Slashdot Mirror
P2P Roaming Chat
fexter writes "A coder called Brendan Reville has released BrendanLand, which he claims is "the world's first peer2peer application where each participant serves their own piece of geography in the overall world." Basically, everyone walks around and chats. But each person gets to design their own piece of land, and everyone roams between these lands. It's all free, and the website has lots of technical notes and a developer diary." Oviously this is hugely basic stuff, but conceptually there
is a lot of potential cool ideas. But for now it looks just silly ;)
...the business plan for every single video game company over the next five years. Final Fantasy XI? Neverwinter Nights?
:)
I'd love to play around with this BrendanLand thing, but I don't see a Linux version anywhere.
(First post?)
Maybe I'm missing something; wasn't there something a few years back called The Palace? It seems the difference is that he's removed central room servers, yet you still have to connect to the network to get a geographical listing.
Never attribute to Hanlon that which can be adequately attributed to Heinlein.
Hey, there's no one here either....
I just love dropping virtual cacti on the ground and letting strangers move icons around them.
Just email Brendan and he'll tell you where to download the software.
(This is being done so that we can manage the size of the community.)
He might be getting a bit more email than he had hoped for...
I was interested in doing something similar with a 3d first-person type game with "doorways" that take you to other servers. Reminds me of snowcrash, with server owners having their own "real estate" in a connected "multiverse". It would be a nice metaphor for online shopping, chatting with friends, etc.
In 5 years you're going to have virtual worlds in which you can literally purchase a piece of virtual land and establish a trade, turn the computer off for 6 months, return, and your property will still be there.
Rental DVDs, online worlds, telecommuting, and pizza delivery. There's no need to interact with more than one human being ever again! Surely no reason to shower! Imagine the savings in gas and water.
I have been pwned because my
Woohoo! I claim username "Hiro"!
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
that could be fun...
you'd have to kill the orcish hord to download that new Saves the Day video. watch out for pks, though, for your hard earned No Doubt mp3s are at stake!
Its a cool idea but I have seen it somewhere before...maybe not p2p though...btw how does one define true p2p?
This site has a similar design (maybe not "true" p2p though): http://www.activeworlds.com/
What's under yellowstone?
I guess slashdot insists on reinforcing that their primary purpose is to allow litle known business or a persons homepage to recieve massive numbers of visitors and publicity when they barely deserve it. Sure it is a cool idea, but it is weak and not terribly ground-breaking.
Sir Timbly of Cannatuna, offical Knight of the Heptagonal Table
: the world's first peer2peer application where each participant serves their own piece of geography in the overall world.
There has been many chat programs/sites in the past where chatrooms were user-designeable worlds such as the one above. I saw some as far back as 5-8 years ago. Granted, they were text based, not graphical, but the idea is the same. I conced this one might be a first P2P version, but does that actually add any value, seeing as there is a master server? P2P usually adds more headaches than anything else, because of firewalls, NAT, etc.
The submitter is the coder's buddy! shameless plug!!
Macs as a fetish property
cant you just picture this guy. you need to contact him to download the software.
what whats that i hear? the sound of 40k emails arriving in his inbox simultainiously...
this will be slashed fast
-
...True Names by Vernor Vinge. If NPC's get introduced into this little world (computer generated characters) one of them could very well become "The Mailman"......
Yea, and not taken over by roving online PK gangs. *lol* I can just imagine guilds being created with the intent of attacking anything that moves or vandalizing online property. Of course Guardian Angel guilds will probably prop up too. Just talking about gets me excited! 5 more years, *sigh*
I have a feeling this will be a new innovation of communication, but the only thing anyone will ever say is......
A/S/L????
Oh wow! Maybe one day when this technology is mature, we'll be able to store files on our "homespace". What??? Morpheus, Kazaa, and Bearshare already do this?
Ok.. so, it's interactive. So is IRC. Anyone played Tanks???
I'm sure that this will eventually turn into something meaningful, but right now it's of little interest. Let me know when it's 3d...
Anyone remember Alphaworld? (back in 1997 ish?)
