Bitcoin Forum

It would completely fill a niche if a major game in development used Bitcoins for their in-game currency. They already have exchanges set up for in game currencies. They might as well just use BTC and allow players to use it.

Also, I used to play these strategy games on my phone that pretty much had the same theme. You work your vampire/mob boss/zombie/etc and he gets experience which he then uses to buy at token/diamond/gem/etc to get better stuff in the game. You could, of course, purchase more tokens/etc to advance quicker. Which is where they got their money.  But we could create an open source type of game like this where you need to spend BTC to get more tokens.

Edit:

I have created a Bitcoin Pool for anyone who wants to see something like this developed.

Signing up is easy, you only need 10 mBTC to join the discussion (the 10 mBTC stays in your wallet).

http://www.bitpools.com/?Video%20Game

With enough interest we can get something working. Let's do this.

Here's an example of how it would work for developing a video game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETCP8NeXasY

Give me a Zelda clone where rupees are Bitcoin.

When you die, continue where you left off after you pay token/bitcents, which you could have possibly earned in game.

I think the natural ease of earlier levels and building up Bitcoin would feel good and the challenges would be more rewarding as they get harder.

The only way I could see this particular made up game working is if the user is not allowed to 'cash out' any built up coins until they beat the game.  So basically no one would just replay the earlier and easier levels over and over.

You could figure out the math on the possible max amount of coins a person could get versus the costs to play etc.     There would be some math to work out, but I could see a game like this being profitable, fun, plus engaging to the user to keep them playing for longer.    No more spin the wheel in the Bitcasino, but something a person would want to play after a day of work or school or something.

I have been working toward this end with several open source game systems. Unfortunately web-based ones seem to have a tendency to not actually be in workable condition, but hopefully as Devcoin picks up  bounties can be used to help fix that.

-MarkM-

I was thinking about this just as I hit this thread..

The game basically uses the some spare cycles to generate BTC. This is then added as "drops" from creatures as they accumulate (mite only satoshi's at first but will grow..)

Makers of game sell ingame items in a central market (set fee goes back into game development, 25% for instance) rest is dished out. A user market place can also exist to resell items (again a small fee of 5% is taken to sell it via this system)

Money can be bought externally or withdrawn from an account if you hunt enough and want to extract your winnings.

Ofcourse this is for an MMO (WoW or dark of camelot style).

I think there is some kind of 3d gambling game that uses bitcoin. "Dragons tale" or something?

want to get it away from gambling but more like a real game.

there must be a decent engine out there to implement such a thing..

This guy is making a Starcraft II tournament system for BTC. Pretty awesome. It's in beta testing now, so if you play that game go support him!

http://sc2btcopen.appspot.com/ (http://sc2btcopen.appspot.com/)

This is an exceptionally good idea.

i've personally thought about using a bitcoin like network for a video game currency, but not actual bitcoin... less outside pressure to affect the game economy.

Hi everyone,

I found this: SpaceTrek: The New Empire
http://game.en.stne.net/

I have not played nor registered.

Looks like they except Bitcoin and Solidcoin.
http://game.en.stne.net/Game.aspx?cr=AitKHr8_2BkLpM02zCdPtdfJ2vA3XEXw0xN3eS6PXxsbN4xZidZEORydhHSGif8Wr

n.olmos

what we need is a real good open source game engine we can adapt and build on to implement this. Any suggestions?

Might I suggest Unity3d? I hear they are releasing better MMO networking code very soon. It's very easy to pick up I couldn't tell you the flexablity of it as I only got to make a simple shooter

Here is some screen shots I still have left over from when i stopped making the project. I purchased all the models but i programmed the whole thing it was going to be an RPGMMO with FPS elements in it
http://hphotos-sea1.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc6/225381_223841074297205_100000139423276_1043432_739119_n.jpg
http://a2.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/231131_226204004060912_100000139423276_1062487_7841996_n.jpg
Me shooting alot of bullets (no bullet models i used spheres instead)
http://a8.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/223227_223473251000654_100000139423276_1040883_7526076_n.jpg

http://unity3d.com/

Anyways just shows how much you can do with it. I stopped working on it because i was going to wait for them to come out with more optimized networking code then I got all wrapped up in Bitcoins so I just forgot about it guess. Anyways Good luck guys!

Edit: I think its standalone and in-game browser. Also I built the above screenshots from the ground up I didn't use any pre-made scripts Unity3d comes with

bleh unity is terrible..

if you're going to make a game, go for a real engine, something like Ogre or irrlicht

Someone mentioned Unity 3D to me not so long ago. Im downloading and installing now will have a play around see what its all about.

If it looks feasable anyone up for trying to crack something out? I know a few 3D guys who may be interested in doing a few models for us... I do say *maybe* not sure if they working right now or what.

Can always start small and see what comes of it :)

Unity does have its flaws for making games with more then 24-30 people online at a time ill give you that. Besides that its a good system for 3d and even 2d games.

If your looking for a standalone solution i would recommend the source engine im very familair with hammer and have made complete replicas of my neighborhood for counterstrike source. I made other fun levels for counterstrike source zombie mods. If you guys go with the source engine you can pm me for more info if you need some one to do maps for you. Im excellent with Hammer editor.

To implement persistent blockchain-based game-currency long term, the economy is very important.

A lot of games start players off with stuff that comes out of no-where instead of from some already existing part of the game.

If that stuff from no-where actually corresponds to newly minted coins from mining then the same "problem", initial distribution of initial resources, that exists in the games and in the currency can be tightly related, in effect truly just one "problem": the early adopter problem.

If your early adopters are trying to rape the players instead of "farming" them, discouraging them instead of co-operating with them long term to keep growing the economy, the games are likely to become less appealing over time as those early exploiters become more and more effective at driving new players away.

Scratch and burn - keep having to start from scratch as each start ends up with a few "winners" discouraging new players from entering.

A lot of games seem designed to ensure that barbarian hordes are the inevitable winners; even "civilisation building" games too often tend to favour wiping out civilisations instead of co-operating with them.

Maybe though with the right kinds of sandboxes and the right initial core players investing in sandcastles within it, creating milieus / cultures etc that will encourage new players instead of raping them, such players can develop growing virtual holdings that actually appreciate in value instead of becoming less and less desireable over time.

Blockchain based currency can serve as a resource that ties many and varied games together. All the games that allow in game resources to be traded for such a currency become able in principle to trade even if those resources themselves are not directly useful or valuable in the other games.

So far I have been working with two web-based, resource-based games; http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ uses energy to mine metal, crystal and deuterium. http://villages.mygamesonline.org/ uses crops to power mining of lumber, clay and "iron" (metal). They thus naturally have metal in common, but blockchain based currency or currencies can also be coded in once development gets to a point where it does not keep breaking new code that tries to add the new currencies.

Blockchain based currency is also so far the main economic link between the web based systems and the Freeciv based worlds of the Galactic Milieu (http://sourceforge.net/p/galacticmilieu/home/Home/) and the individual character "dungeon crawl" scale implemented by the "CrossCiv" server reachable via the metaserver of the Crossfire RPG (http://invidious.meflin.net/crossfire/jxclient.jnlp) system.

-MarkM-

Grand Theft Auto in game currency would be the obvious choice.

That or a troll currency in WOW.

A browser based HTML5+Ajax+Jquery would be very interesting to see such project as its very possible I've seen a few done and I know they can be improved as far as game play goes and it would be over 9000 times better to make it incorporate Bitcoins.

I cannot do anything tech side, maybe use that stupid RPG maker, but if anyone takes this on, I'd enjoy throwing ideas toward a Bitcoin based story where the main enemies are trolls.   Incorporate all the exchanges being attacked.  I don't want to spoil the storyline too much here, but the 'hero' though saving the exchanges may not need them in the end, that twist would be for all the heavy btc politics groups lol.  There is a love story with a girl who exchanges cam images online for btc.  And death story too.  Alt coins will be in the game, but in name only.  Lot of material to work with here, I would play a Bitcoin game if it had Bill Cosby in it ;)

Wow..... I couldn't have said it any better.  8)


Basically what we need for a Bitcoin game that reflects everything we've seen in the past year from creation of the Bitcoin all the way to all the haxks on to where we are now with teh trolls.

I like the idea of building tournament ladders using bitcoin. That could be implemented in any game. Like the starcraft example from page 1.

Creating games nowadays is mostly a matter of how much money you are willing to spend on development, and actually running the games is mostly about sustainability, again meaning money. To make it graphical can be very expensive. Thus if graphics can be made a user-end problem, a problem the users themselves are expected to solve like in Second Life, that would go a long way for development and operating budgets.

Second Life isn't even very pretty, it might be worthwhile to use Plane Shift's open source engine instead of the open worlds system that is directly compatible with Second Life. It too is basically only an open engine, almost all the graphical stuff used in the actual Plane Shift game they do not give away for others to use.

