Shane Conder's Whateveritis of Nothing

Lucasfilm's Habitat was, apparently, one of the earliest attempts at a massively multiuser online environment in a commercial setting. It appears that it was done circa 1985-1986 and used Commodore 64s with 300 baud modems.

This article discusses the lessons they learned from the various issues they faced when creating this early version of Cyberspace. The article was written in 1990. It's an interesting read given what's happened with massive online communities in recent years. Consider that they talk about problems when they surpassed 50 people. Around then or not long later MUDs easily surpassed 50 people, going into the hundreds. Sure, they were text only but unlike one of the articles conclusions about people not want to use a text interface, even now text interfaces are still an option to consider for many games. Not long after that came EverQuest and then the rush of MMORPGs that support thousands of players.

Some of the things they mention, though, like using primatives with modifiers to reduce the amount of data sent are still in use today, too.

In all, it's a good read and some of it can even apply to every day software planning and design.

The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat

Posted by Shane on November 9, 2004 10:48 AM | Permalink