The world is designed by the users to be the perfect place. Only a matter of time before someone desides to hook up into this thing with their head and then we will have to wait for Morpheus to free us from it..... Wait isn't that a movie?
How would one go about that? Could someone clarify?
Yes, 'Oviously' it is pretty neat.
BilldaCat
Well, this is kind of cute, I guess, but I'm not sure what real value it has. Perhaps users can put 'treasure chests' on their land with shared files on it :) It looks like this system is not much more than an interesting diversion. Perhaps if there were more to it, there could be some interesting things going on...I always thought it would be kind of neat to have something like a massively-multiplayer-simcity type thing, although this is very far from that!
I suppose this would be a big hit with all those 12-year-olds that presumably run around AOL chat rooms these days...
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
With a little tweaking I can move my virtual world Shadowrun campaign to the actual virtual world... Maybe spin out a MMRPG out of it...
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
I used to use MUDs as chat systems when I wasn't up to adventuring. This looks like a P2P graphical version of the same thing. Except I never imagined the MUD rooms like scenes from Blue's Clues. :)
(This is being done so that we can manage the size of the community.)
I have two words for you Sir: Good Luck.
Seriously though, unless the guys either
a) bounces all emails for the next 24 hours
b) store them on some large capacity HDD
c) buys some bandwidth,
I'm under the impression that he will ge a lot more requests for download that he normally gets !!!
Enjoy being Slashdotted to death :-)
But, its not text based... He's got 2D pictures and DirectX in it...
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
Better leave it text based...
Even though it's not text based now?
I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but by limiting the client to windows platforms only, isn't this creating a homogenous, one-world-view pseudo-civilization?
I, for one, would prefer a "melding-pot universe simulation" to this limited one.
Now you should walk completely off the edge of your own land. There will be a pause, and then, like magic, the Master Server will send you off to your next destination. And hooray, all of a sudden you're on your friend's land, served all the way from the other side of the world!
So, it's kind of like EverQuest, except you get to make your own ugly little piece of real estate and there's no actual conflict.
Yeah, it's technically peer-to-peer because your land is stored on your own client instead of a central server. But calling it a "Napster-style network" is shamelessly self-promoting, since there's nothing useful for you to share. It's instant messaging with ugly graphics.
Let me know when the next release comes out, with the power to take over adjacent pieces of "geography" and form a collaborative village or army or something.
what you need is an online virtual reality world with an engine that can be dynamically updated. otherwise these virtual reality worlds die pretty quickly due to decay of the graphics / rendering system as soon as the next big multiplayer game gets released. (people lose interest)
Someone ought to make a system like this in which clients use the released source code from Quake 1 or 2. Jimmy
but a cool start, i hope this evolves into something cool
I want 2D games back.
This is sort of like the Active Worlds concept on drugs.
Active World has the same "build your own space" concept, but it is pay to play. You don't really play, it is just a 3D chat environment. Other than paying, the main difference is it is all based on really huge servers. There are huge clusters of teleport tubes to go to different servers. You can even pay for servers that are private, where you control the access to the world.
Anyway, this is the first truly novel application of the peer-2-peer networking philosophy, albeit via a centralized server - and as such it is not very ... interesting.
Now, if only more people would try and do something more ambitious, in this kind of general direction.... - this kind of thing could be used for many more things apart from merely chatting and wandering around some simplistic graphics.
Perhaps the answer lies with the addition of a MOO-like language, (perhaps Java?) - where each object in each person's 'home' would have some embedded code and thus could be interacted with in a meaningful way. There could also be repositories of commonly used objects, that would NOT rely on the distribution of a new src/exe of the main application for this type of p2p. (yeah, I guess kind of having the app update/recompile itself ala emacs style) - but that is off the mark:
What a real distributed server/computing application would enable people to do, is to collaborate on projects without relying on each one of the involved parties to have the software that would be necessary for the collaboration. The software iteself could work on a distributed level. Hm.
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
Things like bear traps and dead falls and of course vehicles. Imagine a mmorpg halo.
