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."

Comments

Linden does not have 2.4 million users

[cshirky]

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.

More about the uselessness of the Residents figure here: http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/12/26/linden s_second_life_numbers_and_the_presss_desire_to_bel ieve.php#comments

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_s econd_life_numbers_thanks_to_david_kirkpatrick.php

Wonderful news!

[vadim_t]

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.

Re:What's a Resident?

[carpe_noctem]

Which begs the question: How representitive am I of Second Life residents in general?

You're not alone, trust me. Your post deserves to be modded up... I had the same exact experience as you, but I was willing to forgive the crappy graphics and lame music if the community itself had something meaningful to offer the net. Based off of my time in second life, and the slew of recent press that it's gathered, I still have not seen this. As far as I'm concerned, SL is a cheesy VRML-like IRC, except with "furries" and flying penises. SL's in-game economy interested me, but as it became blatantly obvious that you can't make real money on selling fake things, people wrote copybots and other scripts designed to take advantage of this fact. Hell, I'm surprised that SL hasn't already been flooded with spammers....

I'm sure that just like with the original VRML worlds, people will eventually see the emperor isn't wearing any clothes, and then move on to another community.