So, I was talking to IP and I suddenly started talking about one of my crazy ideas.
I have to warn you that you might be shocked at such concept


The basic concept:
The website would take place in a three-dimensional space. You would find yourself in a city that probably starts with only 1 small house and starts getting bigger and bigger when more posts arrive. Like, IP said, you'd enter into buildings to read the information posted, the building should probably be marked with the topic name on the entrance and have some kind of browsing ambient in which, not only you would be able to find the topic in order but you could easily browse between in posts with the papers pasted on walls or placed in tables and so. You would be able to see other people that are in the same place as you are.
People will obviously choose their characters on register, there could be both, limited characters (providing only a few male/female characters) or it could be unlimited (lets you choose your own body parts, height, appeareance and possibly even face mapping using a texturing php device that could manage materials in 3D objects to add your own face picture to your character face).

You would be able to see people in houses (topics) or in the street while browsing between topics. You could have several towns that represent the different forums on a board and the cities could be improving constantly depending on the quality of the posts and post ammount. For example it would take X number of posts in a topic (house) to get a whole new floor, for example 80 posts = 2 floors, 120 posts = 3 floors and 3 floors being a limit to prevent skycrappers from randomly raising.
The city aspect would be determined by the quality of posts this value taken from several mathematical operations taking into consideration common grammar mistakes or internet stupidnes liek dis. The number of mistakes multiplied by the number of different posters divided into the average of words by post and that divided into number of total posts in the current topic.
you would get a really small decimal number of course that determines the factor of a town aspect, lower factors equals to worse looking town. a factor of 0.02 would return a medieval or ancient town while a higher factor like 0.1 would become a modern city and 1 being max would return a futuristic looking city.

Sprites should be somewhat different probabl randomly chosen between some different ammount of sprites to prevent monotomy and high rendering times.
There should also be included anomally buildings that do not look like regular houses this buildings would be special site features for example a library would become the wiki or tutorial DB while an storage center skycrapper-looking would be download database and so on.

Modern cities would have easier access to everything, for example, a factor 0.2 city(modern city) would have a casino that represents the current games it would however only open at nights creating a whole new day system I will later explain. While lower factor cities won't have those features and characters instead would have to travel from city to city to find what they need.
You could have parks to go to, hospitals that I don't know what they'd do and so on to make it more realistic like a city.

After what you've read I don't think I need to explain how would store work

Transport concept:
Having multiple cities and a complete 3d environment would indeed slow down your webpage browsing making a lot of time consuming that's why you'll have a couple of options just like you do right now, just that instead of skin chosing you'll have abilities like "teleport" that takes you onto a satellite view of the site and lets you click anywhere you like to inmidiately take you to the place you clicked.
You wouldn't be able to buy cars and things that increase your browsing speed seeing as how a 3D enviroment takes long to render and you'll need an average speed to walk around cities.
There could also be cities that have subway systems or other kind of systems like the teleporting skill that could take you to anywhere you want but that would be stupid seeing as how you have the teleporting skill.

You would start, if recently logged in or appear as a guest in the main city that would have access to ALL features right on the next corner (literally) or store the last location you were in when you come back.

The marking concept:
How would you know what topics to view and not waste time on topics/forums already read?
While you're walking on top of an structure a mark would appear or some kind of a cloud like the ones used on cartoons displaying the last post made and you would easily go inside if you see that you haven't read the topic.
Another concept is like the one used right now. Topics with new post would be colourfull and even if it is a hot topic it would be in sepia shades and if it's a poll it would be in a cold or green. While already read topics would be houses on grayscale or buildings in shades of gray and so.
This last one would help to give the feeling of a dessertic city or a really populated one. Desserted cities usually are represented on poor lights, destroyed buildings and so...
Topics would eventually start losing quality such as some topics that raise very fast and get to three floors but eventually everyone doesn't care about them anymore and it starts getting an skin like if it had crackings or leaks and so.

The day concept
The site would follow a server time or a time set by the site to use so you can either have daylight and nightlight.
Note that this doesn't mean that you'll actually have different lighting style it only means that the backgrounds you can see at the end of your character site change.
In day it could be a sunny, blue sky, white clouds background while on night you would see a starry night. Randomly a rain event would take place and a gray cloud background would be displayed.

This systems lets you do one thing mainly, some special features would only be enabled during both daylight or nightlight. For example, a casino (games) would open at night. This could also bring some new banning methods just like, for example, devilesk is a really bad guy but IP doesn't want to ban him because he's a pacifist (IP not Devilesk ) so what IP does is that he bans him from daylight and devilesk can now only browse the sen world in the night. You'll realisticly have more mean guys in the night while daylight will be full of humble and good people.

This is basically called: the game of browsing the web.