This is pretty neat. As someone mentioned, the possibilities this technology presents to online gaming is pretty cool. Back in the days of online games such as Sierra's The Realm and Origin's Ultima Online, players would "decorate" their virtual land and/or home by placing items, food, trash, etc... in patters on the ground in order to personalize the area. With this new technology a lot more personalization of play areas could be done. The ability to truly and continually decorate one's area would add incentive to play X game. Very cool.
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
I'm under the impression that he will ge a lot more requests for download that he normally gets !!!
That or a lot more email addresses to spam.
If you're going to use tiles at least let the server send you it's own custom tiles. I would rather opt for movable objects however, that don't have to sit on tile boundries. And again, the systems should be able to share this data amoung themselves so the users can create some interesting worlds. How many worlds can you visit made of cookie cutter cacti before it gets lame? For me the answer is somewhere less than one.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Reminds me of Snowcrash. Been a while since I've read it, but wasn't there a whole strip dedicated to this sort of thing where people (including large Corporations) could design their own "block" of land in cyberspace?
Perhaps we can have an Asheron's Call sort of setup where not only do you get to customize and grow your character, but also your plot of "land."
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
In a cute way. My favorite is this Walk around and admire the Programmer Artwork(TM) I'll download it at home. Work is on a Mac. :)
Can I bum a sig?
Hasn't anyone ever heard of Ative Worlds? It used to be known as Alpha Worlds. This program was the sole reason I upgrade my 486DX2 33 to a PII 266, so I could "play" in alpha worlds. I didn't go for the big graphics card, so it wasn't that great, especially on my modem.
Active Worlds gives you everything this guy is trying to provide, except it isn't P2P, so you have to pay to build. The client is a free download, so you can walk and talk to your hearts content.
A paid account give you your own avatar. Worlds, as there are portals to other worlds, aren't restricted to "real" world environments. You can build whole worlds that are just matrices of connecting lines, etc. Every client then downloads different sound and graphics to represent the new world they came into.
It is essentially just a 3D chat program, but I like the fact that if you aren't in the vicinity, you don't "hear" the conversation. Check it out, the client is free to windows users.
This is exactly what ActiveWorlds does. I played around with it a couple years ago. Last week, I looked it up to see if it is still there, and it's grown quite a bit.
:o).
The difference between ActiveWorlds and BrendanLand? ActiveWorlds is free to view and free to build things, but anything you build has public ownership, so anyone can modify it. If you subscribe (which I've never done), you can start your own world, and nothing built in it can be modified by anyone but you. Oh yeah, and ActiveWorlds is three-dimensional, first or third-person view
The speed of time is one second per second.
Has anyone found a copy of the program yet? I've tried a couple of major filesharing networks as well as FTP and web searches and even so much as typing in different paths off of his web site...
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
Obviously, this is a very cool app, no doubt about it. But using DirectX is just brain dead as it locks the app into Win32 machines only... as if the world would consist just of Win32 machines *sigh*
Very sad, it looked quite promising
He gave a scenario where a server had a 'tag' game of some sort going on. You would be chasing this guy thru a castle, he runs thru the 'sparkly door', you follow and seamlessly end up in another level with different physics (low grav) different rules (bouncing rockets) and different look,(Space Mountain).
I'm still waiting for this.
The Metaverse! Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash! Hellooooooooooooo!???
What are PDA's?
Snow Crash's Metaverse but without the VR stuff. Great... and I was hoping to be one of the early ones so that I could drive around in a huge pirate ship at the speed of light :)
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
I don't really see how this is much different than say, The Sims online. Users' create their own virtual world, and when they connect, they can converse with other people playing who have also created thier own virtual world.
A big game devoloper should definetly stick with this idea, though. It's got a promising future.
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
It was interesting to note that he thought it might be a world first. I have discovered that there always seems to be someone that has been there first. In this case, LucasArts Habitat from the mid-80s has yet to be met in terms of community and "playability." But still, good luck and keep hacking!
I've been waiting for technology like this, almost Snow-crash-esque.
Imagine the scenerio- You're walking down a virtual street, on the servers of a search engine, such as Google. Each server appears as a shop on the side of the street, that you can walk into.
It takes ungodly bandwidth, and processing power.
But imagine if each business was run on it's own server. You want to buy a server, you walk into IBM's machine, and talk to a receptionist there.
