70 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
70 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
Nexus is a federated, free software, hackable VR social platform and protocol.
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Project members include Person 1 <user@example.com>, Person 2 <user@example.com>,
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and Person 3 <user@example.com>. The representative of the project is Person 1.
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Nexus' current design is subject to change; we are still in the rough
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prototyping stage and we expect to "Ship-of-Theseus" our current design quite a
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bit. The goal of Nexus is to provide an open, extendable, VR social platform. To
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do this, Nexus separates its logic into individual Wasm scripts and a networking
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API based on the ECS model. Everything communicates using the gLTF and VRM
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standards: VRM for avatars, and gLTF for objects and worlds. Several different
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actors are present within the Nexus architecture:
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A “world” is a collection of Wasm scripts and gLTF models able to be reproduced.
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It is intended for users to be able to create worlds, and to share them,
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allowing others to use the worlds as templates from which to create servers. A
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“server” is a running instance of a world; how servers interop with other
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servers is yet to be determined. A “client” is the front-end application that
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can connect to any Nexus server and interact with other clients over the server.
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The current plan is to provide almost everything using Wasm scripts.
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Wasm scripts have two categories so far; there are server scripts, that just run
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on the server, and client scripts, which are sent over to the client for the
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client to run locally and then interact with the server using the networking
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API. It's possible that we will come up with some kind of server-client dual
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script type, in which clients run a script to keep themselves up to date with
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the server. The server checks to make sure its results line up with the clients’
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in order to limit abuse.
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Camera and physics (gravity, collision, buttons, etc.) interactions, IK and FBT,
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and GUI systems (server discovery interfaces, friends lists, etc.) will all be
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provided by Wasm scripts. We will provide default implementations, but the
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community will be free to hack on those scripts or create their own from scratch
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to provide the same or new functionality. This creates an extremely extensible
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platform. Using Wasm means that, as we go into the future, more languages could
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be utilized to write social VR, or non-social VR experiences, such as games, a
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scene editor, media creation tools, etc.
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This system enables people to to write clients and servers in other languages or
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engines than Bevy, which we are currently using for our standard implementation.
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As long as clients or servers properly respect the Wasm scripts, everything
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should work across different implementations. If someone creates a Nexus server
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SDK in Unity, they will be able to take advantage of much of Unity to create
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Nexus worlds.
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The fact that we use Wasm also means that game developers can create games or
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experiences in normal, 2D IDEs, such as writing a game in Rust, instead of
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having to deal with our scene editor. That being said, we do plan to make a
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scene editor in Nexus, but this is a tentative, far-future plan.
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The current plan is to use IPFS to provide sharing of Wasm scripts, models, and
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whatever else may materialize in the future.
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Theoretical work on a permissions system has not yet begun.
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The aim is to provide an free software VR social platform where people can
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collaborate and communicate with each other, and a game engine-like base to
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build social VR applications.
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Our Minimum Viable Product is gLTF models loaded in for avatars, downloading and
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loading, basic voice chat, and synced worlds.
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The timespan of this project to full completion is several years. If all goes
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according to plan, an MVP should be only a few months off.
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The server and client implementation will be licensed under the GPLv3, but all
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the base scripts, for things like physics, inverse kinematics, and the basic UI
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implementation will be licensed under the Expat License.
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