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First Technical Look at the Second Life Client

Posted by Zonk on from the go-make-it-better dept.

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."

1 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Talk about useless... by DaleGlass · · Score: 3, Informative

    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    It's also out of date.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.