IBM hosts the enviorment, after you walk in.
The most interesting issue, IMO at least, is that of trust with Client data. The information about your persona, what he's carrying, and how it interacts with the rest of the world.
The problem is, you can't leave it server side without sending it to each server that you enter, and trusting them not to modify it as you enter another. Imagine walking into a Script-kiddie hangout, and walking out with a virus.
Not a pleasant thought.
So you could store it client-side, but that opens up the possibility of people editing their data. Could you design a system that can withstand that?
Having user data editable could be interesting. People could design whatever 3d model they wanted to use, and basically have whatever objects they wanted (and could code)
Transactions with cash would be handled much the way they are on the internet now. You would trust the server with a credit card number, which you would send through a secure tunnel.
It's an interesting set of possibilities.
Colin Davis
...being quickly turned into PornLand. Or worse.
Lessee, we have Al Queada Land, HitlerLand, MooseALini (the San Francisco Treat) Land, Land of the Giants, LanLand (for Net Admins only), LameLand (actually, you end up hooking into a live feed to North Dakota, but who can tell?), DeathRowLand (guns, gas, or needle?), RuralLand (more fun than watching the grass grow)...
Mine will be ModemLand where nothing moves faster than 56K baud...
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
So what we have here is Neverwinter Nights with no gameplay, is it? Woo woo!
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
Cute idea. Could lead to a real "virtual office". You'd design your own cubical [or windowed office, if you're an upper level exec ;)] complete with a desk, fax machine, phone, file cabinet, trash can (of course) and clock (even more of an of course). To work from home, just log on, punch the clock, and go. Move files between the network and office with the file cabinet. Click the phone to use the net to dial. Send documents with the fax machine.
Oh, and the Nerf gun is there to fire on your cube neighbor.
Ok, so this is a very basic mud server with portals that are self-discovered in a peer-to-peer fasion? Sounds like a quick hack to an old copy of AberMUD would accomplish the same thing, and not require a custom client to connect (unless telnet is considered custom these days).
What I think would be a cool project in terms of networking would be to develop a p2p system like this that does not require a master server at all. I've been trying to mentally figure this out... how would you contact your buddy across the world if you don't know their IP address... how would you get it? Could you get it using pop servers? What about if they're behind a NAT server.
Build that, and I think you'll revolutionize p2p networks. Until then there will always be a central server mapping addresses.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
"Hugely basic stuff." Anybody have a clue in hell what that means?
Oh, hell, I know this is offtopic, but how often do I get to see the launch of something called BrendanLand? I mean, guys named Bob or Tom or Glen get to see their name so much it becomes old hat, an annoyance, even. Brendans are few and far between (at least in the US).
BrendanLand... one of my oldest and most bizarre idle whims come to life....
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
...in BrendanLand: Clickable thumbnails that get larger, so you can actually see the screenshots
:-)
The problem with this is that there is no compelling action that will drive people to go through the hassle of setting up their worlds. If he wanted to really tie in the Napster aspect, he should have included filesharing in the form of "stashes," or something similar.
However, it would still suck. There's a reason why all that cheesy "virtual malls" and "click on the storefront to enter the store" crap never took off- because simulating an annoying real world experience (trudging through a mall, or wandering through a desert) does not make for a compelling online experience.
Want community? Write a front end for connecting people's Civ worlds... or Sims worlds... those are compelling experiences, and I think someone's already on that
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
This sounds a lot like ActiveWorlds minus the peer to peer portion.
http://www.activeworlds.com/
you've never played GRAAL, have you?
http://www.graalonline.com
"This is being done so that we can manage the size of the community"
;-)
He can code a little universe but making a simple homepage with a form that collects the info he needs is too difficult?
Then again, looking at the screenshots I'm not surprised
I'm not sure how many times this has already been posted, but isn't this pretty much the same idea as Neverwinter Nights? With NWN you can host your own 'module(s)' which are basically your own created world which you can DM or you can just let run off of scripts. Modules can be linked to each other, so eventually there could be 'persistant worlds' of modules linked together all over the internet.
