[vos-d] status and scheming

[Karsten Otto]

Am 04.12.2006 um 17:19 schrieb S Mattison:
> The problem here is you would need to have a notifier when people  
> were in your world, so you could port there and greet them. This  
> would require that your client also be a server, or that the server  
> would not be capable of running exclusively from the client... How  
> many times have I logged into the interreality world, to find  
> nobody there (or some random dev idling into seclusion)... However,  
> if the server were its own client, the host  (or the host's bot)  
> would always be online, and if there were some sort of sound or  
> messenger-like notification telling them that someone logged in,  
> there would be a more likely chance of an encounter.
>
I am not sure this issue needs to be solved via architecture design -  
some simple application extension would probably suffice. You could  
get the notification you mention simply by registering a listener to  
the sector, so you get a notification whenever a new vobject joins  
the world, and can play a jingle or whatever. This works regardless  
of whether the sector is hosted on some "server" or on your own  
machine. Or do I miss the point here?

> Secondly, the thought becomes; How do I change my own world from  
> the default? In the operating system idea, I had a thing called  
> 'overlays'. Your 'host' overlay would be an interactive area where  
> other people would arrive when they logged (or were invited) into  
> your server. Other overlays existed for the desktop and  
> applications... But it would be fairly simple to switch to Host  
> Overlay and change around the world, even when people were in it,  
> much in the fashion that Activeworlds uses.
>
Ok, I *know* I missed the point here. What do you mean by "change my  
own world from the default"? Specifically, what is this "default" you  
mention? Then, what exactly is an "overlay", and what can I do with  
it once I get one?

> 3d linking has always been an oddity, however. How do you  
> distinguish any object from it's linkable counterpart? You can't  
> underline linked objects. Outline maybe? or mouseovers highlight  
> them? Maybe a bounding box appears?
>
The way it works at the moment is, some Vobject *is* a hyperlink,  
with its own representation etc.
This Vobject happens to have the metatype misc:hypercard and a  
misc:link property child specifying some URL (In the start world,  
this is vip://interreality.org/world). So there really is no  
"counterpart" to the link object.  You detect that something is a  
link by seeing the misc:hypercard type, from a programming/agent  
point of view. For a human user, this is not as obvious. You get a  
confimation dialog when you click the Vobject's visual  
representation, but that does not help you to *find* such links in  
the first place. IIRC, the original "Snow Crash" hypercard has a  
standard icon (a business card), so human users could recognize them.  
VOS linking obviously is  much more powerful than that, so it really  
should be the job of the Ter'angreal browser to visualize hypercards  
in some way.

Regards,
Karsten