I often like to do little thought experiments with all the different aspects of the network and think of the possibilities for apps/projects etc. I usually find that not being a coder hinders me slightly. I just imagine the concepts and processes at work and think “what if”,“why don’t we” etc, because I find it enormous fun…like a giant Cryptic crossword, but I’m often missing a small snippet of information that a coder could answer.
I’m just thinking that presently most input is from coders I reckon, who may think a certain way (or not, just saying training and experience etc influences the mind), and we could be missing a lot of creative input from other professions/interests that could look at problems from a different perspective. Anyway, to cut a long story short, should we have a thread where we can just “Ask a coder” a simple question to help others join dots together and get some creative juices flowing?
Often, I’m reading a thread and a light bulb will go on, then I’m away with the faeries in thought, then realise I’m missing the knowledge to enable me to decide whether to continue pondering or just dismiss as unfeasible. What I mean is I often find myself going off-topic because I’ve thought of something and I could just ask the question on a specific thread instead.
An example question:
"Would a shop accepting Safecoins be able to record Safecoin transactions directly from their website/wallet easily for accounting purposes or would/could an app need to be developed? Is this something that a website designer would use a “shopping basket” type thing to do, that plugs into the wallet somehow?
Yes an app can be developed for that, I think of safecoin like cash, so you can still record who paid if they tell you that is. I am not sure I am answering the more base question here though, if not shout
@al_kafir I agree with everything you said and think that the more technical folk here, including myself, can unintentionally (I trust!) make it hard for people to just ask what they want.
So do whatever works for you, and if you want support to help you do this ask the community (as you have), or ask me or @Melvin , and I’ll see how we can open things up more so everyone feels comfortable asking, and gets helpful supportive responses as much as possible. Generally I think this happens, as David said we’re pretty friendly, but always room to improve
OK, thanks guys - I think its usually when people are having a technical discussion and I don’t want to interrupt with a really daft question. Ok, I’ll just ask as and when, but its’ on the understanding that nobody’s allowed to point at me and laugh and say “NOOOOooob” etc…OK…lol.
Seriously though anything I ask will be low priority, just if any coder happens to know the answer, I don’t need to disturb the team. Cheers
This is what seems most impressive about MaidSAFE, the tone set by the founders involves a willingness to entertain everything with humility, charity and humor. Its rare that vision and technical competence and high standards combine with these traits.
I agree. They really are doing a good job of earning my respect in not turning into a bunch of Steve Jobs here. Brilliant people. Not dicks. I like it.
Good idea @Al_Kafir Conversely I think there should be an “Ask a Non Coder” question for all those questions that are not code related or perhaps when you want something broken down into human language and to make sure a concept is understandable. Creating an application or promoting a project is not just about code but also people, art, writing, marketing, PR, and communications of all kinds.
OK, the game funding thread got me thinking, so here’s a question for anybody with game developer knowledge:
Whats anybody’s best guess how big/specialist a dev pool and how long would it take to create a virtual world of maybe a small village size with scenery and avatars etc for maybe 1000 players/inhabitants using Safecoin as an internal currency? Let’s hypothesize that the village will grow exponentially in a natural way and funding won’t be a problem to achieve this, once the initial village was created. I’m thinking along the lines of a few “Game Pods” working together to develop/maintain it.
The other thing is, would it be technically possible to add extra territories etc at a later date, whilst keeping all the safecoin workings/shops/services running? In a similar fashion, could the graphics improve over time, ie from a clunky Simms type, to a GTA5 type world…I assume 1 would take a lot less time/skill than the other.
