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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 ;)
...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?)
Hey, there's no one here either....
...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"......
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...
(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 :-)
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.
Someone ought to make a system like this in which clients use the released source code from Quake 1 or 2. Jimmy
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
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.
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?
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."
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.
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'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
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?
...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 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
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.
Admit it! You're Microsoft's Bob!
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
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
Either 'Personal Digital Assistant' (ie Palm Pilot) or 'Public Display of Affection'. I'd assume he meant the former, but there's no reason you can't graffito tag the teenagers making out on the park bench...
do not read this line twice.
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
Just tried it. It was super fast. I'm sure I'll be using it again. Thanks for the tip!
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
...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?
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 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...
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
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
I know Sneakemail has been around for a while (I've just never gotten around to trying them until now) but I see your point.
This doesn't seem like it'd be too hard a script to write, though. I'll look around, and if I find one, I'll post a link to it in a reply to this thread.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.