The
Galactic Milieu is approaching it kind of the other way around: starting with the currencies and abstract, web-based, text-mode and two-dimensional types of game initially to raise capital and provide the large scale backdrop so that the detailed graphical immersive environment types of representations can be financed, since artwork (and the massive bandwidth needed for video-quality interactive 3-D immersive environments) is one of the largest expenses and also because "power players" likely to be major forces in the overall economics seem more interested in low bandwidth interfaces such as currency exchanges and trading bots and the like more than in flooding their available bandwidth with "movies" or "movie-like representations" of the worlds whose currencies and commodities they are making their fortunes trading in...
For example although eventually it is intended that every market, bank and stock-exchange built in any
Freeciv city on any
Freeciv-based world should be able to be actually functional as an
Open Transactions server, so far just one such server, the
Digitalis Open Transactions Server, serves as prototype, currently handling pretty much all the trading that eventually should end up spreading out over all the many such servers that come into existence as various civilisations build markets, banks and stock-exchanges in their cities.
Similarly for individual character hand to hand type action we so far have only deployed the two dimensional
Crossfire RPG system and the text-mode
CoffeeMUD system for initial working out of the overall economics, encouraging players and developers to look to tools such as
OpenSimulator to work up three-dimensional representations of their characters' activities if they desire - and have the bandwidth - to see such representations of their activities.
Hopefully if there is enough demand - expressed in the form of money put into developing of such interfaces - for more graphics and such, it will come, the more money there is available for such things and the more money people perceive as being able to be made by adding such "superfluous" bells and whistles on top of the actual underlying mechanics and economics the faster and more thoroughly such aspects will come about...
-MarkM-