Leaving the eye-candy to clients or users lets you focus on the actual game, and also hopefully might let the eye candy end of things develop as users prove the demand for it by actually financing it. For a lot of stuff a 3d graphical world is not even a very useful interface anyway. For example running a planetary scale campaign might be easier using something like Freeciv than by using a 3d avatar in some kind of 3d command-bunker trying to issue orders to your 3d avatar generals or something like that. Those who actually run the campaign could use Freeciv to conveniently run it and only bother wasting time and computer-power on a3d avatar system if they for some reason have to deal with political masters who insist on meeting with the military leaders in such ways instead of sending them orders by email or even -gasp- actually using Freeciv themselves to actually take control themselves instead of delegating such details to subordinates.

Basically if you are too lazy to actually control forces yourself using a village scale or planetary scale or multigalactic scale command interface then fine, try to convince those who are not so lazy to listen to you on a character to character scale, but how then will you convince them to follow your plans or implement your ideas?

Do you plan to be more deadly than they in individual combat, maybe, and convince them by threatening to assassinate them or disable them or something like that? If so, why would they even choose to make themselves vulnerable by actually showing up at the avatar to avatar individual character level meeting? Maybe if they consider such a meeting worthy of any notice at all they would be better off sending professional played or non-played assassin characters to deal with you on that scale?

So far it is looking as if more bitcoiners are interested in trade economy and investment activities (aka games; pastimes) that eliminate melee and missile-weapons and even marching armies around; so maybe even if they can somehow be attracted onto a game-board where such possibilities exist their primary concern would be how to make the eliminating of such threats cost-effective enough to make such milieus worth such risks?

Given that observed bias of bitcoiners it seems more important to get the whole "how their coins can interact in such systems profitably" side of things in place before worrying about trying  to make such systems look pretty for people who have more interest in eye-candy than in bitcoins.

Except maybe for artists. If your main product is art rather than coins, yeah, trying to sell art makes sense. But this venue seems more interested in selling coins... What, if any, game-commodities are they willing to spend significant numbers of them on?

-MarkM-

Think of a game like minecraft. Imagine if the act of playing minecraft a hashing process was also underway effectively "mining a crypto currency" as you played. Obviously you would be part of a large pool and every so often you are awarded a small bit of crypto currency. This allows you to cashout to buy real stuff or perhaps ingame items or gambling.
Then we finally have this Far Side comic closer to reality.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_QMuDihPPyPA/TFBCC4Wv0qI/AAAAAAAANpU/qiFZoulx9cU/s1600/farside-hopeful-parents.gif

Minecraft code is available, the main reason I do not yet have it online is a lack of paying customers choosing to finance the hosting and bandwidth for it. So far it seems my player base does not consider a minecraft interface to be worthwhile / cost-effective as a means of interacting with the game universe/multiverse. But if you can find enough people who do prefer a minecraft type representation to actually cover the hosting and bandwidth such a representation entails it can be set up.

So far my players have been preferring to start with more-abstract representations that entail lower hosting and bandwidth costs, the better to allow a larger proportion of "free players" to "paying players". Any player who is willing to actually pay to have portions of worlds they are interacting with illustrated in glorious artwork is welcome to do so, but so far the players I have been working with seem to prefer cost-effective interfaces over art-intensive interfaces for working with their virtual assets.

Thus the approach I have been taking is to first get working inventories of assets, the ability to trade them, go to war over them, and so on before worrying about whether artists will ever end up being able to make a decent wage creating illustrations of them.

IF you were looking to pick up some virtual real-estate that will double in value in 30 days time, how much overhead would you be willing to incur to have artists illustrate the stuff? Once you've sold it at double what you paid for it will you still care what it might actually look like to someone using some specific client on some specific machine using some specific video card? Would it even look the same using their client and hardware as it would using yours? Heck, maybe they might even prefer a different look than you prefer? They might choose a different style of architecture in their client, making all buildings appear differently to them than they do to you. Are buildings that players do not get to choose their own preferred visual representation of worth more or less than those that each players' client can show in the player's preferred style?

If you really like to see stuff represented in minecraft style, that can happen, but there will be costs associated with doing so. How many bitcoins so far are out there demanding that specific representation be added to the list of representations players can choose to use? I am all for increasing the number of clients and types of clients players can use to interact with various aspects of the virtual multiverse but lets try to make sure we can pay the hosting and bandwidth costs...

-MarkM-

Take a read below and make amendants or w/e where possible. Going to pass it along to some real cleaver guys who run a private server and see what they think on fesability. Ive no idea how familiar they are with bitcoins so there is some extra stuff in there that you guys will already know all about.

if some cleaver guy can work out the math behind what im going on about that would be good. Would take me quite a while I think hehe.

I onyl picked dark age of camelot cause im familiar with it. I assume if done with one game can be done with many in relatively the same method.

Just had an idea for a Bitcoin game....

Similar concept. All items/upgrades/etc. in game are purchased and sold using Bitcoins. The Bitcoin client will be built into the game to ease the transfer of coins.

The game will also include mining code into it to mine coins.

It is basically a battle type of game where everyone is out for themselves, or they form groups or whatever they want.

When the combined power of all of the miners discovers a block and gets 50 BTC it pops up in the game (or many coins separated are sent out). The coins fall closest to those who contributed the most GPU power.

When the 50 BTC comes in, it is a free for all. Whoever can get to it first wins. You can fight others, coordinate with others, go lone wolf, etc.

When you get the BTC, the server transfers the BTC to you. From there maybe you need to get back to your home base or whichever.

It would be like pool mining but a game where playing a video game could actually make you money.

How about raining the 50 BTC down randomly in small patches. Send your harvesters out, or something along these lines...

EDIT: about an engine: I played spring a while ago with a friend. pretty good engine, it seems to me: http://springrts.com/

Ya, I guess they do not even need to be considered BTC in the game. Maybe something that you can sell for BTC or whichever.

That spring engine looks quite nice. Open source and everything.

may the SPICE be with you!


I agree.

The Crossfire RPG engine supports a bunch of types of money already, bitcoins can be added simply by offering them for sale in the game.

Each bitcoin can be represented by two tokens, one redeemable for the other. The redeemable one you can trade between characters like any other in game item characters can pick up and carry. It does not tell the address and private key of the actual bitcoin, that way you can tell that no-one has yet claimed that coin thus the token still has value.

The token that tells the actual address and private key of the coin is stored in a vault that can only be opened by the redeemable token, which vanishes when thus redeemed.

Thus when someone wants to actually "cash in" a bitcoin token they take it to the vault and use it to get the actual address and private key of an actual bitcoin. Meanwhile they have a token they can easily trade to other players or that other players can capture by killing them to get the things they carry.

There is a potential "cut" for the game if people do use player versus player in this way, because when you kill someone some of their gear might get destroyed, depending on how you kill them and the material the gear is made of. A paper token for example would burn easily so killing the character carrying one with fire is quite likely to destroy the token.

Also bots can be deployed in the game, running on servers that have bitcoind also running, to provide access to bitcoind functions from inside the game. That can be done with any game that allows bots to be used.

Come on over to the "CrossCiv" instance of Crossfire RPG, it is accessible using the web-deployed Crossfire client found at http://invidious.meflin.net/crossfire/jxclient.jnlp

You will want the science fiction milieu rather than the fantasy milieu, since bitcoins are more a sci-fi type of currency than a fantasy-world type of currency. So don't choose a fantasy character (elves orcs etc, dragons, magic-users, priests etc) if you are looking to reach the science fiction milieu rather than the fantasy milieu.

I have two other games also in testing, both fully web-based, which will also interact, initially mostly by means of blockchain currencies all the games support but eventually also trading resources etc: a Villages (http://villages.mygamesonline.org/) game and a Galaxies (http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/) game. Both are based on aquiring resources, and they already have one resource in common, known as metal in the galaxies game and iron in the villages game. So already they have more in common than just the use of blockchain based currencies.

Because stuff should not appear from nothing when new players join, eventually players will have to first accumulate enough "stuff" for found a village in the smaller scale game before they can start into the Villages game, and similarly accumulate enough stuff at that or the smaller scale before they can launch into the galaxies, but currently they are in early adopter stage where it is assumed they obtained backing (loans) to obtain their startup stuff.

-MarkM-

Ohh SPICE will SWIM be there too?

Is there genuinely any real interest in this or is it just empty B.S. ?

Ryzom has released all its source code plus its art assets, so there is now an engine available that does include art assets.

But is anyone actually interested? In particular does anyone actually want to *play* games that involve bitcoins or other blockchain based currencies?

