Blue Mars beta

Why not? The Chinese already own most of the US Treasury Bills and Bonds. Where would we be without the Chinese economy? Where would Wal-Mart be without the Chinese goods? Besides, the Native Americans were the migrants from China during the Ice Age coming across from the land bridge in Alaska. Did they not own America already? What is so wrong with commies, at least they all got a job, no unemployment!!! Isn't it better?

Well, since google owns YouTube, I wouldn't be surprised there are close to that number of simultaneous video streaming on their servers. In fact, google is so hungry for their bandwidth that they were proposing that google/YouTube's users should get priority scheduling on the net, which totally alienated and countered the net neutral rule adopted by the international internet community.

Doesn't matter. Youtube is effectively stateless too.

Stateless simply means that each communication between the server/client is treated as a brand-new login without any memory of previous state/login info. It is the simultaneous connection that matters in terms of resource allocation.

It means that there's no need for one person watching "Fox Jumping on a Trampoline" to "see" and interact in real time with everyone else who happens to be watching "Fox Jumping on a Trampoline". There's no avatars. There's no 3d space. There's no "here I am pushing a physical ball towards you and it's going to hit you about ... now".
It is the statefulness of a virtual world that makes Second Life so hard to scale up. And without that statefulness, there is no virtual world.

This definition was posted in this thread: /128/60/317444/1.html

The definition we use is voluntarily open :

A "virtual world" is an on-line environment that generally includes these characteristics:

1. Avatar-based: Users represent themselves in a unique, virtual individual that roughly approximates the functions of a human.
2. Multi-user: Many users can be in the same online venue simultaneously.
3. Immediate: Interaction with other users and the world takes place in real time. However, there may be slight delays from network latency (lag) or from other users.
4. Interactive: Users can act on their environment to some degree, instead of being mere observers.
5. Persistent The virtual world, as well as objects and characters within, exist independent of the users logged in.

On http://vworld.fas.org, we deliberately leave the question without a too accurate answer. Our goal is not to define what a virtual world is, but to create a tool that can be used efficiently by teachers.
=================================

Well I hope this settles that argument.

Unless Wikipedia is supposed to be the Only Authority on anything.

A linked definition was asked for, so WooT there it is...

hahahahhaha Nice try Briana!
That may be the definition they use, but not when it is applied to their own site. Try clicking on thier listing of "virtual worlds",............... "Hello Kitty Online" anyone?

O wait! What about "Beanie Babies 2.0"

From what I have seen it is evidently a crime punishable by death to accurately define the term and it is a closely guarded secret of the "Keepers of the Secret". No one else is worthy to utter the sacred words.

*Calls out the Guard to apprehend Jesse*

The crime: Wrongful definition of terms.

The Punishment: Removal of the space bar, delete and backspace keys from her keyboard. To be carried out immediately.

hahahaOwait!Crap!OHNO!!!!

Here's a link to a blog post about Google and 3D: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2009/04/toward-open-web-standard-for-3d.html .

It's about a plug-in for displaying 3D content in browsers, called O3D. Currently in an early stage of development, and will make use of hardware graphics capabilities. It's open source. The site is at http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/ .

It's not directly related to Blue Mars at all, but might have some bearing on virtual world development in the future.

This*message uses none of those, and included errors to be dealt with, just for kicks.


Man, I am bored. Also, what the heck? My alt+255 is turning into an asterisk the first time it's used.

Sounds like the wishful thinking of someone who is optimistic for the future of SL.


There are a *LOT* of people ready to leave SL once a viable competitor hits the scene.

Oddly for many its not the technology aspect that causes this attitude, its the customer service. Something LL could have been doing something about all along.

and this competitor is clearly NOT blue mars, it's anothjer of these companies that want to take what sl did, do it better and especially keep it controlled, AND make big buck on the back of the content creators.

wich kind of give it as much appeal as there.com, no matter how pretty it looks.

But they've gone beyond poor CS now. People put up with the lousy service because SL still afforded everyone pretty much unlimited freedom to do what they want. Now LL is looking to seriously impede that freedom at the least, and perhaps eliminate it for some totally at worst.

Yeah. Which means the practical standards for what equals a "viable SL competitor" will go down.

I have been playing with o3D today also. Its pretty neat, even if it's kinda code intensive.

Someone, or google, could make a fortune if they created some kind of a "builder UI" for o3D. Something even simpler than SL's tools, to hook all us creative types.

I cant think of an application for it yet, other than odd embedded 3d stuff, but still interesting to play with.

For a lot yeah, but I wonder how many will decide that they'll do something else while waiting for that competitor.

Lost you here, it sounds like you are describing Blue Mars and if you were then I would agree. The controlled part is what we are all arguing about and it really is the crux of the problem. To allow the unlimited freedom to create and upload like SL is not workable. There is no scalability and it is amazing, really incredible that LL has been able to do what they have done.

We are talking about terabytes of uuids that have to be cataloged, garbage collected, archive stored for keys that have not been used for a long time, so much shuffled around constantly.(We were at terabytes 2 years ago. Wonder if we have reached petaflops yet?) Only a miniscule amount is thrown away and so much of it is just trash sitting in peoples inventories. I am once again back up to 30+k of inventory and I never really use any of it and I at least try to keep it pared down. What is worse is that it is kept for non premium accounts that are no longer here. EDIT TO ADD: And the majority of all these assets are for people that do not pay LL a single dime.

