Plot hosting

First of all this is extremely wishfull thinking, not something I'm demanding, just would be very cool to have.

Users should have the ability to host thier own "sims", meaning that there would be a hosting client that allowed you to create a plot independent from the SL grid in which you have complete control. There would be options to the size of the plot, the terrain type, the prim limit, the avatar limit, and other things. This plot would only be avaliable when the hosting service is running. To access this service there would be a new command: llSendToServer(teleportid,"Server name"; that would prompt the user to teleport to the plot.

This can be compared to the current concept of webhosting, you can pay for a predone service (buying land and paying teir to LL), or you can host your own site with a Apache like program.

Please post your comments/suggestions.

It's been paraphrased to me a couple times that the Lindens ultimately wished to make Second Life an open-source project over time. Don't hold me to that, because I can't find the official quote and it's still second-hand.

That said, "hosting" in this manner would be detrimental to the current business model LL has set up. This idea, though, is an old one - and it's my opinion that the ultimate form of the MMO experience will be 3D, graphical, virtual worlds (read as: MMO in scale) that are created, maintained, and played by the end-users, both at the hardware and software level. We're not there yet - which is why Second Life is thusfar the closest it comes, IMO.

Or MUDs depending on who you speak to.

So, while this is overly hopeful, my advice is wait a couple years and you may see precisely this. Under current hardware/software, though... don't get your hopes up just yet.

STAMP
The future of Second Life is full distribution of the servers, but I do not think having it seperate from the grid is productive toward the goal of a unified Metaverse... I'd rather just see it invisible and limited access.

It would only be seperate because of the problem of user servers constantly coming up and down, forcing the grid to be redrawn often. To solve this, people could buy small plots of land and use them as links to their hosted property(a la buying a domain name), but the closest to having the servers on the grid would to have a server list (a la CS/Battlenet and such) with the names and hosts of the servers.

No, I think it defeats the purpose of the Metaverse to have seperate grids.

Regardless of the work, I think making flexibility in how sims work should be an essential for the grid so that sims like this wouldn't have to be seperate.

How Im proposing this would work is not necisarily completely seperate, the user could buy land from LL on the main grid, and lets say for example they want to build a club, what they can do is build the exterior of the building on thier land on the main grid, and place teleporter doors, that would send the avatar to the agent hosted server. The entire purpose is to be seperate to some extent. A free private mini sim with total control given to the host.

Here's one big fat reason this can't go forward with the current way things are done: people could set up rogue servers that disobeyed permissions to steal peoples' objects and make copies. Attachemnts, skins, etc... any asset could be stolen and copied by a user-run sim. In fact, the only reason the permissions system as we know it works at all is because LL holds all content as trustee.

I had a discussion with a friend about this yesterday... what it came down to is that there is probably not a technological solution to the above problem, but there MAY be a sociological one. Simply put, no one's going to go to your personal sim if you don't uphold the permissions system properly. If you run a sim that steals people's content, very quickly you'll find that no one will bring their content to your sim.

Something that's probably obvious but that I don't see mentioned here...

- Server capacity
- Disc Capacity
- Bandwidth

That and the fact that not everyone in SL's going to be even half capable of running a Linux server at home. I *hope* most are, but even so.