-MarkM-

DeaD.Gaming are currently hosting the second CryptoCrush Starcraft 2 tournament, it's the second tournament were the prize pool is in Bitcoins, check it out at http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=288969 . It will be played on the 3rd it will be streamed on our stream channel www.twitch.tv/deadgaming

Kudos to the Crypto X Change for hitting up the Starcraft tourney and having those requirements to enter, very well done marketing, and good for the players of Starcraft, it's a huge audience that isn't exactly ignored, but not marketed to enough imo.



I am willing to assist on the side with graphics, possible writing, and other notes, but I am not a person who codes, and the creative freedoms in video games really are limited by the person who would be writing the game.  I was looking at the villages and galaxies pages, were there current screenshots of Galaxies, also the Villages screen page is down.

As long as there is a plan to get revenue, we could offer Devcoin bounties for development.  Unfortunately because Devcoin is not well known yet the value is low, so the bounties may be not be worth someone's time to fix the game system.  However, they should at least be enough to fund documentation, artwork, world description, etc..

For making revenues, the mining idea is great:


Part of the spare cycle money should go to the developers and the server operator.  I suggest that because many players wouldn't have web accessible GPUs that the miner be a CPU coin like Litecoin, with a web based miner:
http://www.litecoinpool.org/embed

That part of the litecoins would then be split among the developers and server operator, with the option of being converted into another coin.

Another source of revenue would be to put the documentation on the devtome wiki, and make adsense directly and also through cross link pages.  Money from that would be split among the developers.

Overall, as long as people are interested in the game and willing to work to develop it, we can do this.

Top secret bitcoin/litecoin/whatevercoin minigame MMO project

http://filesmelt.com/dl/winterpark.png

The Galaxies (http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/) and Villages (http://villages.mygamesonline.org/) games both need complete new grahpcis, open source. The more I glimpse of the commercial games they were intended to be similar to, the more of the graphics look to me to be stolen from commercial games. So I cannot trust any of the current set. A total complete full new set is needed for each.

The Villages game started off from code that said anyone can use it for anything, but then people working on it kept adding all kinds of outrageous claims to the whole thing every time they made some small change, even one that broke it all, anywhere in the thing. Basically the whole "ragezone" forum population seems to be about pirating games and trying to make money on their pirated versions, despite the site's claim it is about free stuff and its its rules against directly asking for money there. Most of the people clamouring for games there actually *want* then to use stolen graphics it seems.

Both the games use a system known as "skins", which seems to be intended to allow players who have a commercial "skin" (collection of graphics) at home to configure their account to look on their local disk drive for graphics. If they want to use stolen graphics that is how they should do it, but the developers seem to tend to just put stolen graphics right on the site, not onlyt as default "skin" but even as alternative "skins" for people to download.

We need "skins" that use truly open source graphics.

Also, I am not all that keen to try to directly "clone" an existing commercial game. So the efforts of those cloner people aren't really on the mainline of where I want to go. For example I had added to the Villages markets the ability to trade in the so called "gold" and also a few types of blockchain based currencies. That all got walked over in an early round of pulling "fixes" from others back before they started trying to add "all rights reserved" crap all over the thing any time they contributed a "fix".

Villages turns out to be a major "gold" hog, you really do seem to pretty much *need* to always have gold to spend. Trying to play it with "gold" seems like it would be pretty crippling. One guy who seems to be trying still has only one village wihile other players have 6 or 7 villages. Though he also doesn't put much time in either I think. I expected it to be one of those "put in time or put in money" type games where the proverbial kid living in his mom's basement keeps up with the folk who have real life jobs by being able to put in a lot more time than they can. But I think no matter how much time you put in you will still really need to at least be able to get 20 gold a week to keep all four types of resource at +25%. The bigger you get, the more actual resources 25% amounts to, so as time goes on gold should in theory be "worth" more and more resources per gold.

The "oases" and "heroes" don't work, nor the "treasury and relics" stuff. That all is maybe sidetrack stuff anyway, needless complication. Right now it seems to be a nice peaceful agricultural world. But there seems to be a problem with transportation: production is so high that the puny merchants system provided seems unlikely to be able to actually move all the resources produced to a starport or wherever to ship them out to the rest of the planet / solar system / galaxy / milieu. I think at very least an "autoship" system is needed that will have your merchants automatically shipping your produced resources for you. Right now most players' storage is full most of the time, it is inconvenient to manage to keep getting back to it often enough to spend the stuff fast enough to make space for more stuff.

The Galaxies one is much better in that regard, it does not take long to get enough storage set up that you need only log in to it once a day, and after a few months you can easily miss a day or few here and there. That is more the kind of laid back pace my players seem to prefer, sicne most of them are just using these systems as background bean-counters limiting the supply of resources much as mining speed limits the supply of *coins.

Income is still a bit of a puzzle, the Villages game assumes "gold" will be bought from the admins or hosters but that direct a model tends to end up with most players not bothering to buy any. As economies are the main way so for of linking many games into one larger milieu, most of the players expect to be converting assets they already accumulated in other parts/aspects of the Milieu into each particular world's local influence / favours / currency / "gold" when deciding to operate in/on a particular "world". In the long term, many of those assets did cost "real money" to create somewhere along the way in some sense, but it does mean each new game added tends to "sell" most of it's own local specialty item speciality resource or "local currency" to characters/entities that already built up a warchest / operating capital fund through various other games already.

If the Open Transactions server actually attracts traders possibly we will find that trading on such markets will provide ways of working on "the funding problem".

-MarkM-

... anybody here read the latest by Neal Stephenson .... REAMDE

MMORPG game currency and economy is a central theme ... crypto, gold, etc. Lots of ideas in there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde)

This is actually being worked on.  It uses html5, and it's making progress. Slowly but surely.

The web-based Villages Online and Galaxies Online games have stepped up to the next level today: registration is no longer open to random passers-by.

Instead, players now need to develop their skills and/or resources using individual characters in order to accumulate or develop the requisites for founding a village or financing an intergalactic mining enterprise.

(The individual character scale of play is the CrossCiv server mentioned in my .sig ... You will need to make sure to pick a character type that will be in the Galactic Milieu not on the Fantasy world in order to have the potential to advance to the Villages or Galaxies scales of play.)

-MarkM-

My hosting's PHP setup is global across all the subdomains, so when I activated a Zend optimiser / decrypter thing in order to test out a "membership site" system, all my sites on that host gained the Zend functionality.

Now the Villages Online system has suddently started gettign errors it did not have before:

Fatal error: Cannot run code from this file in conjunction with non encoded files in [snip]/villages.mygamesonline.org/Templates/Build/avaliable/availupgrade.tpl on line 14

I tried using the "file" program to find any Zend stuff by magic numbers, but it does not detect and of the files as Zend.

Nonetheless I suspect one or more of the "skin" javascript things are probably triggering this, which probably confirms that at least some of the code is stolen code from the commercial "Travian" game, not actually free open source code at all.

Thus, it will be shutting it down. I have been testing the genuinely free open source Villages game "Devana", and so far it seems to be working, so I will move that onto the Villages subdomain and get rid of the Travian-clone at last. It had in any case turned out to be broken in many places compared to what it ought to have had according to its blurbs instructions and so on.

Meanwhile I have also been checking out 2moons, another Galactic mining system. It seems to work much better than the Xnova Redesigned. It also has a larger selection of ships, basically continuing up past the largest ships the Xnova Redesigned has, and its user interface is not so over-designed as to make it crazy-hard to add more buildings ships technologies and so on.

This of course means that fleets developed in 2moons could be even more of a threat to the central civilised worlds of the Galactic Milieu (http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Galactic_Milieu) than the fleets of the Xnova Redesigned system. Thus the Xnova Redesigned galaxies will still be retained as galaxies closer to home, and the 2moons galaxies will be situated beyond those of the Xnova Redesigned system, as an even farther-flung set of defences. Thus the lack of combat in the Xnova Redesigned galaxies can be consideres deliberate, the robotics corporations providing the technology deliberately keeping mining operations so close to home from being armed, at least until some farther threat is discerned which might justify arming the inner set of mining operations.

The 2moons system will be outer defenses, hopefully ready and able to take on any even farther out potential enemies of the homeworlds of the Milieu.

This means that the 2moons galaxies will be even harder to get started in than the Xnova Redesigned galaxies, which already had to stop allowing ever tom disk and harry to start up a mining operation. (Too many "players" simply never did anything, leaving the financiers who financed their startup gear in the lurch, and we were running out of capable CEOs for repossession corps to take over such abandoned operations.)

Most likely people will only be able to start operations in the 2moons galaxies once a jump gate has been built in the Xnova galaxies to enable ships to be sent that far.

-MarkM-

+1 to you, sir.

Yet another web-based game: http://fantasy.mygamesonline.org/

You don't have to think only in terms of bitcoins, there are numberous less valuable cryptocurrencies you might find easier to treat as game-currencies...

