Apb

[Ronin Storm]

Eurogamer have a preview of APB, which I'd really paid no attention to up 'til now. In a way, it sounds a bit like a cross between Crackdown, GTA and City of Heroes. One of the keys to it is that it is a fundamentally PVP game despite being an MMO. At first I wondered if that made it a bit like EVE in mechanics, but my belief is that the is only the PVP game, no PVE.

So, it seems that the game is structured so that there are "matches" that take place in the full world that can have up to 50 people on each side (Enforcers and Criminals). Other people are in the world too but if they aren't actually part of your match then they can't interact. Except occasionally, such as if one of the other side passes a particular threshold of being rock-hard invincible or if the Enforcers bleat into their mics for backup.

Apparently, open beta is "weeks away". I'm quite tempted to have a look at this.

 

[elDiablo]

The character generator is super impressive by itself, and you should definitely look at some of the videos if you haven't already. Apparanetly, the game also uses your own music to play in vehicles and the likes. And if you have the window of your car open, and you drive past another player who owns that same piece of music, they hear it from their mp3. If they don't own it, they use the old Last.fm method of playing something similar. Which is NEAT.

But yeah, looks good!

 

[BiG D]

Apparanetly, the game also uses your own music to play in vehicles and the likes. And if you have the window of your car open, and you drive past another player who owns that same piece of music, they hear it from their mp3. If they don't own it, they use the old Last.fm method of playing something similar. Which is NEAT.

Sounds finicky. As the Last.fm folks will tell you, identifying one MP3 is the same song as another MP3 is DIFFICULT.

 

[elDiablo]

If you want to get technical:

Yes it is, but there are obvious things you can do to try and get around it. Firstly, you can read the ID3 tags of the MP3 in an attempt to just name match. This isn't great for a number of reasons (people don't tag their MP3s, the songs may differ (live versus non-live recordings, etc.), tags can be wrong), but can work a high percentage of the time as most people have at least the artist and song name tagged so it shows up in iTunes/Media Player/Winamp/whatever correctly, which means you can usually just "get away" with it.

If you can't match tags, you can take audio fingerprints of the files (in the same way Last.fm/AudioScrobbler and MusicBrainz people do), which is super duper technical, and I wouldn't want to code it, but it's possible. This leads to a much higher rate of reliability, but at the cost of computational time, and (usually) some user interaction. Still, it's possible.

My guess is that APB would just do the first method, and say "sod it" if they can't find the file, unless they are licensing a third party solution. If they know the name of the song you are playing, it's simply a case of doing a look up on the net to see what is similar, and checking that with other players playlists.

So yes, I concur!