Second Life Passport System

Greetings all,

I just had an idea and I cannot find much on it in these forums. I was curious about what it would take or if it is even a good idea to setup some sort of SL Passport system. Here is what I was thinking:

1) Each sim would have a passport station. Or maybe each telehub would have a station that would cover all the sims in its coverage area (of course this has some issues with coverage gaps).

2) A user would "log in" to the station and if they have never been there, it could "stamp" their passport. If they have been there, they can query maybe when they were last there, as well as get a list of all the sims they have been to.

3) Also, a user could make his/her passport listing public, so other people could query them and see where they have been.

I think it would be neat, if only just so users could track where they have been or see how exploratory other users are. It would also not have to necessarily be LL-run. It could be like SLExchange where there are terminals nearly everywhere. However, this has that coverage issue.

Anyone have thoughts/comments/questions/flamings?

Marcus

I like the idea. Some thoughts:

1. there would probably be a generic template-based default stamp for sims - but sim residents or owners could also get together to design unique stamps for their sims
   
2. bikers (or other vehicle tourers) should be able to add the stamps to their jackets
   

sounds good, but i would only subscribe to this if it reduced lag/rez in time, god forbid something else would have to load...

Neat idea but as long as it isnt a mandatory requirement to visit a sim, then i have no qualms with that! Would be neat to add to our blogs to show where we been

Good idea. I was also thinking that any land owner could offer up their own stamps. So if I went to the NW portion of Sirius (where us crazy Jedi hang out) I could get a Jedi/New Holstice stamp from a terminal there. So a user would have a Sim portion of their passport as well as a specific location portion. The latter would be similar to "Picks" in an av's profile, but could be kept private.

Marcus

I was thinking it would be a query-based system and not an active/monitoring one. You would only get data if you a) get stamped or b) pull a query about yourself or another user.

What do you mean by "mandatory to visit a sim"? If you wanted to claim a sim on your passport, you would have to go there to get stamped. Also, if you go to a sim, it would not mean you'd "have to" get stamped. Actually, there could also be a "sign up" (with a fee maybe if this was privately run) to even get your passport.

hmmm a treasure hunt!!!

Ok, this is getting similar to Geocaching [1], which in my opinion is getting too overloaded with caches everywhere. In my town, there seem to be about 5-10 new ones every week. There are now 150+ in a 5-mile radius in this 100,000 population city. Ugh.

So maybe the hot-pick idea is bad. Perhaps leave it at just a sim-stamping passport. That would keep it simple and yet interesting. Now the customized stamps would of course still be there for sims that are privately owned.

MarcusM

[1] Geocaching: http://www.geocaching.com

You can tell Marcus supports the passport system quite a bit

slgeocaching.com check it out

Here's the problem though. Each time you enter a sim, there is a DB lookup to see if you have been to that sim before or not. This in turn requires the storing of every sim you have ever been to, and most likely the storage of every stamp that ever applied to all sims (unless you want the stamps to change in your passport when the sim stamp is altered).
The reading of the passport data would be required every single time you enter a new sim, and updates/inserts everytime you go somewhere you haven't been before. This is another way to kill the DB, not save it.

If you really want to store the places you have been to and have them viewable by others, use picks. If you only want to store the location, use landmarks. They're a lot more efficient.

This doesn't need to be a feature. Someone could create two scripted objects, the passport stations and the passports, and you could wear your passport and let people click it to see where you've been. Instead of simply listing the sim, it would list whatever the owner of each passport station configures it to say. Of course it would include the location. It wouldn't contribute any more to lag than any other interesting item for people to use, at clubs, malls, etc. For hem to show up at info hubs, LL would have to like the idea enough to set one out.

If you're really interested, offer a scripter some $L to create them and then offer them for free. Who knows, it just might be popular. Images of different nationality passports would be easy to come up with, by asking folks who want that nationality to take a pic and send it to you (or whoever takes responsibility for maintaining & distributing the objects).

If you want the passport station to have a distinctive look, you'd need to find a builder to make it, but I recommend simply a 1 prim shape with distinctive textures and floating text. Something easily recognized but unobtrusive.

LL is highly unlikely to add a feature like this, since it can be done without their help. Try cross posting in the "Products Wanted" section, or IM me ingame.

The problem would be trying to store an unkown amount of data.
You're limited to 16k / script, so even if you use those Mass Memory scripts there's still a maximum number of "stamps" you can keep track of.

It would be best to store all the information on an external server, which would also make it easier to have individual passport web pages, and also be a lot faster.

Doing it seperately from LL, you could run it through an external database. Probably better to store up say 100 stamps before emailing to the external server though, as busy stations would hit the limits on llHTTPRequest, and emails introduce a 25 second delay in scripts.

You can work around the 25 second email limit, but on busy stations it wouldn't be advisable due to the lag it would introduce. One email every 5 seconds would only require 5 additional scripts, one every second would need 25 additional scripts.

A not quite real time service should work OK, a real time service would be very tricky to implement.

I hope that resurrecting this dead thread doesn't mean we're going to resurrect the dead telehubs again.

If some of you guys are still willing to do this I have a server which we can use for storing the data. I've messed around with exchanging data between RL and SL quite effectively in the past.

If someone can build a stamping hub I can handle the scripting side of things...

Hmm, a better idea would be a "First Visit Telehub". It's like it, but the passports system can be: A) Done by gadgets and a website/web server and B) Won't be used i think by most people.

The First Visit Telehub idea is for first time visitors, to enter a welcome area that explains the rules there, and perhaps offer "New Visitor" stuff. It would be able to be configured for, perhaps, First Visit Only, First # Visits, or, First # Weeks.

-Smiles.