Actually, the idea is basically just like the world wide web. Think of it, everyone has their own little site that is linked to lots of other sites creating a 'world.' Only now there games and applications like this one that do this in 3D instead of text.
Wow, I hope that trend does continue though--the 3D one that is. I'm not sure how my lynx browser would keep up!
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Now that you've linked to his email address at Slashdot, I wouldn't be surprised if many more 'friends' that he'd expect would "send him a file to get his advice"... o_O
Bill Gates Has No Penis.
Why not work with him to make it 3D yourself?
never mind
I keep forgetting that not everyone that comes here is a programmer
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
Did you guys read William Gibsons "Cyberspace"?
The cyberspace is a virtual world where everone can design "his" location. But the elements he uses aren't trees or stupid stuff, but programs, buildings representing computer systems and so on.
Take BrendanLand, add network-accessible COM-Objects with self-registering avatars and you have a Matrix as described by William Gibson.
I know this will be important stuff, because there are so few high rated comments about it. At first poeple ignore it, and once it booms, we can hardly remember whose idea it was in the first place...
Sig Nature
To: brendan@brendanland.com
From: afreind@hotmail.com
Subject: a special humor game
This is a special humour game
This game is my first work.
You're the first player.
I hope you would like it.
Prepare for Attack of the Klez.
does it work under WINE or WINEX?
If it does, it can expand out the civ somewhat.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
I thought of that and sent him mail using my Sneakmail account.
I highly recommend everyone check out Sneakmail. You create an account, then for every time you must give out an email address to an untrusted source, generate a new sneakmail alias which forwards to your real email address. There's a unique lahel assigned to every address so you can track spam back if you do end up getting spam that way.
DO NOT AN ASSHOLE BE. I can code all over your pasty fat ass any day. AND I HAVE A GIRLFRIEND. Why would I waste my time writing ASP (or perl! AHAHAHAHAHAH!!) is for pussies.?
-- Brendan
I had an idea for a P2P screen saver, where you design an A-Life creature, and set it free. It will then roam around, and interact with other creatures from other screen savers. They might fight or fall in love. Who knows. There was more to it, but it was a while ago.
Does anyone else remember a couple of different experiments in 3d worlds on the internet back in 1997-98 where you created your own avatar, could create your own city, travel around, and talk to people you met along the way? I don't remember names anymore, but I do remember playing with a couple different iterations back then. This looks the same, without the 3d part.
I wonder how many people you could cram onto one piece of land? Thats the only thinkg I want to try, otherwise it just seems rather boring...
Not half as silly as your slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging "writing." Let us know when you can express yourself coherently.
...What freshmeat is for? Why does slashdot keep posting software releases? And isn't this program the same thing as the worlds simulater (probably out of business now...)
I'm afraid that Brendenland is definitely not the earliest peer-to-peer MUD. David Ackley has been working for many years on ccr, a system where individuals create and interconnect independent MUD-like worlds. One of the most important questions ccr addresses is the issue of security: when you are visiting another person's world, what should that other person be able to do to you? Also, ccr addresses the issue of hacked clients through code signing and chains of trust.
If you are curious about ccr and Dave's ideas, check out his home page and ccr's central keyserver.
--Anil
Can you install Linux on this biatch?
"The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." -Harlan Ellison
This my sound a bit, uh, arrogant, but in the basics this seems a bit unimaginitive to me.
..." Yay! Now if I go into a virtual environment, and I'm stuck with variations in gravity, perhaps some cludge to bend the law of conservation of momentum or something, but other than that, straight vanilla three-dee space, unit-style avatars etc. etc. ... well, I'd be kinda disappointed.
... heh ... fine, I'm a user, "my passions are quotations", I confess!)
Two points:
- Snowcrash (been mentioned in some comments above): what I found frustrating about that story was the limitations: "teleporting in cyberspace is impossible [not implemented] because it would confuse users." Huh? What's the point of having a freely configurable environment if you're going to make it just like meatspace?
- Cthulu: I've never actually read any Lovelace (yet), but I really dug a description I read once: "Space around Cthulu becomes non-Euclidian
(yadda yadda, so if I'm so cool, why don't I do it myself
Whatever. I'll get round to it. Sometime.
yes, we have no bananas
I am sure that Brenden is going to go to Linux next since he works for Tenzing.com , the linux server in the aircraft people.
