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Second Life Faces Open Source Challenges
ruphus13 writes "Linden Labs has talked about Open Sourcing aspects of their platform for a while, but have not always followed through. Now, the OpenSimulator project has been gathering some solid momentum, and this was followed by an announcement by IBM that showed interoperability between OpenSimulator and Linden Servers. What this means is that you can use a Second Life client to log on to an OpenSim server. Beyond that, anyone can run their own server. 'Working with the protocols derived from the official Second Life client, and a knowledge of how Second Life works, these people have implemented their own compatible server code.' It is only a matter of time before users will be able to move profiles, virtual goods, and other elements of their 'second life' on to any server in a truly open world, thereby threatening Linden Labs' virtual world experience. With Google and Sun at the fringes of this space, things are going to get very interesting, virtually speaking."
You seem to make a lot of false assumptions about SL, and probably did your "friend" no favors with your description of "what it was all about" certainly If I thought what it was all about was sex between human/animal hybrids I would probably not be so interested in a class on the subject either.. (gratifying or not) However many schools are looking at SL as in inovative approach to learning. http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life:_Universities_and_Private_Islands provides a small list of schools that have expressed interest. with Names on the list like Stanford and MIT i think you might want to rethink your estimation of what the potential is.
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
When I first heard about Second Life I was pretty excited about the prospect of using it as a teaching tool. My first real exposure to OO was LambdaMOO (MOO = MUD Object Oriented, and MUD = Multi-User Dungeon).
LambdaMOO has a very nice object oriented structure, where everything in the universe is an object which inherits from some other object. There's object 1 which is called Object, from which you derive the base objects Room, Exit, User (User further split out into Wizard and Player), and so on. Every object in the world had a collection of "verbs" defined on it, which were essentially methods. Objects could call each others methods. It was a very nice environment for learning OO, because when an "object" is a "Tree" or a "Vehicle" it is a bit more concrete and obvious than when an object is a "TransactionProcessor" or a "DocumentFactory".
LambdaMOO had no concept of a "class". Your user was an object which inherited from "Player" or "Wizard". But, adding new verbs to Player or Wizard would add them to all players and wizards, and verbs could be overridden on child objects, and the implementation was hidden, so you satisfy all the pilars of a traditional OO system.
Now, we have Second Life, which COULD be a totally awesome tool for learning OO... except the scripting language is like a crippled version of Basic. Scripts can't call into each other so there's no code reuse. Scripts can't export any sort of interface (beyond the dreaded "touch" event) so there's no natural way to interact with scripts. Scripts are also hobbled by concepts like "energy" and various specific commands have other rate limits or other limits on them (which I understand the need for, I just wish they were documented). Let's not even talk about what happens if someone else picks the same "channel" as you to send inter-script messages on.
Finally scripts are not OO in any way; no encapsulation, no inheritance, no polymorphism, no abstraction. Despite the fact that the world is literally made of objects, the development environment is not object oriented. It's crazy talk.
It's outright painful to try and build anything of any complexity.