CT - A Hypothetical Session (mid 1995)

[J C Lawrence]

Did this ever see the light of day?  The web pages are fairly
extensive (and self-congratulatory):  http://www.cyberterm.com.au/
No, I'm not going to touch the glaring security and technical problems 
in the below.

http://www.cyberterm.com.au/ctuser.html

CT - A Hypothetical Session (mid 1995)

Last page update on February 3rd, 1995

What follows is a possible session within a single Cyberterm system
which will connect via modem to a central server which has many other
users logged in. The technical features mentioned in this article are
based upon the current functionality of the Cyberterm 1.0 (alpha)
version (october 1994) and upon work in progress.


When the program is started you are presented with a window which
represents a 3D view into the virtual environment controlled by the
local server which resides within the same program.

By default, the system immediately connects you to the server and you
are allocated an "avatar" which is a 3D object which acts as your
representation within the world. You view the world through the eyes
of the avatar (ie you do not see yourself). The avatar itself is an
agent, which means it has the ability to act and react with objects
and the environment. In this special case, it reacts specifically to
your commands from the mouse and keyboard to move about etc. Any other
user who may be encountered will communicate with our you via his own
avatar.

As the avatar handles all messages to and from a user, these messages
can be filtered and perhaps acted upon without direct intervention of
the user. For example, if an avatar receives email (as opposed to a
direct text message), then it will automatically pass the mail on the
user's mailbox (another agent) and will send a notifying message to
the user in much the way that an iconised mail program may change it's
appearance or beep when mail is received. The difference here is that
the mailbox itself is a separate program which may well have changed
its appearance when the new mail was received. Of course, the mailbox
may have reacted differently to the received mail. It may have created
another object which looked like a human mail man. This man could find
you and hand you an object that looks like a piece of paper but has
the message actually written on it as part of its shape description.

Back to our screen. You have just emerged into the virtual
environment. Beneath your feet is a textured floor, several buildings
which look like houses and offices are ahead of you and other objects
on unknown purpose are scattered about the ground. Some objects hang
motionless in the air like huge abstract sculptures whilst some small
shapes scurry about between the buildings on some unknown task. From
the 3D window menu you can select the status window to show your
current world position, the direction you are facing and your
speed. Opening up the Radar window shows symbolic representations of
the objects about you. The Message window is blank if you display it,
but it will display any incoming messages that you might receive.

As you are turning around, looking at the world, just getting your
bearings, a humanoid figure approaches and a message appears in the
Message window: "Hello Andre! Would you like a tour of things to see
around the town?" You recognised the automated tour guide and decide
you will follow for a bit to see where it heads this time (it shows
something different each time). "Come this way" appears in the Message
window and the guide turns around and moves off to the left down the
street. You pause for a moment having seen a movement within one of
the houses. The guide stops and calls back, "Are you coming?". You
turn to the guide and start moving forwards, following as he(?) takes
a side street and stops in a square before a large billboard. You
click the mouse on the guide's back and the Status window shows the
guide ID and name: "Andre's Guide".

Smiling to yourself you turn to look at the billboard. "This is the
current state of affairs in town, Andre," says the guide. "Reading it
may help you around town. Bye now." The guide turns to move away, but
as he does so the guide becomes more and more transparent until he has
disappeared altogether. The Billboard wasn't here in your system the
last time you logged in, you can see some messages on it, but first
you want to check out who put it there.

You call up the AUIB window (pronounced "orb", Agent User Interface
Buttons) next to the Radar window and close the Status window. The orb
window has a single button in it labelled "Bag". Clicking on the bag
interogates your Bag agent which then displays more buttons for each
object you have, as well as the buttons "Drop", "Use" and "Close
Bag". You see the "Super Sniffer" button, which is a useful tool you
picked up in CT Central when you logged in their a few days ago. Some
hacker on the CT net had programmed it up and made it freely available
from the CT Public Domain file tree in CT Central's File District.

Activating the Sniffer produces a new button in the AUIB window,
labelled "Sniff". You click on the billboard in the 3D window, then
click on "Sniff". The Sniffer agent interogates the billboard for all
publically accessible information. It then sends you messages in the
Message window showing who the owner is, when it was made, it's
purpose, whether it has any attached files etc etc. You see it was
made yesterday by the Sector Controller. That must have been when you
logged into CT Central. The doorman at Central had asked you if you
wanted to download the latest utilities in the background while you
were logged in and you'd given him the okay to write to only your
C:\CTW\UTILS directory and to modify your startup files. You wonder
what other things have changed in your virtual environment since you
were here last.

A small rodent artificial life form goes skittering past your
feet. Hadn't you eradicated all of them? As persistent objects, the
rats exist from one CT session to the next. They were benign enough to
begin with but you are tempted simply to call one of the Sector
Controller Garbage Agents to clean them up for good. The Garbage
Agents have inside access to the environment. The sneakiest of
artificial lifeforms or agents simply don't have any option to resist
the Sector Controller's agents. Of course, as the system's owner you
could just step in youself, but you tend to prefer to let things go
their own way. It makes the virtual world so much more interesting.

