Standards For Interconnecting Virtual Worlds

Tao Takashi writes "Linden Lab, developers of the popular 3D platform "Second Life" started to think about an open standard for interconnecting virtual worlds. The motivation behind this is to make Second Life more scalable but also to allow connection of other grids not hosted by Linden Lab. The process of defining components and protocols is supposed to be handled completely in the open with community participation. When finished the protocol documentation is supposed to be submitted to standard committees such as IETC, W3C etc. The discussion has already started on the Second Life wiki and you can also find a first architecture proposal by Linden Lab."

Whoo hooo!

Cool, I'm glad there are some smart people there at Linden Labs. I've been thinking about this for a while now, that there needs to be some group for developing such a protocol. Basically, this standard would encourage people to run their own servers and that's where it would really take off. Give people ownership, and they will run with it. Now all we need are 80 core processors and gigabit wan connections to the house.

I only hope that if they are altruistic enough to see the value in doing this, that they are good enough to make it as open as it should be.

Or else it could end up like this [suso.org]

Re:Whoo hooo!

I agree. I like SL a lot and see so much potential for it as a platform, and while it's far from perfect 99% of the problems I have with it are policy and business decisions on the part of Linden Labs. Ever since I started SL I've been looking forward to a day when I could fire up my own server and run that sort of thing myself. It has the potential to be an open platform for any sort of MMO you like, a modern resurrection of the BBS era with added polygons, or any of the other things they were hyping "Virtual Reality" to be 15 years ago.

So this means...

That horde could invade EVE?

That would be something to see.

Open Standards, hmm?

I see huge potential. Imagine the day when the internet itself is just referred to as Second Life, replacing the ubiquous web browser with an SL client, or that SL-only machines are sold...

Or even a way to directly interface with the human mind....

Gibson, you were right.

Re:Open Standards, hmm?

replacing the ubiquous web browser with an SL client

I still don't understand why people think this is going to happen, or even why you'd want it to happen. Which is easier and more efficient, to read from a web page, or to read from a web page rendered as some kind of sign in a 3D virtual world?

I'm certainly not claiming that there's no room for improvement or innovation in the web browser, but there are reasons why that model won out and continues to be used today. Reading and writing is often more effective and efficient than speaking and listening, and the document model is efficient for reading and writing. Rendering the document into a 3D world is a waste of time and resources.

Arrrrrr! Fantastic!

Aye Matey - soon we'll be a sailin our pirate ships o'er the internet! Me crew shall pillage vast new oceans and search for precious booty!

Need I say this....

Second Life = notagame

Economies and Currencies

I wonder if each grid will have it's own currency and economy. Linden would compete to be the most vibrant economy but there would be nothing stopping others from competeing. There could even be free grids like the sandboxes that exist now. Just a thought.

This would take 2Life scams to a new level

The motivation behind this is to make Second Life more scalable but also to allow connection of other grids not hosted by Linden Lab.

Awesome. This would take Second Life scams to a whole new level.

All your Linden Dollars are belong to us.

XMPP + X3D ?

I'm not a standards guy neither a game developer, but I'd propose something based on other standards, like XMPP [xmpp.org] for messaging, connectivity, chat and X3D [wikipedia.org] for virtual world 3D models.

cross-mmo accounts?

So it goes like this... you pay some premium fee and in effect it signs you up for every MMO out there and pays those fees (from your massive fee), creates a character with that name and as close to appearance as possible on each one of those worlds (reserving names would be problematic), and from the outside framework have portals to each that you enter and play each in windowed mode. And if really ambitious, have some way of coding objects to resemble gear from each one for when you step out of them. Something like that, yes? and then, to top it off, create an exchange rate between wow gold, uo gold, eq gold, linden lucre, tabula rasa credits, dereth pyreal etc etc etc...

Anyone up for a game of Croquet?

I'm glad to see Linden Labs is moving in this direction. Unfortunately, unless they are bringing on help, they don't have the resources to handle all the issues in their main grid (which is what generates their revenue) so I do not see them being able to remotely support this initiative the way most people would expect.

Enter Croquet: http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page [opencroquet.org]

Croquet allows for the creation of multiple, connected worlds through a system of portals and is already finding use in educational scenarios. Oh, and the fact that it is open source doesn't hurt either.

