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."

Comments

Does anyone actually use Second Life?

[Anonymous Coward]

If so, why?

Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life?

[ReverendLoki]

Does anyone actually use ____? If so, why?

Now, replace the above blank with:

• IRC
• Sim City
• Any computer game greater than 5 years old
• whatever your little pet niche hobby is

I've played with SL a bit, and so far I haven't found that bit that snags me in as a regular user (I'm still working in the "novelty" stage), but that doesn't mean I can't understand that it may have an appeal to others.

Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life?

[VoyagerRadio]

Folks are quick to criticize Second Life, which offers new technology, (many) interesting participants, a few anonymous cowards, and generally a whole lot of information. Meanwhile, the same critics spend time reading and posting on /.

Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life?

[jandrese]

Are you sure it wasn't just an experiment in injecting a social element back into online courses? I'm not sure it's a great idea, but I can see this being a help to those people who work better when there is peer pressure from other students.

Frankly, even if it didn't work, you have an amazing amount of vitriol over what seems like a reasonable experiment in sociology. I'm reasonably certain the instructor wasn't going to dress in a furry suit and force students to have cybersex or something. The only major concern I have with the experiment is that Secondlife is buggy and requires a powerful machine, so technical problems could easily interfere with the class, especially if the students are running on lower end hardware.

Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life?

[jmorris42]

> in a game primarily used for sexual gratification between human/animal hybrids.

SL actually has three primary user populations:

1. Perverts. I.e. people who stick with human avatars to simulate sex in perverted ways with other humans, or more often simulated children.

2. Furries. Not all furries are perverted, there appears to be a big effort to keep the furry and perverted furrys seperated. The non perverted furries are mentally unbalanced, duh, but want to do furry things with their avatars and construction projects.

3. Perverted furries. Nuff said.

I'm still waiting for someone to explain the attraction of SL. Looks like IRC meets the Sims. in that it seems to be a bunch of wankers building virtual homes and text chatting. And they actually PAY to be able to do this.

Other servers won't matter

[Todd Knarr]

One glitch in the summary: it don't work that way. Being able to have your own SL server doesn't get you access to Linden's grid. And that's what people want: to be on the grid with everybody else they know. If most of their friends are on the Linden grid, they'll want to be on it too and not off in some alternate grid where their friends aren't. And any alternate servers will have to get past the hurdle of establishing a big enough community to attract people or they won't last long.

It's MUCKs all over again. SL has better graphics and a different programming language, but at it's heart it's a MUCK and MUCK social dynamics applies.

Re:Other servers won't matter

[peipas]

I reckon if Linden's servers cost money and other servers don't, other servers will matter fairly quickly.

Re:Other servers won't matter

[goodmanj]

Metcalfe's Law: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.

Google's Law (which I just made up): the cost to run a network increases much less steeply than that.

Linden's servers cost money, but their value is much much greater than your brother Ted's private server which he lets you on for free. That's because there's the potential for hot cybersex on Linden's server, but Ted's server has nobody but Ted, and ... ew.

If Ted's private server gets enough people on it that hot cyber becomes a possibility, he's going to have to pay for it somehow... and then it's no longer a free server.

Re:Other servers won't matter

[vertinox]

Being able to have your own SL server doesn't get you access to Linden's grid. And that's what people want: to be on the grid with everybody else they know.

You could link the non-linden grids together so you can jump from one to another or at least communicate between servers or even patch the linden client so that jumping between Linden and non-Linden without trouble.

You could go as far as to have the ability (with a patched Linden client) to receive messages from people on 3rd party servers.

Suffice to say, for those more concerned about free real estate rather than chatting, it would be logical that people could create their own servers and just have URLs linking them so that you could just look them up in the open DNS and you can pop on their web server and look at whatever they've got going on as well as whoever else happens to be there as well.

Imagine is Slashdot ran their own open source SL server where we could all stand around and post comments... Actually maybe that isn't the best mental image.

Still, the idea of a 3d world without centralization is pretty nifty. Kind of like the old world wide web.

Resources

[KalvinB]

Running MMOs can take a lot of resources depending on what kind of functionality you want to provide. While in theory "anyone" could run their own server, logistically it won't happen.

And that's of course on top of the whole community issue. There needs to be enough flexibility so that my server has something different to offer than their server.

I don't get the virtual world stuff

[Adult film producer]

I tried second life but the physics are anything but real (flying through the air, walking through walls, etc) The graphics are poorly done (if this were the early 90's I wouldn't complain.) Why not just setup a Quake server (or whatever the most popular FPS is these days) and invite friends? I bet that virtual experience blows away second life

Re:I don't get the virtual world stuff

[Barny]

You young whipper snappers.

In my day, we used IRC.

Now, GIT OFFA MUH LAWN!

It's time for a third life

[Anonymous Coward]

I lost all interest in SL when they started catering to all of the "think of the children" demands. First they were banning child avatars. Then they were banning avatars that were adults but could possibly be perceived as underage (i.e. anyone under 6' tall). Then linden labs started required age verification (credit card, etc) to enter into "adult" areas of the world (but of course you still couldn't have short characters there). Pedo-hysteria was running wild throughout SL, and then they banned gambling. What is the point of a virtual, complete fantasy "second-life" when you have to abide by the rules of your first-life?

If two adults want to have furry child characters bumping virtual uglies on SL, where's the harm?

1998 wants it's graphics back

[MrSteveSD]

I've used Second Life several times over the years and every time I look, it's like being transported back into 1998. Perhaps some of the dire graphics can be blamed on user generated content, but even the areas created by Linden Labs look terrible. There are plenty of good game engines about and I am sure they could be adapted.

Then there is the issue of the build tools. So much of the Second Life experience is supposed to be about building things, so why are the build tools so awful? Why after all these years is there still no ability to just upload a simple .obj file which is pretty much a standard in the 3D Graphics community?

The Second Life client is also a complete memory monster. On a 2 Gig system it will happily chew up over 600 megs, and completely unnecessarily since minimizing the app seems to kick in some garbage collection which slashes memory usage dramatically. The memory usage then rapidly starts to build up again.

Second Life also has some serious DRM issues. It seems to be quite common for creators of content to make their goods non-Transferable. So if you ever want to leave Second Life, you will have to just kiss goodbye to much of the money you have spent, because you won't be able to resell many of your purchases.

Before too long, some people who actually know what they are doing are going to come along and blow Second Life (and it's 1998 graphics) right out of the water. It will hopefully have a client that has simple off-line build tools which behave just like other 3D apps but also support import of standard formats such as .obj. The build tools should help you build things, not hinder you like the tools (and 10 meter object Restrictions) in Second Life.

Re:1998 wants it's graphics back

[Anonymous Coward]

"Second Life also has some serious DRM issues. It seems to be quite common for creators of content to make their goods non-Transferable. So if you ever want to leave Second Life, you will have to just kiss goodbye to much of the money you have spent, because you won't be able to resell many of your purchases."

Most products are sold in either of one or two states. Either copies are allowed but transfer of these copies are not, or, alternatively Copies are not allowed, but you may transfer the objects to others.

Personally, based on my experience, the ones that permit copies, but not transfer, are actually superior, especially given how easy it is for a simulator crash and rollback to gobble up your objects.

You can't just let everyone transfer the stuff they buy to anyone else without restriction. You can make all the arguments you want for "Fair Use", but giving your friend a copy of something because they don't want to pay for it, does not fall into it, especially if you don't lose access to it after giving it away.