December 20, 2003

Zanpo - Virtual Cities, if only it could tie into FCS

Is what I have thought after taking another look at this site after about 7 or 8 months of not visiting. One of the reasons I'm bringing up this site (is has been around for quite a while) is that it is snowing in Zanpo! This is really cool, not only that, they must have had to recreate every block they had to show snow. Amazing work.

There was a question on their forum as to how to make it more popular as things have slowed down a bit. My first thought would be to incorporate FCS into this. How many users are on at the moment, their info, where they are, teleport to them, chat, see their vid, pick a fight whatever. If you could provide you're own avatar (the walking dude) that would be cool too. Have some town hall meetings there where everybody would gather in one room and the person in charge would have the floor, do a presentation, show some vid.. all kinds of stuff comes to mind. There are so many MORE options when you have when you have live data flying around.

This site really blows me away, but there is so much more that can be done.

Posted by Graeme at December 20, 2003 12:47 PM
　



Comments

Thanks for the post, Graeme. I'd love to be able to do what you say. That is one of the real obvious missing pieces of my site.

As you know, I started Zanpo before FCS, and when it first came out, it wasn't on a lot of shared hosting accounts, and was fairly expensive. It still isn't cheap, from what I've seen.

One citizen suggested more ways to interact within the city. He suggested a marketplace where citizens could buy/sell stuff. That interests me as well, because right now, once a building is submitted to the city, that's it...

We'll see what the next version will bring... I'd love to make Zanpo more popular... and more FUN!

Posted by: Genjo at December 22, 2003 01:38 PM

Hi Genjo! Thanks for popping in and saying hi. Zanpo has a heck of a lot of potential that's for sure. When's the next version coming out anyways? As for the FCS stuff, yes, hosting is quite expensive seeing as how you would need a lot of connections at the same time. I could picture a lot of people wandering in (literally!) at the same time to chat it up. If you need some help on it, let me know, it would be a really cool project to get involved in I think.

Posted by: Graeme at December 22, 2003 02:31 PM

Thanks for the offer! I've got lots of thinking to do on Zanpo. Right now, the next version is in incubation... in my head. One big issue is the size of the city... as it grows it would be harder and harder to find eachother. I don't know if you've ever played Quake III Arena, but if only two people are playing in a very large map, the game can be quite boring. I guess I'd have to figure some way to compartmentalize the city into various chat rooms.

Posted by: Genjo at January 28, 2004 01:14 PM