Its not a game that I’m thinking of really, but I’d need a virtual world to start with, so I may as well ask this first. Cheers
I’m not heavy into the coding aspect however I do know a thing or two about the artistic side of things. What level of graphics are you aiming at? (I’ve seen many rpgs that are thrown together that have half baked graphics and are pretty much clones of one another.) Are you including a character editor in your MMORPG? How much can a player customize their character/avatar? Can players build the landscape and/or objects within the world or is that reliant up the devs to do? Do you want each villager to be a unique person and to have a unique appearance and personality or do you just want mass clones that the player can kill or watch standing around? In short what kind of MMO are you building? Is this something more like Second Life, is it more like Elder Scrolls or is it one of those dime a dozen MMORPGs? The more user customization and creation you provide the less development you have to do, well actually you still have to do a fair bit of development but it’s more in terms of allowing the users to successfully upload their creations and integrate them into the world as opposed to designing content for them. What Linden Labs does is basically charges players a fee to upload their creations (frankly I think the price is jacked as the value of lindens is falling but it’s ONE business model). Or why not extend the safecoin model to the game? If you create something and people downloaded a portion of that goes to the game creator and a portion goes to game development. In order to play you’d either pay individually for what you bought in the game, paying in safecoin, or you could be charged for a portion of what you safecoin you mined while you played the game. Doesn’t sound like a lot but with so many people playing the game and spending hours and hours playing it it would add up.
Thanks, Blindsite, I can see there are a lot of aspects to consider when making a game now. I don’t actually play video games either, so I’m a bit out of my depth all round really…lol.
I may need to be more specific to pin time scales down? Ok, as I said, I’m not looking at making a “game”, but it would operate within a virtual world - (so this probably actually is classed as a game…lol ). I’m more thinking along the lines of something mirroring the 2D Network in 3D virtual space. I’m thinking about the interesting aspects of XOR space and it’s relationship to geographical space too…
My larger thinking is how to change the way the real world works. I’m thinking that rather than trying to use the 2D Network (alone) with search engines, voting apps etc, wouldn’t it be more engaging to just create the societies we want in virtual space, - they would evolve naturally. I’m thinking if landmass increases in relation to network growth (a map is created) and business operates within it, (reflecting network businesses) and land could be bought/sold, farms represented, local area councils established etc (to improve local graphics, establish community rules etc).I think eventually, this world, due to consensus, would have some political legitimacy/influence on the real world (particularly if geographical locations were known, but this may have security implications - unless some XOR space magic can be worked…maybe).
I’m thinking also that maybe “residency” in Safeland could be dependent on an immigration procedure whereby some period of good network vault behaviour/reputation needs to be established first - ie good nodes, farmers and builders - these would be the 3d “pioneers” of the new frontier. So, the first allocation of land would be offered to maybe investors in maidsafe (pay in msafe) plus later, well behaved farmers/builders (pay in Safecoin). This could raise funds for initial development. I’m thinking that a large percentage of users may use this “app”, therefore a large percentage of vaults would be more likely to be good which helps mitigate any (highly unlikely anyway) Sybil concerns…doesn’t it?
I’m further thinking that local “groups”, ie people/businesses you personally know would show up as houses/shops only in your personal “view” within your locality. This means you can walk around paying people/businesses simply, visiting shops secure in the knowledge they are who they say they are.
Just thought I may as wel say what I’m thinking, so I can be told why it won’t work on a very basic level. I appreciate this would be a big ongoing project, that’s why I was tthinking dev pods who would share revenue with the Foundation to fund it’s aims. Any thoughts…apart from “Wtf is he smokin?”
My son persuaded me to go on it a few years ago, but not since. He created a character for me (obviously looked NOTHING like me…but it amused him …lol). He made me go in this free game prize awarding shop thingy - I “won” a huge penis attached to my head for the next 30 mins…so my idea diverges somewhere a little I think…lol. It would be more of a 1st Life with real world interactions from the Network replicated/mirrored in the virtual world…real goods instead of virtual - is this technically feasible?
Alternatively, would it need to be a fork of Safe with a different, but interchangeable currency? This being the case, does a fork of Safe create a new self contained Universe, so to speak, unable to communicate with the Original? Could a bridge be made between Universes and do these bridges need to be “manned” so to speak, rather that trust-less?
I really think you should take a second and more serious look at second life as actual goods and services are traded there, particularly in the arts. Graphics, poetry, stories, music, sex (cyber prostitution), cryptocurrency (bitcoin) and pretty much anything else people can think to trade on there is traded on there. Something like maidsafe would just enhance the experiece and market. Of course Linden Labs are a tyranical draconian corporation but then most coproations are like that. If you could create a decentralized, encrypted and anonymous version of second life that basically was based on the xor network as you describe then yes pretty much anything could be traded on there, and probably would be, and would take off like crazy.