It looks like we will reach 100K concurrency and I expect it will keep growing but always at a slow rate. Demand has always been exceeded by the balance of people coming and seeing and then leaving in disgust because of the asset system issues and limitations. Or they leave because of the lag of having to load so many textures, the majority of which are just way too big for what they are used for. We are always right on the threshhold of the system not working at all.

But even LL has come to the conclusion that unlimited does not work. Hence we have the prim limits and coming script memory limits. After that we need texture limits per parcel and avatar. All of which will change the SL experience for both good and bad and should really have been done more then a year ago.

No one, including LL can see a solution that would provide unlimited storage for even 250,000 concurrency yet. So any alternative competition has to impose some restrictions, in whatever form, to have a chance of being profitable. The trick is to provide enough freedom, short of unlimited, that the majority of people will accept and at a cost that people are willing to pay.

Reminds me of a couple decades back when a *LOT* of people were ready to dump Windows for any viable alternative not only looking for better technology but also because of Microsoft's arrogance and poor CS. Along came OS/2, vastly superior technology for the time and is *wasn't* Microsoft.


And this is exactly what happened to OS/2. The best app developers never devoted much (or any) effort developing for that platform because there just weren't that many people using OS/2. There weren't that many people moving to it from Windows because it wasn't where all the big time apps were. OS/2, as a general purpose operating system went into a death spiral that it could never recover from.

But there's another parallel I see: OS/2 was very successful in a number of commercial settings, running dedicated applications. It was the operating system of choice for ATMs for many years. I see BM as being aimed at companies that need a dedicated VW for their very specific purposes -- corporate showcases, customer interaction vehicles, platform for an MMORPG. The way it seems that cities will be independent entities, the owner/developer model all seems to be very well suited for these types of scenarios.

@CarlCorey, What you have written is very thoughtful. Thanks for this =)

I think to that when we look at the wider picture in trying to understand the future of SL and we look at what LL are doing with regard to Continent-In-A-Box (CIAB) for corporates and other such organisations then we can see how that might work for them and for us also.

Suppose, I am a company and I wish to provide my employees with a 3D Continent for our purposes. I buy a LL-CIAB solution. I install on my own equipment and I have an SLA in place with LL for support and I give legal undertaking that I will honour the Terms and Conditions of Use. My intention is that our Continent will initially be a closed solution intended only for our internal purposes.

Suppose further, that at a time in the future I wish to allow my employees (and myself) to access the rest of the 3D World in our own personal time, logging in through our gateway, our Continent, our Home. I can do this also. I sign a further SLA with LL, with all the responsibilities that this entails. Now my people can login at Home on our Continent and enter the general public 3D world (SecondLife) spend time there, buy stuff even and bring it back Home with them.

If we look at Ursula we can see how this is possible. Ursula is a private gateway in many respects and is a forerunner of the global 3D World I think. And I also think that LL are fully-aware of this.

Many of those who are able to live, work and play in Ursula will come to see it as their Home. They will login in there. And they will also be able to travel to other parts of the 3D World (the General Mainland for instance). Do stuff there, buy stuff even and take it Home with them. People not Ursulians will not be able to do this. In the same way that people who are not my employees will not be able travel to our company Home, our Lands, our Continent.

Is true that Sansara and Ursula are hosted by the same company LL. Is also true that Sansarans have less available to them inworld than Ursulans. The division is there though. And as other LL-powered continents in a box, both private and LL hosted, are connected to the wider world then this is a good thing. It provides choice for us as customers. Not only in what is accessible to us inworld, but also who we can choose as our Home provider.

I can easily see the day when continents similar to Caledon, Dreamland and USS (if not them even) are hosted by companies not LL and their citizens are able to freely travel back and forwards between Home and the general public continents (the mainland) hosted by LL and other continents that those hosts providers have SLAs with.

And LL is like Microsoft in this regard. All those privately hosted Continents that can access the Mainland are going to be on LL-powered servers. Or thats the plan anyways I think. And would be my plan if I owned LL =)

sorry...but to truly disable code junkies you'll need to remove the tab, capslock, shift, alt, underscore, and most of the punctuation keys as well. taking away the mouse is probably a must to (I can rearrange my keys and/or pull up the virtual keyboard with the left mouse button)...

on second thought just remove the mouse and keyboard and epoxy the usb and ps2 ports (although sadly I could still run my system then, BT and remote logon FTW)

I couldn't agree more. This is one of the reasons that I find the BM model intriguing. Basically, you would say something like the following:

a) 200 concurrent avatars in my City
b) 1500 scripts
c) 18,000 1024x1024 and 32,000 512x512 textures

How much is that please?

If you like the price, and proceed, you will get all of the above, and no lag.

If BM really can deliver this I will be impressed indeed. The graphics are already a generation ahead, and if they can conquer SL's biggest bugbear, lag, then they could be onto a real winner.

Rock

Google did it already its called sketchup

http://sketchup.google.com/intl/it/

and thee is an importer exporter already for the crysis SDK , so I Guess there is or will be for BM SDK too..

That being the case why were Lindens so thrilled not so long back to be promoting 'experiments' in 'inter-world jumps ??'

I guess they don't see OpenSim as a competitor.