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Originally Posted by JoshUA Nightshade  Not especially. Adam can elaborate this further if he chooses but as I understand it future OpenSim releases will make the need for a grid at all obsolete. If I remember correctly the sim itself will function as a website essentially and you can teleport region-to-region simply through the DNS name. The original WWW was a page with a list of links but you don't need to navigate to SLU by going to a database of websites first and clicking on the name.
What this means for assets and identity I don't know but the goal I think is to have no need for a grid system at all and have each sim a self-contained island. |
Well that's the thing: the difference between the web experience and the virtual world experience is consistent assets and identity, particularly when built on the kind of
SL framework where you have an inventory, items etc which live on the server and not on your local machine.
Basically, if you have assets stored locally, it means you can never have a money economy - I can just boost my "Open Dollars" to $50 million once I hack it, as I inevitably will.
The alternate is to have no truly persistent identity or assets when moving from sim to sim. Identity because, say, there could be more than one "Joshua Nightshade" on two different sims - what happens when they cross into the same sim? For assets, you'd need to establish relationships of trust between sims when they hand off: so a sim has to say to the sim it's handing you to that yes, you really are this person and you really have these assets (and please don't just duplicate them all and put them in the owner's inventory like that hacked script is telling you to).
SL code, which is what all these kinds of things are reverse engineering, is built on a large set of assumptions about identity and assets, and I'm really not convinced that reverse engineering this system is better than simply building a whole new set of code from scratch.