User:Khannea Suntzu/Khannea's idea
Khannea Suntzu submits this idea on 29 december, both on her blog as well as here:
I happen to live in the world Second Life, as some readers may know and apart from some minor ventures into other places (IMVU, There) I tend to spend most time there and I consider myself somewhat of an authority by now. Well not really, I can build fairly well, but I overuse Prims. I make stuff but I dont make much real cash.
And I barely know LSL.
The funny thing is - the A.I. team responsible for running me in SL (yes it’s a team effort now) received some training in the dreadful actionscript language. That is an object oriented language that is similar to LSL and even though I suck at it, my hands are itching to start working using LSL in more depth in the next years. However, when I introduced into new ideas my mind wanders and immediately starts looking for the far extremes of what is possible in that medium. That gave me the following idea. This idea may not be original. Insiders, people who actually know more about LSL than silly old me (who barely read two pages of code) would probably consider this rather silly.
Linden Labs needs additional revenues. They need to sway users to spend more Lindens benefiting Linden Labs. I think I have an idea to syphon a greater percentage of Linden$ towards the LL coffers.
(ONE)
Enrich prims with a wholly new ability - to have prims contain L$. This may be a new window in the prim options window, since it should be linkable to all sorts of (possibly new) LSL methods. This could take the shape of a credit card, or a “quest award” that is given out by a shop owner. Giving out L$ content in these prims might be linked to group membership, location, having performed a series of set tasks or anything else that can be unambiguously falsified by LSL code checks. The automation of money containment in prims will allow shop or land owners to automate hiring of new players for tasks. A prim that contains money should at the very list show what amount is contained in it, or (default) show the amount contained in it when anyone rightclicks the object. This idea is very important for the *next* idea.
(TWO)
Allow land owners a new option in their land management menu - this should allow for creation of objects on their land (default - this option should be OFF) that can move into their land, be rezzed there or are stationary there, and pay to exist. This setting should be accessible to all who want to know. Say a person designates a spot for selling an article on his or her land - and anyone who positions objects there has those objects *taxed* automatically as the above new game addition - a prim contains money and the PRIM loses its internal cash reserve. I think this will simply installing advertising/sales boxes. Land owners can decide to enact payments from hosted prims per day, minute or second. They can enact a payment per prim the object signified - a 10 prim object residing on someone’s land may be charged more than a one prim object.
LL does not charge for *stationary objects* - But….
(THREE)
here is where it gets tricky - next LL implements a set of new codes (or an object option window) that allow for objects/prims to be animated according to a simple AI variable script. This may allow the creator to set movement speed, some sort of random movement template, linkage to scripting methods, maybe some sort of aggro-engine, making the prim aggro other (animated?) prims or characters. Then the script can set the object to have some sort of ‘hitpoints’, or have the object suffer damage directly channelled to the L$ quanta inside - in other words, a creator can set the hitpoints of an animated (mobile) prim to its value in Linden$.
But that isn’t everything. Next allow these prims to ambulate/hover/move/roll. The default movement would be some sort of slow hovering motion. The default paradigm of these animated prims would be a “droid’, compelling creators to actually shape them in the shape of robotic entities, or monsters. Now I can even imagine a one-off fee to allow a prim to use the settings of an avatar model shape - i.e. this way anyone receives the option to create bots that have avatar shapes. Such objects should be marked as DROID unambiguously. If a creator uses these options, he pays for them - these droids/bots use the codes for animation, the object needs an inside reserve of Linden$. Next Linden Lab withdraws L$ from this primcontained reserve and empties it gradually. If the reserves hit zero, the bot/droid derezzes and evaporates (or get returned to a folder in the characters inventory labelled “bot cache”. Depending on what LL calculates would be an appropriate server load, creating a droid should cost somewhere between 50 and 500 Linden$, and sustaining a bot (with bot options activated) costs several 1L$ (per prim?) per day. So a small R2D2 should cost about 100L$ per day to let wander, and so something the creator deems useful. Best of all a bot (or droid) has the ability to *receive* money from people. Now the trick is to balance annoyance factor versus utility. A bot can be set to harass people about scientology, or it can be set to offer a special service. Good botting could be amazing on a welcome island, and they might create the most stunning wargame sims.
Again, existing land owners who get a heart attack thinking about this, would simply decide to not change the default settings - bots and droids not allowed on their land. But similarly hosting wandering bots might prove a new trickle of revenues for land owners. A good bot creator would then program his bots to agro negatively (fleeee!) if the droid or bot wanders into a land area that charges 1000L$ every minute to any wandering bots.
