My View of the Matrix

There are two large sections of the Matrix:

There is GridLink. This is the only part of the Matrix which has a geographical 1:1 correspondance. All of the buildings are modeled as a part of traffic flow. This is used to direct and control traffic flow and contains all of the signs and floating ads. It contains all the Ads and floating billboards and such. When you are looking through AR you are seeing the GridLink without the vehicle stuff in addition to whatever arrows are within range of your commlink. This is why you can see a billboard for Ares at a distance outside of your signal range and click on it. You can set your filters to filter out various billboards, certain types of arrows, spam, etc.

When you are going through the world in VR you can go through the GridLink as a VR Ghost floating down the middle of the street. You would still have the traffic filtered out but you could see the same billboards and business signs and even see people walking down the street and talk to them as long as they haven't blocked you off. You could see everyone else floating along as well or have them filtered out and see a sort of empty street. The people walking down the street can see you as well through AR unless they have Avatars filtered out. A totally unfiltered commlink would drive most people nuts.

Then there is the Internet. It is just like it is today for the most part. It is full of web pages. It contains all the cable channels and all the communications stuff. Many web pages are full VR rooms with agents to talk to about their products. There is no 1:1 correlation between the Internet and physical geography. There are whole lands in VR but they exist in servers only. The Internet and the Gridlink are very interconnected. You can walk down the street and click on a resturant and pull up it's web page. You can access the internet nearly anywhere through business signs and billboards.

There is a whole VR Mall called "The Mall" (I got this from a novel but I can't remember which one). It has every major store in the world all side by side divided up into subjects such as clothes, electronics, games, etc. Anyone can go there but it has no physical side to it. It is just in the Matrix.

Both of these together are what is called the Matrix and the average person would be hard pressed to know where one ends and the other begins.

What there is NOT:
There is no Nodequest. You move through hundreds of switch points and servers all the time. You don't roll to go from one to the next. Besides, they don't charge you for how many nodes you move through so all that billing stuff is silly. When you are in a VR space then there is VR stuff but when you are going through the Internet there is no rooms or fast highways or whatever unless you have that visual inside your commlink. Most of the time it's just floating windows that pop up. You could find a VR web site and pop in to that but you don't need a visual of movement or warping around.

Your Avatar is not out there in the Matrix. You are surfing along accessing hundreds of servers, maybe just to construct one web site or VR chat room. If you are in VR then you can present any Avatar you want. You can present that avatar as floating along in the gridlink but the avatar not actually out there - it is a file that you have made public so that anyone who wants to view your avatar (ie it is within range and you haven't filtered them out) will see it. There is no way to get trapped in a server by having your connection to that server close behind you.

There is NO reality to Virtual Reality. It is not solid. There is code and some of that code has a visual component but hitting a VR avatar is useless unless you have agreed to take damage in some sort of game. There is no way for your avatar to take damage unless the file is corrupted on your commlink and then it probably won't work. The condition monitor only appies to damage to the commlink. It will not show up on the avatar. There is no reason for it to have the visuals for it and why would you want to give away that information to your enemy. Think of hacking as like playing poker. You don't want to give away tells that they are succeeding. Therefore no dinosaurs eating other avatars.

Basically everyone is inside their office space inside their commlinks. They can remove the office visual and float in space surrounded by windows. You can create a visual of whatever you want around you. This is going full VR. This can be hot or cold sim. You can choose to replace any icon or avatar you want in your office space. There is no Reality Filter contests. You always win, but you don't get a bonus. In order for someone to change your setting they would have had to already hacked into your commlink. The reality filter contest is implying a free successful hack for the sole purpose of changing your browser colors. This is stupid.

Alot of this may seem so obvious that it doesn't need to be said but what I am trying to do is fight the habit of falling for the illusion that alot of cyberpunk writers and games have done. It confuses the players and readers and shows that they lack the fundamental understanding of computers that their character would have.

I can see that and I think it's right except why does AR have to be on gridlink? isn't that the motor vehicle trafic control system?

you still get arross in VR right? Arros have a physical range but they also pop up in VR when your icon comes in range.

