[vos-d] status and scheming

[Reed Hedges]

S Mattison wrote:

> By 'change the world', I mean, without going into an external 3d editor, I
> want to be able to move virtual objects around on the server in 
> realtime. Of
> course, if this functionality were built into the client, it would
> necessitate the need for 3d permissions, which I had called 'overlays' 
> in my
> design of 'the world'.
> 

Oh, ok.  In (Interreality's) VOS the idea is that the same Vobjects are 
"viewed" by all users together. So you just move the object directly. 
Anyone who happens to be viewing the object at the time gets an  update 
and sees the objects moving.

This is what "remote" and "local" objects are all about -- remote 
objects are proxies (or "views") accross the network to the local 
objects. If you edit a remote object, it sends a message to the local 
object to change, and that object sends an update notification to all 
the other remote objects, as well as any other remote things that are 
"listening" to that object.

You can't move or edit objects in the current version of TerAngreal but 
you used to be able to. Someday we'll get around to re-implementing 
that.  If you don't want other people to see changes like that you have 
to make a copy of the object that only you can see.  Or somehow suppress 
the updates from going out but there's no real way to do that I don't think.

> 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.
> 
> 
> So hypercards can link to any protocol? Bring up webpages by clicking on 3d
> objects? And how do I set the "Vobject's metatype"?
> 

Every Vobject has a set of strings which identify its types. Having a 
type can indicate that a Vobject supports some interface, which means 
that it has certain child objects, a certain message interface, or both 
(Or neither).

One such type is "misc:hypercard".  A Vobject with this type will have a 
  child called "misc:link". It's really just a general purpose layer of 
indirection. (Like a pointer in a programming language).   In the case 
of a 3D world, if the link is to another sector, then when the user 
activates the hypercard then they jump to that other sector.  There's 
currently no way of having, say, an http: link in the world really, but 
we could do it by having the "misc:link" object be a property containing 
that URL.

One thing someone could implement in TerAngreal is text objects in the 
world (or as targets of hypercards), that you can display in a popup 
window or a side-pane in Terangreal or something like that, which could 
be HTML with links etc.

> 
> Ah. I have a unique question now. Out of all of the VOS worlds/servers that
> have existed, how many of them are currently online?

There have only ever been relatively small worlds in the past. Right now 
there are two small testing worlds online I think.  Plus the website is 
a VOS site.

Nobody has really got around yet to making any nontrivial worlds that 
actually are nice places to explore.  We keep hoping that someone with 
actual 3D modeling skills finds the project and gives it a try but it 
hasn't happened yet...

Reed