DAEDALUS
Latest
'Hamster ball' robot could explore Moon caves
The ESA is backing a 'hamster ball' robot, DAEDALUS, that would explore Moon caves for signs of water ice and even potential settler sites.
Tomb Raider creator forms new studio with former Yaiba dev team
Toby Gard, creator of Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider franchise, has formed Tangentlemen, a new development studio focused on experiential game design. The studio's team met while developing Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, which Gard served as director of, and includes Yaiba's lead designer, producer and art director. Tangentlemen is currently in concept phase of their first project, a horror game currently being referred to as "Daedalus." In Greek mythology, Daedalus is the creator the Minotaur's labyrinth and Icarus' wings, so you know what that means: it means ... um, well let's see, the labyrinth could be ... uh ... okay, no, we have no idea what that means yet. [Image: Eidos]
NICT's Daedalus creates beautiful 3D visuals to map out nasty cyber attacks (video)
There's nothing pretty about a cyber attack taking over an organization -- or, there wasn't, until NICT crafted this thing. Daedalus, christened as a "cyber attack alert system," is a 3D visualization system that currently monitors some 190,000 IP addresses across Japan. Rather than forcing a human to comb through a punishing amount of data, the visualizer turns into an organized stream of lines that can be viewed and zoomed in on from any angle. You can see networks and subnets, as well as patches of used and unused IP addresses; taking it a step further, the system lights up when an attack is sensed (for example, an IP pinging an unused IP as a virus spreads with reckless abandon). DigInfo reports that the system could find a home in educational and enterprise applications, but there's no word on how much it'll cost to deploy en masse. Per usual, the video demonstration awaits you after the break.
Daedalus Project updated
Nick Yee's excellent MMORPG survey and data site, the Daedalus Project, has been updated with new survey results on the following topics: Guild demographics: What influences players to choose certain guilds, how attached they become, the likelihood of their knowing guildies in real life, and how long they stay. What I find fascinating here is the graph displayed above -- 26% of surveyed players have been with their guild 2 years or more. Alex Ziebart mentioned the other day that his guild has been together so long across multiple games that guild chat's gone from talk of teenage dates to coaching expectant parents through morning sickness. I get the feeling that this is only going to become more common in long-haul games like Second Life and WoW. Character creation: How players choose characters, the elements of character selection they consider most important, and whether classes and races tend to be researched extensively before they're picked, or chosen based on impulse. Character class seems to matter to the most people; starting area the least.
Newest Daedalus Project research highlights genre appeal
The Daedalus project is the most important research project into MMO player demographics in the world. Run by the unflappable Nick Yee, it's a fantastic look into the minds of MMO guild leaders, female players, old players, young players, and everyone in between. Past Daedalus articles have tackled issues like playing with romantic partners, the willingness of players to buy gold online, and the importance of achieving goals in a virtual setting.The newest round of research delves into some fascinating stuff. Probably this round's most interesting data surrounds genre preferences. Have you ever wondered how much people want to play super-hero games vs. sci-fi titles? Whether guys want to play vampires, or whether girls want to play vampire hunters online? All of these questions and more are addressed in the Game Choices article in this round of the Project. Plus! Find out how the demographics of guilds pan out, what the thought process is behind character creation, preferences in class role, and the logic behind choosing a 'main character'. Check it out!
Widget shows character name statistics
If you've ever been fascinated by the MMORPG statistics provided at sites like the Daedalus Project, here's something right up your alley; the WoW Armory Character Distribution widget, programmed to comb both the U.S. and E.U. Armories and capture data on the popularity of character names across race, class, faction, and sex. The project is still in the testing stage, and it's a bit finicky about how you enter character names. Make sure you're always hitting the submit button and not using your enter key, as otherwise the widget will keep searching for the last name you looked for instead of your new query. Its creator, Emilis, also wrote to warn that it uses live information from both armories and will occasionally be slow as a result. I imagine it might also be inaccurate if either Armory is having problems.The widget is tremendously fun to play with and has yielded some rather interesting results even with the completely random names I keep trying. "John" and "Mary," as you might expect, are overwhelmingly Human toons, whereas the greater share of people playing a "Sergei" and "Yekaterina" are Draenei. 3 people with a "Brutus" are actually playing female characters, and 1 person with a "Laura" is playing a male character (Emilis notes that gender-bending names are surprisingly common, although from what I can tell so far this seems to be a lot more true of male names for female toons than the other way around). Most people with a "Killer" are playing a Hunter, Rogue, or Warrior. Characters named "Bank" are mostly Human Warriors, but "Banktoon(s)" are mostly Orcs. And, yes, most of the people playing a toon named Legolas are Night Elf Hunters. Are you really that surprised?Thanks to Emilis for writing in!
The life cycle of a WoW player
As with anything on Daedalus, one of their most recent articles was a fascinating exploration into the deeper psychology of playing an MMO. The article of fascination this time deals with the player life cycle in an MMO like WoW, and indeed he primarily uses examples and quotations from WoW players to build his argument.Daedalus believes that nearly every player will fit this cycle in one way or another, and each step in the cycle has some variables within it that seem to include the majority of the player populace. For instance, when we first start playing the game, we begin for one of two reasons; either we are interested in exploring a new world on our own, or a friend introduced us to the game. Personally, I fall into the second category, as it was a dear friend that introduced me to the game. The general progression of the player life cycle and he sees it is this: entry, practice, mastery, burnout, recovery. While I can admit that nearly every player will go through the first three steps, I wonder about the last two. Does every player burn out at some point during their play of the game? The article mentions burnout in various cases, grinding, social obligations, rerolling, so I suppose the answer is yes. I have myself gotten so tired of playing the same zones over and over that I run my new Blood Elves to Brill just for a change of scenery. The trick I suppose is finding that hook that brings you back into the game, and usually that hook is friendship. For those tired of raiding, tired of responsibilities, just being able to spend time with those you have connected with in-game can be the true motivation to keep playing.
More interviews with more homebrewers
A month ago, we showed you an interview with the popular PSP homebrewer ZX-81. DCEmu has continued their summer series of interviews with two other popular PSP coders: StrmnNrmn and Deniska. Both have very different goals with the PSP. StrmnNrmn is famous for his efforts in bringing "Daedalus," an N64 emulator, to fruition. You can read through the entire interview with him for more, but here's an interesting snippet:K: What do you keep on your own PSP?StrmnNrmn: About 100 or so roms Deniska works on bringing original games to the system, such as KETM. He also is working on a GPS device (see the YouTube video here). When asked what's on his PSP he had this to say:K: So what homebrew/apps do you keep on your own PSP? Deniska: Currently, I only have IRShell, PSPLink, Noiz2sa and KETM.Feel free to read the entire interview with Deniska for more. It's clear that there are two very different segments for PSP homebrew: one focuses on pirating games, while the other focuses on developing original applications and games. Sony's attempt to squash homebrew as a whole is spawned by their fight against piracy, but it's unfortunate to see coders of original programs get caught in the crossfire. What about you, homebrew-using PSP fanboys? Do you use it for emulating games or do you use it to find original apps?
Endgame guild closeup
This fairly old, but interesting, article from Nick Yee's Daedalus project gives an insight into one of the "uberguilds", guilds that persist across games and aim for the top. As the first to kill Ragnaros on their server, Talon's guild is a marvel of military organisation, but not without criticism--the guild leader prefers not to let women in the guild, for example.Talon's rules for membership are especially clear: you need to be able to take criticism, have good attendance for events, and have the "guild comes first" attitude. Many of us have just joined guilds that were openly recruiting, that had friends in, or that a party member invited us into because they liked our style--this is very different territory.
