are going to be an order of magnitude higher than they are today. If a group can be formed that has the right combination of skills (code, design, business, and marketing), I expect we'll have a dominating PvP group/game/system by Feb 2006.

[Pirate Cotton]

Some tips from me:
- Don't spend any RL money till your prototype works.
- Don't have a team bigger than 3 FRIENDS. The other people hire as you need them and fire them if they don't perform
- Don't rely on LL
- Combat is more than FPS. Where are the weeks-long web-stlye strategy games, for example?

Many more tips are available, just buzz me :)

[Prokofy Neva]

Rent, don't buy!

[Urizenus]

I'm not sure it solves all the problems to prototype before buying the sims (Simcast did this anyway -- prototyping an early version on an island on the main grid). I saw the main problems having to do with working out security for the island and then figuring out how many people and how much scripting an island could sustain without lagging to death. Maybe there is a way to extrapolate that from a prototype but I wouldn't count on it. There are also problems related to knitting the sims together. That having been said, I certainly wouldn't buy a sim *just* for purposes of building an FPS inside SL -- only do that if you want your own island to hang out on and screw around with for its own sake.

[Walker Spaight]

Pirate Cotton > "Combat is more than FPS. Where are the weeks-long web-stlye strategy games, for example?"

love it. do we have any in SL already?

[Aliasi Stonebender]

In so far as "small-scale FPS/PvP" games, I'm surprised efforts liek Deevyde Malstrom's Portal Wars hasn't gotten more press; it works quite well, and is scalable to any size arena.

[Tony Walsh]

Aliasi, I've never heard of Portal Wars, but if you give me some info on it (like where I can find it), I'll check it out. I have my doubts about any SL game scaling to a large size, particularly a twitch-based game.

[Walker Spaight]

Hehe stay tuned to the Herald for more on Portal Wars, Aliasi. Coming soon.

[Foxy Xevious]

I'm sorry to hear that Simcast didn't work out. I know that they work very hard on that project for a very long time and it with allot of bumps in the roads. I found creating games inside of SL a very tough challenge. When we created U:SL, we where quickly defeated by lag. It was very fun to create, we gave it all we had. We where happy with what we accomplish, but the game never did well. I have to agree with Pirate's advise. Big groups working on any large scale projects inside of SL = to failure. Good luck to anybody perusing developing games inside of SL.