Newsgroups: comp.ai.games
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!bb3.andrew.cmu.edu!nntp.sei.cmu.edu!news.cis.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!howland.erols.net!news.mathworks.com!news.kei.com!news.texas.net!uunet!in3.uu.net!uucp5.uu.net!world!news
From: hapgood@pobox.com (Fred Hapgood)
Subject: Re: Software steroids
Sender: news@world.std.com (Mr Usenet Himself)
Message-ID: <32dc3ad1.2325249@news.std.com>
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 19:35:05 GMT
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
References: <32d71e70.1224278@news.std.com> <32D71467.4313@geocities.com> <32dbd828.1044124@news.std.com> <5bapbo$3fm@news.Informatik.Uni-Oldenburg.DE>
Nntp-Posting-Host: world.std.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die
X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99g/16.339
Lines: 25

>
>Well what about making this part of the game?
>
>You get a flexible (programmable) environment.  Getting those regular tasks
>done depends on writing a good procedure for it.

No question but what there will be games exactly like this.  They'll
be AI competitions, basically.  They'll be fascinating to watch and
I'm sure will draw lots of spectators, but I had hoped that the future
of online gaming involved more participation than that. 
I'm beginning to think online gaming is going to look like the
Indy 500:  a few dozen competitors and millions of spectators.

On the other hand perhaps companies can write gaming clients that
seize and monitor the entire operating system, allowing only
a narrowly specified list of programs to run.  This would be a
sacrifice but maybe people would put up with it.  Not a great
solution, though, and there isn't anything that could be done
about people running performance enhancing programs on a
second processor..

Fred
--
www.pobox.com/~hapgood
world.std.com/~fhapgood
