Look up OpenSim, a reverse-engineered version of the SL protocol. Runs a decentralized grid (well, allows for multiple, hetereogeneous server setups) and uses the SL client.
I bought one a month or two ago to take with me to classes. I was replacing a heavy-ass Toshiba Satellite, with a 15" screen. That thing was nice, 2-3 years ago, but the damn thing was too heavy to carry around everywhere.
Enter the eeePC, which comes fairly cheap (mine was 399.99) with Linux pre-installed. It's Xanadros, and I'll admit, I'm a moron, so I didn't want to deal with it. Installing XP was anything but easy... lacking a DVD-rom drive, I had to port it to a memory stick, run a bunch of suspicious looking programs to make the stick bootable, and then run it from there. XP died after installing 4-5 times, 6th time's the charm...
Anyways, with XP on it, it runs like a champ. All the drivers work out of the box. I think the eeePC is mostly made of commodity hardware too, making it a delicious geek toy. People have put touchscreens on it, soldered more stuff in the mobo, etc.
Mine's pretty basic, I slapped in an extra 2gb of SD memory and 2 gb of ram, and then overclocked the processor to 900 mhz. Runs wonderfully. The little bastard can even run Second Life.
I lurve my eeePC. I use it as a replacement for my pen-and-paper notepad.
You see, the internet is like a car, and Comcast is like the clutch. If you stick a bologna sandwich in the clutch, obviously you need more cup holders, like Bit Torrent and Vuze.
And why would terrorists download a special client, usually made for graphics-intensive computers, and pay a monthly fee to hop in and "PM" Osama405_bigluv their nefarious plans? I thought terrorism's aims were generally low-budget and crass, not web 2.0.
Ever heard of IRC? Email? Smoke signals?
Just chatting in virtual worlds is too time consuming if you want to convey information quickly and easily. I should know, I work in them.:P Whenever there's a bunch of people trying to get a meeting done, it's done in Skype, or email, or IRC, or Basecamp.
...is to finally put to rest the raging "is a keyboard and mouse better than a gamepad" FPS flame wars.
If Halo2 PC is compatible with the Xbox/Xbox360 version, you're going to see a lot of very pissed off Xbox/360 players getting pounded into the ground by a 15 year old with a mouse.:)
In all seriousness, I'm kinda glad they skipped SL. Yes, it's a program where many, many (many) people derive a ton of entertainment from, but it's also being used by an increasing amount of huge companies to do business and advertise their products. So it's not so much of a game as it's a platform, I guess.
Kinda like how some people derive tons of pleasure from compiling C++ programs. Doesn't make it a game to be placed next to Doom and WoW...
Disclaimer: I make a living designing spaces for those companies, so sure, I'm a smidge biased.
You're looking at the general landscape of SL and going "zomg it's not as pretty as WoW."
This is because SL is created by amateur hobbyists, and WoW is produced by a 100+ member team of paid professionals.
It's like comparing the works of Da Vinci to your seven year old's crayon scribblings.
If you go to places where care, thought, and professionalism were done in SL, you can find graphics that can easily rival most MMORPGs on the market. Nakema, Millions of Us Island, Reuters Island, Numbakalla, etc. are all excellent examples of what you can do with the technology there.
The real question isn't whether or not a Second Life user "gets it", it's a question of whether those who "get it" are numerous and interesting enough for real-world companies to consider a Second Life presence... or for Linden Labs will be able to remain financially solvent. I have more doubts about these issues.
Yeah... the thing is, further, that the folks who "get it" and make the content tend to not want to be bothered by real corporations coming in -- indeed, they become direct competition.
Linden Lab has been "close to" profitability running on two years now; they remind me of Amazon.com. The interesting thing is that LL doesn't really financially benefit all that much from these huge companies moving in -- rather, these companies are being brought in by other companies, usually run by SL residents. The most LL sees out of this is a few more islands as revenue and the pains of more press releases driving more newbies to their door before they're ready for them.
There hasn't updated it's technology significantly since early 2004 (with the exception of MTV's Laguna Beach). They've lost most of their developers since almost going under, and haven't really grown much.
Their main impetus to growth is the insistence of screening all custom content before approving it, and then taking a commission for each sale. It tends to limit growth as most people are interested in sex stuff (look at SL).
That's the way it should work, yes. But any sort of "professional" or "artistic" content gets pushed aside by the free market. People in SL who are the consumers just want to, generally, get their fetishes on, hire hookers, dance at clubs, and gamble at casinos. That's it.
Art museums, discussions, roleplaying, etc. all still happen, but they are, as a rule, harder to find.
...(3.5 years and counting), I've seen it explode from scarcely 50 people online at a time to now more than 20,000.
Since it began it's always had a hard time keeping new users. I think the way it's setup (completely user-created content, so there's less of a "wow" factor to people who just want to consume) means that you either "get it" and stay there, or you don't and leave immediately. The 10% churn rate cited in the article soudns about right; I've introduced something like two dozen people to SL, only one (my gf) stayed on, and that's probably only because I'm such a big fan of it.
SL needs a more compelling new user experience (professionally done content, some sort of direction, quests, whatever) if they want to keep people there for more than five minutes. PRoblem is, no matter how much professional content you throw at the newbie, once the newbie experience is done, you're still thrown in the middle of the content quagmire of SL; cube houses, poorly textured sex clubs, and rigged casinos.
For someone who just wants to experience things, unless you're incredibly social, you won't last in SL. For the creative types there's more of a stick.
Generally speaking, though, if you have to ask "what's the point of this place", you dont' get it.:)
...sounds like they don't even have a programmer on board yet. Game companies are made every day; let's wait until they actually release something other than a press release.
