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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."
First Life
The reality is far from what the submitter is claiming. Open sim has always used the SL client for access, and there are no plans for anytime in the future to allow people to transfer content on/off the SL grid to an Open Sim system.
The IBM test involved a single OpenSim setup where bridge software IBM is working (with Sun) allowed a person to exit SL, and simultaneously login to a OpenSim system. NOTHING was transfered, the avatar shows up in OpenSim in Ruth form.
Linden Labs has clarified that this was a proof of concept test, and that they would like to expand it in the future, but those goals are a good bit off.
What IBM and Sun are working on is a handshake/system protocol for a transient user ID which online systems will recognize and auto negotiate log-in, and if you don't have an account, make you a default account on the new system. eg, you cross over from SL to WOW and if you don't have a WOW account, you start out in a default configuration based on some personality preferences you have preset.
Calm down people, nothing to see here, move along.
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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Coming soon to a tacky interweb near you!
Roughly half my comments are never submitted. You may be reading the better half...
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
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.
Except for the cybersex, I think the most popular feature about Secondlife is the ability to make something (art!), that will theoretically be seen by the masses. Of course the tools are crude and the service is slow, but the ability is there to make something cool and have it be explorable by people from all over the world.
I read the internet for the articles.
Yes, I do.
Every time I see something posted to Slashdot regarding Secondlife, its always the same.. "I can't believe anyone uses this..." or "I logged on for 10 mins and it was so laggy/lame/crap".
I use SL to chat to people, sure I could use an IM client, but quite frankly, I like being able to walk around things that people have created. Yes, theres a lot of crap out there, but theres also some great user content. I also make my own stuff, it gives me a little room to flex my creative muscle and share it too. Sure it can be laggy and crash, but let's not forget our favourite OS (linux of course) hasn't always been a dream to use, and I've been using it for 13 years.
There are obnoxious people in SL, and yes, obnoxious people use linux too! Shock! Horror! They exist outside of myspace and secondlife.
I guess my point here is, I don't mind that you don't like it, but there are people here that do, and dare I say it, enjoy logging in and exploring the SL universe. If you logged in for 10 minutes and then logged off you may just have missed out on actually enjoying playing a so called game without needing to frag something.
Of course, this is Slashdot, where people voice their opinions.
This was mine.
> 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
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.