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Second Life Open Sources Client
An anonymous reader writes "Just noticed that Second Life released their client under the GPL today, and that they're up to 2.4 million users. Article says that 15% of users contribute scripted objects."
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I want to see the flying penis client
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Really, this is a great step towards "Cyberspace" á la Snow Crash. Open Source and, eventually, Open Standars will vastly spur development of this technology.
Wow, this might help spread open source software more, can wait for the FLOSS House (maybe there is one and i dont know)
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
-nt-
Dunno if it hit it yet but yesterday it had almost 25.000 citizens 'in-world' it was floating around 24.500 ..
And Teleporting and or moving around was almost impossible
It has had a lot of media attention lately, all over the world.
Wish they would upgrade their servers, to handle the load of users. Or at least get a EU Server farm.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Linden does not have 2.4 million users, and it does not regularly report how many users it does have. It reports "Residents", a figure that includes people who have signed up for Second Life but never logged in. It also double-counts people who have more than one avatar.
n s_second_life_numbers_and_the_presss_desire_to_bel ieve.php#comments
s econd_life_numbers_thanks_to_david_kirkpatrick.php
More about the uselessness of the Residents figure here: http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/12/26/linde
The only person to whom Linden has reported a count of active users is David Kirkpatrick of Fortune, and as of last week, only 252K people had logged into Second Life twice or more in two month -- the rest were bailouts. This 252K figure, which is a much more accurate reflection of Second Life's popularity, is an order of magnitude lower than most of the press is reporting.
More on Kirkpatrick's numbers here: http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/01/04/real_
First flying penises, now open sores? Oh, wait... Never mind!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
The claim of 2.4 million users is a crock of shit. This blog post has some details on what the actual number of users is like.
Long story short, in Second Life it is free to signup for an account, so no conclusions can be drawn whatsoever from those numbers. Compare this with World of Warcraft, where each account costs $15/mo. or it is killed. Now when Blizzard tells you they have 6 million users, you know it's true. But as for Second Life, the number of simultaneous users in the game world really isn't that large. And the game lags horribly.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Perhaps my fears are unfounded but I would imagine that the servers would be heavily taxed if everything was going on server side. I mean, let's say you make a product. It's possible this creation process is left to your client and then the server is informed of the new object and persists it. Well, wouldn't it be profitable to make a client that just keeps notifying the server of new objects that sell well in the world? I'm not too clear on the crafting process in Second Life but I imagine it takes resources.
I've heard a lot of comparisons of Second Life to Snow Crash but I'm not sold yet on this step being purely progress forward. I don't even think I could think of server software that could handle all possible clients without the processing and network traffic getting exponential.
My work here is dung.
The official announcement from Linden is on the Second Life Blog.
- You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!
But ... the downside is that now it will be even easier to cheat, write bots, and exploits ...
Now when Blizzard tells you they have 6 million users, you know it's true
I'm sure Blizzard has around 6 million users, but a lot of people own more than one account so they can play both factions on a PvP server so their numbers might not be spot on either.
Second Life is utterly dated graphically and has a primitive client.
This open source effort is a bid to get the community to do what Linden Labs
has failed to do thus far -- bring their offering into the 21st century.
The clock is ticking for Linden. If anyone thinks that there won't be a better,
more sophisticated and vastly more profitable virtual community within the next
five years, they're either dreaming or they're one of the suckers who has invested
in virtual real estate believing that Second Life has some unique grip on the
concept of virtual communities.
Open Sourcing the client is an effort to cinch public acceptance of Second Life
as the defacto standard in virtual communities. My bet is that Second Life is
dethroned faster than anyone expects. The experience just isn't remotely
sophisticated, graphically rich or slick enough to have staying power.
Even the 6M claim could be a steaming pile, count the amount of users online at peak time please, not half made accounts, nor anything else, how many people play the game....
...
Current numbers:
Total Residents: 2,434,170
Logged In Last 60 Days: 883,536
Online Now: 13,150
That is right now, right this second as I post this. The highest I've seen the online now number is about 23-24k, and once it gets over 20k shit really does hit the fan.
As far as 15% contribute scripted objects. Perhaps that's 15% of the real active user count, but it sure as hell isn't 15% of the 2.4M. Scripting in SL has a steep learning curve and many people who do building in SL avoid scripting because it is such a pain.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
I think this is a surprising move, but for a different reason than client-side hacking, which is always unavoidable (although made easier by releasing source).
