Talk:HorizonVirtual:Places

Conditions

Terrain

NOTE: As even PCs can be maintained, upgraded or even reformatted, Program Space is to a degree mutable. The overall theme is unlikely to change, but individual buildings may suddenly move (reboot after upgrade). Then again, if a User minute equals a Program day, and a de-fragmentation or antivirus scan often takes half an hour to run, a borough or town may be undergoing a slow shuffling process while the players are present. Any maps they have will probably stay constant, as the File Allocation Table updates itself.

It’s also worth noting that a User’s scheduled weekly virus scan happens just over once a Program year.

• Broken Terrain or Hills indicates disorganised, fragmented data. (Earthquakes as de-fragmentation, overclocked PC or virus attacks?)
• Steep, thin valleys through hilly regions – low-bandwidth connections, i.e. dialup?

Weather

Rain and fog: system effects like defragmentation, or perhaps a result of system congestion.

Timekeeping

Personal Time

The Horizon: Virtual text establishes a unit of Program Space time in the section on the Programmer class: a "cycle". It is described as the length of time required for a programmer to rest in order to regain the capability to execute rewrites. For the purpose of the Waker Dictionary, I've linked that length of time to the standard Wizard rest time of eight hours.

No real day or night. Anywhere from ten to twenty-four Program hours to shut a given computer down; an evening’s use of a home PC can equal up to eight Program Space months of up-time.

Usage cycles for "always-on" PCs such as web, corporate or government servers - where usage increases during "business hours" and drops off at other points during the day - would probably be analogous to seasons.

--IMAGinES 22:08, 12 Jun 2005 (PDT)

Lifespans

No real upper limit on a program’s lifespan; a mobile waker could live for centuries of Program Time.

No time passes for programs on a shut down computer. Not dead; effectively deep hibernation.

Planes

I wonder whether it's worth developing the idea of a mirrored web site as a sort of "alternate plane" to an existing server. It might not be feasible, as I imagine the back-end would probably make the actual System itself different enough that it's still easily identifiable as somewhere else, but it might meet the criteria for a spell/rewrite that shifts players to "alternate" planes.

--IMAGinES 18:58, 10 Jun 2005 (PDT)

Would the OS level be a sort of sub-plane on every system? Perhaps a substitute for the Plane of Shadow?

--IMAGinES 07:44, 17 Jun 2005 (PDT)

Language and Labelling

The text makes clear in several places that, barring programmers, wakers have no grasp of a written language and cannot read. However, it then goes on to mention how data access poarts in major systems are "clearly marked" with destination information, and that maps exist. The question is, if DAPs are labelled and wakers have no understanding of (presumably) symbolic langauge, how are they even capable of understanding what said labels mean?

My personal theory is that, while DAPs are not labelled with actual names or descriptions, they are labelled with the IP address of their destination. I think that, while wakers may not be able to rea a written language, they have no problem with numbers, and would be able to read an IP address and think, "Ah; that's the IP address for New York Hub!"

--IMAGinES 08:31, 17 Jun 2005 (PDT)