At 10:21 PM 11/11/2000 -0500, Jeff Sonstein wrote:
>not technically "peer to peer"
>but IMHO def the right idea
>[and somewhat where have been headed
> with the next-alpha rewrite]
Hmmm... I didn't include all my thoughts on this... I am still trying to
get them properly in order, but what I was trying to work out would mean
that even if the web sites are down, people could still meet in the worlds
that are sitting in the caches on their computers. But I don't know how to
solve getting the IP addresses without some intermediary. In my idea at the
moment the web pages are really only used as holders of the meeting IP
address lists. The geometry doesn't actually need to be on the web at
all... but I didn't follow up on this in my last post properly.
It would actually to individual to individual... but I'm probably misusing
the technical term :-)
> > Imagine a VNet universe where many worlds join up into a larger single
> > world. You could walk seamlessly from one world into another -- they would
> > look like one large world. A distributed VNet universe would live on many
> > machines at once, just like the web. Different parts would live on the web
> > pages of the various owners of worlds. The owners would choose what other
> > worlds they wanted their worlds to link up with, just as web pages link to
> > other web pages as their owners wish. (Of course there would be no
> > requirement to link worlds together if their owners wanted them to be
> > separate, but the facility would be there if desired.)
>
>the direction I have been thinking in
>is having the distributed or integrated servers
>share a database backend...
>that way they can share
>username/password
>default avatar
Excellent. That list of database improvements will be great. What I was
thinking is for the servers/databases to reside on the users' machines.
That way they are truly distributed.
>the idea I have been mulling over
>is to add a "teleport" node/PROTO
>which causes the server you are currently logged into
>[call it "foo"]
>to [try to] pass control over to the new server
>[call it "bar"]
>
>given that we continue using an applet
>[java in a web browser conext]
>and given the java security model
>[an applet can only open a socket
> back to the machine from which it was served]
>this would mean that
>
>a) foo would need to act as a pass-through
> to get/put messages between the client and bar
> [foo becomes a middleware layer
> between the client and bar]
>
>b) contrary to the current setup
> [currently the server knows nothing
> about the scene being used]
> any given server would need to
> have a sense of what wrl [URL] it "owns"
> so it can pass the replacement scene along to
> the new client through the middleware/mediator server
This is where I stumble around in the dark. My understanding of Java's
security limitations is incomplete.
Is it helped if the java applet for the server is running locally on your
machine? The applet would "own" all the worlds in the user's cache, and
would only need to handle packets of position/orientation/chat/action/etc
type. It need not care anything about those. The only time world geometry
gets saved on your machine is when your cache models get updated.
>"the plan" is to finish up the next server-alpha re-write
>over the quarter break
>finish adding a DB backend
>and thus persistent username/password
>and persistent default-avatar by username
>and last-known-location by username
>[location at next logon == location at last logoff]
>and message-object pool [to increase server speed]
mouth waters copiously :-)
>the last server-alpha just added:
>upgrade server code to JDK 1.1.x
>add code packaging
>and some code cleanup...
>it is currently running at
>http://mercury.it.rit.edu/~jeffs/vnet/
>and has been "banged on" some
>
>thoughts/reactions??
Cool. I'll have a look.
Just now I had better get back to work. :-)
Thanks Jeff,
- Miriam
How I wish I could enumerate PI easily
3. 1 4 1 5 9 2 6
---------=---------=---------=---------=---------=---------=------
http://werple.net.au/~miriam
http://web.access.net.au/miriam
http://ariadne.iz.net/~miriam
Virtual Reality Association http://www.vr.org.au
AWABA - free kids' world http://www.awaba.com