-MarkM-

Anybody play CSS here?  I remember back when i played you were able to use a mod that allowed one to "bet" on which team would win.  This would be awesome with bitcoin!
http://ranger.gamebanana.com/img/ss/tools/2811.jpg

Betting with bitcoins would be an excellent idea especially on a popular game like CSS or even Left 4 dead 2 or such Heck i would host a server if that was the case :D

There are a lot of really great thoughts in this thread.

One thing I'd call for is Bitcoin-based game design to avoid simply degenerating into gambling (unless a gambling game is what you're after). I'm not a lawyer, but I think that any game in which you can win back more than you put in is defined as gambling (unless it's a contest, maybe). I think there are a lot more interesting ways Bitcoin can be used in games (especially indie games).

MarkM: You seem to be very familiar with the gaming industry, and developing indie titles. Thanks for your professional insights, and I appreciate that you recognize the importance of doing things the right way.

I'm an indie developer, as well. Have a look at my Potential Games Bitcoin Initiative (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=74870.0) topic, which is a (vaguely defined) campaign to gauge community interest in Bitcoin-related (indie) gaming. We're not yet taking Bitcoin, but I'm personally keen to move in that direction. Any thoughts are most welcome.

Looks like Notch is going ahead with space game thing ... titled "Mars Effect" ... "advanced economic and trading system" ... "mining, looting" sounds interesting?

"He notes the game is still early in development, but they’re planning to include:

    Hard science fiction.
    Lots of engineering.
    Fully working computer system.
    Space battles against the AI or other players.
    A game ending that makes sense.
    Abandoned ships full of loot.
    Waist high walls.
    Seamlessly landing on planets.
    Advanced economy system.
    Mining, trading, and looting."

http://techzwn.com/mars-effect-announced-by-notch-a-free-roaming-space-sim/#comments (http://techzwn.com/mars-effect-announced-by-notch-a-free-roaming-space-sim/#comments)

Wow, mars effect. He's just asking to be sued again.

The Open Transactions server (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0) has re-emerged from its deep rewriting and fixing phase, so we are back on track with the "financial games" aspects of the Galactic Milieu (http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Galactic_Milieu) and have completed the first round of galactic corporation IPOs. I heard that a big problem for investors in EVE online is all the megacorps offering investment opportunities turn otu to be scams, so I aim to make sure there are good ones to invest in in the  Galactic Milieu (http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Galactic_Milieu). Eventually in principle every time someone builds a stock exchange in one of their cities the option should exist to set up an Open Transactions server to represent that specific exchange, but initially we'll use less actual servers than there are stock exchanges in the galaxy, starting with this initial test/demo deployment.

DeVCorp, GDC (General Development Corp), GFC (General Financial Corp) and GRC (General Retirement Corp) all issued a million shares each, and all the shares of all of them sold out at 20 DVC per share.

Note that where we write "General" here on Earth, in many parts of the Milieu they use "Galactic" instead. basically General and Galactic are interchangeable terms for Corps such as these.

Meanwhile we have also finally found a good useable free open source MUD codebase that does not have the onerous "you cannot ever make any money with this in any way" type of license so many MUD systems are stuck with. So development is afoot in adding that to the repertoire of systems one can use to interact with various aspects of the Milieu.

-MarkM-

Jmonkeyengine looks like a good game engine written in java that should be easy to integrate bitcoin with

Thats what brought me here, Stephenson's REAMDE.
When I read it I was all "hey, Stephenson has to write exactly that book with bitcoin!".
But, of course, the way to go is to program a game with bitcoin as an ingame currency.

I like the idea of an MMORPG. It has deep immersion and high addiction! :-)

I dont believe an alt-chain would make much sense. We don't want to market xycoin, but bitcoin. Players won't do the jump from xycoin to bitcoin, as xycoin is basically worthless and will be seen as a fancy ingame-currency only.

I dont think local mining works at all. Most people will have to use their cpu, only a small part has the right gpu. Those, however, would have too much of an advantage. The average would have a ridiculously low "income". Sure, make 0.0001 BTC one gold. But then there won't be any serious connection to the bitcoin-universe (=economy).. Want to get people buying mining hardware for playing that game? Makes no sense at all. They should and will rather mine regular and play regular independent of each other.

I suggest to only do exchanging between bitcoin and gold period.
Maybe something like this:

- Buy the game, for a relatively small price, online or in a shop.
- Each game has its own bitcoin address, the public one only.
- Each copy has one BTC preloaded.

- Playing costs a regular monthly fee, directly removed from that address.
- Bitcoins are converted to gold, by a changing rate dependent on regular exchange rates.

- Transfer bitcoins to your game's address, voila, more gold.
- Request a payout from your account: cashout
- Any bitcoin transaction may cost you some percent
- Dig/earn gold ingame: get bitcoins on your address


The goals:
- Have farmers farming gold/bitcoin, officially.
- Have people buy gold from the game or farmers, which they pay by real bitcoins.
- Have people do many transactions, like selling/buying gear, earning bitcoins, buying gold, and "tax" all of those transactions
- Have people play a lot, for monthly income

This will be a very wiggly economy. However, the game can influence at the btc-gold exchange rate, basically the real-world connection. As well as adapt the drop-rate and gold-finding rate. Make this clever, and a dynamic yet stable economy should be possible.
With income for the developer and people really using bitcoin as a currency in real-world amounts.

Bonus:

Every game is loaded with 100 gold. At the exchange rate of the week it was printed. Maybe the first games sold have one whole bitcoin loaded on that address, which is a ridiculously high amount of gold two years later. Let the huntdown begin!

Bitcoin really is an advantage here. Farmers around the world will love it. A whole new economy will form around the game and its players. Everyone can participate, where WoW needs a bankaccount or paypal or a gamecard bought in a shop. Which excludes a whole lot of people all around the world.

This would be the first game where you can really earn money, legally, with no risk. This will go so damn viral, oh boy!


tl,dr:
Read Stephenson's REAMDE. Then program WoW with bitcoin-gold. Invite all farmers, underage players, exchanges and businessmen!

Ente

There is a popular MMORPG called Silkroad Online. Now if that isn't a sign! ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silkroad_Online

It is pretty big (like in popular), and, remarkably, doesn't cost any monthly fees. You can buy extras and stuff. It seems that is already enough to finance the game?

Also, with "Then program WoW with bitcoin-gold" we obviously are talking about serious money being invested.
If it works, economy-wise, and the player-vs-player as well as quest-part are good enough to play longer than a few days, it would quickly gain a lot of players. Don't concentrate on the graphic (only) at first, make it fun to play.

If done right, this could turn into a multi million dollar venture within two years. I would bet on it. I might even bet money on it. ;-)
It would take a team of pros to do it. But I think it is possible.

edit:
The obvious answer for those problems, if not enough money can be piled up, is to have the players or users or community produce their stuff by themselves. Like in Second Life. You would "only" have to produce the engine, and a storyline..

Ente

You are right that graphics are expensive. They also seem to be a technical challenge too, every time I try to download and install graphical clients on my Fedora systems I end up unable to get most of them working. I did briefly and after trying many alternate clients find one Second Life client that actually ran, but frankly the graphics just weren't worth it.

I have always regarded graphical representation as a client-side problem anyway. I have never favoured trying to look at what objects intersected what other objects at what angles with what relative hardness of material and so on to try to deduce story-elements. I much prefer that the game produce the story elements itself and leave the physics and graphics of how such a story-element might play out or look in a particular universe to an observer having a particular set of senses to the clients. Basically let the game write the novel and leave it up to the clients whether to render it as in illustrated novel or a movie or however else someone might like to have it represented.

So my approach has always been that the game should decide who lives and who dies, who gets damaged, who gets what items, not how many centimetres per second each finger trying to grab the item is moving and with how many gram-centimetres per second of grasping force and so on. Leave it to the clients to worry about what the happenings look like in whatever range of frequencies the observer can perceive, just determine what does actually happen.

Artists have for centuries or more created illustrations after the fact of events described in text. There seems no really compelling reason not to leave it to them to do so in future. The key seems to be providing text worth illustrating. So as you said above, make it worth playing. If it is not worth playing it is probably not worth illustrating, and pretty pictures albeit sometimes a big marketing thing to marketeers do not, to "real gamers" at least, make up for lack of an actual game.

I have been aiming at laying out the actual worlds, and even, using the Crossfire RPG system, maps that can feature some actions driven by buttons and rolling boulders or marching ants, figuring that turning all of it into three dimensional imagery is really just a money problem. If players are willing to pay enough to have three dimensional illustrations of their game actions and game possessions, fine. But for many players that actually seems to be not only an un-needed luxury but also a source of technical barriers and problems. Certainly it is very important to make sure that whatever might end up being provided in the way of 3-D it must not interfere with the functionality of people's scripts they use to keep their characters operational 24/7 while they personally do other things.