The ideal situation would be a small but noticeable number of bots on the mainland and (if purposefully to allow entry through gates or bothubs) island sims. Visitor bots would be on specific errands, most of should be not too annoying or ‘grievous’ . The trick is to introduce LSL methods that allow for engineering these bots to a fine degree. I am sure existing scripting methods allows creation of these bots, and maybe it’s even possible to contrive of bots containing LS already, but a purpseful new Method(); would allow creators to work on wholly new sim content and (very interesting to me!) the formation of increasingly ingenuous AI structures.
This might be a very very useful development, since personally I am pretty sure that in the next years the real world will see a robot revolution, with toolbox hobbyist robot builders and clickandrun selfformatting components being sold to and implemented by hobbyists. SL might take an advance on the way such a robotics revolution might unfold.
(FOUR)
It shouldn't be too hard to formulate a set of programming tools that allow users to create bots (primmed) or droids (avatarshapedriven, one of ten simple default droid skin) and instill them with several simple behavioral constraints. Players should be allowed an object to *zap a bot* as to give any ’spambot’ a serious negative agro, but not on all sims.
It would get really sexy if LL implemented new LSL methods that simulate specific limb qualities, such as “arm” (grabbing physical prims?) a mouth (causing damage, eating any stray prims that contain accessible L$?) and legs (ambulation). A leg should be a distinct entity that acts in a predefined way, according to a number of variables. Attaching a leg to a bot gives it a distinctive mode of walking - you see that exhibited in Spore. The same should be possible, albeit simpler, in SL. “eyes” or “ears” should allow bots and droids to interact with avatars, talk to them (hopefully not annoyingly) and engage in activities that are beneficial to users of SL. Ideally bots should evolve quickly, become useful to their creators AND to people in other sims. The ideal bot would literally respond like an AI, and when queried should provide answers. Say, I see a mallbot and ask where I can find this or that article. The mallbot then takes me there or hands me a landmark or - offers me to sell me a folder with landmarks for 1L$.
These bot based microtransactions could literally create a new cottage industry of content in SL, namely botbuilders. Some bots might last for days or weeks, as long as they were created bloody useful. Ideally bots should be allowed (or capable) to wander the mainland grids and move from sim to sim, as long as they are welcome. Many sims would be extremely suspicious of wandering bots, but some sim owners would create additional revenues hosting bots in this manner. Other sims would host elaborate wargames using automated creatures as monster encounters. And the mere existence of droids or bots that use these methods creates a certain load on Linden serves which in turn creates a strong impetus for LL to extract a fee for the mere existence of these things.
Has nobody thought of stuff like this before? Please let me know! I mean you can replicate entire ecologies of creatures that will allow adventuring. Plus - you can bet that people can come up with ideas nobody thought of before. This will generate options in Second Life that will be far more quickly evolving than any MMO in existence.
(FIVE)
Finally, in the more remote future, LL might try and create a method called MUTATE. Allow these entities to slightly alter set variables in a prim. Likewise the purposeful creation of a method called Procreate(); would allow bots to spread wider according to succes rate. This would give rise to evolution. Imagine a series of complex wargames over sims, owners creating bots that are created to do things, attack each other, extract whatever L$ is in other bots as sustenance. Discrete mutation rates would allow the creation of bots with slowly changing features, but more elaborate features might translate into a higher L$ tariff for the bot to exist.
I think this will vastly increase LL revenues, and will make SL a lot more engaging to new players.
(Addendum 1)
The discussion on this article already started. A friend suggested this might create a new market for LL - simulations. Imagine a shop owner wanting to model traffic in a Real World location. He can then hire specialists to model a complex and expensive simulation, OR he can build the simulation in SL, for probably onetenth the price. These programming tools might be convenient for people modelling traffic, panic in a burning building, hollyday shoppers, people moving in and out of a large building, etc. Current LSL allows those programming constructs (and I have some nice daleks to show you how that currently works) but it takes quite a bit of contrivances and bughunting to make it work well.
An AI options window might prove be a feature in SL that may enrich the game in remarkable new ways.
Response 1
Great ideas, of which the key one is taxable cash inside a prim. All the robot/AI movement actions are already possible, because what the SL scripting language is designed for is the orientation and movement of virtual objects in relation to each other. In many other respects the language is terribly primitive and lacks features that any reasonable programming language should have. You can't do anything complex with one prim, because the size limit for a compiled program - if I recall correctly - is 16K. However, you can put scripts in several connected prims and have them talk to each other. The language lack arrays, so you need to use lists, but lists in this language are limited in length, so you need to nest them inside each other, and pretty soon you have a horrendous, complex data structure, strewn across multiple prims, merely to access numbers in what should be a simple array. If people really wanted, they could create modular prims that function as ready-made arrays, neural nets, or whatever - and perhaps people have done that - and then other people could use them as objects in their programs. But most scripts are very short and kludgy. My favorite example is that the typical teleport script is an adaption of the script for sitting on a chair, merely displacing its location.
