Unfortunately though it is not open source. Trying to recreate it, or something very like it, from scratch is likely to be quite expensive. SO we should start with less expensive projects first to raise funds for the more-expensive ones.

There is however a purported World of Warcraft server clone on SourceForge. It does not seem to have clients though, it seems to epxect people to use the existing actual World of Warcraft clients. I am not sure if that is really a great idea, but it is something that is actually available so is probably worth looking at.

Basically we need to start with free stuff to raise money for hosting and bandwidth at first, then eventually once hosting and bandwidth is covered we can start adding actual development, and so on. Hopefully DeVCoin will help with some of this, since development is after all what DeVCoin is all about.

I expect too though that we will need a core population of cryptocurrency-oriented players, because in any multi-player game the population of players is a very major aspect of the appeal of the game. We need our games to be heavily populated with friendly players who welcome new players, help them get into the game long term, and get them informed about cryptocurrency. Without this core of players we will either end up with empty worlds or worlds whose players simply have no interest in cryptocurrencies thus just push for normal fiat if they want to get currency involved in the game at all.

Unfortunately as I have mentioned before the population of bitcoiners found here at this forum does not actually seem at all interested in games, so how to establish the initial core population of cryptocoin-oriented players is still an unsolved problem. We need active, friendly players, preferably ones who will get all their friends into it too. After all it is the early population that will presumably have the most wealth to be made selling things to the later arrivals, so getting in early should actually be advantageous provided that eventually outsiders do start to be brought in. There are a number of good "residual" marketing tools the core team can deploy though to help bring in insiders, so maybe it will also be important to have some mechanism for determinine who actually brought in each new player, so they can be rewarded for such recruiting/marketing.

(On the other hand, maybe that will take care of itself, since presumably those players who have accumulated things to sell will probably be mentioning their ability to provide such things as part of their marketing of the game, thus can expect the players they bring in to be contacting them about aquiring such resources.)

-MarkM-

The total lack of any connections makes this thing basically useless. Its pretty, but so what, at least with Freenet and i2p and Tor I get connections, this thing might look better but seems to be totally useless, I might as well turn it off too if none of you are actually going to be running it.

-MarkM-

The wallet side is probably best handled by adapting the Armory (Armoury?) client to Litecoin once that client completes its memory usage fixes.

-MarkM-

If the game is open source, and the resources created for the game are open source, then DeVCoins might fit this, since people who are actually actively developing will be able to automatically get DeVCoins as they are generated regardless of who actually runs the mining gear.

So for example people creating the artwork, models, meshes, textures and so on to enable a game to progress toward having a three dimensional representation could get DeVCoins for doing that.

Such development could be tied to gameplay by the fact that a character has to actual do the development work or skill-gaining work needed for the character to actually get to produce, in-game, the items the player is doing the illustrations, models etc for.

-MarkM-

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-

Since the main bottleneck to implementation is funding, it seemed reasonable to look into the economic-game and trading-game aspects first, since it seems possible that the popularity of rampant speculation could really drive some epic development.

I came across Bitcoin and Open Transactions when I went looking for market/trading code. I wanted players to be able to trade and to run trading houses, with the stuff they are trading having a location as well as whatever other attributes it might have so that a transportation/shipping game would naturally arise around it as a form of arbitrage when the locations of the things being traded starts to get in the way of the trading.

Location can also cover things like "this gold is over in the World of Warcraft universe", "these ISK are located in the EVE Online universe", "this suit of magic gear is in the Falling Swords universe" and so on.

However, currencies based on blockchains seem to offer an out from having to worry so much about location. Cryptocoins are easy to ship from place to place even among places where things like swords or grams of gold or local fiat currencies might not be exportable / importable.

Then along came DeVCoin, a coin anyone working on free open source games can easily aquire. The whole design of DeVCoin is based on putting it into the hands of such people. Of course I helped make sure that coin got created, it seemed a perfect fit...

-MarkM-

Soon. Still a few little problems today, but soon...

-MarkM-

Okay, turns out they all issued a million shares and all shares sold at 20 DVC each.

-MarkM-

Okay, the latest round of deep networking/protocol changes are over, we are back to testing, and irning out the wrinkles in the new improved system.

Meanwhile the first round of IPOs in complete, a bunch of DeVCoin oriented Corps. Four of them, each issuing one million shares at 20 DVC per share, all snapped up.

-MarkM-

The Open Transactions server 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 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. 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-

Now that the latest round of deep changes/fixes to the Open Transactions server are ready for testing, I have been able to bring the server up to date about the various Corp. IPOs that have been going on. (Such as DeVCorp as well as this one, GDC and GRC.)