At some point, when/if enough people actually want to take a look inside the game universe using a second life client, it should be feasible to create scripts that will translate a Freeciv or Crossfire map into opensim regions. But starting out with opensim regions as the medium to start up with does not seem reasonable. Take Freeciv for example. How would rendering a Freeciv world as opensim regions help players actually play it? Seems to me it probably would not. Different aspects of the universes benefit from different user-interfaces, different tools for representing aspects of the world and organising such representations. Where opensim could become useful is when you have multiple players all playing the same Feeeciv nation. Whatever their government-type there should be some way for the game to determine which orders from which players should actually be sent to the freeciv engine and which are just internal bickering among the individuals composing or attempting to compose that government. Even here though, unless it is intended that the individuals are merely using hologram projections to talk to each other, opensim does not seem ideal as it isn't really designed to let the players duke it out with fists or knives to decide who actually gets to tell the Freeciv engine what the nation's government has decided. CoffeeMUD and Crossfire RPG both seem more useful for that kind of thing...

-MarkM-

That bit about catering to the needs of gold-farmers is interesting. Reading up on the art of scripting a whole bunch of characters it seems one is recommended to whip up about ten characters at once to run through your scripting, so allowing at least ten characters per player seems reasonable; and scripting something graphical like the Crossfire RPG is much harder than scripting a MUD, since MUD clients are in any cased intended for doing scripts. (Crossfire RPG clients do support scripting, but trying to figure out the geography on a tile by tile bases by which images are used for the tiles is a lot harder than dealing room by room with room-descriptions with listed exits as in a MUD.)

A CoffeeMUD has been set up at MUDgaard.i2p (a telnet tunnel, not an HTTP aka website tunnel) as a front end, yes its not as convenient as plain old internet but plain old internet is not secure and trying to get ordinary people to use secure connections such as ssh is likely to be just as much of a challenge for them so might as well go direct to i2p for this. It is intended as just a first start and front end anyway, as it is expected that a number of MUD servers will be needed anyway to cover things like inability to chat and teleport between worlds or galaxies or planets or whatever, levels of difference at which player versus player combat is enabled and so on and so on.

We have had problems with any games we mass-advertise of having the vast majority of people who create an account never actually playing so this should help keep out those non-starters too, since what we need initially are "serious players" who plan to build a presence they can leverage into actual income once we do start setting up access points where "the masses" can come have a look and, like as not, do nothing like they usually do.

This ia quite a sophisticated system, better than farmville in its way,  you can forage and farm and mine and dig for gems and so on, do al kinds of crafts like pottery, blacksmithing, armourer, weaponsmith, sculptor (sculpting things like ovens and stoves and forges and jacuzzis and such not just ornamental stuff), construction, masonry, and on and on. It also has quite a sophisticated real-estate system so players can rent or own "rooms" or entire "areas", and a really sophisticated clans system featuring several different "government types", a whole range varying from all members voting on everything through the head honcho calling all the shots. Once your clan "conquers" an area, it can get the inhabitants working for it mining, foraging, scavenging, farming, weaving, carpenting, even making wagons and weapons and armour and so on.

Encouraging the use of cryptocurrencies, allowing several characters per player, and encouraging 24/7 presence with scripting should be a good start toward "catering to the needs of gold farmers", yes?

Give it a try... Set your i2p to provide you a telnet tunnel for your telnet client or MUD client to the destination mudgaard.i2p ...

-MarkM-

I don't understand all genre words you use, nor do I understand all concepts you lay down. But what I do understand does really sound great! :-)
I never thought about the "initial population problem" before. I was a WoW addict many, many years ago, and consider myself cured by now. But this, for the good cause, would get me into MMORPG again! :-)

I much appreciate your work and effort.

So, in easy words: what would be the next (first?) steps? Contacting small gamedeveloper-companies? Raise money? Get more (bitcointalk-) people together? Work on basic concepts?

Ente

Simple steps:

Install i2p.

Create a tunnel to MUDgaard.i2p

Telnet or MUD-client through that tunnel.

-MarkM-

..I was more asking about the bigger picture.. The one at which's end a multi-million player game is, you know.. ;-)
No i2p here, yet. Maybe later though..

Ente

i2p or Tor are probably best for the initial core teams, simply because anything that is going to end up as a multi million player empire of games is going to be worth a lot of money. If you don't want to get crushed out of existence before you ever even get off the ground its probably best to stick to such networks for the real stuff.

However, I anticipated from the start that not everyone has the same taste in game-interfaces and in fact many who are really just interested in the finance and trading aspects would prefer not to have to "actually play the games", instead simply speculating on all the various resources and corps and even the games themselves. Hence the Open Transactions server (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0). No need to create a character and have it find or fight its way to some place where it can access a stock exchange or commodities market, instead you can simply directly speculate on the markets using Open Transactions directly with no worries about thief and assassin and mugger characters lurking in back alleys to jump you on your way to the market...

-MarkM-

Challenge accepted.

I will attempt it with Second Life, as I can script. I'll start with some ideas, then I'll make the objects, then the site, then open it if everything works. Bitcoin would be the main currency in the game. I have already figured out how it can comply with SL's terms.

No donations though. I can't take the pressure if this thing doesn't work out and I wind up with angry donors.

The Second Life project sounds interesting, I hope I'll be able to get a client working to see it when it is running.

Meanwhile the MUDgaard.i2p was re-arranged slightly so it is actually now a web destination with a MUD client (the play now link) that can run up to ten clients for you over your web browser.

-MarkM-

Not sure if I should start a new thread or post this here:

I have the basics of the game down. I'll start working on the teaser site when I can. I currently will not disclose the name of either the site or the game. The game because an avatar could steal it and claim they are me. The site because it doesn't exist yet.

I have about 300L$ to my name right now, but that's plenty for now. I'm also a premium user, so I get a stipend every week and have my own land to test my objects. This will help fund my project while giving me space to work.

I'm mainly trying to design it to work without a server, so if I screw up royally, the players don't suffer and can continue playing. I currently would need to sell the Bitcoins myself, but that shouldn't be a problem at first, since there wouldn't be enough players at first to make it a problem.

The game is meant both as an RP game and as a way to get Bitcoins. Both purposes depend on the other.

I am also working on how to make the game able to be updated without a server. I'm thinking everything will be based on items and the skills would be stored in bound items.

Finally, I need to make the ToS sound less like I'm being an ass. Otherwise nobody will agree to it.

I have a brother who will be helping. His avatar is Khalhys Ahren. His job is thinking of the game from the player's perspective so it is actually fun.

This would be pretty easy to make it take and payout bitcoins I think: http://www.cevo.com/ (http://www.cevo.com/) although you don't win money on that site the same principle applies. Pay to enter an event/tourny and at the end you get payed out. Not sure if you could make it automated like the cevo client which finds the match and guarantees (to some degree) that you can not cheat. I would definitely like to see something like this take off, if I had the skills to do such a thing I would.

It turns out that the CoffeeMUD engine supports having your own unique tailor-made currencies for each "area" of the MUD, so despite the high likelihood that like most other games it will turn out people who use bitcoins have no actual interest in actually playing, every area in MUDgaard.i2p has been set to use millbitcoins as the base currency with bitcents as ten millis each and bitcoins as one thousand millis each.

If as past tests have indicated bitcoin is not actually a good choice for use in games due to the lack of interest on the part of the kinds of people who actually like and use bitcoins, it will be simple to chance over to whatever currency's users are in fact actually into games. Tests so far indicate that might end being devcoin or groupcoin, although britcoin and canadian digital notes are also still contenders.

As I mentioned earlier, MUDgaard.i2p is now a web-type destination, you can visit it directly with your i2p-enabled browser, the play now link provides a web based client that offers up to ten tabs of clients all on the one play now page.

Note that this means the banks, loan sharks, monsters, shops, everything all is denominated in millbitcoins, bitcents and bitcoins. Check out the loot and prices and see if you think we should increase or decrease the scale (such as to use satoshis or nanobits or whole bitcoins or whatever as the base unit).

-MarkM-

http://www.geekwire.com/2012/bitcoin-startup-coinlab-lands-funding-tim-draper-monetize-games/


Wow, things are starting to move! :-)

Ente

That's an interesting article. Just to clarify, they are not incorporating bitcoin into games (as currency or otherwise). This is, in fact, a cornerstone of why they think their plan will work - neither gamers nor game developers need to actually care about Bitcoin, as such. From my understanding of the article, CoinLab is running a Bitcoin mining operation, and they distribute their own mining software. The clever bit is that gamers run the mining software so they can get game credit/items/etc for certain games.

