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."

Comments

C# and BSD license?

[suso]

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.

Re:C# and BSD license?

[neokushan]

Wouldn't it be wiser to spend that effort working on a project that makes C# more open source friendly, rather than simply rewriting any/all projects that use it?

Re:C# and BSD license?

[Mr. Slippery]

Wouldn't it be wiser to spend that effort working on a project that makes C# more open source friendly

Not possible. So long as Microsoft retains the ability to attack Mono through patent suits, C# cannot be "open source friendly".

C# is a poison pill that Microsoft would love to see the F/OSS community swallow.

Re:C# and BSD license?

[tepples]

I consider this technology to be the next medium that everyone will use and it will supplant HTTP.

They said that about VRML replacing HTML, but readers didn't prefer a 3D room over a 2D page.

Re:C# and BSD license?

[theM_xl]

With all the crap English written on websites today, do you really want to set this standard loose on important literary works?

the "Sorry Shakespeare" M

Re:C# and BSD license?

[neokushan]

You make it sound like HTML is a wonderfully-formed language that everyone uses well, or that Actionscript and Javascript aren't messy as hell. Lets face it, you're fucked no matter what language is dominant.

Re:C# and BSD license?

[Anonymous Coward]

C# is an ISO/ECMA standard, Java is not.

Re:C# and BSD license?

[Enderandrew]

I have so much respect for ISO standards these days.

Re:C# and BSD license?

[doc_doofus]

So is OOXML...

Re:C# and BSD license?

[Chyeld]

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?

With respect, there have been numerous attempts to replace text based protocols with visual worlds since before the web. I remember drooling over ads in my dad's old Atari ST magazines where BBSes were advertising virtual worlds where everything was represented as a building in a isometric 3d city and people ran along the streets talking to each other.

These have never taken off as the main stream interface because even if you were able to achieve a completely believeable virtual world, it still wouldn't present the same information bandwidth as simply pulling up pages and reading them. And porn jokes aside, the real drive of the internet is presenting information, not pretty visuals.

These will always be the niche, rather than the mainstream, way of interacting because no one wants to 'run' for 30 mintutes to do something that could be accomplished in 30 seconds outside of the world.

That being said, I wouldn't mind seeing what could be created once the reigns were passed from corporations looking for money to Joe Six-Pack. Will it be a revolution or another eternal September?

Given Second Life is already exhibiting a second coming of 'GeoCities' crappy design, I'm not certain I'll be welcoming our new OpenSim overlords.

Re:C# and BSD license?

[vrmlguy]

They said that about VRML replacing HTML, but readers didn't prefer a 3D room over a 2D page.

I think that this was because they were trying to run before they even learned to crawl. I mean they tried to get VRML going back in the mid 90s when most people still didn't know what the Internet was. They needed something simpler to introduce people too. Maybe now VRML would do better if it had some momentum behind it, but it doesn't, and now this is here so tough luck.

Speaking as someone who was there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vrmlguy), VRML was indirectly crashed by Microsoft. MS was pushing something, maybe Direct3D, as *the* 3-D technology for the next millennium. In response, SGI started opening up every piece of IP they had, apparently on the theory that a small part of a open-sourced world was better than no part of an MS-controlled one. VRML was written and implemented in no time at all, and yeah, there's a few bugs that got included. As it turned out, the Internet didn't have the supporting infrastructure, so the project wound up being irrelevant, but not before costing SGI a bundle of money.

Looking back, the SGI's effort reminds me a bit of MS's effort wrt OOXML. In each case there was an existing product that was getting a shiny new file format, so any suggested changes to that format, no matter how good, had to be squashed. In the end, the whole mess collapsed under its own weight.

One big difference, though: OOXML had to support decades of backward compatibility. SGI had written their code well, so VRML has a much better base to build from.

I'd like to see VRML get resurrected someday. I remember using it to handcode a bunch of 3-D animations using vi.

Re:C# and BSD license?

[DragonWriter]

Wouldn't it be wiser to spend that effort working on a project that makes C# more open source friendly [mono-project.com], rather than simply rewriting any/all projects that use it?

There's not a whole lot of open source projects in C# (or for the .NET platform more generally) that don't have comparable open source projects that aren't targetted to .NET, but to more open source platforms (either because they are more platform agnostic or because they target a specific platform whose principal implementation is more open source friendly than .NET.)

