Hyperlandscape

A thought has occurred to me over that past few days, especially after playing with the realXtend version of the Opensim server and browser, sorry, client software. We're rapidly reaching a point of being able to download fully functional sim software to run on our home PCs, seriously. We'll be able to build out whole sims then attach those environments to open, or account-based, grids on demand. In other words, not only will our clients be able to hop our accounts from sim to sim, we'll be able to hop our sims from grid to grid. We can not just show up for the party with our av and allowable inventory, but with our whole sim attached to the landmass. What an entrance!

This turns the world wide grid model into more of a hypercube landscape than a static planet of contiguous landmasses separated by ethereal oceans. A grid is, after all, no more than sets of sim location and user login records on a space server. There's no physical infrastructure associated with it beyond the database machine. Adding or deleting a sim is as simple as adding or deleting a user account. So I'm wondering if the developers will adhere to the traditional model and force us to log into grids to see who's attached at the time, or will there be a clearing mechanism that'll allow us to just log into a sim, using it's own static IP, without regard to the space server it's registered with at the time. Of course, if we've no account on that grid, we'll not be able to leave the sim.

The idea of being able to fly my four-sim spaceship to a grid and park it there for the duration of an event, then fly it back to it's "home" grid is quite compelling don't you think. My friends will be able to log in either way because they'll have an account with me, or my sim is publicly available. Their access to the current grid will simply be limited according to their accounts on those servers. But my thinking stemmed from wondering what these new grids would look like from a virtual nature perspective. Any type of landscape might be "parked" next to any other, and might change tomorrow or next week or next year. Perhaps the social grids will designate some permanent Mainland area, as Linden Lab has done with Second Life, and let the visiting sims dock around the "edges." This might be a bold shift in our concept of virtual geography. If the developers are brave enough to provide the functionality.