CoinLab is effectively supplanting paying USD$ for freemium bonuses with Bitcoin mining. The gamers get premium perks, CoinLab gets the mined Bitcoin, and the game developers who integrate with the whole scheme get some kind of cut (?). If anyone can clarify these details, more specifics are welcome. The CoinLab (http://coinlab.com) site is currently asking for beta involvement, but there is little information otherwise.

Yet another experiment has shot down the idea of using bitcoins in games. Not ONE, not a single ONE player advocating bitcoins turned up. Even Ixcoin has ONE player promoting their use, but for bitcoins, NONE. It was thought unfair to switch the currency to bitcoins rather than to some other currency that at least one player actually advocated. Point taken, so until we do some kind of formal battle of the coins wherein the players advocatign each coin can fight out among them to establish dominance of a particular blockchain we will just use normal default game-currencies as the actual main in-game currency.

-MarkM-

What do you think is the reason for this?

1) Bitcoiners not players
2) Bitcoiners not interested in actually supporting bitcoin
3) Bitcoiners not going to work their way through i2p

For me its 3), by the way.

Ente

Its not i2p, as most games were web based. I think its more they just want some giant existing game like WoW or EVE to suddenly start accepting bitcoins, they aren't interested in populating some startup game and themselves being the enthusiastic core population of players that convinces all the newcomers that bitcoins are a great idea; and they aren't really interested in games per se, just any existing large population of people.

Basically they want populations of people to convert out of the blue, not to create community etc using the coins convincing others that such use is a good idea.

Also though I think bitcoins are too much like "real money". People holding cryptocoins worth far far less per coin seem more willing to play games with those lower-value coins. Especially coins that basically have no use outside of games except maybe to get some pointlessly small pitance of fiat for them in some minor/obscure exchange that still deals in their obscure coin type.

I would expect though that i2p or Tor would be important for any core site where the initial core group of players/investors work on the core seeds that might eventually end up dealing with large sums of money. It might be okay to have a bunch of throwaway random passers-by games at the fringes that deal in small sums and expect to shut down at any moment, but I think wherever the central banking of the whole collection of games meets should plan to be on some kind of anonymising system otherwise the core wealth that makes all the peripheral outliers attractive (they could lead a player into the big leagues if they do well in them  type idea) could be at risk.

Remember ultimately we want to retain the option of going full blown three-dimensional immersive environment type of interfaces to these universes, that will take big money. The core people who get involved long before all that eye-candy is in place to attract the ignorant masses will likely be dealing in large values of virtual goods / resources / populations / etc by that time. (It has already been quite a few years the core players have been working toward this, already a surprising amount of value has been thrown around just getting it this far.)

-MarkM-

i can design a website that get's server stats from real games like quake 3, soldier of fortune, counter strike. you could host private servers and hold matches that require a certain amount of coins to enter, and if your part of the winning team like ctf or tdm, the other team would forfeit their coins and the house can take a commission. it would be pretty simple to write, and i would love to put a team together and start working on it. any volunteers?

I suppose there was a lack of advocacy to get Bitcoiners there in the first place.

You've been mentioning potential solutions all throughout the thread, but you never had a call to action.  You never said, "Hey, now is the time for everyone to join this game (URL)!"  Nothing about promoting Bitcoin's use in a particular game at a particular time/date.

So, try it again, but be more clear with what you want to accomplish.  What game are we supposed to advocate for Bitcoin in?  How do we go about accessing said game?  What's the best way to advocate for Bitcoin within the game?  What date and time should we do this?

Again, your posts have all come off as being "potential" ideas.  I don't think anyone understood that you were actually trying to gather Bitcoin players into a particular game.  And if that was the case, your posts are unclear enough that I still don't know which game you wanted to promote Bitcoins in.

I was gonna write something similar to this -- I completely agree. I myself was completely unaware of what was happening to this thread. At one point I actually just assumed that alot of guys are chatting in secret and were going to release something by the 3rd page arising from this thread but then everyone start jumping in with throwing out possible engines to use so I scratched that assumption and now we are here still with no game or even what I half expected would be a storyline or some gameplay features.

I seriously suggest using some solution that is cross-browser & cross-operating system comparability or it will have some issues gaining any popularity in the Bitcoin world( and couldn't hurt you in the non-geeky world)

Well don't worry about it a lot, anyone who was really gung-ho made it and there isn't much point flooding people in who aren't into it. Unfortunately it turns out that basically any game is mostly going to have idle people, as no matter what the game if initially trying it is free tons of people are "just looking" and never really "play" the thing. That is awkward for game economies if each new player brings some kind of resource into the world whether that resource is geographic like a village for them to rule or a planetary colony for them to exploit or even just a whole bunch of technology and supplies they get as initial equipment.

Also it turns out that most free-open-source multiplayer online games you can find code for are broken. It has taken a long time and a lot of testing to find just a few codebases that actually work. Actually with MUDs I guess plenty work, but most have ancient license heritage forbidding them from being associated with making money, even donations for bandwidth/server costs.

It is just as well that only the hardcore testing people who helped test all the other games over the years showed up for the i2p MUD since it just blew up its "fake database" simple starter database that it provides to save people from having to set up a real database to try it out. It is being set up again using a real database currently.

I set up another intergalactic mining game just as an initial player-funnel to look for long term players and am throwing traffic at it expecting that most people who sign up will end up idling out, but I cannot really include it in the overall large scale long term economy that is what I really want because each player starts out with a whole mining setup which in the proper larger scale economy plan would be expensive to set up. Financing all those startups simply would not be practical because of the vast "failure rate", the vast number of them that will never actually grow and build and expand. So basically the aim with that one is to have it out in streams of traffic acting as a filter to try to find some players who do stick around. I expect it to end up as galaxies full of long-abandoned mining colonies but have not got any really good storyline yet for why most such colonies fail. Maybe they are a first round of attempts long before the technology was perfected or something.

The first attempt at an intergalactic mining setup used the XNova Redesigned code, and has been closed to new players because of the dropout rate. The mining operations are very lucrative in the long term, but there are still several abandoned operations there for which no suitable repossession corp has been able to get set up for yet so there is no point inviting the creation of more operations that will also end up being abandoned before paying back their startup loans.

WIth that one I know some of the abandoning happened because the XNova code itself was broken, its combat code looks like it could never have worked at all as it mentions database fields different from those that actually exist. It looks like it was only part-way through being ported from some quite different earlier version or something. That has worked out well for the players who were not actually looking forward to combat, and for the homeworlds who prefer not to have such nearby galaxies be full of dangerous combat-capable robotic fleets, but isn't what most players of that genre of games are looking for.

I set up one based on the 2moons code too, and that code seems to work, so the storyline for that will be that they are a farther-away set of galaxies, far enough away that the civilisations that sent robots to the XNova Redesigned galaxies are willing to allow the robotics corp to activate the combat capabilities of the robots sent to the 2moons galaxies. We "know" from the existence of many games of this type out on the net that vast numbers of galaxies are full of very offensive, very dangerous factions so the premise is that this 2moons layer of galaxies will be the outer defenses of the civilised worlds, robots being sent that far away more as a defense initiative than for any resources that might be found out there. However because of the distance premise, startups in this distant, 2moons based set of galaxies will only be possible once jumpgates have been constructed in the XNova Redesigned galaxies.

Thus we have so far one set of 500 galaxies run by XNova Redesigned and thus unable to have combat until someone actually wants combat badly enough to arrange to have that code's combat subsystems fixed to allow it, and a farther set of 500 galaxies that cannot be reached until the operations set up in the XNova Redesigned galaxies have built suitable jump-gates to allow the (very expensive) sending of colony ships to the farther set of galaxies. All of that within a larger setting known as the Galactic Milieu, whose main focus is Freeciv-based civilised worlds inhabited mostly by humans and mostly focussed in one galaxy.

The new 2moons-based setup is at http://twomoons.mygamesonline.org/ and is NOT part of that larger economy because the expected failure (going idle) rate makes it not seem economically reasonable to finance startups there. It thus has no storyline (yet at least) for where the resources came from or come from, and where the technology was developed or is developed that its startups use, how they get their startup gear, where they come from and so on. It is basically a pretty normal 2moons game except for the fact that it too has 500 galaxies and its galaxies are about as far apart as a galaxy is wide. It is having traffic thrown at it so that it is expected to forever acrue random passer-by players who mostly will just go idle leaving abandoned mining colonies scattered across the first few galaxies. It has no backstory of any common set of civilised worlds the mining colonies were sent out by so no pre-existing politics of why any given outfit should or should not be hostile or friendly to any other. Its players start out without any indebtedness to any investors who invested in getting them started and thus expect some return on the investment. It is just the typical game that happens in a vacuum featuring factions that appear out of no-where equipped with resources and technology that appeared out of nowhere.

