And game developers are plenty smart enough to know that a game engine, optimized for its original scale (single, MP, or massively-MP) will need to get completely rewritten to move to the next set of scales.

Wil Wright wouldn’t put Spore out there as the proto 3D web, nor would Sony even claim that (they can’t voluntarily shake the proprietary handcuffs anyway, so no dice there).

And the engine that ties multiple games together today already exists. It’s called the Operating System. It simply lacks features to make the transition attractive. I would argue that’s because the demand for moving your character from WoW to Club Penguin is actually low, unless you’re talking about actually clubbing penguins.

There are several contenders now in the gaming world for a seed protocol.

One is Spore, and the other is PS3 Home.

Once one of these extensible universes grows successfully into a mature profit center in the sanctuary of the in-house garden. If the owners are willing and clever enough to open the franchise of the underlying architecture to wider distribution, the 3D web will be off and running.

It will start with an engine which allows multiple games to tie their worlds together.

No one does 3D Graphics and massive scaling like gamers. Success is not about throwing money at a concept, it is about providing value for money to an existing market and growing that market. That is why I think that Spore has the edge, even over a giant like Sony. Anyone trying to sell 3D web is going to be run over by a gaming engine. Get off the tracks!

Question: Do you envision a solution for the transparent load balancing to form one big conversation space ?
SL does not know how to do it, if so there will be no <100 avatar per island limit.
You should read this short paper: http://twinverse.com/TwinverseTechnology.pdf
Twinverse is virtual world that is browser-based -as defined in one of your posts. So for now it’s 2D only. A limitation of actual browsers.
And it can handle an unlimited number of avatars using this kind of load balancing you suggest.

It is a very huge space indeed, it’s build on top of google maps and avatars can move around the whole planet.

I am happy to find someone to discuss seriously about virtual worlds without having the mind obscured by the second life kool-aid
Thanks Avi.

I’m making two points: first, is that load balancing using multiple servers to foirn the appearance of “one big space” should be handled much like load balancing of websites — opaque to the world, not part of the web standards themselves, and not promoted as the way everyone should do it.

Second point: portals are fine, and there is no need to turn a series of spaces which might be run by different individuals or companies into one big cartesian (and gridded) space just to let them connect up. Ad-hoc connections are fine, as are doorways to other realms. If not for this quality and topology, the first point would be moot.

I don’t think these two points result in lots of living room-sized spaces, but rather spaces that are appropriately sized to fit the number of people intended, from one to a million or more, depending on what kinds of servers are put to the task.

I hope that clarieifs my position a bit.

http://joaquinkeller.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-we-are-alone-in-internet-and.html

This post was really interesting and very close to what I have been preaching for years at my company – see my papers section : http://www.conceptsl.com/papers about 2D,3D, Text, … subtle mix and tell me what you think.

- Yohan