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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 ;)
...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"......
> It's instant messaging with ugly graphics.
I think you underestimate the effort that has to go into laying out even simplistic protocols for a server and a single client to chatter with each other. Much less creating one that's scalable and avoids looking like alphabet soup.
Then to expand it to a p2p type setup where every client can (potentially) talk with every other client.
In other words the simple act of getting such a relationship between multiple systems is easily half the battle. Once you get that running, attracting interested parties to actually turn it into a game becomes child's play by comparison. The graphical frontend can easily be retooled to display the world in any fashion the coder wants.
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.
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
Sorry if that was misleading. I called it "napster-style" because of the way the master server manages the directory of nodes... just an architectural thing. If I'd had a dynamic super-node structure I guess I'd have said it was "kazaa-style". Hope I didn't get anyone's hopes up that there would be mp3z on BrendanLand :)
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.
Now that's something I'd like to play :)
- Brendan