-PS

Someone Else, Please

Given the perennial problems that LL's backend suffers (servers going down under the load of a few dozen avatars, servers going down because someone sneezed, data corruption, awkward-at-best internal scalability...) I'd really prefer to see another group build something from the ground up with this kind of extensibility in mind. Open source is a good step, but the impression that I received when I heard about this months ago, and still get now, is that LL is basically trolling for free geek work.

First step to the Matrix?

Global virtual world somehow reminds me "The Matrix"...

Web 3.0 (or 3D) ?

Here's what I want to see:

I want to be able to rent property in Second Life (or some other virtual world) and have it "link" to my own server, so that when your avatar enters my house, you (transparently) continue playing on my server, using my bandwidth, CPU and my rules.

That way, the main Second Life grid can handle much more people, while I can decide how much I want to handle. If I'm IBM, I will put up a server farm to handle my advertisement/community events. If I'm a private person, I'll plan for 10 concurrent visitors with enough spare capacity to handle spikes of 20-30.

One way or the other, my virtual home is no longer dependent on Linden Lab's server farm. If Second Life gets overloaded, the visitors in my virtual corner of the virtual world won't suffer. They might even come to me because my place always runs smoothly. Suddenly, there is an interest in upgrading the infrastructure beyond "it must work, mostly".

My place can be small (one house) or large (an entire island). Just like property in SL is already. Sure, the transition will be a bit tricky (at what point exactly are people transfered to a different server, and how do they "see" the content inside/outside?), but that's a technical challenge that is, in principle, not that hard.
In fact, I'd be perfectly happy to have it work the Oblivion way (e.g. you click on the door, you are teleported inside. Windows both ways are faked with textures if at all.)

What is cool about this is that it removes the scarcity of land. I can rent a small house in SL and have an entire world inside. Hey, why not? It's not as if physical laws matter. Sure, Linden will have to adapt their business model, but since the server load isn't theirs anymore, they should not have to worry too much.

Dream Me Up

I'd like to be able to go to sleep in one world, and dream I'm in another, only to wake back home when I die in the dream.

And I want to visit worlds where girls who wouldn't date me at home are instead suddenly nyphomaniacs.

We tried to get Worlds.com to do this 10 years ago

I worked for http://worlds.com/ [worlds.com] back in the mid 1990s (remember the billboards in S.F. and other major cities? What a freekin' JOKE), and we had the basic technology to do this back then. The system included a world builder as part of the product, although it needed at least another year of work to become a real product. The backend also allowed for this, you could link to other servers on different machines. Users of Worlds have been hacking on it to create their own worlds for years (the server really only tracks your location -- the textures and such are served up from HTTP servers, so once you get the server to a location that YOU have created, you can just distribute your world to your friends and serve up the textures). The problem was that the management at the time blew their entire wad on marketing (see above) and other follies, rather in focusing on anything that might be of USE! It was truely frustrating.

I am impressed by the tenacity of the current president -- Worlds.com has gone broke twice and is STILL hanging on and appears to be planning something for this fall (what it is, I have no idea -- I haven't worked there for over six years).

Let's get some other things together.

If this is possible in Second Life, how about across other platform games and systems. Wouldn't it be nice to run some of your characters through other maps and worlds?

Why stop there? I'd like to transport my profile, postings and comments between all of the social networking sites. It would also be nice to check all of them from a single page and be able to post/lurk without remembering where I stored the "this thread is useless without pics" icon.

Of course, whomever did this would have some great job opportunities in the Middle East afterwards.

VRML

I thought there already was a "3D world" standard.

Skip Second Life...

While this is obviously a necessary step in creating the next internet revolution since the world-wide web, I have serious doubts that it will be based upon the Second Life software.

Most likely, the honor for create the virtual internet "world" will come from either an industrial thinktank (AT&T, IBM, etc...), the game industry (EA with an evolved form of The Sims merged with Spore and SimCity) or the porn industry (as a quality product with tons of cash behind it, complete creative freedom and a self-sustaining internal economy).

This rush to start an open protocol for interconnecting these "worlds" is most likely a last-ditch effort to keep Second Life running a couple years longer before it gets completely replaced by a far-superior product. After which, it'll erupt into an all-out patent war between Linden Labs and whoever wins the race for the first globally accepted virtual world system.

