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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 ;)
Woohoo! I claim username "Hiro"!
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
Someone ought to make a system like this in which clients use the released source code from Quake 1 or 2. Jimmy
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)
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
Yeah, but the cool potential I see in this is making something like this as an open-source project.
Set up a basic world, and basic character interaction rules, basic item rules, and physics, etc. And then everyone can create their own "country" or whatever metaphor is chosen to represent your own little chunk of the Metaverse/Other Plane (credit where credit is due...)
Then allow folks to go to town developing open source add-ons, or modifying their own real estate. Want to make a public amusement park, a private club, who knows what?
I know that they're planning on taking the Sims to a massively multiplayer platform in the next year or so, but this would be so much cooler with folks from all over the world developing modules, items, and god-knows what. Like anything with enough of a cool factor, this would grow into something that we can't even truly envision right now... Plus you wouldn't have all of the copyright and licensing issues that you'll inevitably have with OnlineSims mods...
Yes, you'll have cheaters, and all kinds of other non expected events, but the community will take care of that too...
sounds like fun.
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
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.
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.
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
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
"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."
No!
credit cards suck. sorry to nit-pick, I realize this wasn't the main thrust of your post, I just wanted to rant briefly about how much credit cards suck.
[rant]
Credit card numbers are like keys to your bank account. What kind of commerce system operates by having the customer hand over the keys to their bank account to every merchant they want to buy from? It's ridiculous, "here's the key to my bank account, please don't take any more money than we agreed upon... oh, and please don't keep a copy of my keys"
There's no security at all, it's just supported by insurance and we pay for it in the form of transaction fees to the tune of several billion dollars a year. It blows my mind. Any half-way decent electronic commerce system should be using cryptographic tokens to represent cash in transit.
[/rant]