Monthly Archives: November

“The Cursed” is a collective term for all sorts of creatures and critters on Qubus’ Island – mainly because the majority of these monsters are in fact other citizens who have been cursed (read more about curses here).
The place where avatars catch a curse determines the type of monster into which they are transformed. In the subterranean crypt of Count Vrykulas’ Haunted Mansion adventurers might be turned into a Coffingeek, where at a haunted mine they might be hexed into one of the gargantuan Stone Giants.
Players can direct their cursed avatars to every place on the island they see fit before the curse expires. However, to cross larger distances, they can only teleport to sites suitable for their current form; Coffingeeks for example can only teleport to another graveyard, bandits can only use Dens-of-Thieves as their destination. This is why players better keep their eyes open if such hazard-spots are set up near their village.

Unlike the free roaming Cursed, there are also various forms of critters, rarely leaving their lairs. These monsters are not represented by other players and roam their dungeons more erratically—but they are still dangerous opponents. 

This column will provide a few insights into Coobico’s technical bricks-and-mortar here and there – starting with the server-software powering Coobico.
Backend-wise Coobico’s premise is a cost-effective server-solution with good scaleability and stability when handling larger server-loads. There are quite a few open-source-chatservers around, written either in Python or Java; the problem, however, is that most of them don’t offer any specs on how many users they can handle under which circumstances.

Coobico will therefore be driven by Smartfox-Server, a product from the guys of Gotoandplay.it (give it a glance, if you don’t know Gotoandplay yet). Smartfox is running on Java, but capable of coping with thousands of users at a time under the right environment. Currently, the biggest and most popular chat-app on Smartfox is Club Penguin, a pre-teen-chat with several millions of registered users. Club Penguin, by the way, was sold to Disney for a whopping US-Dollar 350 million at the start of August. 

Update: With the advent of Smartfox-Server’s new Bluebox-extension, will can assure that Coobico will be playable even in a corporate environment behind thick firewalls and proxies – the coffee-break is covered, phew…

Players’ structures (or those build during curses) come in two different levels and can thus be upgraded. They start on level one, until all their neccessary prerequisites are met; particularly its power supply and a connection to the road network of its settlement. Then the structure can be leveled up.




Structures on level two offer more advantages: they are toughened against attacks of cursed adversaries and provide new and valuable quests. For instance, as soon as a settlement’s cityhall is upgraded to level two, the settlement counts as a city.

By the way, the above image depicts a generator. Each settlement in Coobico will need several of those, depending on the number of buildings it is made of. Of course, generators can be upgraded as well…

From time to time we are so busy here at our cube-shaped Coobico-Tower that we miss important news – just like the closure of Habbo China back in August. Sulake had started Habbo.cn/Habbochina.com in January 2006 and completed its beta-stage in summer last year. The service had just effectively started out this spring, though; as Virtual Worlds News reports due to issues with their business partner in China, Guanzhou Optisp. On August 24 Sulake closed Habbo China – the official readout seems to point towards technical problems, more precisely the lack of penetration of Shockwave in Mainland:

“There’s quite many reasons why we closed down Habbo in China (for the time being). Yes, we had some technical challenges with Shockwave, but that was not an obstacle for us. This was mainly a business decision” (Communications Director Juhani Lassila)

However, the rumour pot was given a good stirr, from an intervention of the Chinese government to the service starting to loose large amounts of money – or as Lassila has put it:

“The challenging Chinese market and high operational costs led to the decision of closing the service for now.“

Dimworm’s english and chinese blog has an in-depth posting on the matter, conveying:

“Habbo has been another failed case of foreign companies entering China. The parent company disregarded the Chinese partner’s advice of lowering the price of some kinds of virtual goods. They thought the uniform pricing method works well all over the world, So there is no reason to change it in China. On the other hand, the parent company’s technology support is not good. The China’s partner had to deal with a lot of technique problems so as to neglect marketing endeavor.“

Guangzhou Optisp are no newbies to the business segment: they were running EVE Online and Legend 2005 etc. After the closure of Habbo China, GO cut off their game R&D in Guangzhou and their Beijing wireless service to concentrate on its game operation. Allegedly they were acquired by CDC Games International lately.

We feel that the lack of infrastructure must have been the prime reason for Habbo’s failure in Mainland. Not only is the market-penetration only half as deep as in mature markets like the US (between 15 and 30 percent, according to Adobe), but most of Habbo’s regular payment methods are pretty much non-existent there. Credit-card penetration is very low and there is little support for reverse-billing SMS. Therefore billing customers via land-line phones is a widely used payment method in China, but this comes with high surcharges. Probably Habbo’s business-model just does not work out well in such an environment.
With an eye on some of our own asian target markets, this was also our reason to choose an advertisement-driven revenue as Coobico’s business-model.

Players’ homes can be protected against unfortunate events and attacks just like all other structures – for example by upgrading them or by buying further enhancements for the building (more about upgrading structures here). Nonetheless, you can’t rule out that a home might be lost from time to time: it might be reduced to rubble by monsters’ attacks, or the home-owner can’t afford its upkeep any longer – or he plainly looses the achievement-rank necessary to keep a home.

Don’t get mad in such a moment (better get even… ) – your interior decoration is not going to be lost. You keep your furniture save in your inventory until you’re able to build a new home eventually.   

Here is another example of a players’ home – and a sneak peak on the interiors. Home-owners choose a model and the layout of its floor plan at the same time. They can also customize their home with their favorite type of floor-tiling and a nice color for the wallpapers. Otherwise players will possibly want to play through more quests to earn money for some decoration and furnishing of the own new four walls…

Yesterday this news was all over the web, after BBC broke news about cases of virtual theft at Habbo Hotel. Dutch teenagers have been arrested and questioned by the police for stealing 4.000 EUR worth of virtual furniture (and then allegedly moving them to their own Habbo rooms, duh):

“A Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing virtual furniture from “rooms” in Habbo Hotel, a 3D social networking website… A spokesman for Sulake, the company that operates Habbo Hotel, said: “The accused lured victims into handing over their Habbo passwords by creating fake Habbo websites.“

Phishing scams are not a new phenomenon at Habbo, they date back to the times when Habbo was still “Hotelli Kulta Kala”, as Sulka Haro, lead designer for Habbo at Sulake explains:

“Immediately, there was a scamming problem with the users. The naming convention for furniture allowed for a trick where a user with a name like “100x” could convince other users that he was trading 100 units of furniture.“

Outstanding was the involvement of the police this time, which was the first time ever the Duch police took legal action against someone on suspicion of virtual theft (as expatica.com reports):

“It is the first time ever the Dutch police arrested someone on suspicion of having committed a virtual burglary. Apart from the 17-year-old suspect, the police also interrogated four 15-year-old teenagers about the affair. According to a police spokesman, the suspects will be charged on two accounts: hacking and burglary. “

It seems to be a bit weird to roll out the guns for this case, since phishing is such a widespread and seriously problematic issue in virtual worlds, with a lot of more drastic incidents being reported before. Maybe the Dutch police acts according to the motto “better late than never”.

After reaching a certain achievement-level, players are enabled to build themselves a home. They can pick from a variety of models (more examples to follow in part two) and place it wherever they like – besides the city-plaza, which is locked from any construction-activity. Every home comes with a terrace and a little garden where the owner can grow squareroots as a minigame. 

Oddish flora can be found on Qubus’ Island, of inexplicable origin. There is the carnivorous Squareroot, growing on the island’s grassy plains. This half-sentient species is even known to attack unwary wanderers and bossies. But citizens can also try to cultivate and extract Squareroots in their front garden, and sell them to the town’s gardener.
Another wonder of nature is the energy-storing Powerplant, originating from the island’s forlorn caverns and mines. Powerplants bristle with energy and seem to be a natural source of energy for Qubus’ subterranean contraptions. 

Bossies are a native species of oxen on Qubus’ Island, occasionally encountered on remote grassy plains. Skilled players can catch minibossies and either sell or train them as pets. Otherwise a bossy with its 78 stomachs is regarded as indispensable to keep the carnivorous squareroots on the island at bay. A final draft in 3D can be found here.

Here comes a wallpaper as an en-route-goodie; please choose from three different sizes: Medium (1024 * 768), Large (1600 * 1200) and Widescreen (1920 * 1200). 

Northend Mansion’s original owner was Professor Lina Rotwang, the estate was occupied and further developed by Dr. Qubus after Rotwang’s disappearance. The odd manor resides in the ragged cliffs of the northern shores. It still comprises a number of machines and inventions of Qubus and Rotwang, particularly Dr. Qubus Tremendous Transporter – a kind of teleporting-device used to travel to any place on the island in an instant, if you can best its whacky artificial intelligence in a puzzle-game. It is rumoured that the transporter even lets you visit other worlds. Probably, the wondrous contraption would already be patent pending if it would operate properly in any other place than the Mansion.
Northend is being kept in good repair by Dr. Qubus’ butler Albert and some ubiquitous Q-Bots. 

Upon their arrival on the weird cube-shaped island, Dr. Qubus and his assistant Erasmus discovered the research of their missing colleague Professor Lina Rotwang, besides meeting the island’s grumpy inhabitants. Rotwang had tried to map the subterranean passageways perforating the whole island, bumping into eldritch flora and fauna during her work. In her most startling records, Rotwang describes the so-called powerplants; endemic plants which seem to create energy and matter from nowhere.

Dr. Qubus and his assistant moved into Rotwang’s mansion in Northend, uncovering more of Rotwang’s abandoned work: machines, seemingly drawing on the island’s and its flora’s strange powers. Qubus studied and accomplished Rotwang’s buried contraptions with the help of the Q-bots which he had contrived for this specific purpose.

The island’s inhabitants rarely met Dr. Qubus during his mysterious work, which eventually gave rise to the rumour of a spook haunting Northend. One day, an explosion razed large parts of Qubus’ mansion to the ground, spiriting away Dr. Qubus. His assistant Erasmus vanished without a trace shortly afterwards, only leaving Qubus’ butler Albert behind in Northend.