03-07-2007 21:34
Previous discussions agree that home-based sims (open-source servers) will have limited value if they don't have some connection to the Linden grid. But what form will or should that connection take?

I've been envisioning my own little region that only a whitelist of people can access directly, by logging in to that location from their client. All other travel between sims would take place via a gateway connecting the landing point in my home region and my land on the mainland. Folks have said previously that people wouldn't want to visit just any old server they don't trust. It seems far more important to me that (1) I don't want just any random person wandering into my private world, and (2) I especially don't want just any random machine connecting to mine. I don't want any data traffic at all that isn't with either a Linden machine or with one owned by someone I know well enough to trust. Using mainland "telehubs" (I'm too young to know exactly what the old telehubs did) would provide a perfect entry point, where you can set up rules-and-info givers, introduce people to the private world without risk to you or them, and allow you to control who enters. (And in my ideal world, it also acts as a backup home point for folks whose actual home is not on the Linden grid.)

For communications, well, enough people want IMs even when they're not on the grid now, I suppose that should be in there, but it wouldn't mean much to me. I'd rather have options that let me set when and how long there's an open connection to the main grid. Some would probably set theirs for 24/7; I'd rather have it set for, say, 5 minutes every hour or every 3 hours, with an automatic open whenever someone wants to travel from the home region to the main grid (but not vice versa). I'd like to see IMs, notices, etc. stay in a pending queue and have an automatic "maildrop" run whenever the connection window opens. But I'm envisioning that while thinking that my av would be in the home region more often that not. Most avs would spend more time traveling around, and since "mail" goes directly to the avs, not to their home locations, how would something like that work?

For the asset server -- would it be possible to have multiple asset servers? So that some things can be stored on your hard drive and you'd always have them, others stored on the Linden asset server so that you have them only when the connection is open, and still others stored on the private server? So that, for instance, you can keep your 5000 flexi dresses in your home server inventory, have the client automatically copy the one you're wearing to your hard drive/client cache so it goes with you wherever, but when you move from the private server to the main grid, _only_ the one you're wearing goes with you and the grid doesn't have to worry about everything else in your closet. Or, for instance, roleplaying sims could keep a library of all their notecards and the freebie equipment needed for their stats system; when someone connects to that sim, they'd have access to the library but wouldn't need to keep their own copy of everything.

I'm just theorizing here, and don't have enough technical knowledge to know how feasible any of this is. Thoughts and opinions?