[Opensim-dev] Thoughts....

Wed Mar 5 18:40:45 UTC 2008

Yes and then thats exactly what Diva said, that you can't know people are sticking to your standards. So all you are doing is creating a TOS and saying a set of standards have to be kept. Which is possible and there is nothing wrong with, just its not a technical thing. 

But anyway I wasn't talking about games in particular. I was trying to say OpenSim is not about implementing a single way of doing anything. The goal of opensim is not the global metaverse where everything is linked in one standard way. 

As Stefan said earlier we think more of something like the current web, with yes the ability to have links between things. But one top level standard/protocol isn't enforced. Only a "low" level protocol is really common (http), then lots of things can and have been built on top of it. OpenSim is about people taking it and building the applications they want on top of it. I

Todd Adams <ta2025 at gmail.com> wrote: You are making it much more complicated than it needs to be.  RPG's do this all the time,  You can create a set of agreed on standards for registerd item profile.  and then use that profile to allow/disallow items into the grid.  Pretty simple.

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 1:24 PM, Michael Wright <michaelwri22 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
 While I agree with Diva general comments...that in the near future you aren't going to see anything that can tell a Star ship enterprise from a horse carriage.

I don't actually think it needs to be a case of trusted accounts only. I think there can be a "you can't bring anything with you to this game/region, everything will be provided by the game/region". While these ideas of "global avatars" and "global inventory" are all well and good, they don't fit every case. Sometimes a application might want to be isolated, it might want to give a fixed set of avatars and clothes and inventory out to the users in that application. And only allow those to be used.

 I can think of a lot of cases of such applications. And a lot where there should be no avatar or inventory at all; like 3d data visualisation. As has been said repeatedly before, OpenSim is not about one single way fits all. Its about letting people take it and do what they want. Most of my interests are  in these other uses. 

Diva Canto <diva at metaverseink.com> wrote:

         Todd,

 You're expecting too much from technology. What you are saying is 100 times harder to do (close to impossible, really) than encrypting things so that only authorized people can see them. There is no way that one can automatically distinguish Star Trek's Enterprise from a horse carriage. Meta-info like name and description is unreliable, because one can name a carriage "Star Trek Enterprise". What you are asking for goes into the field of computer vision, one that is still in its early infancy.

 Negotiations like that must be done at some other level. Good old human communication, over a simple Access Control List facility, can take you 99.99% of the way. So if you want to  enforce the theme of your role-playing virtual world, either close it down so that only your trusted friends can enter, or have it open under a ToS that explains the rules of the game and the consequences of breaking them ("you must be 18 years old or older" etc :-). Note that you will have the freedom to write a ToS that is very specific to your role-playing world, not the generic one that LL has. You can make it as restrictive as you want. Enforcing it is another issue altogether... So if you really really don't want to be bothered by mood-breaking off topic avatars, ever, close things down, make your world accessible only to the people you trust.

 OpenSim is trying to figure out how to support surfing of avatars among grids, because that is something that lots of people want for conducting real business and outreach in virtual worlds; but, like on the web, that kind of openness stops in sites/grids that have an Access Control in place. The option of closing  things down to authorized accounts is not only a well-practiced concept on the internet, but one that OpenSim supports at the very core.

 I must say, though, that I don't see any connection between the concrete thing that you said and education, except, perhaps, the Police Academy :-)

 On a technical note, the Inventory is harmless. All assets in Inventory are sitting nicely on some hard disk, doing absolutely nothing. It's only when people attach them or rez them that they may become a problem -- these actions move the objects from the disk where they are sitting to the memory of the server, where everyone can see them and where they can run scripts, if allowed. 

 Diva / Crista 

 Todd Adams wrote: @ Cristina

 Along the lines of permissions between grids...

 There are people who are going to want to set up specialty  grids for role-play.  If they are creating a fantasy medieval world, they sure do not want people bringing in the latest CCC spaceship or BFG 2000 particle beam weapon into that world.  Maybe it should just be flagged so its grayed out in inventory until arriving at a world the item is compatible with.  On the flipside, people role-playing a Star Trek universe are not going to appreciate newcomers arriving with a +6 Vorpal Broadsword...

 Beyond allowing/disallowing,  certain inventory items could be embargoed or taxed in the local currency.  A flexible enough system would be an excellent learning tool for college and high school economic classes.

   On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 3:04 AM, dr scofield <DrScofield at xyzzyxyzzy.net> wrote:
         Cristina Videira Lopes wrote:                          Burnman,

       Technically your comments are off, as Michael already pointed out. They are so off that I think they are directed at the Open Sourced LL viewer,  i.e. at the ability for clients to get complete information about the objects inworld to the point of being able to store them locally and to replicate them. Note that this has nothing to do with OpenSim, strictly speaking. But let me comment on that.

 [...]       

        While the solution is technically feasible, what sense would it make to go around the world seeing garbage everywhere?? Plus anyone who wanted to see the decrypted objects would have to use an extended version of the LL viewer, one that does decryption. Not to mention the added performance overhead. 
 Again, I doubt massive adoption, but this could definitely be done, technically.

      completely agree with that. the point of a virtual world is that you *can see the virtual world* --- again, this is the core fallacy of DRM: you want keep your content a secret but at the same you need to give your customers access to the content otherwise why would they pay for it???

 let face facts (and i'm  repeating arguments others and i have made, i know):

   clients will have to be told about the shape and texture of virtual world objects --- *otherwise they won't be able to render it*       
    scripts can be kept on server, clients don't get access to them (unless you own the object or share it)       
   in a future interconnected grid of grid (let's call that a virtual universe), you could add "permissions" that let you specify to which grids an object may be exported, that way you could say, i trust the LL grid, i don't trust dr scofield's grid because, oh, i don't know, she doesn't agree with me on DRM and VW ;-)      
 that last approach will have consequences for your customers though: they won't be able to take the objects they bought from you with them to dr scofield's grid. some won't care, some won't like it --- and probably not be return customers. but that then is something you as a content provider have to come to terms  with.     

     cheers,
     dr scofield

-- 
dr dirk husemann, mathmatics and computer science, ibm zurich research lab
SL: dr scofield ---- drscofield at xyzzyxyzzy.net ---- http://xyzzyxyzzy.net/

RL: hud at zurich.ibm.com - +41 44 724 8573 - http://www.zurich.ibm.com/~hud/

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