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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.
-nt-
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
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.
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.
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?
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 : )
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.
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
Well, for starters, you've missed that major companies are buying "land" in Second Life and conducting meetings and interviews there. Politicians have conducted town hall meetings there. And Reuters has opened their first cyberspace news bureau in SL. As easy as it may be to mock these bits of information, I think they represent something very important: many companies and services have attempted to be "the metaverse" a la Snow Crash in the past, but what's going on in Second Life is, as klunky and hesitant as it may be, the metaverse actually happening.
For a year I worked for SL's erstwhile competitor, There, which was the one most people were betting on to "win" when both got going. (There made the cover of Business 2.0 and got out of the starting gate with companies like Nike already selling virtual products in-world.) And in a lot of ways There's client technology still kicks SL's ass; the experience is much smoother, even on less high-powered hardware. There's in-world "look" was designed by actual artists, including a former Disney imagineer or two, so when you wander around your eyes don't bleed. There has a sophisticated VR auction system designed by one of eBay's original employees. There accepts models created with GMax rather than a klunky proprietary design system, and ThereScript is based on Lua and is considerably better than Linden's scripting language.
But what Linden figured out that There didn't is that user-created content is king. SL really didn't give a damn if your eyes bled -- they opened the floodgates. Old "Therians" may boggle at my mention of ThereScript, because AFAIK There still hasn't opened it up to users even though they were talking about it when I was there in 2003. (There also had outstanding bugs in the "consumer service" that were going unfixed for months, if not years, IIRC, which were less a matter of technology than politics.)
Personally, I think SL's "under the hood" design is its Achilles' heel, and open-sourcing the client isn't going to help it -- they have a stream-everything model (possibly because their original team apparently came from Real Networks?) and the object system really isn't as sophisticated as what you'd find on an average MUCK server. Someone out there is almost certainly working on what amounts to "Third Life": a design and engineering sensibility as good as There's was (or at least aspired to be), with the understanding of the marketplace and user desires that Linden has. When this happens, that service will be the metaverse equivalent of World of Warcraft to SL's Everquest.
But between all the jokes about flying penises and the ritual mocking of the furries, I think SL is going to prove to be historically important in shaping an "avatar space." Yeah, the idea that a decade from now, it'll be common for businesses to have a virtual storefront in avatar space sounds pretty crazy, and I certainly wouldn't bet on it happening. But you know, in 1994, I'm not sure many of us would have predicted that by 2004, businesses that didn't have a URL would seem to be behind the times.
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.