And so says Sergey Izvoztchikov on 31/03/06 23:12... > I was talking more about difference in users base, actually. > Any ideas why SL users base is growing much faster than > VOS's ? My goal is more about finding out what VOS is missing > at the moment compare to SL, to be able to acquire more users > and developers. I'm not trying to play down importance and cool > features of VOS or challenge you guys. Just trying to help with > directions and find out what's missing in VOS now.
Well, now you're talking :-) What follows is IMO, and you may feel free to weight it less than you would weight something from Peter or Reed. And of course it's not really a comparison to SL, because I've never seen it, and I don't see any reason to take a look (non-Free Software is not software, and a single-purpose virtual world is not something that rings me as interesting). So this is my take: - First of all, VOS has no marketing dept. We place no ads. - There are a few missing features that are important for us, but overall, it's quite usable right now as a multi-user, virtual reality chat environment. This is mostly documented on http://interreality.org/cgi-bin/moinwiki/moin.cgi/VosRoadMap and on Bugzilla. The main things I believe we need, technically: * building is troublesome. Peter fixed this for VOS proper, but Ter'angreal (vos-browser) still sucks; I believe he's still working on it. Much of the blame lies with CrystalSpace, and to a lesser extent, wxWidgets. Either building must be *much* easier, or we must have binaries for every imaginable platform. Or both. (As a measure, myself, an enthusiastic VOS developer, currently don't have a working Ter'angreal.) * We need portals/hypercards/whatever to navigate between worlds. This is the big differential that makes VOS a "3d web". (From the Roadmap, it seems there is a simple form of links working now?) * I believe we need a better persistence framework, so that people can feel comfortable putting interesting, dynamic (mutable) content up online. I'll be tackling this one first thing after the .23 release. * there isn't anything that resembles bots. A basic barkeeper, a basic "npc" that roams around and does nothing useful (or maybe listens to chat and responds to keyphrases) would be cool. * sound, absolutely, how could I forget that. We need sound. * We need a way to display GUI elements and specially text, to enable people to build more interesting content. which brings us to... - mostly, we need content, lots of content. This falls into two categories IMO: * nicer chatrooms (as in, nicer than a flat square floating in the middle of nowhere with three coloured blocks on it), interlinked, so that you'd actually feel compelled to chat from there; worlds that make the best use of the features we already have. (Rendering of places from real life, history, or fiction would be specially cool.) * interesting dynamic worlds; if the previous item is "cool but static websites", this one is the web applications that make the web really useful. Here, the content author will most likely stumble on missing features (like there being no convenient way to display text right now), but that is actually a good thing, because it would drive development with real-life use cases. Of course, in this stage, it would be better if such content authors were also developers. One possible, if "cheap", approach for interactive content, in the initial stage, is to just bridge it from the web. Wikipedia strikes me as easy. Another approach -- one I'm actually working on -- is go the other way around; keep interesting data in a VOS database, and be able to view it as a website. The current interreality.org does that. You could write your blog as a 3d world, and have hypervos or a "dumper" turn it into html. Nice-to-haves: - I'd be really happy about an XMPP (and maybe msn/icq) bridge; then I could dump gaim for ter'angreal, which would probably mean running it most of the time. - I wrote some design for an email bridge, and got sidetracked into other things (because it seemed to me email would be of limited use without those). I'll probably be going back to it once I have a sufficiently good GUI viewer (and better persistence). - Personally, if we had the manpower (which we don't), I'd be very happy if we had a second browser, based on something other than CS (I'd go with Ogre). Maybe I just grew weary of CS constantly breaking and never getting anywhere nearer 1.0 :-) best, Lalo Martins -- So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable. -- personal: http://www.laranja.org/ technical: http://lalo.revisioncontrol.net/ GNU: never give up freedom http://www.gnu.org/ _______________________________________________ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