-MarkM-

P.S. This "out of nowhere" stuff presumably means there should also be no objection to the site administration selling stuff out of nowhere for cryptocurrency. In the proper larger game I am really aiming for, the site admins will not be conjuring stuff out of nowhere to sell, everything will arise in game in the normal in game ways so players will mostly be buying from each other.

What I don't understand:

- 1. do you want to advertise BTC to some (more or less) computer illiterate people, who have never heard of bitcoins?

- 2. Do you want current BTC users to play your game?

For 2. , I would definitely _not_ recommend any game, that you have to learn for hours and then play for may hours before you get anywhere, because I guess more users would be computer freaks and have better things to do than playing a game for a long time. I would instead recommend some game concept, that you can play during lunch break, or so.

As an example:

http://www.moorhuhn.de/onlinegames/mh_ancient/mh_high_amg_index.php?g_name=mh_high_amg

I just finished it.  It sucks.  Don't read it. 

I've read -everything- by Neal Stephenson and been a huge fan.. and I'm having trouble to wrap my mind around how he could have done such a terrible book.  Wow. 

Formulaic stereotype reinforcement drivel with not an ounce of science or history anywhere.

Seriously..   

Actually I am thinking more of cryptocurrencies in general, basically resources that you can take home from the game or even take with you into other games. A big problem with many games is stuff being worthless because endless amounts of it can be conjured from no-where; if each of the "resources" players use to "build" everything (stone, metal, wood, whatever, a few basic things everything else is built out of) was a blockchain based currency then the total amount of each that exists across all games that choose to use the stuff would maybe help combat "MUDflation".

I am far from convinced that bitcoin is the best choice of blockchain based currency for game use simply because so far it has been mostly anyone other than bitcoiners who actually get into the things. BBQcoin might actually turn out to be one of the best choices since it was created expressly for having fun with and it is noticeably neglected by "serious" folk, so maybe gamers can have fun with it without worrying, at least for some time yet, about some "serious" mining operation deciding to come eat up all the coins that are still to be minted.


I am definitely not looking for fly by night few minutes at a time people. I am in fact nowadays looking into a kind of "CPU mining" concept where we make CPUs be able to work better than special purpose circuits by making actual gameplay be a means of earning, with gameplay that is sufficiently variable that CPUs should be better able to play than ASICs or FPGAs.

The Ixians are a nice example, someone decided that Ixcoins sounded like a good kind of currency for a people known as Ixians to use, so has been creating Ixians in various games, possibly with some idea of relating it potentially to the planet Ix in Frank Herbert's DUNE series. Over the years maybe that faction might grow and end up making Ixcoins a widely recognised currency at least wherever Ixians are found.

-MarkM-

If mining performance is poor though you are kind of making the players overpay if you do it that way.

It would actually be more efficient to get money from them by whatever means and invest that money into ASIC mining gear so you can merged mine efficiently instead of wasting player electricity inefficiently, and you could maybe even throw in a new additional merged mined coin in your merged mining mix that is specifically for the game and is the main one the players are after.

-MarkM-

What I was actually looking for way back when I first encountered bitcoin was free open source general purpose trading software I could use to implement trading houses that warehouse virtual goods they and other players own, and broker trades. These warehouses were to be associated with a virtual geography so that in addition to the basic wheeler-dealer trading game they would in effect operate as they would also serve as infrastructure for a transport tycoon layer that would emerge once players hit the limits of the wheeler-dealing they could do using goods that do not move from one virtual location to another.

That is, initially players would be able to trade X amount of substance, item or commodity Y located at one "location" for V amount of substance, item or commodity W located at the same "location" or a completely distinct/separate/different "location". Once that was up and running hopefully it would create a market for "transport", that is, the ability to actually change the "location" of substances, items or commodities.

This is actually also why I got into the whole Open Transactions thing: it was the only thing I found that seemed to promise eventual generic markets. However my players actually were not all really interested in the kind of "market" in which "the house" passes on the arbitrage opportunities to its customers; some of them much preferred the idea that if they owned "the house" they would be able to sell stuff at the highest prices they could get for it while buying stuff at the lowest prices they could get it for, which struck them as a much more natural and normal way for a merchant prince to operate than admitting to customers "oh actually that is available cheaper than the price you are willing to pay for it", which is how they perceive the currently standard bitcoin exchanges as operating.

I am still slowly working toward these same basic functionalities, using whatever free open source code I can find. For example CoffeeMUD, due to its built in auction systems and the ability of played characters to learn marketeering skill thus becoming able to act like shopkeepers, is looking interesting / potentially-useful lately (especially so due to it also having routines for "producing" goods as well as selling them).

The initial case, in which trading takes place but not "transport", is similar to what happens when virtual goods are located in games that do not provide means of moving one game's goods to another game. The "transport" case could come into effect in such situations once a means of exporting objects from one game and importing them into another was implemented. Obviously this is not all that likely if the different games are operated by different administrations, but that just serves to motivate investigation and testing of all free open source games to try to find ones that actually work, so that as many different games as possible can be made available for eventual implementation of this "transport" functionality to allow actual shipping of things between games instead of merely "I will trade you X in that game for Y in this game" type trades.

This has proven to be a long and slow-moving quest but it is still ongoing. Unfortunately the testing part has discovered that a lot of free open source multiplayer game code does not really work, so it is also developing backlogs of "things to fix in various codebases if we ever get this going well enough to bother fixing them".

-MarkM-

So the first Bitcoin game that uses Bitcoin is finally getting started.

http://www.bitfantasy.com

It is a sort of strategy RPG game played on your browser.

It costs BTC to start playing but from there on it costs nothing. But you can trade in-game objects for bitcoins.

Everything in the game costs gold pieces and the shops in the game only deal in gold but the player to player market is all bitcoin based and it appears that the developers are trying to push more player to player purchases as opposed to buying things from the shops. Though it is currently in Beta so there are only a few people on there testing things out.

I have been Beta testing it and it is pretty fun. It has all of the typical quest type of stuff where you can go around fighting monsters and getting goodies and experience and all of that, but they also have the ability to build farms and homes and your own Inn with the ability to make money from farming the farms and having people pay to use your Inn.

I like that it is almost like a multi-player strategy game, with a bit of hack and slash thrown in. There is a good team at work making it better and I can see it growing very well once they open up for players.

Let me know if you want to get in on helping with the Beta phase before they open it up to the public.

one-and-a-half years later, this puts a big smile on my face:
http://screencast.com/t/Z7SC1twGW (http://screencast.com/t/Z7SC1twGW)

Roger Ver, you brilliant!

Ente

Something like this already exists based on a Namecoin fork, a blockchain based game with mined own currency:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=262599.0

I am currently building a horror game using the Unreal Development Kit however I doubt it is a game suitable to Bitcoin. I have explored this ideas before though, I even have a top secret game idea that I believe will be very successful, providing I can get some good programmers on board.

i make games
http://gamejolt.com/games/arcade/taquito-tower/17651/
it doesnt accept any currency though

i want to get the humble bundle widgets to accept bitcoin as well though.

I definitely want in please.

I noticed it is already open for registrations.  Any chance for me to get a promotion code...  ::)

I am working on a game as a side project ;)

This would work well for the emerging microtransaction market.

Would love to play one, and please make it free and not like the BitFantasy...

I work on games.. in my imagination. I've had some interesting ideas, but I don't think they would work well in the real world.

Something like Runescape with Satoshis as currency?

I am not yet inside BitFantasy, but sounds like there is a lot taken from GoldenTowns and I absolutely love GoldenTowns :-)

@Elwar or someone else, can you give us here some stats from the game, nothing is accessible from the outside, I am interested in supporting and I know many people who would do the same, but we need to know more.  The graphics there, do not look too sharp yet...

I want my own minecraft server I'm just too lazy to code it lol

microtransactions are cancer for games
more indies should accept bitcoin for their work / tips

candy crush isnt a game even

Do some of you here actively play BitFantasy? 

I looked a little more into it, and looks like a MAJOR development  :)

I don't. I dislike paying for something which I cannot test on forehand.

I played for a while before getting busy on other things.

Very fun game.

Thx, good to know is a good game.

@bitcoininformation, I think they have to charge something, they need the funds to keep on developing the game... How I see it, they do not have a publisher support, so they need to depend on their members... Neither, do they make any profits by selling some virtual gold or virtual energy.  From what I know, they do not sell anything, members only trade between themselves, this is why they charge for their platform, it makes sense I think...

BTW, we wish you all the luck with your side project!

I have a game which would be ideal for bitcoin as the currency:

http://2dspacemmo.wildbunny.co.uk/

(you mine asteroids for in-game currency, which you then use to buy upgrades)

Only trouble is, development is currently halted due to lack of funding.

http://2dspacemmo.wildbunny.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/3.png

http://2dspacemmo.wildbunny.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/kickstarter640x480.png

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2t2H-aefDQ

Yes, you can do it.

