Don't you understand!? With this, my god, we could build an entire virtual world, out of fully interactive, fully physic'd, fully exploding *barrels*!

...build games for it - but how does this translate to serving up virtual world games with unlimited photorealistic detail?

Does it draw the perspective for every individual logged on player ahead of time, cache it, and somehow overcome bandwidth and latency concerns to deliver something in higher quality than a local GPU can do?

Or is this about the architecture of the virtual world itself - messaging, AI threads, triggers, events, decision making? It would have to be one incredible world that required more than a rack of servers in a colo can admirably achieve today.

Now, as far as actual development goes, I can see how this would be an incredible tool. I'm just confused where the cloud becomes a gaming platform.

The report lists the immediate causes of death as depressurization, and then trauma (not properly restrained, or failure of restraint for upper body and head in sudden depressurization) for those who survived even that long.

Each event listed after is in of itself certain death, and the report makes sure to say that even if everyone were wearing their full equipment and had been properly restrained, there was no way to survive - there simply isn't a way for our current equipment to "eject" or have a "safety capsule."

The things we can take away are that all signs point to sudden, painless deaths well before breakup, and that the things learned in the investigation can be applied for greater safety in future missions.

Yeah, prior art?

UO began development before the first patent was filed, was publicly demonstrated technology, and pretty much already did everything mentioned between the two patents.

Obvious point being that UO is a 2D game - or is it? It has three directions of movement, but is merely rendered in military projection by the client. As far as the server goes, every avatar is represented by an X, Y, Z coordinate set.

Draw shortcuts/prioritization by proximity, amount of other avatars/mobiles on screen? Yep.

Scalable server architecture? Yep.

Chat system? Yep.

Stable? So much so that UO is now the longest continually running MMO.

This isn't to mention Meridian 59, or the *other* MMO forerunners that already qualified for the title of 3D virtual world and were in public release before the first patent was filed.

Could someone illuminate what parts of the patent are *not* prior art from the earliest MMOs?

...sweet princess.