Everything old is new again. I founded Worlds Inc. which started (prematurely it turns out) the 3d virtual worlds walking around avatar thing. Activeworlds was designed without knowledge of snowcrash, but was certainly synchronous with that novel. It turns out that the main problem with the concept is that it is less like a living world and more like "neutron bomb world"...tons of buildings and constructs, but nothing to do there. There were two main lessons learned. First, the aesthetics must be of Movie quality which we now have with the PS2 and XBoxes of the world. The second lesson is that there must be SCARCITY of land (hong kong and manhatten) creating reeflike ecologies/economies rather than North Dakota land...land as far as infinity and nothing to do and no way to find anything interesting. Hmmm - I wonder if it's time to take another run at the concept Cheers, David Gobel If knowledge is infinite, then I MUST be infinitely ignorant
Oviously this is hugely basic stuff, but conceptually there is a lot of potential cool ideas. But for now it looks just silly ;)
.
;)
Why do you so-called editors feel the need to make such smarmy comments before posting articles? Your inflated self-worth must cloud your judgement.
I want to remind you that LNUX is about $.90 per share. When it delists your options will be worth about...hmmm, let's see...NOTHING! You really need to keep your ego in check.
By the way, your idiotic, winking emoticon does not absolve you of the insult you levied.
P.S. I have noticed that Michael has gotten the hint, since the lashing he got for this [slashdot.org]
P.P.S. The comments by users on Slashdot are interesting, but the design is silly.
Well, I wrote this large essay in here about a brainstorm I had about tiered servers to control a Metaverse-like virtual world.
Basically I said that you could have trusted root servers for the universe, similar to the DNS root servers, then everything underneath arbitrates and delegates control over subdomains.
In this case, the domains would be like this:
World -> Continent -> Country (-> maybe region) -> City -> Block/Region -> Building (-> building subdivision).
For an example, a person installs the software for the city server on his machine, configures it, then would vie to become a city server. The country server would test the city server's capacity (speed, storage, etc), check whether its information conflicted with other cities (ie, has an identical name and location) then brings it into the city network as a peer if it passes. Other cities within that region would reflect their information to this new city server, and it would then be known as New Gondoland or whatever.
There would have to be a lot of checking and intelligence built in, to prevent cascades and problems when servers crash or get bogged down.
Servers with X amount of uptime would have good marks stored in the controller's database; if there is temporary network congestion, a controller with a good history will be chosen over one with an unknown or rocky history.
Big fleas have little fleas... but the smallest flea, the apartment/house/office owner doesn't have fleas. He controls his own space, but he also gets an avatar. Other domain controllers don't get one; they are dedicated servers.
Your avatar can go anywhere within the system; he can choose to view at any of the hierarchy levels. Information states are stored with checksums so that only diffs have to be sent to clients (not in a textual method surely; that would be very wasteful of resources). A city would merely have records of street and area and building placement. Entering a city would cause a check against your last update for that city, and the last X hours or days of changes are stored so that the city can send you a diff based on your last update.
Shrug, maybe someone can run with this idea. I can see an idea similar to this becoming the basis for a real Metaverse (so to speak).
each participant serves their own piece of geography in the overall world. Basically, everyone walks around and chats.
You mean like real life without intimidation and shyness? Real life with people just walking up and asking if you want to have sex.
I believe you mean Lovecraft, not Lovelace. Just saying is all.
Um, ever heard of LambdaMOO and all the other MOOs and MUDs? Text-based social VR has been around for years and years. This just tacks on a graphical interface, which is cool, but much more limiting.
It seems to me like this has been done with many small chat projetcs already. Not to mention the many video games with chat built in that work on this model. What about this is new in any way shape or form?
This has already been done... Active Worlds has been around since about 1996 doing this. You build your own "town", and people can come and talk to you, full 3D and everything.
Active Worlds
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
>>Oviously this is hugely basic stuff, but >>conceptually there is a lot of potential cool >>ideas. But for now it looks just silly
I think you've outdone yourself this time on being grammatically correct and witty.
