Sea of Memes Archive
September 2007
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10:25pm Saturday September 29, 2007 (link)
For practically my entire programming career, since the first time I played with a computer in 1971, I have been fascinated by computer games and computer graphics. Unfortunately, I've never been involved with a commercial project that involved either. At various times when I haven't had a job, I've taken stabs at doing something in that direction. And every time, after a few months, having only scratched the surface, I put it away again as an impractical waste of time.Now I'm on disability due to my health and bored out of my mind. I'm going to take another stab at this. It's either that, or create another character on World of Warcraft....
So what do I want to do?
Start with a virtual shared world like Second Life. The key thing for me is that users can add their own content, and nearly all of the world has been built by users.
However, I'd like to make the infrastructure peer-to-peer, so that it scales without adding additional central servers.
Adding new art in-world is key, but it's not really where I'd like to go. Second Life has a scripting language which players can use to define behavior of objects. I'd like to support a real programming language via a virtual machine. Players should be able to open a full range of applications and programming tools in world, and share development with other players.
Adding voice support would be nice.
Finally, there's the problem of viruses inside the world. If the world supports arbitrary programs, it has to do something about security, or else viruses could spread from objects to players, etc. and crash the world. I really regard the current model of computer security in Windows, Mac and Linux to be completely obsolete. I have some ideas along those lines that I want to explore.
Doing little demo programs that try to prove my point about security would be useless. The current approach is just too entrenched for anyone to change it even if I had a brilliant example of how it should be done. However, each new environment creates an opportunity for new approaches. A shared world oriented around software development would be that opportunity.
This is all of course impossible for one person, or even twenty. Perhaps I will find some variation or subset of the total project that's actually achievable.
The Downloads page has a couple of programs written during my previous attempts. The Overview section is currently empty, but will have design notes as I proceed.
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