So how would you implement this?
Jesus, I have absolutely no idea.

One option would be having pre placed screenshots for a determined location, for example if you're at staredit.net/?lo=12,35,44 you would see a determined image as a background that has divs (because they are invisible unless they have borders) that can be clicked and are at different positions on the screen. For example you are on a street and you see, in a perspective view, houses on the sides and you would be able to click on their doors to enter them OR you could be able to click the street and you'll advance in the street to get to a corner in which you could turn left right or turn back or keep straight ahead or so.
This would decrease the movility you'll have on-interface but it would require less coding and probably less plug ins to download just to browse the page and so. But it would require more creation of stupid divs all around and more webpage/images to show.
On thing you could avoid multiple pages is having a script that handles the original city, you request a webpage and a camera makes the page you're requesting an image, return it as a background and then generate the divs or some other things. This would be easier but not optimal because it won't entirely be a 3d environment just a random image representation of it. Which is what takes me to the second concept and much more accurate.

Having a script that manages the generated environment, all vertex would be stored on hashes and managed via arrays, you get the horizontal and vertical projections (to represent 3D on a 2D screen) and then render them in the generated coordinates on your screen. the verticies positions and IDs would tell the engine to fill them with an specific plane (poly) that has the materials and all of that which turns them into a three dimensional solid for you to appreciate.
It would then generate the backgrounds and some other features the site would have.
After all of that it would make updates to the server on the site status, the posts that were made and so... that way the starting city would change aspect (the one you used at the beggining to get the first verticies) depending on the posts and so, meaning the secondary scripts that determine this.


The whole concept would HARDLY AND ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to be represented on IE or Firefox or Opera or Safari or whatever browser you use.
You'd probably have to create an engine that manages this system, using this you probably would have higher rendering times and you could use it just like any game or so. You wouldn't be able to watch it on the internet unless it is going to be on the internet.
Making an application would probably make it easier to browse it and will make it faster but you'll have to download another application even when you have your original internet browser. It could be some sort of plug in too.
You could still probably doing it for standard browsers but it would take a lot of coding skills.

Lastly, I should add what IP said:


So who's in to make this concept real and win an spot on human history revolutionizing the way you browse the web?

I'm in for modelling.

I've though of this a billion times. I'd say an fx plugin would work. I do 3D stuff to and I can program for macs. It's say a website based and 3D one would be good so search engines could find the site info. Who knows I might get really bored and do this.

How would you exactly do it? wanna be on the team?

Freaking insane.
Sounds like Scifi.

How would topics work once they exceeded the max number of posts to continue adding floors?

Why wouldn't they work?
Basically what usually does is just post and what makes the floors is a single condition.
If posts = blah
if posts >= blah and < bleh

and so.. I can't see why they wouldn't work.

Sounds like I could finaly have another site to visit other than Yahoo, xkcd, and SeN

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Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 5 2008, 2:37 am by Phobos.

I can do some 3D stuff in XNA.

I don't know how you would manage it through a browser. I know 3D applications are possible int the browser, but definitely not practical, or we would see more of them. Still, google silverlight if your still insane enough to go through with it.

Really simple question:

Why would anyone want to go through the trouble of traversing a virtual 3D environment to view forum threads?

I don't doubt it could be done (virtual chat clients are already doing much of this anyway), but I can't see it replacing the expediency of a forum.

Because it's cooler that way, maybe you should ask why WOULDN'T anyone browse forums in a 3D way.

And it's not supposed to replace forums, it's supposed to replace the internet, I just used sen as an applied example.

Yeah, functionality would be lost for aesthetic value. However, I do like the idea of having a different format than the current lines of order.

If you were to start out with possibly an overhead view of a town with many different sub-forums as little squares. (members could also add more little squares for topic that didn't fit into any sub-forum.) Anyway, as you click on one, you zoom in and get a lot more little squares each representing a thread. Newer posts would be marked by how close they were to the center of the square jumble, and possibly marked with a little faint glow if people were currently reading/adding onto them.

Opening a thread though, would give a linear order of posts, to make it understandable, but perhaps sort these in a type of folder-like appearance. Dragging your mouse along the little folder tabs would cause the post highlighted to pop to the front of the list. (No more scrolling and fast access to many posts.)

Blarg heres two images. (Actual effort not included.)
A thread
Forum

I was thinking an action similar to opening a notebook on RE or something like it. And the boxes idea would be nice for a webpage right now but not exactly the full 3D environment I'm talking about

Have fun getting spammed. But, you could always do this with a large Java applet.

It's possible. But you might as well as create a whole new game/client/browser made specially for this sort of browsing.

HAY GUYS LETS JUST MOVE SEN TO SECOND LIFE.