LL make their money by selling server space. You can't just connect your own server to SL - it has to be one of theirs. The network is closed. All of the PR and astroturfing that's been coming out of LL recently is aimed at getting more people to invest in SL space: the more investors there are, the more the space will be worth. They're trying to drive a homesteading boom like the one that happened in the early days of the Web, when companies started to go online.
Now people could create a SL client that can connect to an alternative SL universe: one where the servers are free software clones of the original SL servers. This makes SL an open standard. That means we can all join in and host our own stuff without having to pay LL for a server. The system is open - we can join for free.
Presumably LL are relying on "their network" being the best, so people continue to pay them for something they can now do for less money elsewhere. Bit like AOL and Compuserve assuming that their internal networks would always be worth more than Internet access.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
While it's not a 'combat game', there are areas that are combat zones. Your avatar can 'die', but I believe it just spawns your avatar somewhere else. (I don't do the combat stuff, I've just heard about it.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Your fears are both unfounded and under-respected.
If the Linden folks aren't doing server-side logic for exchange and storage of Linden bucks, they are screwed whether or not the client is open source.
Ever heard of aim-bots? Those work with closed-source clients.
On the other hand, it looks like the Linden folks are still working on server controls to make sure stuff doesn't run out of control. Flying penis storms, grey goo, that sort of thing.
And from the sound of it, their server software seems to have individual servers representing specific geography. Never mind the redundancy issues - that's a major scalability issue.
Hey, it's the first beast specifically of this type. There are a lot of hard lessons you learn by being first.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
I downloaded the client a few months back, created an avatar and wandered around:
I felt the experience was primitive, with sub-par graphics, a horrible UI and poor performance
(I'm on a PC graphics workstation with a very fast connection -- that should easily have been able
to handle it). The music was some sort of cheesy new-age MIDI composition, and the character
models seemed like 1990's low-poly attempts at something stylisticly mid 1980's. The character
interaction was poor, there were clipping issues and there was a poor response time with
the environment.
I uninstalled the software within 1 hour.
I'll never log in to Second Life again, and I remain convinced that the contest to be the first
to develop a compelling virtual community is still a wide-open race.
But in terms of statistics, I can assure you that Linden Labs still counts me as a "Resident".
Which begs the question: How representitive am I of Second Life residents in general?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
And less than 30% of all MySpace accounts are active, get visited at least once every 2 weeks.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
SL has a number of problems. One of them is that the client is well, slow. Framerates of 5 FPS aren't entirely uncommon in some areas. Now instead of blindly speculating, we can look at it and actually tell whether it's just badly coded, or the nature of SL makes it work slowly. This will probably also spur some effort in trying to make it take advantage of multicore CPUs.
Another thing to try would be rewriting the UI. It would be a lot less painful to use if the UI and display weren't in sync, so that when things were slow you could still type at a normal speed.
My personal area of interest would be attempting to provide some sort of way to let SL objects provide a better interface. The sort of interface that can be scripted in SL is very primitive as of now. Being able to make an object with a full dialog with buttons, dropdown lists, a list view, etc would really improve the usability of complex objects.
This should also give a big push to the libsecondlife project, which is also a great thing. SL can be used as a platform for interesting things, such as A-Life experiments. That's another thing I plan to try eventually.
On the Linux side, I'd like to see the integration of something like DCOP, or at least a named pipe to communicate with the SL client. For coding it'd be wonderful to run 'make' and have all the modified scripts automatically sent to SL. Currently this requires an edit, copy, paste into SL cycle.
HOORAY.
Now everyone will be able to program their own perversions!
Well, wouldn't it be profitable to make a client that just keeps notifying the server of new objects that sell well in the world? I'm not too clear on the crafting process in Second Life but I imagine it takes resources.
The way I understand it, is that there is no "crafting" system per se, but users create things outside of the client, and then upload them to the SL system. Users can then set flags in their creation that makes it non-copyable, non-transferable and/or non-sellable. Therefore a client that creates items perpetually would not give a user any advantage, as items can already be copied at will. There is no rules in SL (except in player created environments), as it is more of a virtual space than a game. This is what I've understood of it, I haven't played it myself so this is only second-hand information.
> Ever heard of aim-bots? Those work with closed-source clients.
Yeah, but it's actually just a "tool" that happens to break a "game". SL is not a game. It's a crude early version of cyberspace, and hence has performance, security and stability issues galore. However, it's the best there is at the moment, and, quite frankly - it's mind-boggling what some people pull off with nothing but finite state automatons and parametric geometry.
