Early 3025 Concepts - Real-Time Desktop Map

Back in 1999, shortly before the MPBT:3025 promotional website was released prior to that year's GenCon, a few of us from the MPBT team were brainstorming with the Kesmai marketing people about ideas for supporting 3025 outside of the game.

An idea that I'd had percolating since before I joined Kesmai was the concept of an on-demand Inner Sphere status map to keep players regularly updated with the real-time House spheres of control. Originally I was thinking that a website would be the proper delivery platform but after Doug (Vernon) and I discussed the potential, we looked into other routes.

What we came up with was to use the now-defunct Windows Active Desktop platform to deliver a real-time map as the player's desktop wallpaper. Along with the map banner advertising would be delivered. The marketing folks liked the idea and we started to develop a prototype.

A little about Active Desktop, courtesy of Wikipedia:

The introduction of the Active Desktop marked Microsoft's attempt to capitalize on the short-lived push technology trend led by PointCast. Active Desktop placed a number of "channels" on the user's computer desktop that provided continually-updated information, such as news headlines and stock quotes, without requiring the user to open a Web browser.

... Active Desktop was largely considered to be a failure, with one of the main problems being its high use of system resources and reduction in system stability.

And that was the key to our problem. Back in the day when XP was only a rumor and 64MB of RAM was pretty common in Windows 98, the hit on the player's computer was staggering. That didn't take into account the need for a fairly robust Internet connection (for the late '90s) to push data.

We were working on alternatives that showed promise. Maps specific to your unit--company to House sized, depending on your rank; game forum messages (this was prior to the wide acceptance of RSS feeds); in-game to push messaging.

Unfortunately, it was all swept into the trash when the project was scaled-to-canceled prior to EA purchasing Kesmai.

I'm surprised other games haven't developed something similar since then.