A scrap of paper blows past you feet and you retrieve it by a direct
command and clicking on it with the mouse. When you get the paper it
transforms into a butterfly and flys away sending you a parting
message from your friend Jason, "Meet you at The Club at 8." It's a
message from your mailbox. You changed the mailbox to create paper and
other objects which you come across one by one to read your mail. Of
course, you could simply read the mail, but it was an interesting
programming exercise in Tcl/CT and took less than 100 lines of code.

The billboard has some messages pinned to it describing some new
facilities available at CT Central. A faster line was now available to
the main North American hub server and the sysops at Central had
decided to open up a new sector of cyberspace for building development
over by the Bay. Bidding in virtual credits had already started for
prime locations. You open the Bag again and check your wallet,
entering your personal code number to unlock access to the
funds. 12,000 credits could buy a nice sized block, maybe even on the
foreshore. But you've been saving for a faster modem to speed up the
service for users in the direct mail order business you have operating
within your machine here.  Turning around you can just catch a glimpse
of the activity in the distance, right across town where people and
agents have gathered around the ordering booth. There are only a few
people milling around as it was still early. From your Bag you check
the credit takings for the day. Most had bought floppy disks,
stationary and some other small items, although one agent has ordered
a VFAST modem for its owner. Some goods had been paid for in virtual
credits, some in real dollars and some were on credit (from known
users with a trading history). Checking your Microsoft Windows 3.1
clock you see it's 7:45pm, so you head over to the booth and the
gateway that stands nearby. This is just the standard unmodified grey
marble platform a few feet across. Engraved on the surface of the
platform are the words "Gateway to CT Central". Things look quiet here
so you step onto the dias...

The screen goes black for a few seconds. It would be slower if the
line hadn't already been open and the gateway agent had had to dial
the phone and wait for the modem to train up. Suddenly the screen
fills with the familiar scene of the lounge room of your house on CT
Central. Stacked neatly against the wall is your 3D file stack which
can display the files in your home directory. Various tools and
devices sit on shelves around the room. This is where the tools go
when you're not using them, where the Bag puts them when you don't
take them with you. Usually when you hop to other servers, your Bag
only takes a reference to these objects with you, but sometimes you
actually take an object through with you as some need to be remotely
present to operate properly. Your Dog is sleeping in the corner. He
hasn't stirred yet so you leave him be. As you go to the door you
notice a chewed book by the Dog's nose. He'd obviously found it
somewhere. A quick examination shows the data is badly degraded but it
looks like some spells from the Dungeons of Mor. Obviously a player
had dropped it when he held too many things.  Normally the Dog didn't
wander so far by itself, but since you'd modified it's ranging
behaviour it had picked up some interesting things while you've been
away. The Dog uses up many virtual credit points in CPU energy whilst
you are away, but as you tend to own so few objects at Central (unlike
some people who tended to hoard things) you'd negotiated with the
sysops for increased CPU time for the Dog in your absence. You hope
it'll pay off one day when it comes home with something really useful.

As you step outside your modem's receive light is still flashing as
cached information on the immediate area around you is still being
downloaded. In the 3D window you see objects pop into being for a few
nore seconds. Checking a system status window you see that some of the
objects you see don't match the stored libraries of objects on your
hard disk. A perusal of the list shows that David Hendel, who owns the
house across the street has changed it's appearance again and your
system needs to download the new description. You haven't got
automatic aspect updating turned on, so you manually give the OK to
download the new house description in the background whilst you head
off to The Club near the town centre.

You live fairly close to the centre of Central as you were one of the
first users to register.  Now there were nearly 2000 users and the
streets are busy with activity. Glancing at the radar window with its
symbolic display of objects you notice that most of the objects moving
around are agents, with a dozen or so real avatars in sight. Some of
these may be agent controlled too so it can be hard to tell who is
human and who isn't. Two humanoids are talking in the street ahead and
as you pass by you pop up the chat window to overhear what they say.

"What do we offer then?"

"25k"

"What?! Not worth it!"

"And let a commercial company buy in?"

"What would *they* do with a hill?"

You recognise Steve and Biro by their avatars. It's getting towards
8pm so you can't stop.

"Hi guys, catch you later," you type hastily in the chat window as you
zoom past at a run. A teleport booth is coming up on the pavement. It
costs a virtual credit per 100 unit jump. Once you enter the teleport
booth you quickly tell it to take you to The Club. The screen goes
black and you see objects pop into existence around you as the object
cache reloads. First you see the things up close, then things further
and further away. The centre of town is crowded with objects as this
is the oldest part of CT Central so the modem receive light is still
blinking away furiously as you approach The Club.

