SledjHamrs killer feature, or one of them. A major reason for SledjHamr is to break down the garden walls. We do this by allowing free travel between peoples virtual worlds. In OpenSim this is done by HyperGrid, which is clunky and hard to use. Second Life deliberately has no such system. Even worse, it's hard convincing people in SL to visit your grid, coz it's all very hard, again due to deliberate policy decisions by LL. LL knows their content is the key to their business, even though almost all of it was created by the users, LL locks it up tight. So people visiting OpenSim grids from SL have to create a new avatar from scratch, which is such a major pain that most people baulk at that and don't bother. And they can't bring their inventory with them, inventory they paid for and spent years collecting. In SledjHamr, as well as allowing completely unrestricted and easy access to lots of content, we should make it easy to travel between virtual worlds. Part of this is to include compatibility layers in separate modules to be compatible with what ever virtual world systems are around. You would still need to create accounts and log onto those worlds though. How can we mix them up? I imagine easy to use portal objects. Let's start with the basics, and work out some more complex examples. As mentioned in the no_accounts.txt document, every SledjHamr user has their own little world running on their computer by default when they start up the extantz client. There is a star gate on this default world, an already setup portal that can connect to a bunch of default external worlds. The user can use this star gate, and other peoples portals to travel around other peoples worlds. Initially this could be using OpenSim and its HyperGrid system. Later it would be SledjHamr style worlds as well. A portal would be like Cobalt style portals, you can see the destination in real time, and step through it to go there. They can be permanent, or temporary. You can carry them in your inventory, they could just be normal scripted in world objects. So you travel around the virtual worlds, meeting people, and you want to invite some one to your home, or a group of people. You right click on them and select "Invite them home" from the menu. Extantz knows your home world, that's where you started and it's running on the same computer. Extantz communicates to that home server, or starts it up first. The home server adds this new person to it's access list. Extant creates a portal object and offers it to the person, so they can rez it anywhere. Or you could rez this portal object in the world you are in. Either way, once the portal is in a world, it connects to your home world, showing a view of your front gate, maybe including your lovely garden in your front yard. The portal connects to the "front gate" of your home world. Any one on your home worlds access list can step through this portal to get to your home world. Simple to use, no figuring out HyperGate URLs and copy pasting them, no manual messing with hard to use access systems. Though it would still be possible to create URLs to in world places, to store as landmarks, to email to someone, or to copy'n'paste into farcebook. Portals rezzed in world could be temporary, and vanish after who ever you invited to come stepped through it. Or time out several minutes later so as not to clutter the universe with left over portals. Or deleted by the owner / managers of the world you left them, or deleted yourself from your own world. Portals could be permanent. Say you found a larger world that you and the owner decide you wish to be a part of. Portals could be left on both worlds linking them. The "portal" could just be reconfiguring each world to locate the other world near them, like neighbouring sims. Still, that should be done via the portal interface, just a simple click. Portals can be fully open if you want to run a public world. People can be banned. Or private worlds with specific groups and people allowed. Similar to many web sites, you could have your own account system on your world, people with accounts are allowed to build, or allowed to with certain limits, or are the only ones allowed to visit. Privacy can be applied to the portal, only those that can step through can see through, or semi private, you can see a limited area, but not step through. A portal could include a "door bell", people that want to visit ring the door bell, someone might answer and let them in, but can chat with them across the portal first. Perhaps getting dressed first. For those hard to reach places, I'm looking at you SL, a portal could be coded as an LSL script in a SL prim object that you keep in your SL inventory. It can operate in two modes, depending on who is looking. If someone using a SledjHamr aware client looks, they see the usual portal view mentioned above, and can easily step through it as usual. Others would see a still photo of the view through the portal, or perhaps a live video stream if the other world server has enough bandwidth to support that. Or they could see just a logo if the world owner hasn't bothered to pay LL to upload a suitable photo. If the user of the viewer that is not SledjHamr aware clicks on or tries to step through the portal, they are sent to a web page that lets them download SledjHamr aware clients, with instructions on what to do to actually get to that world. Once a user of that closed world steps through the portal using a SledjHamr aware client, their client knows what that person looks like, and has access to that persons inventory in that closed world, so they can bring it all with them with no need to do anything other than step through. The user remains logged on to the closed world, coz SledjHamr needs no actual accounts. What their avatar is left doing in the closed world for others to see is an open question. Perhaps sitting on some chair on the portal prims, snoozing. Just had a better idea, the user gets a new tab, in their original world they can wander off again and do stuff, and in the new world they can do new stuff. Likely LL will ban this in their TOS, and ban SLedjHamr aware viewers, they are anal like that, and want to own your content to keep people locked in their walled garden. Here's a SledjHamr for you all, break those walls open. B-)