And that works for you. On the other hand, for those who paid your
commissions and might not understand the risks they are taking, the
story
isn't so good. On the same hand, they might have to come back to
you to
rehost it and that is a good economy.
You are off the mark on one point: online building tools and MU are
only
important for certain applications or genre of real-time 3D, mainly
virtual
reality because that is where the art is being performed. The main
advantage is not the software technology but the server farm: in
music
terms, the Room. It has traffic and electron hoses.
If protocols begin to shift back toward peer-to-peer as they
certainly will
for other applications of real-time 3D, then the server farm, or
built in
audience, isn't as important as the portability of the data and the
interoperability of the systems. SL gets to surf on the waves
created by
the early pioneers in MU and that's fine. That's how it should be,
but the
momentum under that is not your art or the art of your peers; you
are riding
the wave of millions in venture capital and if that gasoline burns out
before someone can add wood to the fire, the server farms go away.
Other
pressures such as the rapid rises in energy costs and potential green
policies coming from the Federal government are also to be considered.
I am an artist too, one who watched the 'it must be free' ethic
collapse the
market for his art, but that's ok because at the same time, smart
artists
adopt new media and this is one of them as you know. But I am also
someone
who knows precisely what it does to a customer and the band when a
club
burns down with our equipment inside it. That is where inhouse hosted
toolkits are a blessing and a curse unless you have your own PA and
a policy
of taking your axes home at night. If the club furnishes all of
that, que
bueno. I only have to tell the customers where our NEXT gig will
be. The
artists who relied on the club owner exclusively will be serving
lattes at
Starbucks.
I'm happy to see the Mac supported. IMO, it is a boutique machine for
boutique buyers and sellers, but that is fine. Like any other
niche, it's
value is relative to what customers will pay and how often they
return to
buy again. Otherwise, it's just a platform. Cool but so is a
Peavey PA
from Mississippi compared to the best from Europe: audiences can't
tell the
difference.
So those of us hewing to the goal of royalty-free open standards
for both
server and client side real time 3D anywhere and not just the web,
will be
the ones responsible for making sure if those rooms do burn, you
have a
place to go. Just say thank you to the volunteer doorman on your
way in,
and tip the waitresses. They work hard for the money.
len
From: Adam Nash [mailto:adam@yamanakanash.net]
Naturally, there's always the consideration of portability, but I
don't see SL as any less portable than VRML/X3D. It's all about the
ideas, so as long as I keep those ideas (and, unless I suffer some
kind of trauma to the brain, that's not going to be a problem) I can
easily recreate them in any environment. Most scripting languages are
pretty similar, so it would be quite easy to to modify the SL scripts
and assets (I keep copies of all my scripts naturally, the geometry
is just geometry, the textures and sounds are my own) to the 'next'
suitable environment.
But the point for me (as you correctly say Len) is what works now. I
could port all my old stuff from VRML into SL, just as I could port
the SL stuff into whatever comes next, but I'd rather just move on.
I've archived/documented what I need to as a professional artist
(mainly using video dumps).
I can't stress enough, though, my main point which is that artist/
content creators need two things in realtime net-based 3D: inworld
tools and multi-user capability. Without those two things the artists
will not come.
This is illustrated by the other projects I'm currently collaborating
on, one that uses the Torque engine to create educational worlds,
another that uses Unreal, and another that uses a feedback cycle
between Pure Data and Torque. They all have inworld tools and multi-
user capability. Also, all of these tools run well on Mac.
Adam
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