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."

Comments

First Technical Look Is Not Much...

[__aaclcg7560]

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

I guess we're going to have to wait for the Second Technical Look before we can see anything.

Re:Payola

[Rob T Firefly]

I mean, seriously, why so much attention for a game where the first two things that happen when you login are some loser wanting you to go offline with them to engage in "sex chat" for cash and someone trying to sell you random crap?

You mean like the Internet?

SL isn't much of a game in that sense, but it's a neat Internet-based platform for many different types of content. It's basically a big chatroom in a user-generated 3D environment. Like any chat platform, if you're not looking for the lowest common denominator, you have to actively seek out something that pertains to your own interests.

Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[TubeSteak]

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.

All their money is made server side.
Why wouldn't they open up the client?

The only reason I can imagine involves the prevention of IP (skins, etc) theft.
But, that is an arms race that they've already lost.

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[Rei]

Perhaps some contributors to the client, now that it's open source, can make the rendering engine not look late-90s. I'm not talking poly counts or texture detail, which would be constrained by bandwidth. I'm talking about how flat everything is. I don't know what their lighting and texturing models are, but they need first aid. :P

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[Solra Bizna]

Not to mention the fact that the efficiency of said rendering engine is currently... how can I put this delicately... vomit-inducingly pathetic.

-:sigma.SB

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[DaleGlass]

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.

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[reverius]

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.

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[cowscows]

There's one thing, more than anything else, that I'd hope someone will change. If you move quickly across the SL landscape, you can easily outpace the rate at which the server can stream stuff to you. But what often happens to me is that my avatar starts bumping into objects that aren't yet visible. Basically, the client knows that they're there, because it's performing a collision detection and stopping my character. But I guess since it hasn't gotten enough texture data or whatever, it has chosen not to show me anything.

Needless to say, this ends up being very frustrating. I end up trapped inside of buildings where I can't actually see any of the walls/ceilings/floors, and if it's a complicated area it could be a couple minutes before enough textures load that the client will display enough geometry for me to find my way out.

It seems that a pretty simple solution would be for the client to immediately render any objects that it's aware of, maybe just use a flat shading or something temporarily until it has recieved the actual texture. I don't know why it functions differently right now, and it drives me nuts.

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[GuruBuckaroo]

Actually, the client itself doesn't know jack about positions - the server handles the physics. That's why you bump around. The client says "I'm moving in this direction", and the server says "ok...... STOP!" (more or less). The client doesn't know there's a wall there yet. Usually, prims will get drawn as soon as the client knows enough about them to make a grey block/sphere/whatever - and the texture comes when it can.

In short, it's the server doing the collision detection, not the client.

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[DaleGlass]

There has been a discussion of texture caching on the development list some days ago, and perhaps the result of that will be that the client will be improved to make it load the world faster.

I haven't really looked at the rendering code yet, but I know what you mean. Some data must be there, so probably something can be done about it.

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[nevermore94]

I don't disagree with you that their render engine could be more efficient, but if you are only getting 6 fps, something is wrong. I run SL on my old 2Ghz laptop with a Radeon 9700 Mobility. Granted a little better than yours, but I regularly get 20-30 fps with most graphics settings medium to high. Check in the about panel to make sure your drivers are _at least_ OpenGL 2.0. I would also highly recommend using the ATI Omega drivers http://www.omegadrivers.net/.

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[reverius]

Cool, thanks, I'll check my drivers... that makes me optimistic, though. Unfortunately I can't use the Omega drivers, because I run Mac OS X (yes, I neglected to mention that my laptop is an iBook G4). If new drivers don't fix it, I'm going to assume that it's probably a performance difference between the Windows and Mac OS X versions of the Second Life client.

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[cowscows]

Ah, I was not aware of that.

Avatar physics should not be handled that way then. It is annoying. I'm sure that changing that would probably break all sorts of other things that I'm not thinking of though.

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[Kris_J]

WoW looks better because the textures are so much better. You can get stuff to look just as good in SL if you spend as much time on the textures. Thing is, textures cost $L to upload, so people tend to upload as few as possible, and make do if they're not quite right.