>On the other hand, it looks like the Linden folks are still working on server controls to make sure stuff doesn't run out of >control. Flying penis storms, grey goo, that sort of thing.
Yes, that's necessary, and it's good. Their Grid defense has become much better in the recent months, and grey goo type attacks can rather quickly be contained.
>Hey, it's the first beast specifically of this type. There are a lot of hard lessons you learn by being first.
Yes, it's the first beast of this kind, and the lessons learned are invaluable - and very tough.
Even the 6M claim could be a steaming pile, count the amount of users online at peak time please, not half made accounts, nor anything else, how many people play the game....
It doesn't really matter if the people are logging in regularly; they're still paying $15/month for the account.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Second Life has a curious economy. People make money by making stuff and selling to others, but it's all virtual stuff that must be run on the client. While some object code does live on the server, everything required for visual rendering must be revealed to the client at some point.
A look at SL history will show various incidents of people figuring out how to work around content protection to copy it unhindered and the vicious controversy that ensues. Now, there is simply no such thing as graphical Intellectual Property. Open client code should mean open copying.
They have just knowingly crippled one of the their models of avatars getting money from other avatars. The "steal this avatar" client will be out in a week, I'd wager. Should be interesting to see what happens.
Blizzard has roughly 6m accounts that pay $15 a month. That's all that matters, really - they aren't trying to count "real people" who play, and even if they did it'd be a meaningless number. What is important, from a business standpoint, is that wow has $90M coming in each month from subscribers.
World of Warcraft doesn't cost $15 a month everywhere. In Asia you don't even need to pay monthly.
SL client doesn't really need to be protected.
This isn't WoW, in SL the server takes care of pretty much everything, and the client is practically a 3D web browser. The client is already very unresticted as far as MMORPGs go, you can teleport anywhere you want for instance. Of course you can be banned or not allowed to some destination, but changing the client won't change that.
Even without it being open, the libsecondlife people had figured out enough to duplicate in-game objects. This means that very possibly creators of things that aren't scripted are going to get screwed. But this was always a possibility. It was completely obvious somebody would do it within a few days of trying SL, closed or not.
L$ handling is of course server-side, you can't create them out of nowhere. L$ are only created by LL and then exchanged between residents and bought and sold for USD.
Yes, I'm sure that counts for 2 or 3 million of those accounts, at least.
If the Linden scripting language is really "pretty easy, just like C++" I very much doubt that they have 375k contributing users. C++ is hard enough for professional programmers, and not a language for getting non-programmers to contribute anything.
I always felt like NetHack was sort of a virtual community. There were many denizens who weren't really people, but rather trolls and monsters and whatnot, but in a rudimentary sort of way it seems to fit the criteria for a virtual world. http://sourceforge.net/projects/nethack/
in WURM (www.wurmonline.com)
The reasons that MMORPGs need to "protect" the client don't apply to SL, or are easy to avoid. There are basically three reasons that MMORPG systems have problems with "unauthorized" clients:
Assuming bots aren't an issue, there should be no security-related reason for any MMORPG not to open-source the client.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I find it interesting that DESPITE the fact that the majority of posts from "People who know" that Second life is a steaming pile of crap that it continues to grow.
5 8975402950&q=second+life that was done for google.
Go watch the video at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-51827597
The fact of the matter is SL is VERY interesting due to the way in which it's built. It's flexible and the people who run it are BIG proponents of open sourcing everything they can. When you ask them about the number of users they tend to be honest about what they think is real and what are just scripts running. The BS is usually from Trolls.
As for the quality of the graphics.
1. All the content is USER CREATED. Go someplace in SL where people know how to use Blender or Maya and it looks great. Go someplace made by somebody who just learned how to sculpt prims yesterday and it sucks.
2. There is a GREAT live music community growing in SL. The quality is pretty good since you can get up to 768Kb/s of bandwidth to stream your live event.
3. Guess what? The graphics are as good as the clients can handle considering that their primary objective at this point is a flexible world that allows users to create what they want and be scalable.
The majority of people who "crap" on SL (that I've talked to) expect something like WoW. WoW is a TOTALLY different monster. Scripted world, Blizzard created objects...and a much lower age group demographic.
If you want WoW...go play WoW. But don't expect SL to be LIKE WoW.
Of course you could run your own private server, like the Construct in the Matrix. You could do things like the "jump" program and "learn karate". But unlike the movie, you can't carry your guns from the fake fake world to the real fake world.
