The Trion World Network, Inc. has received investment capital totalling US$30 Million from Time Warner, GE/NBC Universal's Peacock Equity, and Bertelsmann AG's BDMI. The company, who announced a partnership with Hewlett Packard earlier this year, is developing a multi-platform content delivery system for use in a wide variety of applications. CEO Lars Buttler summarized the vision:
"Imagine Amazon, or Google, or Yahoo in large-scale gameworlds," he said. "And the platform also allows you to tap into the same experience from any connected device. We're taking the game experience out of the client and putting it into a sophisticated infrastructure."
While the specific focus of the technology involves keeping most of the work on the server-side, Buttler's talk of a direct push for a 3D version of Web 2.0 will definitely shake things up. We can expect to see the first world by the company released by the end of the year, and it will be accessible through a wide variety of devices from cellphones to Windows PCs. According to Buttler, "at it’s core, it will be a large-scale game. But it will be a large-scale game that has a tremendous amount of elements of social networks, and it will be a game that will evolve almost like a TV show evolves."
So this is like a 'thin client' right? Minimal footprint client side, with the servers pulling all the weight..
sounds great, but it makes you wonder that if SL has so many issue with scaling, with a fat client... well how exactly are they doing this..
Almost everything in SL is done on the servers. The Second Life client is pretty damn thin.
Easy. They have NCSoft America's former games architect. NCSoft develops rich content online games including Lineage/Lineage II which were designed for the other side of the digital divide. They started lean on persistent worlds, and now think they can run lean on dynamic content.
compare this:
http://www.lineage2-online.com/content/lineage2-requirements.php
to this:
http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php
And then imagine you actually got performance out of Linden Lab's "recommended" configuration. Lineage II runs like a dream at their recommended requirements level. On the Lineage II minimum requirements, it's a judgment call if it runs better than Linden Lab's "recommended level.
Frankly, I am not impressed with Linden Lab's ability to design and implement code, but they have created the first large social non-persistent virtual world (unless you count Eve Online, which involves a world which while somewhat dynamic, restricts you to playing a brain planted in a starship). LL rushed in where angels feared to tread, and they can expect competition -- competition that is better funded, with better tech staff, and no utopian libertarian aspirations to fetter their behavior.
Is this a good thing? Dunno. Look at the megacorp badges on trion's front page:
http://www.trionworld.com/site/index.php
...and then think what your code of conduct will be on their sites? Your privacy? The marketing load you'll be subjected to? The amount of freely authored content, vs corporate content.
Perhaps this is the beginning, effectively, of the "network neutrality" fight for "Web3D" space?
Shava