Monthly Archives: December

What were your most favorite MMOs in 2007? According to GigaOm’s Blake Snow in “GigaOM Top 10 Most Popular MMOs”, World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel and Runescape are leading the pack, subscriber-wise. Runner-ups further down the list include Club Penguin, Webkinz and Guild Wars – you might object with the compilation of competitors here like some commenters who are missing virtual worlds like Maple Story, Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom, Final Fantasy XI and so on. But it’s already quite a smorgasbord of massive avatar chats and hardcore-mmorpgs. It’s pretty much a comparison of apples to oranges raising the question of a more detailed definition of the word MMO (massively multiplayer online world/game). Do Habbo Hotel and Webkinz fall into the definition of a multiplayer game? It’s a similar problem like the compilation of the top 10 social networks (where sites like Gaia Online had their place, too). 

An accurate classification will get more and more important, the more online-worlds position themselves on the thin line between game, social network and massive avatar chat – the very genremix Coobico is set out to conquer, too. This is going to be especially important for the media and advertisement industry.
According to an industry forecast for 2008 from 45 industry leaders (done by Virtual World News, download the PDF here), a massive boom and fragmentation of virtual worlds and their genres is going to happen in 2008. Wagner James Au gazes into the crystal ball in “My 2008 Gaming and Online Worlds Predictions” and shares the same opinion:
“The GigaOM Top 10 Most Popular MMOs from June tracked some 35 million active members, and was already in serious need of an upward revision a few months later. I’m working on one now, but if I had to hazard a rough guess, I’d say it’s approaching 50 million. (Which means it beat Gartner’s oft-cited estimate by four years.) Given the ceaseless growth, investment dollars, and new startups (especially for kid-oriented MMOs), it’s reasonable to expect that level of growth will continue next year.”

It’s going to be an interesting (and industrious) new year. Anyway, a happy and fruitful 2008 from the Coobico development team to everybody.

As you can see, our mascot Coobrick is already in the mood for Christmas, which is not entirely true for all of us. In fact, work for Coobico at our development-cubicle is going on in full swing, even during this season. Anyway, we wish you a Merry Christmas, Joyeux Noël, frohe Weihnachten, feliz Navidad and 聖誕快樂, and we prepared a new wallpaper for you as a little christmas-goodie. As usual, it comes in three different sizes: Medium (1024 * 768), Large (1600 * 1200) and Widescreen (1920 * 1200). 

In last time’s Backend-article we introduced our chat-server “Smartfox”. This time we are going to take a look at Macromedia Flash. Two actionscript-frameworks are our weapons of choice for developing Coobico: Fuse and Pixlib.

Animations are almost exclusively scripted, powered by Moses Gunesch’s ubiquitous Fuse Kit. Fuse is a real powerhouse when it comes to scripted animations and filters, albeit a bit resources-hungry. Coobico therefore mainly relies on Fuse’s underlying ZigoEngine.
Flash has always had as its nucleus animation and motion, and its player’s performance has been greatly improved over the past years; still, Flash is painfully slow when it comes to animating objects over time, especially when developing a game depending on scrolling large areas of the screen at possibly high frame-rates. Thus, our focal point is fast and lesser cpu-hungry code – even though this eventually leads to less elegant solutions. 

All other tasks are being conducted by Pixlib. Pixlib is an Actionscript-framework developed by Francis Bourre, designed to support event handling, managing preloading, data holders, data structures and patterns implementations, dealing with XML and a lot more. As Oddlyonward describes: “What makes Pixlib different from many frameworks is its extensibility.  It has been called the ‘swiss army knife’ of frameworks because it is very open-ended.  While some frameworks are very dialed-in for specific uses (rich internet applications, game development etc.), Pixlib can be put to almost any use.”.
Pixlib’s architecture is quite convincing, especially the model of its front-controller, which virtually pulls the strings of all events and commands on the clients’ side – it’s a great way to keep your myriad of functions in order and under control. The only let-down is Pixlib’s nearly non-existent documentation – a disadvantage it shares with more or less every Flash-framework currently to be found. 
By the way, an Actionscript 3.0-version of Pixlib called LowRA is currently on its’ way. A few informations can be found here.

Here are some recommended links about Fuse and Pixlib:
OSFlash has a collection of links about Pixlib. Everything about Fuse can be found at MosesSupposes.

Nex time we are going to talk about our level-editor…

Hekate’s witches’ house can be found somewhere in Foggy Forest. Strangely, it appears to be much larger inside than its outside could possibly contain. Come to think about it, this is mostly the case with buildings in Coobico…
In her alchemist’s shop Hekate trades with useful adventurers’ gear. Essentially, she is going to be one of the non-player characters selling events to those settlers who can reach her house – the twisted Foggy Forest blights on the northern shores of Qubus’ Island and can be a somewhat dangerous place. It is in fact one of the dungeons in Coobico, stuffed with odd spots where treasures can be found, but also teeming with monsters.

In case you missed it (we nearly did): GigaOm, acclaimed tech-related media-network, reports about Coobico in their recent article “Attack of the Casual Game Sites”. Wagner James Au writes:
“Visually appealing with an inventive concept, this has a good chance of attracting the same creative teen gamers that made Gaia Online such a hit, as well as older gamers with less time for the hardcore strategy games they used to love.”