It turned out they all issued one million shares, and they all went at 20 DVC per share.

So the IPO phase is over, they are now ready to be actively traded. Though as I mentioned, the server is still in testing; there is still some awkward clunkiness but that is a minor thing considering the massive amount of internal rewriting the code has been through in the latest wave of updates and fixes.

-MarkM-

Well my node isn't showing any of the 27 bitcoiners it knows about as being online. So somehow our nodes have lost the ability to find each other or something? Do your nodes have my no-ip hostname, crossciv.no-ip.org in their records of me? If so that ought to be letting them find me even when my ISP changes my IP-address...

-MarkM-

So what is happening with this? Not one of you people are online??? I have no connections despite 27 bitcoiners listed to connect to!

-MarkM-

Yes, exactly. I have always seen a proliferation of blockchain based coins as being good for bitcoin, it shows the concept is good by the fact that everyone and their game is adopting it, and I believe that there will also be a tendency to more and more leave all the hassle of dealing with fiat to bitcoin, so more and more of the altcoins will let bitcoin serve as the curtain behind which the whole can of worms of "real money" laws and regulations and all that crap hides, entrenching "real actual original bitcoins" more and more as the gateway between the cryptocoin world(s) and the dinosaur world of fiat they hope to somehow eventually leave behind.

Thus probably for anyone who is still using fiat as a measure of value will tend to always see bitcoin as more valuable than the other cryptocoins, and most of the cryptocoio see bitcoin as the most valuable as long as a lot of their users still have some desire to obtain fiat.

It is just very very horrible mess to try to use "real bitcoins" for a lot of things IF/WHILE "real bitcoins" are intended to become as officially a "real money" as possible, since "real money" is just a really crappy thing to get involved with while governments screw it around with all kinds of regulations.

Therefore unless the intent is for bitcoin to NOT become in any way considered to be "real money", it is best to NOT use bitcoin for a whole bunch of applications ranging from equipping monsters in roleplaying games with treasure through paying spies to spy on rival galactic empires or corporations in galactic scale games.

We need toys people can play trading games with, currencies the forex markets in games can trade, currencies to use to buy stocks and shares in games themselves and within the games in things existing within the games. So players can "invest" their time and hashing power and so on not only into loot for their character or empire or corporation but also maybe into the various games themselves, the development of 3d graphical representations of those games, etcetera etcetera etcetera holodecks here we come...

-MarkM-

Coiledcoin *is* your time-shifted bitcoin. It even put in the BIP16 or BIP14 or whatever it was before the main bitcoin did.

There are tons of altcoins, the problem is not enough actual merged-mining is happening. Luke Jr probably owns the largest hoards of many of them simply because his pool's users apparently don't mind how many altcoins he makes for himself using their hashing power.

He seems to have stopped crushing coiledcoin some time ago, though I don't know if he simply switched to plain old merged-mining it and continuing thereby to amass a hoard of it.

The negativity toward altcoins is a really bad thing in my opinion, since the more toy/play coins that work like bitcoin the better, lots of toys of a thing generally goes along with social acceptance of a thing. Gun toys for boys, for example, are probably no coincidence but part of promotion for real guns, and so on.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? And a form of marketing?

-MarkM-

In the Galactic Milieu, we introduce players to the general concept of bitcoin, the technology, by having a number of nations that use blockchains for their national currencies, and we mention actual bitcoins in particular by attributing them to the legendary/mythical "Hacker" nation.

Thus we take a soft-sell approach. The fact that a Hacker known as Satoshi actually visited the mythical planet "Earth" and introduced the "Hacker" currency, Bitcoins, there early in the 21st century is just a bit of historical trivia, players can have fun with various other blockchain-based currencies, hopefully ones they can actually realistically mine some of for themselves, before worrying about the actual real live bitcoins that, it turns out, someone known as Satoshi actually *did* introduce here on Earth in the early 21st century.

The thing is, the "Hacker" nation is so insanely advanced that their currency is ridiculously valuable, even more valaube than those of the very powerful and advanced Brits, Canucks and Martians. Plus, the Hacker nation is approximately as mythical as the planet known as Earth, so it is far more likely that players will find themselves dealing with one of the "big three" national currencies - United Kingdom Britcoin (UKB), Canadian Digital Notes (CDN) and Martian BotCoins (MBC) - or the currencies of the largest intergalactic megacorporations General Mining Corp (GMC) and General Retirement Funds (GRF), or even the relatively new United Nations Scrip (UNS) than actual Bitcoins; and probably often simply using bitNicKeLs, which all of the preceding use as the small-change denomination for day to day stuff smaller than, say, battlestars or space-stations or leases of entire planets or suchlike. Even bitNicKeLs are actually pretty hefty really for small game stuff like buying a beer, so individual-adventurer scale players will thus tend mostly to use DeVCoins or, if relatively well-healed, GRouPcoins.

