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 ;)

Comments

Re:Everquest x 10

[peterpi]

... and hopefully will have gained in value ;)

Winner: most boring use of "P2P"

[mblase]

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.

Re:Winner: most boring use of "P2P"

[mblase]

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.

If this were "scalable," the developer wouldn't require users to register by email before downloading.

I have no argument with the amount of effort involved for the developer. My point is that it's not really that useful. Active Worlds already does this, in 3D and with better potential; The Palace has provided graphical avatar-based chat for quite some time now without the P2P aspect.

So it's neither scalable, nor novel, nor revolutionary. I'll pat the developer on the back for coming up with it on his own, but I'll not download it myself nor recommend it to my friends when other long-time applications already do the same job, and better. If someone wants to make a MMO game out of it, they'd be better off starting with one of those other apps instead.

Remember AberMUD?

[Quixadhal]

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).