This article shows why Second Life hasn’t really taken off as it might and I think Safe Net can address a lot of these concerns…interesting read for inspiration anyway. It appears that issues include graphics being too cartoony due to computers not being able to render, problems operating on mobile and the fact you are basically walking around talking to weirdos most of the time.
Anyway, back to my 1st question - would it take loads of devs ages and is it just a case of wait and see if somebody does it, or is it not feasible?
A lot of 3d games are designed for level building. Which essentially consists of graphics and physics engines, as well as textures and such. So basically if you wanted a professional pricing version… you could look at what it took to make a 3d game, of the style/quality you would like to mimic, cost to build. Basically with the engines from one of those games, you could build virtual worlds and characters. Then there would be the coding of the “activities”, which should be somewhat comparable to the coding it took for story line and level development.
However, most 3d games are franchised, and much of the work previously is rolled up into the next series with better or improved engines. Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic I guess took 3 years, and cost about 200 million. Then there is the costs of the servers hosting the game.
Thanks for explaining about the costs/timescale of developing such a 3D world. There wouldn’t really be a story line, but it sounds like we’d need an existing graphics “engine” on which to build and expand then. Thanks for the answer.
You can’t convert XOR space to euclidean space as far as I know. The XOR space is there for routing through a distributed network, as it offers scalability, reliability, randomized consensus groups, and a degree of privacy and anonymity on the network level. It doesn’t have a function on the application/presentation level and is thus invisible to the typical end-user.
I don’t really see the point of this idea, trading in a giant virtual world would be more cumbersome than through a simple GUI or independent instances of virtual 3D shops. It also doesn’t provide extra security I think, if someone can pull off identity theft on the core SAFE level, in the virtual world on top of it that identity is also compromised.
I believe if you want to get people into a giant, persistent virtual world you need to offer entertainment through game features. Give them competition and an outlet for creativity or problem solving somehow. I’m not an expert on dedicated social games, but I believe even they revolve around competition in looks/cosmetics/achievements?
I was thinking of XOR space as a mathematical construct, an imaginary space, so to speak, which basically mixes up the real geographical locations of nodes and leads to the things you say. I may have entirely misunderstood the concept though, I freely admit. I was thinking that the XOR space is the mathematical space in which the routing between nodes operates – it would have some kind of relationship to the real life nodes though. If the XOR space or network (whatever) “knows” the amount of nodes, then this is the extent of what I need it to do I think
I disagree on the “no point” thinking and was thinking along the same lines as you with individual instances of 3D shops. I see it as potentially more engaging rather than cumbersome, though it’s just my opinion.
The competition aspect would be provided by creating communities, upgrading local area amenities/infrastructure etc and competing with other towns in various things - how much competition exists in real life? This would promote community thinking/competition, rather than individual thinking.
I was just thinking aloud about the XOR space (as I imagined it) and if it was possible to map network growth (or just count nodes even) and display it as a land mass growth, which would create continents. The continents would not replicate actual geographical locations, rather a new world would gradually be revealed.
As to security, I was thinking about Sybil attacks (as I understand them). If nodes have to go through a behaviour quarantine period, then I would hazard a guess that this pushes up the likelihood of more well behaved nodes - is this not the case?
The other thing I was thinking was that real life/safe net shops would be scattered across a different landscape than the real world– I was wondering if it was possible to display shops that are in my real world locality on an individual user level without impacting security? This would give an added feature and would be voluntary for shops…this would allow for free trade both anonymously and by known entities, whichever is appropriate.
I’m also thinking that as you create groups of known friends/contacts/shops on Safenet, this can be replicated in the virtual world, creating entry points to other groups/communities/special interests in the 3D virtual world - They would necessarily be living in a multi-cultural society due to communities developing in different 3D geographical localities than in real life - this goes towards global community cohesion and harmony.
My larger thinking is that if we want to change the real world, then creating this consensus driven virtual world would be a means to an end. Eventually, (maybe decades) the virtual world would gain a legitimate voice and will affect the real world. To change the real world, we may have to create a working virtual model first, rather than try to change things within existing parameters.
That’s what I always do on these forums. I’m a coder though so I do have a bit of confidence in understanding.