Multiuser VRML alternatives to Blaxxun

Sleepy

Like the tame subject line?! ....seems less interesting somehow, doesn't it? Wink

.......

Given Blaxxun's inability to keep their content online (it's been offline more than 30% so far this year - which is pretty bad by any measure), I'm wondering what alternatives folks know about for 'mutli-userizing' VRML.

There is "ABNet" available at VRMLWorlds.net, which is free and works pretty well. I've only crashed there once - which is a dramatic improvement over Blaxxun, the ABNet server is hosted there for free, and you can download the client and/or server for free.

Anyone know of other alternatives?

alain · officer Joined: 16 May 2005 Posts: 87

arrrrrrrrrr Sleepy

http://closed.forumactif.com/3D-chats-h1.html

fabricator and Peter are here to tell more

Sleepy · Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 11:38 pm Post subject:

Seems to work well ... nice.

Sleepy · Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 8:25 pm Post subject:

If your interested, the following is what I've got bookmarked for multi-user VRML:

- Blaxxun
http://developer.blaxxun.com/vrml/home/ccpro.htm

- VP3D Chat
http://www.vrmlworlds.com/software/vp3d_chat/

- ABnet Client
http://vrmlworld.net/

The last two (VP3D and ABnet) appear to work very well. Unlike Blaxxun, ABnet doesn't crash all the time. I haven't spent enought time in VP3D to know if it crashes regularly like Blaxxun.

Would be nice to see folks use them more!

If anyone knows of any other multi-user VRML sites, please let me know.

alain · officer Joined: 16 May 2005 Posts: 87

re arrrrrrrrr LOL

did you scrolled down on the link I gave ?? LOL

you have too

http://3dchat.3d-check.com/

from Peter ....

btw , the prob , yes , is to get ppl on all these alternative chats ,
and nobody seems to have a solution for thzt Sad

may be there is none ? Sad

Pet(er) · midshipman Joined: 24 Jul 2005 Posts: 71 Location: germany

The free vrml chat community (the reds? the free? the poor?) is loosing density of population rapidly ...

I don't feel like people are finding a haunting in the free alternatives. Only a few, from time to time, fall into those servers and find just emptyness and nothing really new to do.

Probably not an experience inviting for comming back.

I would very much welcome a common list of worlds and chatters for as much alternative chat servers as possible, that could be embedded in as much web-pages as possible as a compact iframe.

My experience, during the first blaxx-out of 2007, was that only such a common list could avoid or stop the "virtual diaspora" of independent 3d-chatters.

Omind is showcasing several of such lists on www.spafon.com for example, but it would be pretty nice if we could unify this idea and create a layout compact enough for as many sites as possible.

The only ideas comming into my mind regarding that are :

It would probably need a client side system and software-check for avoiding frustration due to missing components or wrong browser/viewer combinations, depending on what server is managing the linked chat-world.

Only opened worlds should be displayed on list, and number of chatters or their nicknames.

May be a link to a worlds-list of each server would be good.

Each server would need to write onto a common data base hosted by the common list holder. I don't know how far this is possible and secure.

Could we agree something like that?

Another 'urgent' thing, in my oppinion :

There are plenty of world-directories linking to blaxxun framesets. That means : If one day the blaxxun server shuts down forever, we will be obliged to crawl inside contact.html and bxx files for rescuing those jewels of vrml.

Some of those worlds are hosted by people not very much related to the community anymore.

May be we could promote on several boards some sort of vrml files list, to be completed by the ancient builders, allowing to showcase their work in alternative 3d-chat systems.

Regards

Peter

rickta59 · Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 2:30 am Post subject:

http://www.web3d.org/x3d/publiclists/vrml_list_archives/0611/msg00039.html

hermetic · admiral Joined: 16 Mar 2005 Posts: 184

as I still like the idea Kick had years ago I think its ok to repost the
text in detail as url given above:

************************************
A world registry, now there is a great idea. Smile

When I looked at the state of VNet in 2001, I concluded
that the reason it never took off is that people had no
way to find online servers that had users in them.
That is why I came up with VNet+ and ABNet. I started a
site called vrmlworld.net with the sole purpose of being
a registry/gateway for VRML/X3D multi-user worlds.

