Official NASA Futuristic Space MMO May Come to Linux

sehugg · on Sept 15, 2011

I wish them luck .. realistic games based on space exploration have been few and far between ("Buzz Aldrin's Race to Space", which is more of a strategy/management game) and have questionable marketability (Maxis scrapped "SimMars" to concentrate "The Sims").

sliverstorm · on Sept 15, 2011

Honestly, they should ignore Linux, at least at first. They already have a herculean task on their plates with the project; they don't need more problems like making it run on Linux.

jholman · on Sept 16, 2011

It's not at all clear to me why Linux in particular ought to be ignored. Recent experiments like humblebundle.com suggest that Linux users are a larger gaming market than Mac users.

Also, obviously the strategy for making a cross-platform title needs to be "use cross-platform tools". It sure worked for Minecraft!

And unlike Mac, in the case of Linux you have a volunteer community ready and eager to help you iron out the kinks. And it's such old news that I'm almost embarrassed to be repeating it, but the position of the WINE team is nearly "let us know what we need to change in our platform to make your existing Windows game run, and we'll do it".

All in all, I'd put Linux deployment ahead of OSX deployment, if it was me. But I admit I'm biased.

yohui · on Sept 15, 2011

That seems to be the plan: " Linux is a possibility - PC. Mac and iOS would come first though."

Tichy · on Sept 15, 2011

Is a MMO == MMORPG? Cool idea if NASA where to create one.

Think of games as explorations of the idea space...

onemoreact · on Sept 15, 2011

No, you can also have an MMOFPS or just about any other game type. The reason why MMORPG's are so popular is they are relativly easy to create and adictive.

kevinkemp · on Sept 15, 2011

What do you mean by "relatively easy to create"? If anything, I'd say that an MMORPG is probably the hardest (and most time consuming) genre of game to create.

onemoreact · on Sept 16, 2011

The man advantages of an RPG style MMO are simple gameplay mechanics, lag tolerance, low server utilization, cheap content, a built in learning curve, built in constructive player interaction, and diminishing returns on extreme gameplay. I could go into each of these to see why MMO golf / the sims / FPS / chess / poker / just about any other game type is much harder to adapt into an MMO framework. But my main point was not that it's easy to create a 3D MMO RPG just that RPG's naturaly work better in the MMO format than just about anything else.