John
The real problem with SL is one of scalability. In the real world, we work on a combination of peer to peer and server based models; server-based because you have water, power, and communications services delivered to you; peer to peer because your house does not depend on your neighbor's house for anything, and they are effectively equal (even if their sizes are wildly disparate, for example, they both perform the same function.)
In Snow Crash, Stephenson's "Metaverse" was also a peer-to-peer network. It would seem to be highly similar to the web in some ways; links between servers, the capacity for hosting, et cetera. Of course, in Stephenson's world, cheap and plentiful bandwidth connects subscribers (in the form of L. Bob Rife's cable network.)
To make this long story short, we need a distributed architecture that allows you to host your own part of the game world. Monetary transactions between servers would occur in legal tender, and you could have any kind of currency you liked in your game world (if any.) Money transfers could be carried out through any number of services (paypal, egold, whatever.)
This permits as much scalability as you can afford. If you have the money, then you can have your "land" hosted elsewhere; otherwise you put it on your dinky little home connection and only a handful of people can connect at once. Still, this is pretty much the only way to accomplish this goal, and it keeps freedom in the hands of the people.
For a light technology demo version of this, one could add inter-server portals to Sauerbraten. In itself it wouldn't give you the full experience however, as there would be no scripting. Still, Sauerbraten is a collaborative building environment, so it would be interesting in itself.
For something a little more likely to be the future than Second Life, check out Alan Kay (and others)'s Croquet. Croquet is based on Squeak which in turn is a graphically rich Smalltalk environment. Thus Croquet is (or will be - it's in beta now) portable, consistent (Squeak has its own VM which is very consistent across all platforms) and fully Open. Not to mention, it works as I described :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Does that scare the hell out of anyone else?
There is a very good GoogleTechTalk from last year here where the Linden guys give the Google guys a show and tell about some of the technology underpinning Second Life.
Bottom line, as I understand it from this video, the client is really very very dumb. Everything intelligent is running on the server, and it is just left to the client to handle the basic graphical rendering.
Now it is always possible that there is something they have missed, but it appears that the system was designed from the start to make it resistant to any compromise of the client.
Hopefully, we'll see an improvement to the dog-slow Mac. client.
Of course you could run your own private server, like the Construct in the Matrix. You could do things like the "jump" program and "learn karate". But unlike the movie, you can't carry your guns from the fake fake world to the real fake world.
Ah, good point. An interoperability problem. That would reduce the value of a private server.
I suppose it might be possible to come up with an open standard for object exchange, so that objects could be moved between suitably configured servers in the alternate universe. This would not provide any protection against copying though, and there would still be no way to move things into the official network.
Frankly, I'd rather pay them to host the servers than to try to host my own. What with all the griefers making life miserable for the server maintainers, it hardly seems worth the effort to try to run your own public server.
The counter-argument is this: the network would be more valuable if it was mostly composed of privately-run but publically available servers. How rubbish would the Web be if, for example, MySpace was the only company that could host a website? I dare say the WWW revolution wouldn't have happened if client and server software hadn't been freely available.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
3D Objects are created entirely inworld. Animations and textures are created outside of the client. Object flags (Mod, Copy, Transfer) can be toggled according to the existing flags and your creator and owner status on the item.
Linden Labs, Wired Magazine, and a bunch of self-congratulatory bloggers and assorted dorks out of San Francisco give a crap about this train wreck of a "virtual community?" Every "article" I read about this thing seems like just a thinly disgused ad.
The 6million user number has also been debunked as crap too. I was reading a pretty good article concerning that this weekend actually, naturally the article URL isn't at hand but afterwards it was pretty clear that 6million is also bogus. It's still a HUGE number though and I think bigger than any other.
FWIW on EVE I regularly see 20K or more folks logged on and as many as 28K without experiencing problems. I believe it's gone over 30K but that's been a pretty rare thing and nto something I've ever personally seen.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Sincerely,
Grumpy Old Man
No jokes, please
They're not first - Activeworlds has been around for years (I first used it in 97 or so).
http://www.activeworlds.com/
I have to agree with you. There are a few People making money with things like Virtual Slot and Vending machines that could be put under quite quickly if their code was circumvented.
I can't really see how they [the Lindens] can keep the sort of economy they have going without at least some "Black Box" elements in the code.
That being said I look forward to a GUI that isn't on par with Quark Xpress in terms of ugliness and learning curve.