It is probably not necessary to build into the games software for directly dealing with blockchains at all. It should suffice that tokens be used, or even that the various coins are simply assigned a relatively stable value in copperpieces, silverpieces, goldpieces, platinum pieces etc and use these normal familiar tokens in game, only bothering to actually directly use blockchains when sending funds to other players for use in possibly some other game (aka, some other sub-game of the meta-game, since actually hacking the code of all the subgames to make them smoothly transfer stuff between them is probably lower priority than simply getting them all working and working out what exactly they do each have to offer to the others in terms of export and import opportunities.)

The big thing that blockchain based coins have to offer for gaming is precisely this ability of the players to move them from game to game. They are rather like "real money" in that way, except that in most games you usually find in practice that you cannot in fact move "real money" out of a game. Most games explicitly forbid you from moving "real money" out of the game, you can only put it in, not take it out.

Basically it is simpler and more generic/homogenous to move cryptocoins from game to game than it is to move, for example, specific types of starship, or specific species of played character having specific skills and experiences and vital-statistics. Games tend to represent the latter types of things in such different ways that each thing to be shipped between games can involve a huge amount of theoretical work just to formulate the conversion algorithms before even getting to actually implementing them. But fungible "money" is an item many games represent quite similarly, that is, as a numeric value having various uses/effects in the game. So money seems the simplest place to start in weaving together many games into a larger metagame/economy... Your rich uncle who runs a village on a "Devana" based planet might not be able to come kill rats in the sewers with you in the Crossfire RPG or CoffeeMUD MUD based city you live in, but he can send you pocket-money or buy shares in the XNova-Redesigned or 2Moons based intergalactic mining venture you intend to finance with the loot you find in those sewers...

-MarkM-

In games like WoW and EVE, players buy game-money and the automated software money-interfaces in the game for shopping and for what monsters "drop" and so on is in the game-currency not in whatever currency the players used outside the game to initially equip themselves with game-money, right? Even in the upcoming Diablo 3 it is not contemplated that various Earth-currencies be used in normal gameday to gameday stuff like grabbing a beer or bed at an inn or picking a troll's pocket or the like?

So basically what I am suggesting is be prepared to leave actual bitcoins out of the list of port numbers in-game money-routines can choose from in selection among the many cryptocurrencies that all use the identical bitcoin-style RPC call API. Accepting bitcoin as outside currency instead of USD or GBP etc for the normal outside the game things like subscriptions or buying a bunch of boosts or whatever is fine, you could just as well accept USD or GBP or whatever there. But don't put actual bitcoins into the hands of the monsters and barkeeps and so on in the game unless you are equally prepared to have some of them happen to "drop" GBP or USD or whatever. (Maybe trolls use USD, orcs use GBP, whatever, however you choose which currency which monster happens to "drop".)

The point is, bitcoin aims to be like GBP, USD etc: "real money". So you need to expect that some day all the reasons why you don't want your monsters to drop dollars or francs or yen or pounds etc should equally well lead you to not want them to drop bitcoins either.

However, things like for example DeVCoin could be fine for monsters to drop, since DeVCoin's aim is to promote free open source software, and encouraging players to play free open source software based games could be well in line with that purpose.

Thus I consider DeVCoin much better suited to use as "game money" than BiTCoin is.

I expect that if even Diablo chooses to have its monsters start dropping fiat, it will run into legal hassles, don't you?

We should expect and plan for bitcoin to end up being, for such legal purposes, pretty much just another "real money". If you want your monsters to drop dollars, fine, have some drop bitcoins instead. But consider too, how will you convince the monster to even admit it has a "brainwallet" let alone tell you the passphrase? Surely any bitcoins owned by monsters will be harder to get them to "drop" than any dollar bills or silver quarters etc? Intelligent monsters would, I would expect, use cryptocoins for the greater security they provide over carrying cash. Unintelligent monsters likely would not have much use for cryptocoins, though I suppose you could find in a dog's tag a message saying "here is a bitcoin address, I offer you its contents as an inducement to return my pet unharmed, more awaits you when that is accomplished" or some such...

