Thursday, April 2, 2009

My own personal grid

Yesterday, the Linden Lab® blog featured a post by Amanda Linden that rather got my hopes up about having my own personal grid (Web). "Today, we’re pleased to share that the stand-alone version of Second Life solution is currently in the alpha phase," she wrote. Imagine, being able to build while completely disconnected from the Interwebs and from servers lagged by the presence of others. No more watching moved prims snap back because of server hiccups. No more paying L$10 to upload a texture just to find it doesn't quite work so you can try again, texture after texture. Imagine being able to finalize a build in a fast, reliable workspace then move it in-world.

Maybe I'm making some wish-based assumptions, but it sounds like a personal grid could be a boon for builders. And landscapers! I love to terraform but don't have my own sim to try new designs. It is easy to imagine having a personal grid living on my iMac with a full parcel of region-sized land to play upon. erm . . to work. Right, work.

Would much time elapse before the Lab or others find a way to connect these stand alone installations? Probably not. And I suspect that a distributed grid platform is a possible goal. It makes too much sense to not spread the construct across multiple sites.

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