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Standards For Interconnecting Virtual Worlds
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Sep 19, 2007 07:59 AM
from the can-i-hearth-back-to-everquest-yet dept.
from the can-i-hearth-back-to-everquest-yet dept.
Tao Takashi writes "Linden Lab, developers of the popular 3D platform "Second Life" started to think about an open standard for interconnecting virtual worlds. The motivation behind this is to make Second Life more scalable but also to allow connection of other grids not hosted by Linden Lab. The process of defining components and protocols is supposed to be handled completely in the open with community participation. When finished the protocol documentation is supposed to be submitted to standard committees such as IETC, W3C etc.
The discussion has already started on the Second Life wiki and you can also find a first architecture proposal by Linden Lab."
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Submission: Linden Lab to develop standard for Virtual Worlds by Anonymous Coward
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Whoo hooo! (Score:4, Interesting)
I only hope that if they are altruistic enough to see the value in doing this, that they are good enough to make it as open as it should be.
Or else it could end up like this [suso.org]
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Re:Whoo hooo! (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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I'm right there with you. It would be cool to be able to play whatever client I want, and seamlessly move from world to world. Let's hope this takes off and other MMOLRPG's adopt the standard as well as allowing the general public to create their own worlds.
If they don't do it, IBM or Sun will... (Score:2)
So this means... (Score:4, Funny)
That would be something to see.
Bad idea! (Score:2, Funny)
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Bah, my Red Mage would cut down you puny orcs like wheat before the scythe. I might even invite in a Dark Knight so we could have an actual scythe.
Chris Mattern
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Open Standards, hmm? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or even a way to directly interface with the human mind....
Gibson, you were right.
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Oh for VC funding so I could get more people involved....
Never mind, by 2009 I should have a decent product.
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And if it takes you three years to get it to market what with patents, copyrights, advertising, then you'll be rolling by 2012.
oh crap, nevermind.
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Oh boy. VRML.
Re:Open Standards, hmm? (Score:4, Insightful)
replacing the ubiquous web browser with an SL client
I still don't understand why people think this is going to happen, or even why you'd want it to happen. Which is easier and more efficient, to read from a web page, or to read from a web page rendered as some kind of sign in a 3D virtual world?
I'm certainly not claiming that there's no room for improvement or innovation in the web browser, but there are reasons why that model won out and continues to be used today. Reading and writing is often more effective and efficient than speaking and listening, and the document model is efficient for reading and writing. Rendering the document into a 3D world is a waste of time and resources.
Parent
Arrrrrr! Fantastic! (Score:5, Funny)
Need I say this.... (Score:2)
Economies and Currencies (Score:2, Interesting)
This would take 2Life scams to a new level (Score:2)
Awesome. This would take Second Life scams to a whole new level.
All your Linden Dollars are belong to us.
XMPP + X3D ? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Arrrgh!
The way I'd be doing it (I have a little tiny mmo toolkit I work on when I have the spare time) is serialization, but customized serialization to not send the bits I don't need. In c++/C3 (the languages I've tinkered with) yo
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strut pirate
{
char name[10];
int num_peg_legs; bool has_bird; };
Each one of those variables takes up a certain amount of space, and can be packed in a pre-determined way when you serialize. So then lets say you send the serialized package to a c# program. As long as the c# class is packed the same way, your deserializer can deserialize the package.
It might not work out of the box, using (for example) C
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Again, this is only if you are writing your own (1) homebrew (2) cross-language serialization. If you stick to one language it is infinitely easier
cross-mmo accounts? (Score:3, Interesting)
Real World Interface? Good Idea! (Score:3, Funny)
What I envision is something like this: We have several offices at various places in the world with low-cost labor and good wifi coverage. When you (in Second Life) enter a portal for "Real World(tm)", you pick one of these offices. At this point a hired "avatar" dons a pair of wifi goggles that lets you see what he sees, and gets commands from you to move about in this "Real World", and does so (they will require some minimal training). The offices should be
Anyone up for a game of Croquet? (Score:2, Interesting)
Enter Croquet: http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page [opencroquet.org]
Croquet allows for the creation of multiple, connected worlds through a system of portals and is already finding use in education
Web 3.0 (or 3D) ? (Score:5, Interesting)
I want to be able to rent property in Second Life (or some other virtual world) and have it "link" to my own server, so that when your avatar enters my house, you (transparently) continue playing on my server, using my bandwidth, CPU and my rules.
That way, the main Second Life grid can handle much more people, while I can decide how much I want to handle. If I'm IBM, I will put up a server farm to handle my advertisement/community events. If I'm a private person, I'll plan for 10 concurrent visitors with enough spare capacity to handle spikes of 20-30.
One way or the other, my virtual home is no longer dependent on Linden Lab's server farm. If Second Life gets overloaded, the visitors in my virtual corner of the virtual world won't suffer. They might even come to me because my place always runs smoothly. Suddenly, there is an interest in upgrading the infrastructure beyond "it must work, mostly".
