The Neoclassical Habitat Server Project(frandallfarmer.github.io)
frandallfarmer.github.io
The Neoclassical Habitat Server Project
https://frandallfarmer.github.io/neohabitat-doc/docs/
16 comments
This reminds me of the obvious: that we will probably never be able to play the advanced games being produced today in 20 years time (or even sooner than that). DRM and reliance on closed source server infrastructure will make it impossible. Decades of digital cultural heritage will be lost if we don't do something drastic.
What if game developers, Internet Archive and other forces created sort of a consortium (a bit like W3C) and created methods for sharing these infrastructures when development is stalling, servers closing and companies going bankrupt? In the best of worlds this future would be in the minds of the programmers when building the games.
What if game developers, Internet Archive and other forces created sort of a consortium (a bit like W3C) and created methods for sharing these infrastructures when development is stalling, servers closing and companies going bankrupt? In the best of worlds this future would be in the minds of the programmers when building the games.
We're sorta working on this, small though the preservation world is. Frank Cifaldi has founded a non-profit specifically to do this, and themade.org is behind Habitat.
Aw. Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar once demoed that for me. Very cute, and amazing that they could fit the client in a Commodore 64 and run over a 300 baud modem. The classic paper on this is "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat". It would be fun to have it running again, but it might be easier to run the old code in an C64 emulator.
AOL originally ran this as QuantumLink Club Caribe. It didn't catch on, though.
If they're going to revive this, it ought to be phone-based. It's about the right level of detail for a phone screen.
(The current big effort in virtual worlds is High Fidelity.[2] This is from the guy who ran Second Life. Supports VR, face tracking, etc. It's supposed to be better visually than Second Life, but so far, it isn't.)
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_W... [2] https://highfidelity.io/
If they're going to revive this, it ought to be phone-based. It's about the right level of detail for a phone screen.
(The current big effort in virtual worlds is High Fidelity.[2] This is from the guy who ran Second Life. Supports VR, face tracking, etc. It's supposed to be better visually than Second Life, but so far, it isn't.)
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_W... [2] https://highfidelity.io/
Coincidentally I just finished watching the postmortem of Lucasfilm Games[0] from GDC14 where this is a topic
[0] https://youtu.be/-8AGwZ5mp_U
[0] https://youtu.be/-8AGwZ5mp_U
Club Caribe anyone? I think for people of a certain age at a certain time, that was an "oh wow" CGA preview of what the next 30 years were going to be like.
What year was habitat released? I'm under the impression that WWIIOL (cornered rat software) might have been out earlier, but perhaps as public beta. They did extend that beta a couple times.
I didn't realize Lucasfilm laugh the first graphical MMO! Seems like they did a lot of groundbreaking work in games -- it is a shame that Disney axed that division.
LucasArts made some great games, but had they really done anything near the end that wasn't just another Star Wars game using someone else's engine?
It would be interesting to recreate the backend/server side portion in a (modern?) MUD system, and use the C64 Habitat as a MUD client.
Would be neat if it was rebuilt on current web technologies and be playable in browser.
Instead of rebuilding it I think it would be better to run the original client through a C64 emulator, and run this emulator in the browser, with some sort of 'modem over websocket' tunnel.
It links to a github...
https://github.com/frandallfarmer/neohabitat-doc/blob/master...
which mentions MongoDB, causing me to discount the project altogether as a pipe dream by people who don't know what they are doing, but will manage to make something simple, then a larger buggy and unstable version. Eventually it will be abandoned. This is the story of most "collaborative" open source projects.
https://github.com/frandallfarmer/neohabitat-doc/blob/master...
which mentions MongoDB, causing me to discount the project altogether as a pipe dream by people who don't know what they are doing, but will manage to make something simple, then a larger buggy and unstable version. Eventually it will be abandoned. This is the story of most "collaborative" open source projects.
* The current effort is to replace the server, not the client. The client runs in an emulator, or on original hardware. We already have both online in a test server.
* The project is rolling along very quickly, but we cannot open up to the public because the server can be crashed by the actions of a client. Devs only for now.
* The overall goal is not to revive this game to make money or sell it. The goal is to revive the game for preservation purposes. Without Habitat in working form, we're without a major piece of software history. We;re bringing it back to make it completely, freely playable online by all using an emulator.
* Most of the work is porting PL/1 objects to modern platforms, and rebuilding the game's geography. Come help us preserve the world's first graphical MMO!
* The rewrite is taking place because the original hardware was Stratus running VOS. We have a Stratus machine, but we are missing some libraries from AOL's QLink, and could not replace them. Qlink was kinda a black box. Those libraries are coming, but they are taking a bit of time, so Randy just said, "Screw it, we'll do it live!" Ala Bill O'Reilly. Not really. But you get the idea.
* This is the culmination of three years of work to get the original owners of the rights to allow us to do this, to get AOL to give us the missing bits, and to get Stratus to give us the original hardware.
Everyone involved worked for free, and did so out of their love of digital history. It's been a great effort so far, and now we're really nearing the end of the line, frankly. It will take a lot of work, but being able to open this as a project to outside developers is an amazing feat.
So, please, before nay-saying or thinking of some technical thing we've obviously missed, come join our effort. We need all the help we can get to preserve this piece of our digital heritage for future generations.