So what happened to VRML and 3DML? It seems that every once in a while, projects pop up that try to establish standards for 3D on the web. But these have existed for over 5 years! What is wrong with VRML that it never became widely accepted? Is it that the world isn't ready for 3D yet, or is VRML fundamentally flawed?
I myself have frequently thought of building a virtual world using standard technologies, but support for VRML seems so weak that I thought going for Quake worlds would be a better idea. As for the rest of the 3D technologies, I won't try them unless they release their specs as an open standard, so anyone can write viewers and create their own worlds, the latter preferably only requiring a texteditor.
---
Q: What do you get when you cross a mobster with an international standard?
A: You get someone who makes you an offer that you can't understand!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I think, like a lot of good ideas, someone else has thought of it first - a very annoying phenominon!
http://www.activeworlds.com/
--
Callas
Anybody ever play those "everybody's a wiz" MUD's? It was similar, in that you designed your own little piece of the land, link it into the main land, and people could wander around and check it out.
:)
MUD's begat EverQuest, MOO's begat BrendanLand
...no, I won't go there, b/c that's not funny anymore.
I'd like to see him patent this. Now *that* would be funny.
Please tell me that no one that is posting in this discussion takes this as a serious piece of software.
The most obvious problem it had was simple- unless you give the geography a purpose, all you're doing is hindering communication and simulating very annoying properties of the real world. That made it pretty hard to get into.
The aesthetics of the world do not matter one whit- they will only attract newbies once, and then once the newbies have gathered a base of friends, they generally don't leave their standard stomping grounds. There are certain people that live for exploring the world for its own sake, but they are rare
The fact that nearly all MUDs include some kind of broadcast chat channel and affinity group chat systems is a big hint as to what people want. They enjoy overcoming the challenges of the MUD's geography, and yet prefer all possible haste in communicating with one another.
The problem with alphaworld was that it provided all the lovely geography, but there was no point to even leaving the same area.
In this vein, Ultima Online is probably the most successful in the "personal space chat" category- players wander around in a pre-made world, but as they gain more power by interacting with that environment, they can eventually exercise that power by building their own house, which functions as a meeting place and status symbol. Your point about land scarcity is dead on as well- if your giant castle is a hard thing to make, people might come on over just to see it.
If you make the avatars able to kill each other, then the world is generally a great success, because the inconveniences of geography become a challenge to overcome and a situational help or hindrance to the hunters or hunted.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
He can code a little universe but making a simple homepage with a form that collects the info he needs is too difficult?
Unless you go to SourceForge.net (remember the "OSDN is dying" scare?), you can't really get inexpensive hosting that includes server-side dynamic content. If your provider allows only static pages, then how does it respond to an HTTP POST from a <form>? That's right: "Method Not Supported".
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've considered doing something like this, but for a different reason.
something is considered a "piracy tool" when piracy is its PRIMARY use. If walking around and having fun is the primary use of a cool P2P program, then it can hardly be a "piracy tool".
This can be exploited. I'm not condoning piracy, but P2P is really really useful, and it would be nice to be able to protect it from litigation.
Oviously this is hugely basic stuff, but conceptually there is a lot of potential cool ideas. But for now it looks just silly ;)
So... what are you saying exactly?
"First you gotta do the truffle shuffle."
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at pop3.iicinternet.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
:
--- Below this line is a copy of the message.
...etc
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
Ugh. I'm sorry, but that name has GOT to go.
And no, I don't think AlseeLand sounds any better.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The Virtual Object System / Interreality Project is a free software (GPL/LGPL) effort to build the software infrastructure and applications for distributed peer-to-peer virtual reality. The basic model of enabling users to host their own virtual worlds is the same as BrendanWorld, but our software supports 3D, is open source, cross platform (GNU/Linux, MacOS X and Windows) and built upon a powerful, extensible generic base. We're pretty far along in some ways, but the reason you haven't heard of us is that we've been keeping a pretty low profile so far, at least until we get our documentation up to speed. We do welcome new developers, so please come check us out!