We possibly could create our own taxable cash prims by having a prim send encoded messages to a home station, recording who owns it at the moment, and the home station could send regular $L whenever exchange to the regular economic system was needed. However, nearly a year ago Linden closed down all private banks - which had ATMs a little like what I described - because some of them had become Ponzi schemes. Linden then limited banking functions to organizations that were licensed as banks in the real world. Of course, today we realize that many real world banks were also Ponzi schemes! The current system already allows property owners to rent apartments by the month - Interviewer Wilber lived in a monastery for a month, and the room reminded him to pay his rent or move out.
The fundamental issue about the scripting language is when Second Life will allow directly programming using a regular, full-featured programming language. For a while there were rumors that Linden was going to incorporate some part of Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net, but to my knowledge that has not happened. Your point about the possible economic gains for Linden are valuable. I may be completely wrong, but I get the impression that Linden has been either "hanging on" or "thrashing around" for a year or more, surviving but not yet finding a business plan that can work in the long term. From the beginning, there have been skeptics, like:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/221252/tech/second-life/a-story-too-good-to-check
Every time I log into SL, I wonder whether it will still be there! The move toward SL-compatible virtual environments hosted by others than Linden - which Giulio knows all about - is a good sign, but remains incomplete. As an AI researcher, I tend to think that even more important than enhancing the scripting language is improving the capability to send data in and out of the environment automatically. It is easy, for example to create a website that saves data to and gets data from a database on the owner's server, and that database can be operated via any system the user wants. The AI could be constructed outside SL, and operate an avatar inside it just as human users do. This used to be impossible with SL, or very difficult at least, but I have not checked to see if the move toward more open source with the user interface might make it possible now - if requiring considerable technical expertise and effort.
So, encouragement for your ideas, and I wish the SL programming environment were more open or more sophisticated in many ways.
Following up on importing/exporting data to run AI avatars in SL: I just spoke with a very savyy person who has done this. Yes, you can transfer data, but only very slowly. Linden limits this intentionally, to prevent people from running spambots in SL. If anybody is interested, I can get more technical information in a few days. Not 100% clear if there is a way around this limitation if you restrict the bot to your own island, but we don't at this point have much optimism.
Since Cory Ondrejka left SL over a year ago, I've lacked good contact with Linden.
A good person to enquire with, and in general a great Architect, if he isn't already (blush), is Ben Goertzel, who is (supposedly, with some financial difficulties) building an AI-based dog in SL. His Brazilian development team is certainly top-notch on what you can squeeze out of LSL. (And come to think of it, isn't Giulio's too?)
Anyway, apart from SL itself, a more and more important platform is OpenSIM, where federated autonomous regions are forming at great speed. On the islands in these regions you can actually run several languages like c#, Javascript, etc.
I am a total noob at LSL and such. But the one thing about the proposal that worries me greatly is the idea of auto-taxable objects. The VAT tax already in place is bad enough. Imagine how the eyes of tax creeps the world over will light up when they consider the possibility of mandatory taxes built into the very existence of virtual creations. I shudder to think of it. The droid notion is fantastic and wonderful in some ways and worrisome in others. Why should bots get taxed extra just for being bots at any landowner's disgression? Should our own non-bot avatars have our purses lightened automatically also? Why would android bots need extra methods that are not needed by avatars? Or is it the same set of things that you can use to animate an avatar? Of course the first thing I think of is having external AIs running these bots. That is quite exciting. I do not know enought to know how much of that sort of thing is or is not possible in SL today.
Don't overlook OpenSim http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page You can set up an instance of it very easily on a virtual host or your LAN.
From what I can see, Second Life as a proprietary platform is fading out and soon it will be dead. Linden lab must be given kudos for having created the first viable metaverse for consumers, but as a company they will be history soon.
We are not recommending SL to clients anymore. We still have a few SL projects to complete and deliver, but all new projects involve open source versions of SL (OpenSim and especially realXtend), highly realistic simulators built on CE2, rich 3D Intranets for training and professional collaboration, other 3D environments like Panda3D, and, of course, integrating 3D components in Web2.0 systems. Of the very many strategic mistakes of Linden Lab, I think the worse has been considering SL as a stand-alone platform. This approach can reach only a few escapists or early adopters, but the metaverse industry cannot mature without achieving full integration with he rest on the Internet.