In the meanwhile, there are some other pressing issues involved, such as making the tools necessary for creating and managing these virtual worlds (and their respective data/database content) intuitive enough for anyone to use. The open-source community alone probably won't be enough to accomplish this. (Interface design consultants, anyone?)

Metaplace

Moving beyond the proprietary system unique to a single game, there's new initiatives like metaplace.

http://www.metaplace.org/ [metaplace.org]

I think this is more likely than expansion of one world from its custom, proprietary software.

Uh, thanks but no

Last time I read an interview with LL, they said something about 11,000 servers running 2nd life.

Huh?

That would explain the atrocious lag, at least.

Sorry, I'd rather have someone else designing something a bit more...streamlined... if we're going to talking about a web-wide standard.

The Subtle Knife

Can anyone code up a knife that allows me to cut a portal in space-time between two worlds?

Nothing new there ...

Once again, the MMO world grabs ideas from the world of Muds.
UnterMuds did the same thing 15 or so years ago - you could log in to your home Mud, then travel through portals to other Unter-compatible Muds.
(there was a downside - I took one character through a few portals that way, but then got stuck because the Mud I was on went down. Attempting to log in to my "home" Mud didn't work because it tried to forward me on to the next one.)

Great, Now I Can...

to allow connection of other grids not hosted by Linden Lab.

Great! Now I can open my casino in a more tolerant place.

Knock.. knock...

Does that mean orcs may visit my house now?

Remarkably like Electric Communities in 1996

Chip Morningstar, Randy Farmer, and Doug Crockford put together a company to build a "Cyberspace protocol suite" for this purpose in the mid 1990s. (These gentlemen were the behind the original Lucasfilm Habitat project, inventing the term "Avatar", among many other things). At their heyday, E/C employed just about everyone with experience in this area, and wound-up burning through several million in VC money, building a virtual world platform on top of a customized Java virtual machine. The diagram on the Linden Labs Wiki looks surprisingly familiar (although the names of things are different, reflecting "memetic drift").

It was a cat herding party of monumental proportions. The first year was the design phase - it was amazing. We found out a need to fix Java so it had distributed garbage collection, closures, and the like. We made our own VM with these add-ons, and invented a world specification language called Pluribus for knitting together object aspects which represented the multi-party nature of distributed awareness.

Like many first attempts at "ontological revolution", the performance was less than spectacular. It didn't take long to build stuff that was beyond our understanding, either. Later, when aspect-oriented programming was invented, and the rest of the world starting thinking about distributed cyberspace, it has become possible to do what we were trying to do then. Even Java has caught up, co-opting most of the add-on features we had to come up with.

My advice to those approaching the problem today:

• Don't reach too far beyond what the average C++/Java programmer can understand.
• Don't invent anything that you can't make-do with that is already out there.
• Plan on getting stuff wrong at the beginning. (E/C released their first product without a version number in the protocol!).
• The start of the art of standards specification is not good enough to deal with this problem. Your only hope lies in producing a "Literate Reference Implementation". Doing that probably requires doing a rough-pass first, then recoding it.
• If you attempt to assemble a "dream team" to put something like this together - be careful about the human-relations stuff. (In our first year, one of our engineers found out he was getting less money then two others and went out on a "passive-aggressive vendetta". This dampened morale during a critical time.)

There is a lot more to say about E/C and its fate. Lets hope it isn't repeated...

Already Done

It was a TV show called ReBoot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReBoot/ [wikipedia.org]

LFRG 2nd Life

This could be interesting if they interconnected with a game like World of Warcraft and put a portal in Shattrath. Then we could like, organize big raid parties, invade 2nd Life and kill everyone in sight.

I suppose their economy could suffer a bit because then people would have to save money for body armor and weapons instead of genitalia, but they could always sell cool stuff like hoof and horn manicures that you can't get in Azeroth. Maybe we could even have interconnected auction houses too. We both win.

Sign me up!

Yay!

I for one welcome Second Lifers to my homebrew Diku-alike MUD.

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

SLer: Wait, where? All I see is black and white text--aaaargh!

The Beastly Fido devours your corpse.

Yeah, welcome to MY world, 2lifer bitches!

Connect it with low sec EVE!

I'd like to connect Second Life to my low-sec system in EVE. And greet the new folks visiting EVE from Second Life with a couple Gjallahorns