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An Intro To OpenSim, the Apache of Virtual Worlds
ajohnj1 writes with an excerpt from Ostatic: "You've probably read a bit about OpenSim, the BSD-licensed virtual world server, and recent news that IBM and Linden Lab are working to make Second Life and Open Sim interoperable. Besides that project, what's Open Sim about, who's working on it, what are they doing with it, and how do you get involved as a developer and participant? Here's a starter's guide."
I predict it will only take a day for someone to start working on a project to rewrite this in some more open source friendly language. Just because it says OpenSimulator doesn't mean it really is.
I've been waiting for this whole ordeal to happen. I consider this technology to be the next medium that everyone will use and it will supplant HTTP. It needed two requirements for it to take off though. First, an open protocol needed to be developed and second it needed to be possible to interconnect different servers together to make once cohesive environment. Well, we have the first part now, is this the second part?
Time to go write a new spreadsheet.
in seeing this come to the inevitable Open Source Server code from Linden. Though I mentioned "inevitable", it was hoped this would happen when they released the viewer source.
My opinion is Open Source and complete interoperability between the SL Grid and OpenSim Grids will never happen. Just look at the number of viewers that were coded to grab peoples credentials, then multiply that by a malicious server admin.
Taking into account the amount of real world revenue the game generates, I don't foresee this ever happening.
I do however see the opportunity, depending on the build UI and capabilities of OpenSim, the possiblity of "Pay-per-play" grids for SL Builders. An environment where they could test their scripts, and builds alone from griefers or the worries of crashing their sim.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
After all the hype of Second Life, and the realization that only a bunch of furries and other weirdos (NSFW) are into it, why prolong the suffering of SL with initiatives like these?
The problem with all 'virtual worlds' is simply that they are boring. There is nothing more for the average user to do than walk around and be a good little virtual consumer of virtual products. This in contrast with the massively popular MMORPGs that, while they are criticized for the grind-fest, at least give their users a good time in the process (how else could one explain the millions of paying WoW/Eve/whatnot users, compared to the thousands not paying a dime in SL?).
So (and this is not a troll), who cares about SL or any similar 'virtual world'? What am I missing about virtual worlds that seems so attractive to hype, corporations and in this case even open source developers, but clearly not to ordinary users?
This sig is intentionally left blank
Opensim is severely lacking in abilities compared to normal Second life to the point that it is absolutely useless.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The VRML people made a terrible mistake. They 1) went XML, and 2) got taken over by advertising people. The VRML effort was shut down in favor of something called "X3D", which is, exactly, VRML syntax with XML delimiters. "Now you can have spinning 3D logos with 60 characters of X3D!". This positioned X3D as an ad-delivery system, for which it's terrible.
If you bring up an old VRML viewer on a modern machine with a good broadband connection, it works great. It's still not very useful, but it does work. Most computers of 1997 didn't have enough graphics power to run VRML properly, so it was hopeless back then. (I had a machine that did, because I was using a high-end animation system. But it cost $6000 and sat in a 19 inch rack.)
You can be too early. I was interviewed by "There" when they were starting up. They were determined to make a 3D shared virtual world that would work over a dial-up modem. I told them this was going to produce a terrible user experience, drive them nuts trying to cram that data through a tiny pipe, and that by the time they got the thing going, enough users would have broadband to make a broadband-only product feasible. They stayed with dial-up, launched There just as broadband was starting to get serious market share, never really made it, and downsized when the funding ran out. There is now owned by something called "Makena Technologies", still running, and still designed for dial-up modems.
Second Life is a poor implementation of an awesome idea. The problem is that there's no purpose to it yet... it's ahead of its time. They've built a platform with no content, and they're relying on their users to fill the gap.
I don't care much for the game itself, but I do care about the concept of virtual worlds. I believe it's necessary for human culture to always have new frontiers - wild west zones where men with ambition can make their own fate.
Humanity has two possible frontiers left - space, and virtual worlds. Space exploration is going to take a while to heat up, but virtual communities are already alive and well. So the interesting thing will be to see what those communities do with this technology. Can virtual reality become our new frontier?
This is a subject for a dissertation though, not a /. post, so I'll leave you with that snippet. Yes, it matters, but it's going to take a while for this stew to cook. Be patient, and keep an eye out for opportunities.