My idea was simple. When a vrmlworld.net enabled
chat server starts up, have it send an HTTP request to
vrmlworld.net. A script on the server updates a database
that shows your chat server is online. When someone joins
your world, send another message to the server and update
the user count. When somone leaves a world, send another
message and decrement the user count. When your server
shutsdown, send a final message indicating your are
not available.

The idea is to have many worlds online, some dedicated,
some transient. By using HTTP messages as the
transport, the implementation could be added to any chat
server fairly easily. The other benefit is that instead of
having to have a huge dedicated chat server architecture,
there could be many chat servers hosted by many people
all sharing the bandwidth costs. It seemed like a simple way
to get a scaleable inexpensive meta-verse.

Why hasn't it taken off? Who knows?

Here was the protocol.

Register your chat server with vrmlworld.net, just send
me an email. I give each chat server a unique worldID
and password.

The HTTP request ABNet sends is very simple, the
a server startup message looks like:

http://vrmlworld.net/u.php?nWorldID=123&sUniqID=secret&nState=1&nUserCnt=0&zoneURL=http://someworld.com/foo.wrl

when someone joins a world it looks like this

http://vrmlworld.net/u.php?nWorldID=123&sUniqID=secret&nState=1&nUserCnt=1&zoneURL=http://someworld.com/foo.wrl

It is the responsibility of the chat server to keep a count
of the number of users in each chat zone.

In addition, to providing a way to tell the world your
status, there is a way to get the list of the worlds.

http://vrmlworld.net/s.php

That request dumps out the current list of online worlds
sorted by the world that has the most users online.

You can also get the list in XML format:

http://vrmlworld.net/s.php?output=XML

You could also get a list of all worlds regardless of
state just use -1

http://vrmlworld.net/s.php?output=XML&nState=-1

So, the idea has been around for a long time. Why hasn't
it taken off? No idea. Funny that all this has come up in
the last couple of days. I'm in the process of update the
code and database on my server to work slightly different.
If you have any ideas on what I should add let me know.

-rick

*****************************

and beside all, Alain, Peter: there is always a way to get people
inside alternatives, but sure one will leave if no one is there.
So why not calling steady meeting times a week on each system?
A time where users can be sure to meet others.
It would be the way to 'populate' things, it only needs some organisational talent and, yup, some time.

If Rick has the possibilities to run an open vrml/x3d worldlist, would be great, especial if its open message protocoll and not only works with abnet, but should make sure its not closed like
bxx one day.

Also some ideas Alain had to run a comm driven bxx server should be discussed, but be warned. To run a server is no
cheap bussiness, if you want it not to be up only few months!

alain · officer Joined: 16 May 2005 Posts: 87

I just added ABnet after reading rick , in my 3dchats page ,
( I had forgeten before , but btw it needs BScontact and I hate the stupid logo , so I deleted BS Sad

yes all these ideas are good ,

and I agree with a monthly or weekly meeting , a thing to try .....
( and not very expensive Smile

- except the energy to advertise about -

hermetic · admiral Joined: 16 Mar 2005 Posts: 184

given the 'shared' event system fab an me use and which is documented here in board (tutorials) and the 'protocol' rick showed, such a world list also could be a 3d world(!).

So one wants to build, lets say a city with buildings (the 3dchat servers online at moment) with description (anchor) who much people are inside?

Buildings could be provided by the different 3d chatservers, else used default models.
Also maybe possible to show somehow from far how much traffic
a server has at moment, maybe, lightened windows on building?

