The shit performance of most apps is already on par with RPG Maker. Thanks, electron!

$ make deposit
make: *** No rule to make target 'deposit'. Stop.

That's what the metaverse should have been

Tauri is a great alternative for making apps

I'm surprised that RPG Maker has become such a huge success. I understand the game making aspect of it. But people make stuff in it that's only remotely related to RPGs. It looks like the software that young storytellers use to bring their narrative to life. I am sure it has also been used for stuff that's not storytelling, nor game-related.

One of the ideas I've had kicking around my head for awhile now is trying to bring back ZZT/SuperZZT/MegaZeux with some modern design sensibilities and support for full character sets and color ranges and with better scripting.

You could host your own small worlds or upload them in a big directory. Just something that could run on barebones minimum specs and he accessible in any terminal. A kind of micrometaverse.

Can I get the "DLC" patch?

But could never be, because the very person who created it was not an artistic person.

I knew a guy that worked at a company that had something like that. You had to walk your snes-style sprite around the virtual office. If you walked up to someone's avatar you could start a meeting. You could move your guy around to indicate you were at lunch or working or whatever.

Seems extremely wasteful to me but a lot of people there liked it.

Shortly after COVID started (but before I retired from the US Air Force in 2022), I was working in an office with a bunch of programmers. I myself was a server admin.

We were exploring ways for our squadron to stay connected, even though half the squadron was at home at any given time. We were doing split half-shifts during COVID. Half the squadron would come in for the first half of the day, then they would sanitize everything and go home. An hour later, the other half would come in and work the rest of the day.

Zero physical contact between shifts. So if anyone developed COVID symptoms, their entire shift would stay home for 2 weeks while the other half of the squadron came in full-time to keep operations running.

One of the proposed ideas was to have everyone join Gather. It's basically a top-down 8-bit style world like old JRPG games, except you could design your own virtual office workspace, then others could create avatars and be invited to the office you created.

They had proximity chat, so if you were close enough to an avatar, you could just talk through your mic and be heard by them. They also did zoom-style video meetings and Slack-style chat boards.

Plus it was basically a game, so you could get creative in how you designed your office space. You could have karaoke rooms, mini-games, etc. You could design the place to look like a dungeon, or a cyberpunk building. I knew one guy who built a whole labyrinth of offices so he had a private place to hide out and work when he needed a break from his office mates (without being caught logging off). Another guy built a massive outdoor garden to explore, for when he just needed to "get outside" during his shift.

We played around with it for a while, but the company eventually wanted to charge us to keep using it, and we couldn't justify the expense to higher leadership. In the military, every expense paid to a business needed a government contract written up and no one was willing to make and approve one for some random virtual workspace development company that no one has ever heard of before.

For the record, we mainly used Zoom and Slack during COVID, but we talked about moving off those programs when they started demanding government agencies pay for continued use. I know we already had contracts with Microsoft and we were already shifting a lot of resources over to Teams as our virtual workspace. I retired around that time, so I have no idea what happened with all that.

I'm enjoying retired life now, but I still think about Gather every now and then and how cool of an idea it was for a digital landscape.

Even wails is pretty great if rust is scary

jtrek@startrek.website, do you think this is what you're friend's office was using?

This looks awesome for any group of people who want something more personal and less oppressing than Zoom calls! I can fully imagine replacing a lot of offices completely with this.

bonus: so much room for activities ads.

You say wasteful, I'd think very efficient. If it's just enough fun to get everyone in an office to engage and use it, a manager now has an accurate tool to check who is where and what they're doing. Plus if it actually makes anyone actually have a little fun with it and have a better day, bonus wins.

Adtivities 👍🏻

I can see that being the next buzzword in the marketing world.

Given two top level comments in this thread, I hate to say it but maybe Zuckerberg was on to something…

$ git money

Millions of dollars spent to replace status messages and what slack/teams already do. There's no mechanism to keep it in sync with reality so it's not even especially accurate.

A real stretch to call that efficient.

There was briefly a thing like this pushed during the pandemic. It was basically zoom, with an avatar that could move around. The key benefit was the chat was local, so you could go to different 'rooms' with people as a kind of ersatz lunchroom conversation.

It was a neat idea for a time when many felt a lack of organic connection.

Would it have the old RuneScape problem of someone hogging all of the bankers when all you need is to make a quick deposit?

So you're saying we need to automate the avatar and use surveillance to do so! And maybe even AI why not

IIRC this is the premise of the VR world in Ready Player One - it started out as a game, but ended up being the "default" online place, with millions of level 1 avatars running around safe zones, going to school, work, etc.

can we work NFTs and crypto into this?

spatial audio honestly has the potential to be a legitimate (if moderate) revolution for digital conferences, being able to lean over and whisper into someone's ear is soooo much more intuitive and makes the whole process much easier.
Full on VR conferences would be super easy to use, but of course making something actually functional is too boring and thus no company will ever do it.

big hype stuff usually has a kernel of something that could be genuinely useful, but they always ignore that part and focus on making the concept as pointless and stupid as possible.

git checkout hotel

That's how you pay your employees