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First Technical Look at the Second Life Client
An anonymous reader writes "Second Life is a virtual world, maintained through a combination of client software and hosting servers. It has the unusual quality that nearly all of the content is user-provided. It is also unusual in that Linden Labs recently announced the release of its client software as open source. This is something that is rarely, if ever, done in commercial MMO apps. This article introduces the client (or "viewer" in Linden terminology) and explores the Second Life development environment."
It's pretty much a copy of a small part of the build instructions from the wiki. Absolutely nothing new, and even not enough information to actually build it.
It's also out of date. The latest versions do build with GCC 4, although it doesn't seem to be fully supported yet. Once in a while they release source with a couple of lines that GCC chokes on (such as using "class::method" in headers), but compiling with GCC 4 doesn't require any changes besides fixing that.
OpenJPEG recently became very usable as well, thanks to some good work on optimizing it.
SL doesn't transmit polygons to the client, it transmits "primitives". So the viewer knows that there's a sphere at position x,y,z with radius r, texture t, and so on. The amount of polygons you see depends on the detail setting.
I don't think SL is ever going to luck really stunning though. While rendering can be improved, the content is still generated by normal people, and not by a company who hires artists and has a plan of how things should look like. You can find professionally looking areas (especially ones made for big companies and such), but the grid as a whole probably will always look unimpressive.
Also, the amount of primitives that can be used is limited, so it's not really possible to create all the details you'd like.
Second that. I can't run Second Life on my laptop at all... I get maybe 6 fps on all the lowest possible settings. Compare that to 20-25 fps on World of Warcraft at not even the lowest settings. That's with a Radeon 9200 Mobile. Which game would you guess is more graphically demanding? I'm really not sure, but WoW sure as hell looks a lot better.
It's got nothing to do with LL's business model.
SL is full of people with a little business of their own. There are many money handling scripts, and objects being sold for money. There's the CopyBot, but it's unable to copy objects fully. A rogue sim would probably be perfectly capable of making a 100% perfect copy of anything, with scripts and all (which the CopyBot can't do, because scripts aren't available to clients that have no permissions to them). Additionally it would have access to scripts (since it's what runs them), and thus be able to extract information like passwords stored inside.
So, allowing that would effectively destroy nearly all the ways there are in SL of doing any sort of business, and possibly even allow stealing money from random people. The outcry resulting of that would be of really gigantic proportions.
Now, if you don't care about the current SL world, just take OpenSim and run a distributed grid with that. I doubt it such a system can be made safe, but it should be technically possible, if you remove money, content ownership and such.