While there may be 1 million users (at some time in the future) using Second Life, the display name would be used for distinguishing friends and people in your neighborhood.
Being an old-time IRC developer, I see simularities with IRC nick names (that can collide) and how I'd have solved that if I had been given the chance :p. What I'd do is tag every display name (internally) with the time at which it was set. Then, when someone enters a sim where someone has the same display name, the youngest of the two is reset (the server could reset it to empty and ask at the same time for an alternative; the viewer could be changed to provide an alternative automatically, provided that didn't exist also already). An empty display name would result in the username being displayed, of course, which is supposedly unique. This would reduce griefing a lot, since you'd have to guess what display name someone is going to use before they set it. It would also reduce confusion because it would not be possible for two people to have the same display name when in the same sim. Most of this idea (adding a timestamp and comparing display names when someone logins in or teleports to a new sim; resetting it and asking for an alternative) is almost exclusively server-side though; not sure who to contact to propose it. -- Carlo Wood <ca...@alinoe.com> _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