The Multiverse is a virtual reality world -- you can "buy" real estate in it, and code your own piece of land. Everything ran using the Multiverse protocol, so that they can interact. A few large corps hosted the backbones, from whom you purchased prime virtual real estate. This project sounds like something similar -- individuals can program their own little lands that others can see.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
This sounds exactly like the virtual world from Snowcrash. You get an avatar. Cool hackers can customize them, people on public terminals got slow, jerky, greyscale avatars. You have to travel on some sort of virtual transit system along a main road that was 32,768 miles long. 'Course the l33t hax0rs could travel many thousand miles a second.
Anyway... read it... it's a good book. This software however? I dunno... maybe if they guy would actually post a *LINK* to it hehe...
...obviously needs some artistic improvement! What was thrown together looks like a kindergarden student drew it and tryed to hang it on the refrigerator but was so ugly that his own mother refused to have it in her house let alone on the refrigerator, so she promptly burned and sent it back to Hades and it was never poken of again in the land on all things Good. In summary: FOR ME TO POOP ON. ;)
Unoriginal idea. Terrible, ugly, horrible execution. Egotistical project name.
One wonders why this isn't a Linux project?
Could you explain a bit more about it? Are people still using it?
MMORPC; Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Chat. Why roleplaying? Well, it'll take all of three seconds before the entire population of the online community is FBI agents posing as 14 year old girls (or boys, now that the internet is taking off in Catholicism).
It was fun for a year or two but failed to make enough money. Since then we moved to something else.
Something we learned from this experience: using this metaphor for online community is difficult since users are too dispersed in the landscape. There were tweaks that we could do to improve it but we ran out of money :)
Running it as an online game might make more sense. If anyone is interested in continuing it please email me at joel@commontown.com. We have thousands of cute little icons and lots of ready-to-run server codes.
From: "Brendan Reville" <brendan@brendanreville.com>
Subject: Welcome to BrendanLand
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002
hi there,
thanks very much for your interest in BrendanLand! It goes without saying that the response, particularly due to slashdot.org, has been overwhelming.
There are too many emails to respond to any individually, so this mail has been automatically sent to you.
If you've surfed through the BrendanLand.com site, you'll probably realise that this was just an evening hobby project, done mostly to prove a concept to myself. BrendanLand has known bugs, many things could have been done better with hindsight, and the master server isn't that tough. But it's occasionally cool :). I'm going to spend a little while toughening up the
master server before I release the product.
I'm going to make future announcements about BrendanLand via the Yahoo Group named brendanlandgroup. If you are interested in trying out BrendanLand, please subscribe to this group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/brendanlandgroup/
The download instructions will appear in this group shortly.
Only I can post to the group at this stage, but I might open it up later. If you don't want to receive individual emails, you can choose to read the group on the website only. You can unsubscribe at any time, too.
I apologise for not having the chance to respond to individual emails. If you really need to talk to me without receiving this message automatically, in response, then mail support@brendanland.com. To answer some of the more frequently asked questions, it's Windows/DirectX for now, the source is not open at the moment (don't worry, you'd learn more about what *not* to do :),
and while there are a lot of good ideas out there for improving this
system,, I have a job, other projects, and A Real Life to maintain, so I
hadn't planned to expand BrendanLand too much further.
I'm really excited to have so many people interested in hanging out in BrendanLand. It's going to be interesting.
Sign up to that Yahoo Group, and keep your eyes peeled; I'll have news soon.
- Brendan
Can anyone say... "Otherland". This has great potential. Note: POTENTIAL. Quake started somewhere small too you know (doom anyone?). These things have to evolve to work. After all, no MUD was built in a day.
Move faster
I see this being popular with younger surfers, too young to type, yet big enough to draw things with a mouse. Yes, there's security/wierdo infiltration considerations, but you don't usually leave your 2-3 year old alone with the computer that much anyway.
I'd do it as SVG, and have everyone be able to select object oriented avatars that could inherit different characteristics like clothes or noises. Quick transfer when you go to another land. And I'd let older people create the base class for the avatars, so that they could be copyrighted cartoon characters or other things that appeal to children. There's the napster-like content...
Ale