This rocks, if you can earn a little free Bitcoin (can be as low as 0.0001) while playing would be really great.

Thanks :)

I did look into that idea a while back, but the reality is that the difficulty level means that its impossible to mine bitcoins on consumer hardware, let alone inside the flash player.

But like I say, development is halted right now anyway, due to lack of funding.

Yep, unfortunately this is the most common problem with individual developers...

If our BTC community was less competing and more cooperating, everyone would gain...

the idea of a game that uses bitcoin as a currency is just objectively bad.

Why do you think that?

it breaks down to the mechanics of the game

In most games you have to do some form of work to get currency in return, so if you just cut out that part you are basically just paying for the reward part. Like buying the best sword in the game so you can beat everything with little work.

There are whole teams of people that work on mmo's to make sure that there isnt a way to exploit the money system to get ingame money without doing any of these things(I worked on an off on a project with a friend of mine, and it the end it wasnt worth it to keep making a game that used btc as currency). So an MMO powered by bitcoins would probably be a TON of work.

I guess I am pretty much against games that use any form of real currency other than to purchase them to begin with. Games like dragons tail, the casino mmo thing dont have this problem since all the games are ABOUT money. its fun to blow all your money in that game, and its pretty community based. I suppose a game like EVE online might be able to make it work, or second life as those games both are completely driven by the community.

Just making a game and throwing in bitcoin isn't going to work that well, and a game would have to be built around all the things that could happen, price changes and all.

not that i want to be discouraging, i just think more effort should be focused on game portals like gog or steam, and developers themselves to accept bitcoin.

a friend of mine did a write up of his games sales, including bitcoin donations on his blog - https://seagaia.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/anodyne-pirate-bay-promo-post-mortem/

if you can buy items with real money (inc btc) it's unfair.. that is the basics of it.. appearance items are ok, but not a Sword of a Thousand Truths which one shots people and only rich people can afford.

this is why every MMORPG bans people selling virtual currencies.. (almost all.. some like project entropia use real money)
I believe wow tried it.. but cancelled

if the game is a competition (maybe with different tiers - for rich and poor) then it is probably ok to use real money (but not to buy overpowered items).. e.g. Poker, Deathmatch, or something similar
Items which help you level up faster are probably not so bad

saying all this.. maybe in Chronokings you can buy "health potions" with the in game currency, and maybe the in game currency will be on exchanges..  ... the cost of the potions in "CHR" will go to the miners..

See, chrono kings doesnt suffer from this problem, the entertainment value comes from how unique it is and you know that its going to be using the money beforehand.

looks awesome

not sure how you can use bitcoin as a currency though (safely and fairly)

all that anyone needs to do if they want to use bitcoin, is have an exchange or www.ige.com website which trades btc for the in game currency.. but how does anyone know if the devs haven't just created some in game currency out of thin air.. this is the main problem i think

If you mined asteroids for bitcoins, the bitcoins will need to come from players (as the devs aren't going to give free bitcoins).. but then the devs know where they all are and maybe they will steal them without anyone knowing? something like that

if it is a game in which everyone pays 1btc, which then goes into a pot.. and the winner(s) get it.. it might be possible? (not sure how that would work in an mmo though)

It really looks awesome. Players could buy upgrades to their spaceships with bitcoins. Part of the money would go into asteroids. So free players could mine them and buy stuff too. There could be restrictions on the upgrades that depend on experience gained by players, not on money. And only players with comparable strength should see each other. Thus the only advantage of depositing money is saving a lot of time (and thus getting a slightly better game experience). It seems to be fair since time is money.

That would probably work, actually. As long as at least some people did purchase with their bitcoins and not everybody mines :)

I agree. Introducing real currencies makes everything different, hell of a lot more complicated, but opens op a whole new world of possibilities too.
Many years ago I read Neal Stephenson's REAMDE, where just this is described, a MMORPG with real currency, and free and easy connection to real-world money. Yes, it's just a novel (a good one), but I think he was up to something there.

Also:
http://content.screencast.com/users/uncreditedsource/folders/Snagit/media/b3a4c9cc-c6e6-4f17-a698-ab69cdf0b34b/10.07.2013-12.54.png



That's a problem. So, lets turn this into an opportunity! Like, you may easily (and expensively) buy the "Sword of a Thousand Truths". It costs the awesome amound of 500 gold. To wield it, you have to have an additional 500 gold with you. When wielding it, a huge red arrow points into your direction. Alternatively a huge dollarsign. Or other players can enable, or buy "gold-goggles" for the same effect.
Now when the sword-wielding guy finally is taken down, he drops his gold to be lootet.
What happens? He will kill many many people. Until gangs form and hunt down high-profile players. Goldmules.
This redistributes gold, makes playing possible with no initial bitcoins, makes the game very attractive for, hell, everyone!
And, by "losing" a few percent of the gold each kill/drop/loot you could even finance the whole game eventually.

Oh, use gold and bitcoins, with a slightly floating exchangerate, maybe slightly inflating. Of course the whole new can of worms with the bitcoin exchangerate opens up here.. So, maybe, gold is pegged to USD, with a slight floating and/or inflating exchangerate. Your bitcoins are "just" a method of getting gold in and out of the game, bitpay-style.

By now, after two years this thread is open, I think it's not about Bitcoin in itself or the killeridea how to put Bitcoin into a game. It will all explode once a game with large esthablished playerbase uses Bitcoin (first).
For a newcomer to go viral, it has to measure itself on the big productions, and have Bitcoin as an additional, new, viral component.

Ente

To answer the general point about in-game purchases with real money being bad:

I think as long as you don't sell power, you can make it work. Sell time saving and convenience, but never give an unfair advantage.

love it!

Maybe there is a way to bridge the gap between people who like to just play a game for a short span of time on lunchbreaks or whatever and hardcore people who either live in their mom's basement playing games full-time or make full use of their game-client's scripting ability to equip their characters with scripts sophisticated enough to keep them doing productive stuff 24/7 or as close to 24/7 as possible.

So far we have mostly been looking at catering to the people who miss "CPU mining", by setting up something that CPUs should be good at but botnets and GPUs and FPGAs and ASICs not particularly good at.

That is the stuff I wrote about at http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining

However I think maybe players who are not willing to leave characters running 24/7 but instead will log in do something and log out again might actually be able to compete, at least if they are willing to prey upon the 24/7 folk.

The problem of player versus player combat enters in at that point though, since presumably if you want to log in, raid some productive bunch of characters who have been slaving away 24/7 piling up resources, and log out again you will likely prefer that all your potential victims are all forced to be in a mode that allows player versus player combat, so thay you can charge in and slaughter them all for experience as well as loot the stuff they have been working on.

So maybe there will still be a tension here between the preferences of the 24/7 worker/crafter types who probably would prefer players cannot attack other players, and the lunchbreak raid types who, I am guessing here, might really want to be able to attack any and all other players they choose to?

What do you think?

The default mode of CoffeeMUD is that player versus player is optional. Both players have to opt in to it, and both can opt back out at any time.

The configuration system though can be set up to make the player versus player decision irreversible, so that once a character turns it on they can never turn it off.

Also what levels of character are allowed to PvP what other levels can also be configured, the default is four levels up and down.

Most likely we need feedback from people actually interested in using such settings in order to determine which ones would be worth setting up servers for, so I am interested in what kinds of PvP settings people actually want.

Note however though that there remains another way to "prey upon" 24/7 workers, and that is simply to be upper class or ruling class, basically fork out the coins it takes to set yourself up at a large scale where all the puny little labourers' pathetic little piles of produce need to all be put together into huge wagon-trains or starship-loads of goods before your character deigns to notice them, so basically you log in, see if anyone has a million of anything ready to sell, or fifty thousand tons of something so you can put it into a Freeciv-scale "freight" or "caravan" unit to ship off somewhere, do some wheeler-dealing on that kind of scale and log out again...

-MarkM-

ill exspect that to see for alot of games. its a great way for bitcoin!

Would be cool to see games like Diablo 3 have BTCAH instead.

haven't read the whole thread but have you seen this:

http://www.leetcoin.com/

LeetCoin allows you to compete in your favorite first-person shooters for bitcoins.
BTC is transferred from the losers to the winners instantly.

I have created a Bitcoin Pool for anyone who wants to see something like this developed.

Signing up is easy, you only need 10 mBTC to join the discussion (the 10 mBTC stays in your wallet).

http://www.bitpools.com/?Video%20Game

With enough interest we can get something working. Let's do this.


BitPools is made for gathering funding among people interested in the same project so that someone with a solution is willing to put something together for the group.

Here's an example of how it would work for developing a video game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETCP8NeXasY

http://www.exhumedrace.com/

Interesting!
It is about time for a primetime game working with digital currencies!

Ente

We're working our butts off trying to promote the kickstarter so that the game can get done faster :)