Originally posted by: drag
My pipe dream for the future of gaming is just having fully immersive 3D world to screw around in.
Everything network-based, were your computer is mearly the terminal to the online world.
It can be like that right now to a certain extent if you only deal with 2D interfaces.
I don't know how much you all know about Linux and X Windows, but X Windows is a network protocol. That is it's not like the Windows Shell on Microsoft or Aqua on OS X were your dealing with only local communication and you have to use special things like RDP and VNC to access PCs remotely... All your GUI applications on Linux are network aware. They all, individually, can be accessed over any TCP network. Your firefox browser can be running on one machine, your Gnome stuff on another, and your email client on a third... and all of them work together in a single unified desktop on your local machine.
Most of the time this sort of thing is disabled because it's a security risk (X is not a secure protocol) but with minimal effort you can configure X to run over SSH connections and get reasonable security.
For X Windows versus HTTP.
X Server == Web browser
X.org server == Firefox Web browser
X clients == Webservers
X Clients are your applications. The gnome panel is a X client. So is the email stuff, file manager, your video games, etc etc. All of them can be run on remote machines. With AIGLX you can get 3D acceleration with remotely running applications also. In fact a lot of improvements to the '3d desktop' help out running applications over a network quite a bit.
Now imagine that inside your video games you can open up a web browser, a real web browser. Open up any application, access your media player, get the command line, etc etc. All of that from inside the game itself. Bring them forward, surf the internet, burn some cdroms, and then shove them out of the way to play games or interact with other players.
This is technically possible.. With compositing desktops the application is rendered off-screen then the image of the application is transposed over a rectangle primative in 3D space. It wouldn't be a far jump to make a game that would also be a X server. It's kinda complicated and a stupid idea by itself, but it's technically possible.
Now imagine that instead of this just being a video game.. this is a network'd 3D world and is your normal desktop. Inside this world there are games, but it's just a portion and people can kinda play around and make their own games using sophisticated scripting languages and such things... as well as the equivelent to websites and journals and forums and such. You'd be able to pull up applications running on your terminal, but also be able to access remote applications too.
From wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project
The Croquet Project is an international effort to promote the continued development of Croquet, a free software platform and a network operating system for developing and delivering deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Croquet provides a flexible framework in which most user interface concepts can be prototyped and deployed to create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations. Croquet can be used to construct highly scalable collaborative data visualizations, virtual learning and problem solving environments, 3D wikis, online gaming environments (MMORPGs), and privately maintained/interconnected multiuser virtual environments.
http://www.croquetconsortium.org/index.php/Main_Page
If that does not work out then
http://secondlife.com/ is open sourcing their code under the GPL license. Both client and server.
http://www.linuxworld.com/news...03107-second-life.html
edit:
Oh and I don't want to imply that Croquet or Secondlife support X Windows, but it makes sense to me that they would incorporate X support for backward compatability.