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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 ;)
Hey, there's no one here either....
(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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
...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.