Turning around you see the building of the File District towering
nearby. The top of the New Files Building is red so that means there
are new files available. You have a couple of minutes so you walk over
and in the front door. At first when you enter, the large high
ceilinged room is empty, then suddenly a towering, sparse tree with a
few nodes appears before you. Doors to the sides lead to individual
file sections, but this tree shows the complete hierarchy. Moving
around the tree you read the names of files written on the nodes. You
click on the name of a Microsoft Windows executeable file called
RAVEN.EXE with the right mouse button and a floating menu asks if you
want to execute the file or download it. You select execute and 3 AUIB
buttons appear, "Download Status - RAVEN.EXE", "Pause Download
RAVEN.EXE" and "Stop Download - RAVEN.EXE". There are no other files
you want so you leave the New Files building. Raven is a small program
and as you are approaching The Club, the Windows executeable program,
which has been downloading as a compressed file to a temporary
directory in the background, fires up. It's a game of some sort. It
looks interesting so you close it and copy the files to a new
directory for later examination.

If the program had been in Tcl/CT you could have executed it remotely,
locally or downloaded it. In addition, many Public Domain agents have
2 file associations. One is the file which created the agent and one
is a description file describing the agent. Both may be blank,
especially for dynamically created agents, but often the programmer
will make sure there is a description file available describing what
the agent does. If you're interested he'll usually leave his CT email
address in the description file and you can contact him for a copy of
the original code (or to buy or barter for it).

If you select to execute an agent locally then it'll run on your local
server. If you want to run it remotely, it'll run on the remote server
provided you have permission and haven't used up your quota in agents.

Some sysops provide Safe Zones where new agents can be tested if
you're not too sure how they will perform, but usually people run and
test agents on their machine at home in a test world, just in case
something goes wrong.

The doorman of The Club has been eyeing you off as you approach,
checking your security clearance and other details. When you get
nearer he opens the door for you to enter.

Jason is waiting in the usual booth. These are soundproofed regions
that are screened from eavesdroppers by hardcoding in the underlying
design of the building. You see a few people scattered about, no
agent-controlled avatars are allowed in here. The sysops booth has a
few figures hunched over drinks (they always do that). You wont be
moving for a while so you select the 3D window option for Enhanced
Reality and the modem light flickers for a few seconds, gathering
extra scene description data. The lighting in the room changes and the
clarity of textures and reflections in the room increases. Jason waves
hello and begins, in chat mode:

"You hear about the hill?"

"I heard Steve and Biro mention it."

"3 hills, nearly 50 feet high, with a view over all of
Central. Enhanced server coding has been added so you can see the US
Hub in the distance. And sailboats on the bay!"

"Neat. Go audio."

You select another menu item and pull out the microphone plugged into
your Sound Blaster card. This takes heaps of bandwidth and has a few
seconds delay, but is worth it by a mile.

"Online, Andre." You hear Jason's familiar voice in your headphones
plugged into the Sound Blaster card.

"Online. So what's the deal?"

"MultiMedia International." Jason sounds smug.

"The interactive TV guys? What about them?"

"I suggested they hook a link to Central for ordering movies realtime
and they want in."

"And the Hill?"

"They'll pay for agent programming and services, in *real* money!"

"All right! And we buy some of the Hill, stick a flag on top or
something to advertise."

"No hardware needed. They can do it all via Central. They need just a
permenant modem line. I've already talked with the sysops, it's no
problem once the funding happens."

"So do they have any idea about CT? What they want for agent
interfaces?"

"Not really. We're to make a real world presentation to them early
next month."

"Better get started."

Jason's avatar turns on the booth's "blanket visuals" button and the
rest of The Club disappears. To other people in The Club, the booth
has just gone black with a red light indicating that it is occupied. A
template under the light shows the names of who is inside and a button
marked "talk" is next to the template. Aside from that, Jason and
Andre are utterly isolated. Andre tells his mailbox to hold incoming
messages as Jason places a complex small 3D model on the table between
them.

"I've programmed up some demo agents. Here's a scenario."

Your modem receive light blazes red... 


Cyberterm runs on a 486DX PC under Microsoft Windows 3.x and is due
for release in early 1995.


(c) Copyright Michael Snoswell 1995 Cyberterm Pty Ltd

(ms at cyberterm.com.au October 26th 1994)

Permission is granted for the distribution of this text by electronic
or other means provided that it is accompanied by this copyright
message and appears in its entirety. This text may not be sold, nor
may someone furnishing this text to a distribution resource receive
any direct funds because of this text alone. It may be used to
accompany a paid printed article on cyberspace, Cyberterm etc provided
that acknowledgement is made of the original author and the article is
accompanied by the above copyright message line. Partial reproduction
of this text is forbidden without prior consent from the author.


NOTE October 3rd, 1995: The current version of CT achieves
approximately 90% of the functionality described here.

Author Michael Snoswell (ms at cyberterm.com.au)

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...