P1828: IEEE Standards in Elite Dangerous

[yeehi]

I wonder if the programming team at Frontier Developments are aware of and have attempted to implement the standards of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) Virtual World Standard Working Group (P1828), or even been contributing.

The goal of the standards is summarized here:

The purpose of this standard is to promote a common basis for leverage (software and data reuse) sharing of concepts and work products among virtual world project development projects and to promote effective sharing and integration of virtual world resources in operation. Another purpose of this standard is to establish the means to incorporate the respective strengths of different virtual environments.This standard is an over-arching standard for virtual world systems. The over-arching standard provides a reference model and covers subsequent standards for virtual environments. This standard establishes terminology for the Virtual World (VW) components and systems. The reference model covers addresses, interfaces and/or communication protocols between and among system components. Components include supporting devices, like servers, reality engines/environments, virtual objects, scripts and avatars. This standard defines processes, conventions and protocols to promote interoperability of avatars and objects between and among virtual world environments and networked resources. This standard is application agnostic but will provide illustrative use cases.

Some details about the Virtual World Model are available here.

If you look at the Working Group's current assignments here, you can see some of the many features that are relevant to E: D - Avatars, Objects, even Outworld.

I think it would be great if members of the Frontier Developments team contributed some of their expertise and first-hand know-how to this working group.

Establishing and following open standards when engineering is an important contribution to society. Where FD lead, others will follow. The tools and principles that FD develop to create the E: D Virtual World might one day be released to others.

If FD haven't participated in this Working Group, I think they should become involved. If FD haven't implemented the standard, it is never too late to start looking into it.

What do you think?

 

[Sir.Tj]

Moved to game development section.

 

[yeehi]

ISO (International Standards Organization) have a relevant standard, too:

ISO/IEC 23005-4:2013

ISO/IEC 23005-4:2013 specifies syntax and semantics of description schemes and descriptors used to characterize a virtual world object related metadata, making it possible to migrate a virtual world object (or only its characteristics) from one virtual world to another and to control a virtual world object in a virtual world by real world devices.

I think that imports and exports to and from virtual worlds will be an important feature in times to come. For example, players will invest considerable time in a virtual environment and may develop artefacts there, which they would later wish to use elsewhere or donate to another community.

 

[yeehi]

One interesting comment in the Virtual World model is:

There may be a need to change from IP addressing so that specific locations within Virtual Worlds can be identified.

I wonder if that could easily be built into the E: D universe.

These standards organizations all seem to be including DRM ('Digital Rights Management' ) into their descriptions. The industry lobbies must have arrived first, sensing blood!

The only purpose of so called 'DRM' is to stop the user from doing what they would want to do, i.e.'DRM' are there to take away our freedom.