Web Textures

What would be neat is if we had a "net texture" object, which works like a normal texture except you set a URL, and the SL servers download the image from the web instead of you uploading it from your client. Obviously it will still need to cost at least L$10, but a little extra would probably be worth the added feature.

Once you have set the URL for the texture, the server would then periodically check the URL for an update, say with the option to have it check every 5m, 15m, 30m, 1h, 3h, 8h, 12h or 24h.

The images would be downloaded and cached on SL's servers as a normal texture internally (with a fixed UUID), so your client does not fetch the texture from the web directly.

To prevent loading the servers with too many dynamic images, and to keep everyone from *always* selecting the fastest update interval, perhaps a L$1 per update check should be incurred.

Of course this means you'd be paying anywhere between L$1 and L$1,440 per day depending on how often you request the servers to check for updates.

This would probably be a nightmare to implement, but figured I'd post anyway since I was thinking of it, and since I haven't posted a Feature Suggestion in a while. =)

This would open a potential door for griefing and/or PG-sim abuse.

Say I have an image of a car that updates at the most frequent interval. Once a day, at a random time, it replaces the image for one interval with some really nasty pr0n, or really grotesque rotten.com style image.

It would be difficult, if not impossible for the Lindens to find the proof they need to suspend/ban someone for abuse. Some poor Linden would have to sit there for 24 hours watching the sign. Or, they'd have to permanently store a copy of the image every time it's downloaded.

Or I could file an abuse report complete with screenshot of said texture.

Wow, this is a cool idea! It would be great to connect to a webcam and be able to go to SL windows on the world or mars probe images or just seeing faces of people online. I hope they finda way to make it work.

Don't forget you'd be leaching these sites' bandwidth everytime you downloaded an image from them. I'll leave copyright issues as an exercise for the reader.

I like this idea.

What about paying L$10 a day for every day you have the object pulling the images?

As for bandwith and copyright, bandwith wouldn't be that much of an issue if its not constantly updating, and since it loads into SL's cache it wouldn't need to swamp the bandwith from the website for each person. And copyright, this wouldn't be any more of a problem than we currently have, same with abuse.

AH right!!! That is the idea I keep forgetting about!!!

I don't really like the net-texture idea because it would use Linend's resources to bring a web page to you. And this round about way uses more resources than would be practicle. And Julian brought up a great point regaurding copyrites.

However, a llHyperlink() or llWebLink() that send's a URL to the user's web browser would be more effective. and it wouldn't need to cost any L$ or cause lag for the servers.

Even better would be to incorporate a World Wide Web browser into the second life client, so that we could build web windows, monitors, etc. This wouldn't use any server resources and all web access is between the client and the target website. I would expect to see a feature like this in future versions of SL just for it to remain the most cutting edge world around. But just on the *very* slight chance that the brilliant team of seinior devs, professors, and inovators havn't throught of this idea yet, well there it is.

This has the potential to be used for a DDoS of a web site: Just set up a system to llHyperlink every online user, or give a notecard with an embedded webtexture to everyone, and you could take down a small website.

But then the creator/owner of that object would have their account canceled at the least and the police at their door at the most.

You could also set a time delay on it if you want to be really paranoid.

True, good point. DDoS people tend to prefer anonymity (SP?). I don't think they would use SL for this, after all, their credit card number, and IP address is logged.

Also, obviousely the website would not show up unless the object was in your close range view, and hyperlinks wouldn't activate unless an event triggered it, like a llListen() or ()TouchStart. And even then we could require permission to launch a website.

Besides I'd love to catch those basterds who set up DDoS attacks anyway. I wish we had public naked flogging in the United States. (Ohh, *writes down idea for S&M club*)