[sldev] Anyone aware of Vworlds or similar which can be run offline

Q Linden q at lindenlab.com
Wed Sep 26 06:34:09 PDT 2007


Hi, Elio.

A replicated virtual world? You'd be missing out on 99% of what makes SL 
(or any virtual world) useful -- namely, the community aspect. But there 
are use cases that support the model -- construction of new objects 
(which I doubt salespeople will be doing "live") and viewing of existing 
objects and spaces. The value, I guess, would be that people could 
create objects and leave them lying around for others to see.

I don't know of any single-user virtual environments that let users 
easily create objects in the world and share them -- it's one of the 
advantages of SL.

If the usage model is that someone in corporate creates modifications to 
the virtual world and the sales people just use it, and don't create 
content themselves, you could look into doing "mods" to a standard game 
engine like Half-Life or Quake 2. The content creation people would have 
to use the game tools and possibly a 3D modeling tool to build things, 
but you could then easily push out the mods to the salespeople.

If you're more concerned about, say, simply showing off designs or 
models in 3D, there are various 3D modeling tools of different levels of 
sophistication, and there are also free 3D object viewers available that 
will let you look at them. It depends a lot on exactly what you want to 
show (for example, do you have to walk "inside" the objects, as in 
houses, or is it enough to simply show the outside?).

If the client really wants to create text-based entities, then such a 
thing is better done with something like Lotus Notes (which was designed 
for just that scenario). You could make a blog or wiki behave that way 
by adding some sort of replication system to it.

If you give us more detail we can probably help you more.

Hope this helps.

    -- Q

Elio Maggini wrote:
> So I have a client who would like to do a small Vworld implementation to be
> run by sales reps with no access to the internet at the time of the sales
> call. They would then update local system at night by connecting to a
> central server.  Obviously SL does not do this, nor will it ever by what I
> see from working group architecture. And my brief research into the current
> other Vworlds show them all to need online connectivity as well.
>
> Is anyone aware of a system or method for achieving such a thing with other
> technologies?
>
> Or perhaps this could be a good talking point for the Architecture working
> group?
>   



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