Given that, its not all that surprising that people interested in both the subject matter and open source ideals for platforms as well as applications might want to participate in non-C# projects, and (taking advantage of the nature of open source) take the interesting bits from C#-based projects and port them over to those non-C# projects. That's certainly less trouble than both participating in the C# application project and participating in the Mono project, especially for someone who is interested and skilled in the application domain but, despite interest in platform openness, isn't particularly interested in platform development.

Re:I'm interested

[elrous0]

Linden has been TALKING about open sourcing for years. So far, they've delivered very little.

Who cares?

[AlXtreme]

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?

Re:Who cares?

[Ash-Fox]

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.

Those are stupid users and I would be happy if they would go away on Second life. Much like the annoying club people.

They don't do anything creative on Second life, they just take up space, they're not interesting conversation and are so computer illiterate, everything is a issue for them. They come up with random explanations for problems they're having which has nothing to do with it.

On Second life, I spend a lot of time scripting, building things. From things from in-world air defense systems to play against other builders as a game to building things that are deemed practically impossible or really difficult due to the technical limitations in world.

(how else could one explain the millions of paying WoW/Eve/whatnot users, compared to the thousands not paying a dime in SL?).

Second life is not a game. It's a virtual world. It's not a roleplaying game.

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?

Nothing, it isn't exploitable by corporations, ordinary users are too stupid to make any use of it - although there are some that go there and just waste resources and in the case of open source developers - I don't see how a DRM system that Second life uses interests Opensource developers when they can't prevent people from close sourcing their builds or scripts.

Re:Who cares?

[AlXtreme]

I've found it adds something to the show to sit in SL when the show is on, as there are quite a few knowledgable people in the SL audience who can add something to the show as chat.

What I'm curious about is this: what does SL offer beyond a traditional IRC-style chat? 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).

Re:Who cares?

[tonyreadsnews]

What did people do with early websites in the beggining.

At first, they were just boring static pages that were either a horrible marketing attempt. How far has the internet come now that there are things like collaborative Encyclopedia building (Wiki), Google docs, YouTube, Ebay etc.

It is impossible to tell what this medium will make possible in 5 years.

Also, I wouldn't exactly call IBM a furry or weirdo. Nor would I say that Cisco is either. There are also a growing number of universities colleges using the space.

The thing I try to hint at for most is, look at all the different news articles about 3D virtual worlds in general. How many different categories to they fall into? Economics, scams, porn, politics, social, collaboration, business, marketing, play, serious, military, health care... and more. Something that is looked at in so many different ways has huge potential as a medium. And the more open the server side, the more likely it will be adopted by a larger group and customized for even more possibilities.

Re:Who cares?

[skeeto]

Second life is not a game. It's a virtual world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard this before. "It's not a doll, it's an action figure!" :-P

What happened to VRML?

[Animats]

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.

I do

[darkvizier]

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.

It won't get big until Apple does it

[foniksonik]

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

Re:Opensim not good enough.

[tonyreadsnews]

Such as? I've set up some Opensim servers, and it has quite a few. Not to mention, if something doesn't exist, it can be created (since it is open source).

Re:Opensim not good enough.

[Ash-Fox]

Opensim allows use of either a basic physics engine or OpenDynamicsEngine which has COD 4 on its list

Which, I have used and is entirely rubbish, it doesn't even reach the crap physics of regular Second life.

It supports LSL, OSL, and c# for scripting with a few limitations

It isn't just a few limitations. All my previously written scripts do not work what-so-ever on Opensim because so many functions are not implemented correctly or not implemented at all. Anything I was interested in, in regular Second life is currently not possible on OpenSim. llhttprequest for example doesn't even send all the headers that it's supposed to. Yet it's claimed to be fully implemented.

Stop trying to spin it, I have used OpenSim and I have determined it is worthless for my uses entirely.

I'm not saying that opensim is anywhere close to Second Life's level as a finished product, but I would hardly call it useless, especially since it is impossible to run a Second Life server of your own.

You can "rent" a full featured simulator however from Linden lab.

I'd care less if that came true

[Chibi Merrow]

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...