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[Carnildo]

I'm working on a raytracing engine that'll knock the socks off anything LL can put out -- if you're running an 8-core or better system. Hopefully I'll be able to speed it up so that people stuck with quad-core computers can use it.

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[Cerium]

It may be annoying, but as soon as you start trusting the client to tell you where it is, that's when you start running into wallhacks and what have you.

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[Rei]

Best of luck to you. :)
Offloading some of the work to the GPU, I presume?

Re:Why wouldn't they open up the client?

[Carnildo]

Offloading some of the work to the GPU, I presume?

Offloading camera-ray intersection testing (just what the ray intersects, not the intersection point) to the GPU is one of the speedups I'm looking at. GPUs aren't quite flexible or fast enough to handle the entire process, and the communications overhead is too high for finer-grained division of tasks.

Talk about useless...

[DaleGlass]

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.

Re:Payola

[daeg]

I think it's because the Slashdot crowd likes the idea more than the game itself. Not necessarily the advertising and sex chat (well, maybe...) aspects, but the idea that a user-generated world opens a new avenue of the expression of information.

I think the overall problem with Second Life is that the largely negative, undesired crowds got into it first, and that society in general isn't quite ready, nor are computers. As an example, I know that the furries exist, but on the regular Internet, I can avoid them easily just by never searching for them. In Second Life, though, you can't just avoid their island or whatever they have. They are, well, everywhere. Same with everyone else--flying penises included. Don't want to see X-rate content? Too bad. The community has far too big of an ego, too.

Well, that an Linden seems to only want to make a buck, and they'll sell whatever they can to do it. Maybe sometime in the future.

Technical?

[fruity_pebbles]

That's technical? It's just some tips (albeit useful ones) on how to build the Second Life client. Don't waste your time with TFA unless you're interested in building the client.

Re:Payola

[DaleGlass]

As an example, I know that the furries exist, but on the regular Internet, I can avoid them easily just by never searching for them. In Second Life, though, you can't just avoid their island or whatever they have. They are, well, everywhere.

You can't really avoid anybody on the Internet, look at my website ;-)

But, furry themed areas in SL aren't that many, and quite easy to avoid. It's not like they're going to bite you if you happen to pass by, anyway.

Don't want to see X-rate content? Too bad.

Nonsense. Look at the menu bar. Right near the region's name it says "(PG)" or "(Mature)". If you don't like the porn, then just stick to PG areas. X-rated content in a PG area is a bannable offense.

Flying penises are the SL equivalent of the well known .cx site. You can't entirely avoid that sort of thing anywhere, but it's not an all that frequent occurrence, and usually dealt with quickly.

Re:Payola

[jofny]

Because some of us have more patience than the typical myspace (or, apparently, some slashdot) users. Walk out onto a random downtown street in NYC or another big city and the chances of you having the exact same experience there as you described Second Life's initial moments as being (minus the offline bit) are pretty high. There is plenty of really worthwhile content there, but it's not going to be served up to you as you apparently expect it to be. If you want to be passively entertained, get a video game or drown your brain with tv.

Re: yeah!

[Lord Bitman]

See, on the internet, I can look at one thing at a time through a pinhole, so if I don't want to see something, I can just reposition the pinhole and look at something else. In a 3d environment, I have to walk around without a box on my head. If I'm to be exposed to things in my peripheral vision, why would I even bother to stay online instead of going outside?!

Re:Payola

[jofny]

that an Linden seems to only want to make a buck

As do we all...we need to eat and live. I think making a buck running something like SL is far more socially valuable than, say, making a buck selling dvd rentals. It encourages creative social participation and shared content.

The community has far too big of an ego, too.

So, it's like Slashdot? ;)

the largely negative, undesired crowds got into it first, and that society in general isn't quite ready, nor are computers

Thats an interesting statement. Given the history of the internet in general...and how closely it looks like Second Life's history (from a social perspective)...It seems to me that the "largely negative, undesired crowds" are, the, uhm, majority of people. Society really does expect to be spoon fed, it really isn't creative, and it really does like suburbia, sex, money, and kinks - no matter how much it tries to pretend otherwise on tv.

