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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."
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.
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.
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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.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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It's also out of date.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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
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.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
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.
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.