4 ms·

I'm skeptical that closed source is what's actually holding SL back. I think splintering it into lots of shards would actually hurt something like this, which i

I'm skeptical that closed source is what's actually holding SL back. I think splintering it into lots of shards would actually hurt something like this, which is closer to a social network. Once you shard it out, you get even further from critical mass, lots of desolate servers with nothing going on and inconsistent rules/user experiences

Jtsummers 10y ago
Rather than sharding, consider federation. Anyone should be able to run a server and allow "doorways" or other access points to other servers, hyperlinks. I recall, circa 2000, a project that I can't name at the moment that I toyed with in college that had this concept. You could host your own area and connect it to other areas hosted by other people. The name "Metaverse" is in my head, but googling it (quick search, probably missed something) was dominated by Stephenson's concept from Snow Crash and not a software project by that name.
- jff 10y ago
  Active Worlds?
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    Possible. Saw that on Wikipedia just now. 16 years, apparently my memory isn't strong enough to recall back far enough.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  > Rather than sharding, consider federation. Anyone should be able to run a server and allow "doorways" or other access points to other servers, hyperlinks. > You could host your own area and connect it to other areas hosted by other people. Sounds like Croquet/OpenCobalt/Qwaq/Teleplace/Terf (hooray for forks!). Different spaces can be hosted by anyone, like Web pages, and the hyperlink equivalent is a 'portal' which you can step through to go from one "world" to another. As far as I understand it, the client processes the world via a stream of events, which a p2p protocol tries to keep consistent between all of the clients (e.g. user avatars) inhabiting a world. Going through a 'portal' switches your client to the another "world", and hence another event stream, so there's no central authority. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cobalt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cobalt for example. Edit: It seems to be p2p, rather than server-based, according to: > The Open Cobalt application leverages peer-based messaging to eliminate the need for virtual world servers/commercial services and makes it very simple for end-users to create and securely share deeply collaborative virtual worlds that run on all major software operating systems.

Jtsummers 10y ago

Rather than sharding, consider federation. Anyone should be able to run a server and allow "doorways" or other access points to other servers, hyperlinks. I recall, circa 2000, a project that I can't name at the moment that I toyed with in college that had this concept. You could host your own area and connect it to other areas hosted by other people. The name "Metaverse" is in my head, but googling it (quick search, probably missed something) was dominated by Stephenson's concept from Snow Crash and not a software project by that name.

jff 10y ago
Active Worlds?
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  Possible. Saw that on Wikipedia just now. 16 years, apparently my memory isn't strong enough to recall back far enough.
chriswarbo 10y ago
> Rather than sharding, consider federation. Anyone should be able to run a server and allow "doorways" or other access points to other servers, hyperlinks. > You could host your own area and connect it to other areas hosted by other people. Sounds like Croquet/OpenCobalt/Qwaq/Teleplace/Terf (hooray for forks!). Different spaces can be hosted by anyone, like Web pages, and the hyperlink equivalent is a 'portal' which you can step through to go from one "world" to another. As far as I understand it, the client processes the world via a stream of events, which a p2p protocol tries to keep consistent between all of the clients (e.g. user avatars) inhabiting a world. Going through a 'portal' switches your client to the another "world", and hence another event stream, so there's no central authority. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cobalt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cobalt for example. Edit: It seems to be p2p, rather than server-based, according to: > The Open Cobalt application leverages peer-based messaging to eliminate the need for virtual world servers/commercial services and makes it very simple for end-users to create and securely share deeply collaborative virtual worlds that run on all major software operating systems.