That way every user could go into a 3d world first and see building-gates to the different 3d chats. Would be a great contest for an experienced vrml/x3d coder like, fab, alain, erny, marco, rick, whoever?

Pet(er) · midshipman Joined: 24 Jul 2005 Posts: 71 Location: germany

Hi !

Hermetic, that's probably the best idea I've read in all these months, and the most challenging project for our "master builders".

Some really good portal worlds do already exist, but this portal would be fed by a "global" database of worlds and servers. We would be on our way to the "Metaverse", yes.

We should search for the most cross-compatible server for hosting this portal-world.

As n3dme only runs on Windows, M$IE & Blaxx or BS - and it's permanently throwing new bugs, lol ! - , and ABNet 'only' supports BS (why that, Rick ?) , I guess that Fab's VP3D, running on whatever Borwser and supporting BS, Blaxxun and Cortona (if not even more) should be our choice for it... or we could make it run on all servers.

Rick's world registry is a good starting point, but I did not find anything about that it was intended to work together with other chat-servers, not being ABNet. It also returns a large web-page, not very usable as inlined content for other web-pages and may be even less usable inside a vrml world.

So, another thing to be discussed, before the portal-world could be designed, is, what sort of data will be retreived from the world-list-server, and how are they reaching the portal-world.

Probably a modified cgi2vrml set would be the ideal vehicle, instead of returning chat-text and avatar positions it should return an array of servers, worlds, and people... maybe also some thumbnails.

Nevertheless, I still think that - beside this spectacular portal - we should be able to use the data of the world-list-server for generating a compact, inlineable document to be displayed all over the communnity's web-pages.

Cheers,

Peter

rickta59 · Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 3:45 pm Post subject:

rickta59 · Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 4:05 pm Post subject:

Pet(er) · midshipman Joined: 24 Jul 2005 Posts: 71 Location: germany

Yes, sorry Rick, and thank's for the reply.

It's due to my lack of XML knowledge that I did not notice the possibilities the XML output does provide, it's a good reason for trying to get into XML again ...

The information provided by the XML output should be far more than enough as is.

If I am right, urlIndexPage is set to some sort of ABNet frameset generator and passing the url of the world inside the query.

For the case that you would agree in setting up a 'global worlds list' (including all worlds actually open on alternative 3d-chat servers), could this value (urlIndexPage) be influenced by one or a few of the params passed to u.php ?

If not, would it be possible to provide an additional parameter to the u.php script, carrying the needed link to the server-specific frameset or file ?

Would you provide a new output option for s.php - e.g. output=vrml - which would return the vrml file with the script you did mention or a modifyed cgi2vrml output?

It would be great if, even if working on different approaches to 3d-chat, we could agree in this and some other improvements, which could make the difference to other, commercial, systems and bring some sort of healthy diversity into this world.

About the BS logo :

If I am right, unfortunately, the BS logo only is being removed after agreement with the Bitmannagers whenever content hosted by 'registered' domains is being displayed.

This means, that the worlds need to be uploaded to such a host or that every builder would need to ask for 'registration' of his own domain.

I did not find a way for having Blaxxun and BS Contact running together on the same system, letting me choose if I want to use one or the other.

Also there is no way for forcing a Browser or any other app to use one or the other by specifying it's classid, which is still the same for both CC3D viewers.

Viewer switches (e.g. youpien's) don't succeed neither when they are asked to switch from one to another.

If the Bitmannagers would let the logo spinning down in the right corner, it would be okay - Cortona for example, can live with that - but a logo spinning across artwork is sort of insulting, same for the artist as for the visitor.

Yes, Flux seems to need some fixes, and I would wish a more complete ecmascript subset support, beside other improvements making it more backwards compatible to the old vrml worlds. By now, even some of the worlds showcased by Mediamachines seem to crash the player.

But Parisi did start it from 0 , i guess, so we (I) owe him some patience.

Cheers,

Peter

rickta59 · Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 11:20 pm Post subject: