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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."
Does anyone actually use ____? If so, why?
Now, replace the above blank with:
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.
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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.
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 /.
Harold
> 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.
Democrat delenda est
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.
.obj file which is pretty much a standard in the 3D Graphics community?
.obj. The build tools should help you build things, not hinder you like the tools (and 10 meter object Restrictions) in Second Life.
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
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