Why do you make a distinction between the AR/VR matrix and the "internet", didn't cannon pretty much kill the WWW with the crash of '29? What do people do on the internet?

Tron was just never a good model, and that is still what Shadowrun is still trying to emulate.

I think it's fundamental mistake is assuming that people who know what they are doing will use any sort of interface that prevents them from directly interacting with the system or filtering it. Kiddie scripters use GUIs that more competent people have built, people who know what they are doing typically work with command line tools that allow them to directly interact with the target. And they will be a lot faster than something that uses a billion lines of code to make clever animated pictures and is running with an 85 millisecond round-trip delay on top of that.

VR/AR etc would be tools for people who don't really understand how the network works or are just using the system to do something. The clever visual picture of streets and buildings is a whole lot less useful to a hacker than the actual route table used by the RTG. The whole idea of a "hidden nodes" just doesn't work if you are looking at the actual system table of the network instead of the view it wants to show you.

The reason that AR is on gridlink because there is no other 1:1 virtual space. It's is already there in order to have a model for traffic control so it seemed like it would be able to do double duty. Otherwise I couldn't think of a reason to have a virtual city. It's not necessary on ther face of it but as a side effect of traffic control it make more sense to me.

Yes, you could see arrows if you were in VR moving through the grid.

The internet is used for everything that it is used for today. There doesn't need to be a VR display for everything, most of it would still be on web pages, though they might be spiffier.
Even if it all did crash it would still be replaced with the stuff that works. I just took the crash to mean that they wanted to get rid of some of the node quest stuff and the matrix topography. In my games it never looked like that in the first place and the crash just lost lots of data.

I don't have agents actually on other nodes. They are on your commlink running from there. The reason I do that is it seems like it would be very easy to prevent agents from moving from node to node. All you have to do is only allow access of a certain bandwidth - enough to surf for web pages but not enough to move an agent on to your resources.

The avatar is your icon on the Matrix. There is nothing there to take as damage. It's just a copy of a file that is sent to the viewing computer just like what happens when you look at a picture on a web page. If you damaged a web page image but didn't upload it back to the site then you would only be damaging your copy. The analyze action MIGHT tell you that there is bandwidth problems but keep in mind that if you do send an attack virus at a commlink you can get feedback from the virus that it is succeeding if you want to. You don't need the analyze to do that.

The reality filter would be better phrased as your VR Desktop or Office Space. That would make it less misleading.

I have only a vague idea of what a system table of the network is but can a person really scan and comprehend a whole one of those in less than 85 miliseconds?

By 85 milisecond delay are you refereing to the Observe in Detail simple action of a matrix perception test?

It's an interesting take, but I actually rather prefer SR's "incorrect" way of doing things. Call it devotion to genre if you like.

I do plan on doing a few things similar in my next game though. I'm actually going to be modeling the Matrix after The Street in Snow Crash, and Gridlink will be an underlay system much as you've described it (of course, no AR in my games, but the rest of it).

Not what I was getting at, really. Garrowolf has a lot of really good points vis-à-vis computers and reality vs. SR/cyberpunk "ghost in the machine", it's just that I enjoy forgetting how computers work in order to play said ghost.

So at home your TV is your home computer and you can interactively oder stuff online as well as watch TV like microsoft envisioned?

The veiw of the matrix is so up and down that i just hit the reset button completely like the writers did and forgot about it all together. Seeing as how I have yet to run on the matrix i need some help.

Grider can I get your take?

Actually, by canon the entire city of seatlle has AR overlays to make the buildings all emerald-y. There's also a program that lets you slap images up on any surface you want, but only you can see them.

The key here is that AR does not have to have a 1-1 correspondance, but it can if you want it to. It's just a matter of having the computer's cameras analyze it's images, create a 3d model of the area, and check both your own data and the broadcast data of the nodes in range to see if anything is supposed to be there. Y'know, Just. I've always figured that those 1-1 AR overlays tend to be the links for the nodes they represent, and you interact with them somehow in order to access said node.

AR.

And really that isn't critical visuals, unless you consider the city itself to be visually overwhelming.

In fact, if you did, it might be possible to get your reality filter to edit out the skyline.