I know I'm off the subject here, but I just have to say that I don't get why people participate in that cynical "alternative" world. I heard so much about it, that I decided to try it out. The thing that made me really hate it - it the way they try and push you towards spending real money on bullshit items. I mean here is a chance to make something beautiful for all to share. Here's a chance for a platform where all are equal and have equal chances - but nay. Second life makes it all about the goddamn money. Hence it's main concept - it you have money, you'll have a better life... I really hope that second life will fail - and that one day we can all roam virtual landscapes regardless of money. Say, did the 60's ever happen?
Locksmith
Can't I just use TinyFugue?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm not sure, but it seems to me that Second Life is able to stream content to users. I don't know if any other 3D client does that? WoW doesn't, does it?
That might not make it pretty, but in itself it's quite powerful.
Who's got the HowTo on embedding existing apps as modules in the SL client, with their GUIs rendered onto 2D surfaces on 3D SL objects? I want my avatar's chest to display the GAIM messages I send from my mobile phone.
--
make install -not war
Any reasonable security model protecting online currency has to be proof against tampering with the client, and instead secure the server. Even before the client's source was opened, people were reverse-engineering the network protocol, against which work there is practically no protection (especially with an unencrypted client/server protocol). Currency and money supply must be controlled at the server, or counterfeiting can't be prevented. Even in the real world, the only proof against counterfeit is the extreme complexity of physical currency features, which are not only virtually impossible in digital currency, but directly contradict digital currency's best features.
The real question about Second Life's "Treasury security" with this release is whether Linden Labs has first secured their servers against currency attacks. That sounds like a fascinating research paper for the current term of a CS or even economics, student or researcher.
--
make install -not war
Think of SL as an IRC server that is being run by The Sims. Most people I know in SL go there for the community. The 3D representation gives them a better sense of the person they're talking to, and a different level of interaction.
You CAN do alot for free. There's alot of good free stuff out there. You can also make stuff if you want to. Nobody says you have to buy it. Natural resources? LIMITLESS! Want another box? Just drop one. With SL, the ability to sell goods isn't limited by any sort of ability to produce quantities. It's about design.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
A place with 2.4 million instances of "bunny in a ball gag." *shudder*
That's a lot of paedophiles!
I think, you're right, but nobody is forcing you to buy anything in SL. You can still participate in the "social culture" without ever spending any money. I haven't. And if you need something, you can simply create it yourself. If I need money to upload a file, I simply sit in a camping chair.
I never bought anything, but created my own skins, textures, objects. I never bought land, because I'm not interested in making money (renting land for a shop) or "settle down" (build a house). I never understood the concept to own a "physical location", a house, in a world which you only experience when you're logged on and roam that world. Why would anyone log on and stay in a virtual home and not visit the many places?
There have to be some people owning land to show their ideas, so other can look at them and experience them. It's like the Web. Most part of the "surfers" just roam the many pages, but a few create their own to share their ideas. No one creates a webpage and locks everyone else out. Well, they surely exist, but they don't matter.
will do things like, oh, I don't know, load a wall image BEFORE you run into it?
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
While I would LOVE to see the 500 client bugs fixes even if it means getting the fixed from third parties, as well as MUCH NEEDED UI improvements, I can't actually see much of that happening for a couple of reasons.
/terrible/ bug regression problems as they are never compeltely in sync.
/mostly/ for reference for people wanting to do compeltely different things as an SL interface rather than as a way of improving the main client. THey love that kind of stuff. Having people create 3d immursion versions of the basic client etc...
1) Normally the SL client is updated every two weeks, and at least once a month with MAJOR changes. That is a hell of a lot of work to keep up with for anyone wanting to provide an alternate client.
2) LL has been typically resitive to advice. They have shown all the signs of a pure "Not Invented Here" attitude. (With that I do NOT mean not using things like MySQL and mozilla, they have, it's IDEAS that they hate to hear from outside. They do everything their own way and reinvent the wheel constantly with typically bad results, repeating the mistakes of every other on line game in the past) So I wonder how much input for bug fixes that they will accept back into their main tree. Of if they are even capable of doing it. They maintain at least 2 seperate development lines at once and have
I bet that it is
The one main thing I hope they've done well is gotten their "API" secure becuase as much as they have been hacked in the past with libSL and in-world scripting hacks, this client release will spur a HUGE hack fest on them for the next month or so...
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
the first and only person who i ran into who mentioned SecondLife was a total ass whose parents sent him to Wharton and spent some time working for some BS capital firm in SF. The usage figures they give are complete BS. No one gives a crap about this stupid thing. My guess is some reputable people bought into it and they're not yet willing to fold their cards. Slashdot really needs to stop taking payouts from PR firms.