Re:ads

[lilomar]

See, the problem is that it isn't supposed to be a game. It is supposed to be, quite literally, a second life, that is, a place, online, where you can do pretty much anything you can do in real life, plus. I tried SL a while back, expecting a really cool "game" I didn't like it. It wasn't a game. But that doesn't mean that you can't appreciate it for what it is.

Re:Payola

[revlayle]

sex, money and kinks? SIGN ME UP!!! :)

I can do without suburbia, however...

Re:Payola

[mrchaotica]

SL isn't much of a game in that sense, but it's a neat Internet-based platform for many different types of content. It's basically a big chatroom in a user-generated 3D environment.

The only problem is that, unlike IRC, it's proprietary and centralized. Having an open-source client is great and all, but I'd much rather hear about them making an open-source server and distributed network so that anyone could actually host their part of the Second Life "world."

Re:Payola

[The Orange Mage]

I completely agree. There's a new SL article every week or so, and it's always about some inane thing that doesn't affect the majority of people who read /. afaik. It's borderline adspam.

Re:Payola

[DaleGlass]

People are already working on the OpenSim project, which is exactly that.

But, I doubt it'll ever connect into the main grid. There are huge security issues there.

Re:Payola

[mrchaotica]

But, I doubt it'll ever connect into the main grid. There are huge security issues there.

Only if you give a shit about Linden Labs' business model. Given that I don't, I see no reason why there couldn't exist a Second Life-like service distributed like HTTP or Jabber. I was trying to convey that idea in my original post; I guess I didn't make it clear enough.

Re:Payola

[wezzul]

If you want to be passively entertained, get a video game or drown your brain with tv.

How exactly is a video game passive entertainment while Second Life is not? Since they both require user interaction to function, you would think they would both be classified as interactive entertainment, wouldn't you say?

Re:Payola

[DaleGlass]

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.

Re:Payola

[jofny]

Passive in that the entertainment content is thought of, created, and delivered to you...vs Second Life where you generate the content. Or, said another way, video games tend to supply a plot or a plot framework. In Second Life, you supply your own or collaborate on one. (As an aside, I dont think the entertainment value is really applicable to a conversation about Second Life anyway...I think it's value is in providing an associative social context for collaborative interaction with information. Ie, you remember and process things usually mostly in the context of their surroundings and other things. Second Life does a much better job than the web or text or tv or irc or ____ in providing the human social components of context and so experience and learning tend to be much more valuable there than in the other mediums)

Developers! Developers! Developers!

[argent]

What's with all the lame Second Life articles? There are a lot of other MMOs around that do not suck and they don't get an article every day or two on here.

This is Slashdot (news for nerds), not Gamasutra or an airline magazine. Slashdot's what Dilbert reads, and if you're not Dilbert then you're probably going to hit a lot of boring articles.

SL is interesting to Dilbert because it's deliberately hackable. WoW is interesting to the Pointy-haired Boss because he read that it's "the new golf" and he thinks one of the VPs plays.

If you want Dungeons and Dragons at 80 frames per second, then just ignore the SL articles and remain happy with your were-tauran split-class whatever. I'm going to see if I can make a Steve Ballmer avatar with a "Developers! Deveopers! Developers!" sound clip and jumping-around-on-stage dance animation.

Re:Payola

[Spikeles]

SL isn't much of a game in that sense, but it's a neat Internet-based platform for many different types of content.

I just wish people would start looking into the open source platforms like croquet

An odd title

[SleepyHappyDoc]

I'd hardly call 'How to compile this program' hacking.

Re:ads

[brkello]

It seems the astro-turfers had mod points when I posted. Second life does not have 5 million users. That is laughable. They inflate their numbers to make themselves look better. Maybe 5 million have logged in over the hisotry of the game...but that many active users? Don't make me laugh.

I have no problem skipping over Second life articles. I have problems with Slashdot advertising for them.

As far as not knowing anyone of the 5 million people who play the "game"...I think that is significant. I have a wide range of friends from hardcore gamers to myspace junkies. If NONE of them has played the game...that is significant. I can spout off a ton of games that at least one of my friend's has played or is playing.

I am not asking for more WoW. I am asking for less Second Life ads. Usually people agree with me on this but I think the people Second Life pays off to post positive things on here had mod points.