If all you want is a programmable 3D doll house with a license more open than GPL, use OpenSimulator (BSD license) or Open Croquet (MIT license) or Croquet's successor Open Cobalt (MIT license). I do not consider the licensing issues on-topic for FoNC.
Open Croquet/Cobalt/Simulator make good toys. But certain aspects - object placement, for example - tend to be haphazard and serve primarily to hide and obfuscate. The impression I have from Open Croquet is that a bunch of smart people built it then determined, "No. This is neat, but it isn't what we want." I want a system I can live in. This means a focus on cooperative work, augmenting and orchestrating our own reality, security, programmability, liveness, distribution, consistency, scalability, and ad-hoc 'queries' and mashup presentations. Every artifact in the resulting world should reflect something external to the system - the state of a database, a robot, traffic. Artifacts should be automatically and predictably laid out in accordance with a query (i.e. a view) and the content of the objects themselves. Users and portals should be able to change views in ways that transform the layout and presentation, sort of like CSS. Gameplay can be something to model on top of this system - i.e. people can model simulators and keep 'artificial world' databases, and share them through views secured for gameplay purposes. I've designed several capability security patterns for secure interaction of avatars in a federated game world, while toying with the idea of multi-player interactive fictions. I would recommend Peter Wayner's 'Policing Online Games' which also covers the case of P2P worlds. I agree that contents should be separated from 'browser', and that decentralization is important. On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 9:18 AM, BGB <cr88...@gmail.com> wrote: > > well, granted, I wasn't thinking of a 3D engine as a "OS-like platform for > managing ones' files and emails", but more like if there were a > semi-unified, and freely available, platform for the development of 3D > worlds (say, if there were something sort of like "second-life" but not > owned by anyone, but more like an open-source platform). > > there would not be any centralized source or content-provider, and doesn't > mandate distributing both the engine and game contents as a single package > (common practice at this point). so, effectively, "a game" and "a mod" are > not all that different (potentially, they would be distributed as > "packages", sort of like is common with OS's like Linux). > > better yet if it allows both commercial and non-commercial usage (more like > a generic browser or OS), rather than mandating particular licensing terms > (GPL or similar would itself restrict freedom of usage). > > assuming the availability of freely-available content, then the barrier to > entry can also be likely much reduced, so that the "freedom of expression" > is more freely available to everyone (rather than having a presently very > large barrier to entry, in the form of a general lack of freely usable > contents, such as 3D models, "stock characters", sound-effects, artwork, > ...). > > also, ideally, content shouldn't be "pushed in ones' face" either, as is > generally the case in things like traditional MMOs, ... > > maybe also sort of like Valve's Source/Steam system, but also all > open-source. > > > but, what prompted this was partly this paper: > http://www.quaddicted.com/quake/Tronyn-QuakeTalk.pdf > > which led to some looking around and thinking, and then the original post > went over really badly... > > > granted, yes, even for all it has done, Quake has still fallen short, and > lacks much "common content" beyond its original (and still technically > proprietary) game data. most later open-source efforts have thus been very > fragmentary, still often have to recreate all their data from the ground up, > ... > > > but, granted, maybe none of this is really relevant here... > >
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