5GB is a number Joe came up with after checking out all sources (servers, clients, libraries, scripts) plus unit tests, packaging tools, and test plans. None of the 5GB includes user generated content of any kind (i.e. textures, lsl scripts, objects, etc.). One can get into all sorts of arguments about methodology (as seems to happen whenever we publish a stat), but the point is, we've got a lot of code.
Today was a small step in the grand scheme of things. As one of the other posters pointed out, the amount of code we posted was a number much smaller than 5GB. But, this will hopefully be an important step in giving people control of their own computers. We certainly don't want you to have to install proprietary software on your computer to enjoy Second Life, and now, you won't have to. Admittedly, there are still some rough edges in a purely open source compile, but that's a bug, not a feature.
Is it just me or does Second Life seem more and more irrelevant every day. I've never tried it, but my perception of it is that it's pretty much just another dork clique. The only people who seem to care about it at all are the people who are really into it already - to the rest of the world it's a non-entity.* It's not the Metaverse. Hell, it's not even as interesting as WoW or EVE because of the entry barriers and the learning curve associated with content development as well as just the overall amateur/capitalist sheen of it.
Is there any chance that it will ever become something more than a playground for for a very minute minority, or is it just going to slowly cannibalize itself into oblivion.
(* That's just my perception - maybe i've missed something?)
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Or perhaps they're relying on patents. If they have appropriate ones, they could shut down any OS alternative service providers.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
A senior developer from Linden spoke at my class a few months back, and he told us about their plans to open source the client, and eventually the server system - i.e., you will eventually be able to use your own hardware to run a SL land server over the internet. The question isn't whether it will happen, it's when. Will it affect their business model? Of course. But according to the developer, the goal is to open-source everything they can, and if the business model has to change, then it'll change.
You know what I find cynical ... people who believe that if everything was free we'd all be happier. We might be happier if we could eat under that scenario. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, we all have to make money somehow in order to feed our families. Even open source programs with full time programmers need ways to pay the bills. In the end everything comes down to the almighty dollar. Unfortunate yes. Reality ... yes.
If I had points I'd mod you up. We'll have to appeal to the few /.ers who aren't basement dwelling WoW players.
For a lot of people community is more important than how many polygons you can render.
The scenario you describe is pretty similar to what we want to do at http://www.interreality.org./
If the client end of your client server app needs to be "protected", your security model is already terribly flawed. The first rule of client/server app development is simple: Never trust the client.
If you never take input from the client at face value, then you don't need to "protect" it (a war you'll never win, by the way).
Raph Koster knows it. Why other MMO developers have historically ignored this rule over and over again, I'm not sure.
Blizzard has had a terrible track record of violations, however: numerous Diablo 1 hacks, map hacks in their RTSes, up to and including WC3, etc. Frankly, I'm stunned WoW hasn't had any major hacks to date -- maybe they finally learned
I used Activeworlds years ago too, is it still active?
LL make their money by selling server space. You can't just connect your own server to SL - it has to be one of theirs. The network is closed. All of the PR and astroturfing that's been coming out of LL recently is aimed at getting more people to invest in SL space: the more investors there are, the more the space will be worth. They're trying to drive a homesteading boom like the one that happened in the early days of the Web, when companies started to go online.
On the other hand, this will be a very concrete experiment with micropayments on an effectively wide open information network. If a fully open client with just a trusted third party to handle financial transactions (or maybe ecash) can support a viable information economy through either donations or some form of copyright respect, then it bodes well for a similar "real life" system of micropayments for information and services. Realistically, since most things digital already happen on the Internet, SL will be as real as it gets in terms of the future information economy.
It's likely that Linden Labs is betting on being the manager of the Linden Dollars in the new economy and making their money that way. Hosting server space is a relatively mundane activity compared to the management of the actual money and objects used in SL. Perhaps they will now act as an object ownership repository, basically just keep a hash of every object along with the name of its original creator for the purpose of micropayments to the real creator. Make all objects fully copyable (to respect the reality of information sharing), but let everyone know who the original creator was. Obviously the problem is formally intractable because anyone can modify an object and claim that they're the inventor, but generally market forces will prevent that from happening. Once enough people have seen the original object, they will be able to spot fakes, and since anyone can copy any object, it will be easy to demonstrate the imitations as cheap knockoffs. Payments would just be donations from people who would like to reward the original artists for their creations, and of course for customizations and other services.
