RealityPrime

Here’s a better writeup of the PS Home features, which do include some customization:

Gamasutra - GDC: Harrison Keynote Reveals Home , LittleBigPlanet

And then this interesting tidbit:

The final announcement is for LittleBigPlanet, the new Media Molecule-created game from the creators of Rag Doll Kung Fu. It’s a customizable multiplayer environment with physics, a sandbox environment where you can make "tactile and highly interactive environments".

Now that sounds interesting.

You know, I almost liked it better when there were only about 50 people in the world who understood 3D graphics and VR well enough to attempt building a big virtual world. Now that there are tens of thousands of developers working on this stuff, we are about to be inundated with the same stuff and the same painful lessons learned over and over again.

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PlayStation Home, the free virtual world of PlayStation 3 - Joystiq

Comparable to Second Life, PlayStation Home is a virtual community of PS3 owners living together in both public and private environments. Users will be able to login, chat with both text and speech and play casual games together such as pool, bowling and even embedded arcade machines. And when the old stand-bys grow stale, users can invite one another into other PlayStation Network titles outside of PlayStation Home.

I hate to nitpick, but unless PlayStation Home allows the world the be edited, it’s not comparable to SecondLife — perhaps There, though with nicer shadows.

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Gamasutra.com - The Trouble With Patents

Pretty good article, but not as in-depth as I’d like. I wrote this comment to the author of the article:

David, I do have some direct experience with that “Crazy Taxi” patent you cited, as I interacted with EA’s lawyers on the case. From my perspective, it’s all the more ironic because I helped develop a “Wild Taxi” game design at Disney, which was pitched to Sega execs years before their “Crazy Taxi” game was made. The Sega game designers might have come up with concept on their own. But just about everything in the Sega patent was part of the original Disney concept (esp. the people jumping out of the way). Whatever the origins, the patent was entirely stupid.

I’m also familiar with this Skyline vs. Google/Keyhole patent suit, which could also impact game developers. Skyline, who has an inferior implementation of “earth streaming” IMO, is suing Keyhole, which I was part of, and which has done very well as Google Earth. The patent suit seems to center on the mysterious concept of “quadtrees” or some sort of hierarchy to store and stream a big 3D database… Google is currently challenging the patent’s validity, which is the best possible course of action IMO. The Skyline patent also seems a bit short on implementation details, which _should_ matter, as one of the main rationales for patents was disclosure.

IMO, a patent which simply tries to stick a stake in the ground without disclosing a useful, novel invention is not worthy of a 20 year monopoly. Patents are an exchange of public protections for a real public good, not some sort of anti-competitive corporate welfare system. And with the cost of litigation, they’re certainly not doing anything to help individual inventors anymore.

I could write much more, but I’m busy inventing stuff. Funny how all that fighting over who invented what tends to result in nothing new or useful coming out.

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