When Apple reinvents iLife to be a VR world where you can edit photos in a dark room, put up a virtual gallery of them, walk them down to get books made, etc. etc. Garage Band will actually be a garage studio where you can lay down tracks with your friends... pull off concerts for millions, etc etc. iMovie will be a virtual film studio with greenscreen and effects lab in real time....
Until then nobody will care ;-p
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Nothing, it isn't exploitable by corporations [...]
That's yet to be determined. There have been a number of corporations that have done some really dumb things in SL... like expecting people to pay for a box textured to look like an MP3 player or PC... and turned around and thrown their hands up. That just means that they haven't figured it out yet.
The same kinds of comments were made about the web in the early days. It's useless. People don't get it. Corporations can't succeed. It's only for porn. You know the stuff. Look at this thread for example.
Wouldn't a chatroom on the show's website offer an easier way to communicate? (As it lowers the barrier to entry and is more efficient with regards to multitasking).
In what way is a "chatroom" more efficient with regards to multitasking? I'm not sure I get this one. What kinds of things are you thinking of?
Here's a message I posted in 1991 bemoaning the lack of business interest in the Internet, in particular Compuserve's lack of telnet access:
70216,1076 was my real CIS ID. We were all a bit naive back then. :)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard this before. "It's not a doll, it's an action figure!" :-P
But that's just a play on words.
In the case of Second Life, it's not a game because there is nothing to play! [By default.] That's rather more fundamental.
Second Life is a sort of vanilla 3D platform, and you have to make it into whatever you want. A rather poor analogy might be with a webserver containing nothing in the body of its top index.html file --- "it's not a website because there is nothing to see", is pretty similar to "it's not a game because there is nothing to play".
Admittedly some people do play there, because others have made ready games for them. That doesn't turn SL into a game though, unless you are also willing to concede that the real world is a game as well because people play here.
Virtual reality is useful for allowing you to do things that would be too difficult/expensive/dangerous to do in the real world or more traditional interfaces, such as training on operating very valuable equipment or visualizing complex data. Slapping an "Oooh look, 3D!" interface onto an existing (and arguably well designed) workflow will only make a task harder and less fun to do, not easier and more fun. I realize you're just trolling, but the "3D Interace is teh aw3s0m3!" is infuriatingly common...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
This is so old. ICS mapped Ben Richards' face onto a stunt double so he could be killed by Captain Freedom because the audience started rooting for Ben and Damon Killian couldn't have that happen. And that was like 20 years ago! Or 9 years from now...
Start a VRML-NG project and you won't be alone for long. :-)
You'd be surprised at how many people have a fondness for the good parts of VRML, and who recognize that it was ahead of its time, and that sadly it was trying to grow in poisoned ground. With broadband, multiple cores and modern graphics cards, the result today would be very different. The current decline of Microsoft will help too.
We also have far better community development structures now, so version control repositories and wiki documentation and community forums for it would appear in days. The design and implementation would have to start from scratch though. People don't design nor program in that monolithic fashion anymore.
Good luck!
PS. And yes, I'd join in the effort too, as long as you make a clean break from legacy VRML, raise the level of abstraction, and plan for a language-agnostic API and extensible heart that beats in tune with modern, evolving hardware. The world has changed, and so must the core specs.
I find it strange so many people slate Second Life when there's so much potential for metaverse systems. What I'd love to see is 'gaming zones', so you'd be able enter a certain area of Second Life (or whatever), agree to a dialog box or some such and the rules and physics for any 3D game, first (Quake!) or third person (WoW-like?), would take effect with some kind of organisational system for points, tournies, time restriction, etc. Even just a basic samurai sword fight! I'll also expect to use a "Use your Wiimote in Second Life/OpenSim" /. post within the next few years.
MilkMiruku
Ugh, I understand the interoperability bootstrap concerns that lead to them being compatible with Linden's stuff, but Linden's stuff is just crap. It's poorly designed because it wasn't even designed, it was just accreted. The CTO they booted last (?) year even admitted he spent all of one night designing Linden Script (which was asinine decision #2 after asinine decision #1 to create Yet Another Scripting Language). The entire structure is just fragile as hell (and shows it) as they push one bleeding wound and something else breaks and pops out on the other side.
So hooray for gilded, highly polished open source turds.
Seriously.....
http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/07/18/microsoft-eyes-integration-between-opensim-and-windows-live-id/
http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/06/13/not-just-ibm-microsoft-looking-into-opensim/
http://www.metaversejournal.com/2008/07/20/microsofts-paws-on-opensim/