Hi,
As there's no sorta General Discussion forum I thought this was the most appropriate board. Move it if you like.
This thread is aimed at a broad discussion regarding the future of addon making on the Real Virtuality platform and how one could develop the infrastructure to manage, disseminate, authenticate & grow the "Community Addons for Real Virtuality" or CARV Initiative.
In recent threads in the BIF, namely
New community venture announced - discussion and Q's
CSS - Community sign server there has been some discussion around initiatives to substantiate the addons management space within the community.
I mentioned in the first linked thread some thoughts I had on the topic and was aked to substantiate a little.
So, in a very nasty and fast way I hacked up a bit of a document last night and a couple of graphics.
So, here are they are, to stimulate some discussion on topic.
The first is carv.pdf - An illustration with a few thoughts added on the interaction between & usage senarios of the entities in the framework.
The second is ui1.png which again is a nasty graphic sorta showing fictional data that would be display in the upper viewport slpit-screen of the CARV application.
Essentially, it's to indicate that the application shows the 'record' information retrieved for a .pbo that's sitting locally on your machine.
A similar format is in the bottom viewport but shows a filtered querying of the are published addons available from the 'swarm' via the CARV-Relational Database.
The third is ui2.png which shows a screen capture of the sort of look and feel of the record display within each of the 2 viewports in the application.
Have a browse & read. Crit & Comment is a requirement. Be a little imaginative about filling in the blanks in the painting. Ask for clariying thoughts.
Some additional observations...
- Running a MP Server with Signature Checking Enable for CARV-Subscribing MP Servers would of course be required.
- A .bikey for each addon should be a requirement. The only valuable mechanism to substantiate this is by having a single source from which the .bikey is acquired. In most cases if you are going to distribue something you should goto the effort of distrubting the 'whole' rather than just a 'portion'. It faciltates robustness, future scalability and management.
- To require a single (or small number) real world organisation to provide the delivery mechanism for hosting all these addons etc. is too much of a imposition on any single entity. The medium for distribution needs to be torrenting technology. This then relieves the burden on bandwidth and distributes it across the seeders. Torrenting tech is only as good as the number of seeders.
- If you are going to run a CARV-Subscribing MP Server then you are going to allow certain addons to run on your Server or 'with' the blessing of your Server 'Signature Checking' Mechanism.
- If your Real World group of people is willing to endorse the usage of a given Addon then part of your responsibility to the entire community is supporting the distribution of that addon. As torrenting tech is only as good as the number of seeders then making the seeding of addons your Server is endorsing mandatory is necessary for the good of the whole community.
- With the CARV-Relational Database a critical part of the equation and it storing only information about the unique qualities of any given addon it's physical managability is more realistic. It's useful to the future organisation and growth of BIS's business would ultimately prove very rewarding to all concerned in my view.
- Current community content related 'News' & 'Content' hosting sites (eg. Armahohlic, plus others) may feel disinfranchised by the proposal. They can still be major contributors by substantially seeding the 'published' content.
They can re-brand the 'news' of the current status of any given addon by monitoring the activity in the CARV-Relational Database through the API which they can integrate into their webspace. They can still offer discussion, meeting etc. places for the content.
- Individuals, MP Server Admins & Publishers should all use exactly the same application to manage the content present on their computer.
- The UI needs to be simple and clean.
It should show the current .pbo's on the box & their various status's.
It should show the published .pbos that one can source through the CARV-Initiative. The acquisition of non-local published content (both singular addons and groups of addons) should be as simple as dragging from one portion of the UI to another and the application goes and sources this content from the torrent swarm. In theory this should be very fast (relatively speaking) as the swarm is mandatorally seeded for 'Endorsed' .pbo's and for non-endorsed .pbo's may not be as fast as probably only Dedi-Seeding Services such as Armaholic & most probably the publisher etc. maybe seeding them.
- The architecture is such that it still provides the flexibility for individuals and MP Servers to utilize any addons they desire and any combination of addons they desire.
Many more thoughts persist... let's brain storm...
Cheers, Sy.
PS. If this is an inappropriate place for this sort of discussion please say so an I'll shift it somewhere else.
Topic: CARV Initiative (Read 1743 times)