My place can be small (one house) or large (an entire island). Just like property in SL is already. Sure, the transition will be a bit tricky (at what point exactly are people transfered to a different server, and how do they "see" the content inside/outside?), but that's a technical challenge that is, in principle, not that hard.
In fact, I'd be perfectly happy to have it work the Oblivion way (e.g. you click on the door, you are teleported inside. Windows both ways are faked with textures if at all.)
What is cool about this is that it removes the scarcity of land. I can rent a small house in SL and have an entire world inside. Hey, why not? It's not as if physical laws matter. Sure, Linden will have to adapt their business model, but since the server load isn't theirs anymore, they should not have to worry too much.
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When the client goes to the new server, does that server then have to request and store all the graphics associated with that avatar? Or do other users have to request the data from the originating server? At what point do you say 'this character belongs to this server'? If someone creates a character on my private server, then goes elsewhere -forever-, am I forced to host t
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At what point do you say 'this character belongs to this server'?
That's a good question. Here are two solutions off the top of my head:
a) Make avatars client-side, so the client supplies them. The servers could act as caches, so other clients don't access the client directly (which would probably slow everything down if he's on a slow uplink).
b) Have the avatars streamed from "avatar servers". That way my server only stores avatar ID, location and URL of avatar server to ask for everything else. Or it could act as cache, as above.
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Dream Me Up (Score:2)
And I want to visit worlds where girls who wouldn't date me at home are instead suddenly nyphomaniacs.
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We tried to get Worlds.com to do this 10 years ago (Score:2, Informative)
I worked for http://worlds.com/ [worlds.com] back in the mid 1990s (remember the billboards in S.F. and other major cities? What a freekin' JOKE), and we had the basic technology to do this back then. The system included a world builder as part of the product, although it needed at least another year of work to become a real product. The backend also allowed for this, you could link to other servers on different machines. Users of Worlds have been hacking on it to create their own worlds for years (the server really
VRML (Score:2)
Skip Second Life... (Score:2)
Most likely, the honor for create the virtual internet "world" will come from either an industrial thinktank (AT&T, IBM, etc...), the game industry (EA with an evolved form of The Sims merged with Spore and SimCity) or the porn industry (as a quality product with tons of cash behind it, complete creative freedom and a self-s
Metaplace (Score:2)
http://www.metaplace.org/ [metaplace.org]
I think this is more likely than expansion of one world from its custom, proprietary software.
Uh, thanks but no (Score:2)
Huh?
That would explain the atrocious lag, at least.
Sorry, I'd rather have someone else designing something a bit more...streamlined... if we're going to talking about a web-wide standard.
The Subtle Knife (Score:2)
Nothing new there ... (Score:2, Insightful)
UnterMuds did the same thing 15 or so years ago - you could log in to your home Mud, then travel through portals to other Unter-compatible Muds.
(there was a downside - I took one character through a few portals that way, but then got stuck because the Mud I was on went down. Attempting to log in to my "home" Mud didn't work because it tried to forward me on to the next one.)
Great, Now I Can... (Score:2)
Great! Now I can open my casino in a more tolerant place.
Remarkably like Electric Communities in 1996 (Score:4, Interesting)
It was a cat herding party of monumental proportions. The first year was the design phase - it was amazing. We found out a need to fix Java so it had distributed garbage collection, closures, and the like. We made our own VM with these add-ons, and invented a world specification language called Pluribus for knitting together object aspects which represented the multi-party nature of distributed awareness.
Like many first attempts at "ontological revolution", the performance was less than spectacular. It didn't take long to build stuff that was beyond our understanding, either. Later, when aspect-oriented programming was invented, and the rest of the world starting thinking about distributed cyberspace, it has become possible to do what we were trying to do then. Even Java has caught up, co-opting most of the add-on features we had to come up with.
My advice to those approaching the problem today:
- Don't reach too far beyond what the average C++/Java programmer can understand.
- Don't invent anything that you can't make-do with that is already out there.
- Plan on getting stuff wrong at the beginning. (E/C released their first product without a version number in the protocol!).
- The start of the art of standards specification is not good enough to deal with this problem. Your only hope lies in producing a "Literate Reference Implementation". Doing that probably requires doing a rough-pass first, then recoding it.
- If you attempt to assemble a "dream team" to put something like this together - be careful about the human-relations stuff. (In our first year, one of our engineers found out he was getting less money then two others and went out on a "passive-aggressive vendetta". This dampened morale during a critical time.)
There is a lot more to say about E/C and its fate. Lets hope it isn't repeated...MOD Parent up (Score:2)
The thing is SL is for the most part pointless. There is nothing in it that can't be done better in other systems (web, IM, video/voice chat). The system seems to thrive on Furries and prostitution. Previously gambling as well but they banned that.