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Virtual Real Estate Boom Draws Real Dollars
An anonymous reader writes "According to a USAToday story, Second Life from Linden Labs is seeing a boom in virtual land trading. The article quotes a player as saying: 'My vision is to buy real estate in Second Life with one or two other investors and make it available to new players as a business', and it seems that 'Large swathes of undeveloped online property, some bearing an uncanny resemblance to a palm-studded West Coast beachfront idyll, are selling for up to $550 an acre.' Second Life uses OpenGL and Ogg-Vorbis running on a Linux grid." S!: We've previously covered Second Life on several occasions over at Slashdot Games.
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You are quite right. Second Life is expanding 20% each week! New land masses are added all the time. 11 New Sims (Servers) were added just a day or so ago.
If you want to try out Second Life on a trial basis, click here
I don't think that article is correct; here's the Second Life exchange on GOM, and it lists blocks of 250 Linden for about a buck. Unless I'm reading it wrong, which may well be the case.
Land can't be added without adding hardware.
65536 square meters of land equals one server.
If they tried to double-sell a server, it would be obvious, since the client provides tons of debug information about the server processes that are running, in real time.
If a group of new servers are added to the grid with 1/2 the normal performance of the existing ones, we'd know something is up.
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I don't spend much time in SecondLife any more as my real life keeps getting in the way but anyone that hasn't should really give it a try. Keep in mind it's not necessarily a game but more a really advanced social tool. You get a free trial and if the whole land-owning idea doesn't appeal to you, you can pay a one time $10 fee and hang out all you want. The in-game tools are very capable and getting more advanced all of the time. Some of the things people have come up with in SecondLife are extremely creative and your time would not be wasted there if you were just to spend it wandering around seeing what others have done.
For the Linuxites, it runs under winex as indicated *shameless plug*here*/shameless plug*.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
The idea in Second Life is that what you are paying for are resources of their servers (RAM, disk space, CPU cycles) which are permanently assigned to your account. In Second Life, unlike other MMORPGs, even when you're not logged in your possessions and property are being interacted with by other players and consuming computer time.
How much you are paying (there's a tiered subscription model, as well as a single-fee "visitor" plan which doesn't let you own property) determines how much of Linden's capacity you are allowed to use up. The fact that it appears for interaction as "land" isn't really important, any more than real-life real estate cares to exactly what purpose you put the area you own (within zoning laws).
Changing the specification is practically impossible. Too much content has already been made which relies on a simulator being 256m x 256m in size.
They have stated that it's possible for them to run more than one simulator on a server; but like I said earlier, if they did this without disclosing the fact, it would be obvious.
"65536 square meters per server" is hardly a universal physical constant!
In the hypothetical set of all possible virtual world designs, you are correct. In SL however (which *was* the topic of my message), it is a universal constant.
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