-MarkM-

Aren't they mostly into the piracy / Terms-Of-Service-Breaking side of things - encouraging / enabling trade of game stuff the game operators do not want traded? Those people are willing to break the Terms of Service to support (by playing, by being enthusastic about, maybe even by encouraging others to play) games that do NOT support such trade. They are black market opposers of the whole principle of making games that lack such restrctions on trade, they'd rather support the very games that want such trade-restrictions in place. They likely have no interest in supporting the development and deployment of games that lack such restrictions, and in fact those making money at it maybe even have an incentive to keep the restrictions in place, in much the same was a heroin dealers benefit from the illegality of heroin...

-MarkM-

I actually prefer the alt-coins to bitcoin for games, largely because bitcoin is the gateway to/from fiat and thus the one most likely to run into all kinds of legal problems. Others might be much easier to claim to be purely play-money, whereas bitcoin has a lot of folks who are trying to convince people it is a real money. So for play money it just seems safer to stick to the altcoins, and let players convert them to/from bitcoins if they wish as long as bitcoins are not considered money, but always ready to throw out bitcoin as a game-currency the moment is gets legally declared to be real money.

It is unfortunate that DIablo seems to have realised that banning players from buying and selling game stuff is bad, because that was a major thing indies could offer that the big companies did not: freedom to buy and sell game stuff, no rules saying you cannot sell characters, you cannot sell gear and all that crap. Free trade.

Hopefully Diablo will actually turn out though to still not really be as free as some might hope, maybe there will still be some stupid restrictions like you gotta use their shops and pay them a cut or something, that might still leave a huge field for indies.

I have been testing every free open source game codebase I can find, trying to sort the actually working ones from the vast numbers of totally broken ones, setting up as many games as i can with the core shared concept that the whole point is you CAN trade game stuff, and thanks to blockchain based coins you can even move value/wealth from game to game.

It does seem to be true though that despite the occassional suggestions that someone should make games that accept bitcoins, very very few bitcoiners are at all interested. They just want some other shmuck somewhere to play some stupid game so their personal bitcoin hoard will increase in value due to someone somewhere uses coins, they don't actually want to play games, they have no intention of bringing players iDiameter:    9825km (137/138)
Temperature:    about 23°C to 6nto such games, they certainly have no intention of becoming a part of one of the main selling points of multiplayer games, which is a community of players that welcome new players and help them get into the game long term instead of trying to kill them off and discourage them as fast as possible.

Basically this forum has been one of the worst places to find players for games. They are all into making money, not into playing games, and the concept of making in game stock exchanges that will try to avoid EVE Online's problem of all in-game investments turning out to be scams is just alien to them, I doubt they would even invest in a game company if it listed on GLBSE. It is getting that my players don't even like bitcoins because of the people involved with bitcoins. They have more fun playing with devcoiners and groupcoiners and even the sole solitary character who is trying to establish Ixians as a people whose currency is Ixcoins. There just aren't any bitcoiners actively working in game to establish bitcoin as a good useful in game item. You can buy decent stuff in game for devcoins or groupcoins or Ixcoins, probably even Iocoins, but bitcoins? Hmm, people seldom even offer stuff for them because they have learned that bitcoiners aren't players, and even if they were they would be offering anything other than bitcoins to buy stuff with since to them bitcoins are real money not an in game token to play the game with.

Bottom line: bitcoiners aren't there to spend money, the only way they'd bother being there is to suck money out of the other players not to pump money in. They aren't players, they are "the man", out to feed on the players.

-MarkM-

No, it is not pegged to fiat at all.

In some games though some of the players seem to generally assume it ought to be worth 1,000 DeVCoins since that is how many more DeVCoins get generated than GRouPcoins. The fact that mining them is actually much easier many players kind of shrug off as well y'know, the people who mine the gold for goldpieces or the silver for silverpieces or the copper for copperpieces probably make a markup too, its what parts of gaming interest you, you wanna run around killing critters and taking whatever kinds of coins or jewels or whatever they happen to have, or become some kind of computer geek to rig up your home machine to mine for you? Heck many players don't even run 24/7 scripts to train up characters or forage for resources etc. Many don't even run triggers to have them automatically eat when hungry, apply healing aids when wounded, etc. Its all in what aspect of gaming you happen to be into.

You lot probably don't even want to have a material body in the game subject to having some assassin sneak up behind it cosh it and steal your coins while you read the stock ticker. Others would prefer to pretend to read the stock ticker while waiting to pickpocket actual traders who come read it looking to trade. Different games for different folks...

Right now GRouPcoin and DeVCoin are looking better to most players than most cryptocurrencies simply because there aren't yet a lot of players offering decent stuff for sale for other currencies. With GRouPcoins or DeVCoins you can buy good gear, so they are "worth more"... Other currencies' advocates just don't seem to be into gaming maybe.

-MarkM-