Ooops... just realised I didn't CC this to the list.
At 11:57 AM 03/07/2000 -0400, Jeff Sonstein wrote:
Steve wrote:
>> 1) The default state of an Avatar is as a Wizard [...]
>
>actually
>that would be "the default state of a user"
>as the avatar itself has no "rights" attached to it
>but rather the user does
>
>my orig thinking was that the default should be
>an ordinary "citizen"
In ActiveWorlds they have a caste society with different levels of user
privelege. In my experience in managing Awaba (a world for kids) it only
serves to generate jealousy and envy -- these seem to simply waste time and
effort.
I feel fairly strongly that we should have only levels of control necessary
for security: the owner of a world, and the owner of certain objects. I
don't see that any other levels are necessary. The owner of a world can
build in his or her world, and open it up to others to build there if
desired. The owner of objects can move or delete those objects, but no-one
else (except the owner of that world) can. This makes it possible to avoid
vandalism and accumulation of junk objects. Anybody can make their own
world (like anybody can make their own web page), and anybody can bring
objects into a world, but only the world owner can decide whether objects
are allowed to accumulate in that world. Only the owner of an object can
alter an object. It would be nice to be able to confer these ownerships
upon others, so that a world could be owned by a group, and games of catch
could use a ball with open ownership.
>my orig idea was that
>each VNet2 server might support multiple linked WRLs
>(like the "rooms" in a text-based MUD)
>and maybe adding a "teleport" node
>but that each user in a VNet2 DB
>would have only one user-power level
>for all the WRLs controlled by that server...
Yeys! Yes! Yes! Multiple linked wrls!
Wouldn't it be great if many people had wrls (on different machines) which
were adjacent to each other as a patchwork quilt countryside, so you could
walk from one wrl to another by walking off the edge of one onto the next.
These wrls would be part of a cooperative country and so would have limited
edges. For unlimited wrls we would need the teleport booths Jeff mentions.
The idea of having all these wrls easily accessible from one another and
supported on multiple machines is getting very close to the ideal of 3d
cyberspace. Very exciting.
>> 2) An Odd Function: Be able to load new HTML frames in the browsers of
>> VNet clients ( say your viewing VNet is in one frame - the other is blank.
>> And I could control your blank frame via VNet ) - Is this
>> possible?
>
>this functionality is already present within the Anchor node...
>go to the Town Square at ariadne [single- or multi-user]
>and try clicking on one of the books in the Library
Actually there seems to be no easy way to change or interrogate an html
page from inside VRML at present. I would love that functionality too. It
is something that seems to me to be a glaring omission from the VRML spec.
>> 3) Have it done as planned by Oct 4 so we can show it off at Georgia Tech
>
>I *hope* to have it done by then...
>;^}
heheheh :-)
Best wishes,
- Miriam
How I wish I could enumerate PI easily
3. 1 4 1 5 9 2 6
---------=---------=---------=---------=---------=---------=------
http://werple.net.au/~miriam
Virtual Reality Association http://www.vr.org.au
AWABA - free kids' world http://www.awaba.com
