oh one other thing that I was thinking about the other day ... I don't know if you are familiar with the "universe simulator" called Celestia? (http://www.shatters.net/celestia/) It's been around for quite some time. It is quite a different breed of simulator than Opensim or RealXtend; it gives you a read-only experience. You cannot interact with it. But it does very well what it needs to do: very smooth rendering of a 3D space. It can handle multi- res textures (I think at least it can) and has no problem displaying objects from either up close (say, 100 km) or millions of light-years away. You can actually fly to other stars; it puts no relativistic limit on velocity. And it also supports customised objects (like for people to build Star Wars spaceships with :) ) and has a scripting engine.
I think it's a great app. I have used it to give lectures more than once. Anyhow: I was thinking how great it would be if those two technologies - RealXtend / Opensim and Celestia - would merge. That would give you the possibility to create not just a simulated patch of land, but a whole virtual universe. I don't think that the size of the internal representation - I mean as in "how complex in size and in computational terms" - would necessarily be astronomical .. it would largely be determined by the overall information content. And whether the next sim is adjacent or a dozen light years away is not all that relevant for that information content: just need to add a lot of empty space in between (plus, admittedly, some stars etc.). I mean: if you'de have a planet that would have a couple of regular- sized sims on it and the rest would be modeled very sketchy - that would hardly be larger or more difficult to handle as the OSGrid of today. But it would add hugely to the sense of the whole thing being a coherent space. And even more so if there would be other planets. But ok, that's just an idea based on my global understanding of how it might work. I must admit that I have never actually worked on any simulator code, so I might overlook something very important :) I'm curious if someone else has thought of this, or what you think of it? -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org