I'd also note that Linden Labs has always claimed that SL would be open sourced at some point, so it's likely that this has been planned out quite a bit in advance.
Well, for FPS games where centisecond network latency makes a big difference, it's done for performance reasons. For systems where latency isn't as much of an issue, maybe it's a cost-reduction issue: processing that clients do is processing power that you don't have to pay for in your server farm.
But honestly, I think it's probably more of a case of too many "game programmers" who haven't done enough of anything else to have learned about writing code for use in an adversarial environment.
http://outcampaign.org/
And that is different from RL how? Did you not go into any stores during the Christmas season?
I tried it, and it looks (and feels) really promising. The difference to SL is, Croquet is FAST (very close to real-time), because most of the work is done on the client side and synchronization works by sending behaviour not state.
http://www.opencroquet.org/
Like the other responder so far, I'm working on something similar, though I'm doing a Ruby-based game in the style of Lambda Moo, but with an open architecture and the ability to graft on various tools, such as the neat looking Sauerbraten engine you mention, for design on art, code, or other resource.
The engines and protocols between them aren't my interest, I'm merely concerned with them ending up open and extensible. I'm working on the idea of shared development by sharing a persistent Squeak-like world. I want to make an html front-end for this instead of relying on people using heavy-weight VMs like Squeak, etc.
Thanks for the links. Croquet looks quite interesting as well.
Philip Rosedale (Linden Lab CEO) gave an interesting presentation on the workings of Second Life about a year ago. It's available on Google TechTalks...
Essentially, he was saying that they are very security-minded (since hacks that create Linden dollars will lead to rampant inflation, which is no good for anyone). As such, most stuff is done by the server -- all the client can do is to make requests, and it's up to the server to validate, process and update the state of the world.
...to the monoculture of the GPL. Makes me wonder if a time is going to come when most people will more or less forget that other OSS licenses exist.
I guess, sadly, that it's predictable...between the black of proprietary software and the white of the BSD license/public domain, the GPL does represent the proverbial shade of grey.
No. You instead pay HOURLY.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Yeah, gotta give CCV (or whatever their name is) credit - their servers are ultra-reliable, ultra-fast, and isn't there only one? I mean, heck, a Blizzard server crashes if 3K people log on
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Second Life's clevering marketing of the term "residents" has dupped many into believing that Second Life has 2.4 million users. Residents is a reference to number of characters created.
On the other hand, this will be a very concrete experiment with micropayments on an effectively wide open information network. If a fully open client with just a trusted third party to handle financial transactions (or maybe ecash) can support a viable information economy through either donations or some form of copyright respect, then it bodes well for a similar "real life" system of micropayments for information and services. Realistically, since most things digital already happen on the Internet, SL will be as real as it gets in terms of the future information economy.
I thought about this some more, and I think you're spot on. They want to be the bank. Everything else should be open in order to get it adopted as widely as possible. Now I understand what they are trying to do, I have much more respect for them.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
ll of the PR and astroturfing that's been coming out of LL recently is aimed at getting more people to invest in SL space: the more investors there are, the more the space will be worth.
Astroturfing is a serious offense, in my opinion at least. Do you have evidence they've been doing this?
Becasue no software is ever developed outside of the USA, and no servers are run anywhere else either,right?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
But the SL Exchange is not owned by LL? How would that work?
Hey, am I the only one here having trouble logging out?
Yeah, but Active Worlds has nothing compared to the flexibility of Second Life.
Good point. Allofmp3.com seems to mostly get away with it, and that has an entire industry fighting it.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
Second Life is 4 times better than Half Life
You just described AOL or Compuserve's history through the end of the last century. Some minor user development happened; there was a large (for its time) community; it was looked down upon by the technical elite; and was generally ignored by the vast majority of unconnected people; and they filled bank vaults with their money. The difference between AOL and Compuserve is that while they both became more and more irrelevant as the web matured, AOL evolved their business model to keep making money while Compuserve failed to do so.
I think Second Life is picking up the AOL reins. They're making money, they've got a devoted fanbase, and they're everything VRML tried to be back in the '90s (and more.) They'll do well for quite a while to come. They may even define the standard for future avatars and navigation that everyone will someday adopt. If that happens then at some point there will probably spring up a rogue network of SL servers as ubiquitous as www servers. The Linden will crash, of course, as the official servers will be abandoned in favor of the free servers. But who knows, if they can provide a griefer-free haven some people may be willing to continue to pay top dollar for it.
