Multiuser VRML alternatives to Blaxxun

[Pet(er)]

That sounds pretty good to me, Rick.

Let's go ahead.

Thank's

Peter

[fabricator]

As Rick says polling the servers to get a list of active chatters etc is going to get tired very quickly. Its bandwidth intensive for one thing, and thats going to put more load on the chat servers.

I do have plans to add a thumbnail image field to my chat proto. That way I can have a page like rick's front page with the rows of images, but I'll also keep the existing mini page. At the moment I can't get people to update the existing worlds on the list though.

For those who haven't noticed I did add a places list button to my chat.


Anyway for the combined places list I have an idea how to make it work properly. Instead of polling, we put a set of scripts on each server for each chat.

say my server would have:
abnet-places-update.php
n3dme-places-update.php

When someone enters abnet the server calls:
abnet-places-update.php?p="test"&c=1&u="http://vrmlworld.net/....."
my server then updates to show that there is one person in "test" world.

Simular thing for if someone enters my chat or peters. The fields for the php scripts needs to be standard though, p=place c=count u=place url and maybe i=image url if needed.

One downside is it means each server has two custom scripts which need to be written, and two extra servers need to be contacted for each person leaving/entering a world. The upside is a failure of one server won't kill the entire system.

Not sure yet how to deal with duplicated place names, also we might want to add icons to denote which chat is used for each world. Big question is do we want to send the image url.

[Pet(er)]

Interesting thaughts, Fab.

BTW, I came to read them after you told me about on your 3d-chat, to where I went after seeing on www.spafon.com's world list that someone was in VP3D.

Such a mini list embedded in frequently visited web-pages is a very usefull thing, and if we could get as much forums, boards and pages, showing such a list, our chats would get more and more populated.

So let's come to a working solution asap.

Anyhow, Rick's set of data seems to me a very complete information, as well usable for a compact mini list, as for a very complete 'worlds data sheet'. We should try to keep that fabulous set.

I can also think of ABNet's solution as the more easy to implement (whenever Rick provides also a vrml output) and not necessarily very much loading our servers, as we might only call the u.php when a chatter joins or leaves, and poll the s.php once a minute or two, like we are doing with our own lists.

The idea of decentalizing the list-server is good, as far as it comes up with a redundant system. For the embedded mini-lists we could even work out some sort of swapping mechanism, that changes from one server to the other, whenever one of them fails.

A bad part could be, that we need one script per server. Just imagine if there are lot of servers more ... or if 2nd hand life decides to join the ring ... lol.

I would ask Rick, how far it could be possible to set up some replicants of his list system on other servers and create such a swapper.

The thumbnail url should be part of the fields. If the information is there, we will find a use for it. One could work out a onMouseOver function for the mini list, displaying the thumbnail, for example. For the portal world it should be available anyway.

I think the homepage url of the world builder, as provided by Rick's, is also an interesting possibility that we should try to keep in the set.

For avoiding duplicated names and also to inform what server is running the world, we could automatically add a server specific pre- or post- fix to the worlds name, or something like my_world@abnet his_world@vp3d hell@n3dme.

C U laters

Peter

[rickta59]

[Pet(er)]

Hi Rick,

sorry, I was off the line and probably you are not focusing that topic any more... timeout?

Even tough I did propose it, I'm not the one to set up a vrml output in a reliable way. I'm not even sure if I would be able to implement a solution based on the cgi2vrml script - which would need a wokarround or some serverside setup for avoiding MSIE caching it... you posted about this in another topic.

The XML output, whenever I find (learn) a way to parse it, will be good for my purpose, as I am embedding the vrml into a web-browser.

The idea of using a socket in order to avoid polling the server is probably the most efficient one, but I'm trying to run a 3d-chat server from within a virtual-host, with all the limitations it brings, and I would not like to add even a winsock server/client to the system 'just' for keeping up to date a worlds list... even if i'm sure that the 'global worlds list' we are talking about is important.

Couldn't we agree on an adecuate polling frequency or couldn't the frequency be managed/limited by the world list server ?

Cheers,

Peter

[fabricator]

The issue with polling is simply the bandwidth it uses.

1 update per minute becomes
60X24x365 = 525600 updates per year

even if its only 5KB per update thats 2,628 meg a year. only about 2% of that traffic would be from people actually being in the chat itself.

Ricks listing uses up more than 5KB per update, its 20k for the html listing I expect the xml version to be half that, so double the above 2,628 meg above to 5,256 or 438 meg a month.

Plus if you want to display a complete list of worlds regardless of the chat used, you'd have to download it off Ricks server each time.


Have a read again of what I proposed, it uses way less bandwith and means anyone running a server is free to create their own custom listings.

[rickta59]

How did you come up with those numbers? My server sends
out compressed data if the caller supports it. If you do a
view source on the output in a browser you will see that
the page and xml are both compressed.

BTW, the servers aren't going to be polling. The world list
polling is done by clients. The servers only call the
http://vrmlworld.net/u.php script to update the world list.
That was discussed way back at the beginning of this
topic. Your suggestion for updating is what I've already
been doing for a long time.

I understand about running on inexpensive virtual hosting.
VRMLWorld is running on a virtual host.