Events are going to be an interesting and important game-mechanism for home-owners and competing settlers. Events are occurrences affecting a whole settlement – for better or worse, events can have positive and negative effects on an affected settlement. They hook into Coobico’s quest-system. An example for a positive event: during a “Goldrush” characters will earn more money for an accomplished quest. A negative example is “Great Fire”, which blocks the entrance to all buildings in a settlement until a certain amount of freshwater was disbursed to cancel the event.

So where do events come from? They are invoked by geomancers and alchemists, players can purchase events from such nonplayer-characters – but they don’t come cheap. There will at least be two shops where events can be “bought”. Any settlement can only be affected by one event at a time, so settlers might want to buy positive events for their villages here and there to block out negative ones.

Mashable covers a Nielsen Online metric about the current top 10 social networks, traffic-wise. No big wonder about first and second place: even though MySpace’s growth-rate is waning at 7 percent, their number of 57 million visitors is still more than twice as large as Facebook’s, ranking on place two. Another interesting aspect of this measurement is AOL, whose websites are loosing traffic by the leaps and bounds.
Mashable’s Adam Ostrow points out that Bebo didn’t made it into the Top 10 – according to Nielsen, they saw around 1.7 million visitors in November. Seems like the ongoing hype about Bebo is somewhat inflated? By the way, our (slightly empty) Bebo-Profile is here.

The Top 10 of social networks poses the question of what exactly is considered a social network, at least to Nielsen Online? AOL’s Hometown and Microsoft’s Live Spaces turn up in this list, even though they might better be described as a collection of blogs and online diaries. Then the list features Club Penguin, which – besides being a social chat-app, of course – does not have any social networking features like profiles and the like. Habbo Hotel on the other hand, which has added such features, misses here. Since their userbase is allegedly beyond 4 million, they were either not considered as a social network or couldn’t live up to their own claims.

Daily Bits reports about the Top 6 Bizarre Online Gaming Incidents, a real must-read. The first three places are rather tragic than bizarre: Players killing or kidnapping each other, or just dying because of sheer exhaustion. We already wrote a piece about the number four, the theft of virtual at Habbo Hotel. Number six is about a virtual plague in World of Warcraft, killing thousands of avatars. Now, that one is a real oddity…

Supply-Chains and resource-management are yet another key game-mechanism in Coobico, just like in other city-building games. Without supply, you can’t build new structures or pay for the upkeep of your settlement.
The following icons depict the resources in Coobico: Rock (left) comprises natural stone, clay, sand and cinder. The category Crop contains all renewable primary products like wood, cloth and harvest. Freshwater is neccessary for reclaiming, irrigation and fertilizing land. Prefabs (right) adhere to all materials for building new structures. 

Rock, Crop and Freshwater can be harvested and obtained at corresponding resource-spots – in case players are in need of Crop, they need to visit a farm, for instance. Harvesting automatically increases the settlement’s productivity to which the resource-spot belongs.

Prefabs (obviously) can’t be harvested, they can only be traded. To engage in trading, players need to attend a merchant. Merchants will exchange all types of resources into various other types. To exchange goods for gold, players need to visit a bank instead (more about the bank later on). Both trading and selling resources also boost a settlement’s productivity. 

Farms are among the most important structures in Coobico, as they provide food for settlers. A settlement must first build a farm before it can expand and construct further buildings. Whenever the farm is lost, the upkeep for the settlement raises, as more money needs to be spend to transport food from nearby suppliers – and of course no quests for building a new part of the settlement will be issued.
What’s more, players can enter a farmstead to harvest timber and crop. These resources can be used as construction materials for new structures or as items of trade.

Second Life is riddled with bugs, that’s a well-known fact – it seems like you can be glad if you manage to still keep your belongings (and clothing for that matter) with you after you are transported to a new land. This time a severe security issue was exposed in Second Life, to be more precise: an exploit on QuickTime-videos that takes its toll on Second Life through the embedded Second Life Viewer. Right now, after enjoying a QT-video in Second Life – zing!, you might find yourself blagged of all your Linden Dollars – or moving uncontrollably towards the next land to spread the QT-virus on.
That’s true, as Mashable reports, by using a flaw in QuickTime, one “can not only pick the pocket of any user within 100 virtual feet of the [QT-]player, they can take complete control of the avatar. Once the account has been taken over, the hackers can then use that avatar to go to other lands, embed their virus loaded video, and it will continue to spread from land to land.”

Dean Takahashi states in his blog:

“The exploit works because Second Life allows users to embed videos or pictures on their character’s or their virtual property. When someone comes nearby and is within view of the object, the Second Life software activates QuickTime so it can play the video or picture. In doing so, QuickTime directs the Second Life software to a web site. By exploiting the flaw in QuickTime, the hackers can direct the Second Life software to a malicious web site that then allows them to take over the Second Life avatar.”

There is no fix for the exploit yet, but Linden’s official blog covers the matter:

“At this time we advise that you disable streaming video playback in the Second Life viewer except when you are attending a known and trusted venue. To do this, just open the Preferences dialog, and uncheck the “Play Streaming Video When Available” checkbox on the “Audio & Video” tab.”

The QuickTime header stack buffer overflow exploit was exposed just some two weeks ago, and so far there does not seem to be any proof of a real pickpocket in SL using this bug.