--
Jeff Sonstein
Assistant Professor of Information Technology
Rochester Institute of Technology
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http://ariadne.iz.net/
http://www.it.rit.edu/~jxs/
http://ariadne.iz.net/~jeffs/jeffs.asc
=============================================
there are no bugs
there are just undocumented features
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From: "John A. Stewart" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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To: Miriam English <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Subject: Re: distributed multi-user
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Hi Miriam;
(This is 'cc'd to JeffS, as I don't know if this site's return
address is correct to put me on the list)
What I have done is to "multicast" vnet. This means that I don't
have a server; every person in vnet is peer to peer. It is fast,
although not entirely reliable; and it scales fairly well.
My goal was to put our audio/video conferences on VR; thus I have
a design goal of 15-20 people. I don't have a login screen or
anything like that; in essence, you just start, and there you are!
The Audio is fairly neat; rather than the textual chat window, you
simply walk up to (a group of) peopl(e), and start in. The same
idea will work with any media; want to watch a tv screen in a
store window? walk up to the window...
In terms of breaking it up into different worlds; I have put the
multicast addresses in the .wrl file, so that if you walk through
a "portal", you are communicating on a different set of addresses.
Now the funish part; I have spent quite a bit of time getting my
linux VRML viewer up to snuff; it is, and as of last week I have
put my attention back into the VNettish side of things. Right now,
for instance, I don't send around state information, so people's
avatars, names, etc, are not passed around.
I have some stuff in the links section of my web page; it does not
address quite a few of your concerns, but it does attack some of
them.
All my VNettish stuff is written in Java, so it should be portable
to other platforms.
John Stewart
http://www.crc.ca/FreeWRL
> Here are just a bunch of thoughts I have been having on the subject of VNet
> possibly becoming distributed, or peer-to-peer, VR. That is, not having any
> one central server -- using a distributed system of interconnected servers
> like the web does...
