from Hacker News

The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990)

by kuba-orlik on 10/22/23, 6:05 PM with 92 comments

by davexunit on 10/22/23, 9:50 PM
You can actually play Habitat today. Randy Farmer, one of the developers, has an open source project called Neohabitat that has preserved the game. http://neohabitat.org/
by dang on 10/22/23, 7:24 PM
Related:
The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22822691 - April 2020 (1 comment)
The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850 - Sept 2014 (10 comments)
The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70180 - Oct 2007 (1 comment)
by dannyobrien on 10/22/23, 7:05 PM
Note that Randy Farmer is now the CEO of Spritely Institute, which is taking the lessons from Habitat and other work and applying them into the modern networking and social media context: https://spritely.institute/
by luismedel on 10/22/23, 7:02 PM
This is great. I didn't know that Mutiny[0] from Halt And Catch Fire was based on a real service.
[0] https://www.ryannelson.me/projects/hcf/
by DonHopkins on 10/22/23, 8:12 PM
Also by the authors of Habitat, Randy and Chip, presented at the Second International Conference on Cyberspace:
How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure, by Chip Morningstar, June 1993.
"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman
http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html
by mtillman on 10/22/23, 6:51 PM
Along these lines, my co-founder worked with Spielberg on an early virtual world for children with chronic diseases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbright_World. I'd be shocked if they didn't use some of these lessons from the Lucas ecosystem.
by dccoolgai on 10/22/23, 7:13 PM
This was later adapted into Club Caribe for Q-Link. I regard it as deeply unfair that only those of us born in a brief window of history got to experience the pure magic this represented at the time. It lit up areas of the imagination like nothing before or since.
by juliangamble on 10/22/23, 9:26 PM
This was written to a target audience who had all read Cyberpunk novels and imagined it as the future. See the references:
[2] Gibson, William (1984), Neuromancer, Ace Books, New York.
[3] Bruce Sterling, ed. (1986), Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, Arbor House, New York.
by enahs-sf on 10/22/23, 8:57 PM
Chip was the first real software engineering mentor I ever had. He taught me about simplicity and the importance of getting software to work first and foremost.
He also imparted the sage wisdom that premature optimization is the root of all evil.
by Animats on 10/22/23, 6:35 PM
That's famous. I knew those guys.
What amazed me is that they were able to cram a graphical client into a Commodore 64. Now that was a cram job. I could see doing the world on minicomputer servers, but the client!
Those early 2D metaverses not only predate the consumer Internet, they predate AOL. They were all superseded by things that looked more like the early web.
Round 2 of that was when 3D Second Life was overtaken by mostly-text Facebook.
Recently we had the Web 3 "metaverse" debacle. You can build it, but will they come?
These things are fun, but they're a niche, like games.
by plexxer on 10/23/23, 10:49 AM
> Habitat is built on top of an ordinary commercial online service and uses an inexpensive -- some would say "toy" -- home computer to support user interaction
> There were two sorts of implementation challenges that Habitat posed. The first was the problem of creating a working piece of technology -- developing the animation engine, the object-oriented virtual memory, the message-passing pseudo operating system, and squeezing them all into the ludicrous Commodore 64
The authors seem to have some opinions on the venerable C64.
by dredmorbius on 10/25/23, 8:51 PM
I happened to note the use of the term "avatar" to refer to players' in-game representation. This pre-dates the 1992 date cited by the Online Etymological Dictionary (based on Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash). I'm curious if there are earlier references which might exist, either up to the game's introduction in 1985 or perhaps even earlier still?
<https://www.etymonline.com/word/avatar>
by ulrischa on 10/22/23, 8:05 PM
Wow it was way ahead of its time! While we now have many online virtual worlds, Habitat did it when the internet itself was still in its infancy. It laid the foundation for many of the online multiplayer games and virtual spaces we see today.
by DonHopkins on 10/22/23, 8:11 PM
Habitat had pie menus, and the Japanese version let you "bow" and perform other gestures and animations by stroking in different directions.
by jruohonen on 10/22/23, 6:08 PM
A great find! There is also some real wisdom regarding the warning they gave.
by a1o on 10/22/23, 6:14 PM
You can do something like that over IRC without much fuss! As in IRC as a backend.
by hoc on 10/23/23, 3:36 AM
That poor characterless tree.
by bullen on 10/22/23, 10:53 PM
The real lesson is that the game media/medium does not lend itself to linear stories inherited from TV, that inherited from film, that inherited from theater.
Games should only be multiplayer. Real-time action multiplayer.
And they should NEVER have cutscenes.
They also can't have music (except live) because 3D sound is paramount.
And they should be open-source or source-available so we can improve and modify them.
Habitat said all that and I think the article didn't but... you know... down votes without comment incoming!