John
Sure you can, just do something like they do for Blender. You will just be charged for the textures you import.
The developer of VRML Worlds worked on Second Life, so the comparison is quite apt!
It's CCP, and the concurrent user record is a shade over 33,000. And there are technically two, since there a separate server in China. Now, 33,000 concurrent users converts to some ungodly number of transactions per second. For the load they're handling the game runs phenomenally well under load. From a player's perspective lag can be an issue with some regularity, but we seem to be past the worst of it. EVE is growing and so the server infrastructure is lagging behind capacity. They're buying servers, upgrading the network and tweaking things to reduce the load, but they're still behind. The recent network upgrade seems to have helped a lot.
CCP has done two interesting things to avoid lag. A couple dozen solar systems run on a single blade. High traffic systems have been moved to their own hardware, but the problem comes when a fleet action breaks out on the same node you're on. Their plan is to try and dynamically predict load and move systems off of nodes that are about to suffer some severe lag. In the latest expansion they overhauled the gang system to make it a hierarchical fleet structure instead of just a flat group. I'm predicting that in the next round fleet commanders will be able to designate systems as objectives and rally points. That will let the load balancer start moving other systems off of that node.
Fleet actions really lag the system right now. The biggest I've been in was a 40 v 50, but I've heard of 200+ ships per side. I'm a Battlecruiser pilot. I launch 4 drones and put out 3 missiles every 12 seconds. That's a lot of objects in space when you figure that battleships launch more stuff and there can be hundreds in a fleet action.
The other interesting thing is they recently removed the need for bookmarks to move quickly and safely. Many pilots in alliances would have had thousands of bookmarks. CCP deleted just the so-called instas, and left your other bookmarks intact. That took a relatively small but still significant number of objects out of the database. At the point they did it, even a percentage point or two would have helped.
Let's hope Linden Labs is paying as much attention to their performance issues.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
That's all that matters, really - they aren't trying to count "real people" who play, and even if they did it'd be a meaningless number.
Not meaningless. It means their stupid "Office Space" commercial can honestly[0] claim that by signing up, you're joining 7m other players.
[0] Used in the extremely loose fashion that the word holds in the advertising world.
I believe you mean:
Humans do not eat money; money is important because it can be exchanged for various goods. You have not made an argument that the current economic system is essential for sufficient goods to be produced to satisfy the needs of humanity(or that the current economic system allows sufficient goods to be produced to satisfy the needs of humanity, the way those "needs" are shaped by that system).
Considering that whoever pulled that 15% fact out of his ass is probably the same person responsible for the 2.x million figure; all those numbers seem ~slightly~ inflated.
Anyway they are talking about people writing stuff in a scripting-language; highly complex operations like sending an email when a button is pressed.
Remember the good ole '90% of everything is crap' quote and think about the consequences of non-professionals writing non-trivial code.
In the end I suppose it is a personal choice for all of us to work for no money and produce our own food. My family has a long history of farming for their own food (we grew up poor and grew food to make ends meat). Let me tell you this. At the end of a long day of growing food for your family there is no energy for the higher pursuits of thinking (read programming or any other creative pursuit).
Money is like the court system in civilized nations, horribly flawed and sometimes unfair. Some people work 80 hours a week to make what people who work 40 hours a week. Unfair, yes. Unfortunately, it is the best system we have at the present time. Even poor working people in civilized nations lead a life that is frankly much better than that realized in third world nations.
To believe that everything (software in this case) can be provided at no cost at all is nieve. Everyone needs to eat. In other words some value has to be transferred from user to provider in order for the exchange to be worthwhile. For some people that value is simply that people appreciate their work. These people typically have jobs elsewhere. For people wanting to live in the real world and work on a open source project full time this value exchange is usually cash (however indirectly). This always ends up costing someone something.
To believe that all software projects and material goods can be provided at zero cost to all consumers is frankly a load of malarkey. In the end someone pays. The provider pays by having another job they go to every day while working on their hobby at night or they get paid by a foundation set up by a loving community or business. This is the world we live in.
Thinking that some day everyone will have everything provided to them for free because everyone will provide their valuable work for the greater good is to ignore human history and nature. In the end someone will pervert the system to receive more value. They will either pervert it or work harder to receive more of a share than everyone else. To believe otherwise is to believe in a fantasy.
Interesting where this has gone. http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Enterprise-Infrastr ucture/b8d0672c-8f02-4228-a867-e160234f12a5.html/