1) Free is good; isn't slashdot all about the open source movement, blah blah blah? 2) Working for me right now. 3) Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And, the world is made by amateurs, not professionals. Sturgeon's Law. 4) If people stopped grey-gooing the grid, this wouldn't be an issue. 5) All games and chatrooms are meaningless. 6) Because Lord knows, there aren't any deviant sexual people in real life... 7) The act of creating isn't doing anything? Awesome, I'll be sure to send that memo over to Da Vinci. 8) Because the contingent there were racist homophobes who shot their neighbors?
The first is socializing. People love logging into SL and chatting in a 3d environment. Why? It's expressive. Why do Slashdot users hang around in programming IRC rooms, or post on Slashdot? Community. Participation. Chatting. Whatever. SL users do that all the time. Except now they can have a visual interpretation to their words; humans are a visual creature, after all.
The second is creativity. I've run into so many creative people using SL as a creative release (myself included). If you have a creative drive of any sort, SL is a huge sink of that. Houses, motorcycles, characters, machinima, whatever.
The third, becoming more prevalent now, is moneymaking. People make money in SL in two ways: producing compelling content (avatars, clothing) and selling a boatload of it, or by doing promotional work for companies wanting to get their foot in the door (companies like Millions of Us and the Electric Sheep Company do this). The former is less lucrative than the latter, currently, but is also less likely to be affected by the obvious bubble this is causing.
In short, SL is what you make of it. Sex house? Sure. Creative playground? Yep. Marketing gimmick? You bet.
No, SL is free. You don't even need a credit card anymore. You only pay if you want to buy the virtual currency or buy virtual land. Otherwise, rock out.:)
>take the "real" estate economy. those who got in early were able to snag up >properties that have exploded in value. but now that so many people are >playing the land game to go in now and make a living out of it requires a >HUGE investment in money.
Except not really; land is currently being brought online at about 64 acres a day. There is no shortage of land; if you want to be in the land business you have to go by volume. Furthermore it's easy to start small and work your way up. Anshe Chung, SL's biggest land reseller, started the game (almost a year after launch, btw) being a virtual dancer/escort. Then she started buying small plots of land and selling at 10% markup. Rinse, repeat, grow.
Now she owns her own continent and pulls down about $US 200,000 a year.
>for you to make 10$, ten people need to spend 1$ each (or one person 10$, or >something along those lines), for each of those ten to make 10$ then 100 >people need to spend 1$ each, thats a pyramid. Those who made their money can >cash out and pocket their profit, taking money out of the system and leaving >those behind to get more people to join to fill the gap.
Except the money that's "cashed out" is instantly recirculated back into the economy, because you're selling it to another user. There is no gigantic vacuum sound that the economy makes. The only time money leaves the economy is when you upload a texture/sound/animation, or buy land from the game company directly using the in-game currency (very rare).
People entering SL today are generally more successful 6 months from now, than someone like me who joined just after SL started was 6 months from then. The world is increasing, so you get more people buying your stuff, so you make moeny faster.
Actually, those coming in now have the best chances, ebcause they're not bogged down by the "i was here first" mentality that a lot of us old timers have.
SL's just based on a creative class economy, rather than greed.
The most important resources are information and creativity.
When I make something I'm creating value, thus making you want to (hopefully) buy it.
It's not a pyramid scheme: there is nobody "at the top". Instead, folks who want to get creative can be financially rewarded for their time and effort.
The total number of people that've signed up is a bit over half a million. Yeah, still tiny. But still.
Anyway, the peak concurrency rate is about 6000 people. This is similar to a single shard of World of Warcraft. But consider that there are no "shards" in SL.
Finally, the community keeps poking Linden Labs to release actual user data, and they finally came out and said that there were 60,000 unique accounts that logged in at least once in the last 30 days. So a bit smaller than 200,000 active accounts.
Nevertheless it's growing fairly quick. The servers currently simulate an area about the size of Boston. A year ago it was maybe 1/5 that size.
Slashdot Mirror
Look up OpenSim, a reverse-engineered version of the SL protocol. Runs a decentralized grid (well, allows for multiple, hetereogeneous server setups) and uses the SL client.
A front page article with no comments? Really? ...are you all having sex or something?
...the bat must also be given a pony whenever it asks, and have an ample supply of ice cream for bad bat-days.
...in this country still has privacy! Where do I go to have a secret session room?
I bought one a month or two ago to take with me to classes. I was replacing a heavy-ass Toshiba Satellite, with a 15" screen. That thing was nice, 2-3 years ago, but the damn thing was too heavy to carry around everywhere.
Enter the eeePC, which comes fairly cheap (mine was 399.99) with Linux pre-installed. It's Xanadros, and I'll admit, I'm a moron, so I didn't want to deal with it. Installing XP was anything but easy... lacking a DVD-rom drive, I had to port it to a memory stick, run a bunch of suspicious looking programs to make the stick bootable, and then run it from there. XP died after installing 4-5 times, 6th time's the charm...
Anyways, with XP on it, it runs like a champ. All the drivers work out of the box. I think the eeePC is mostly made of commodity hardware too, making it a delicious geek toy. People have put touchscreens on it, soldered more stuff in the mobo, etc.
Mine's pretty basic, I slapped in an extra 2gb of SD memory and 2 gb of ram, and then overclocked the processor to 900 mhz. Runs wonderfully. The little bastard can even run Second Life.
I lurve my eeePC. I use it as a replacement for my pen-and-paper notepad.
You see, the internet is like a car, and Comcast is like the clutch. If you stick a bologna sandwich in the clutch, obviously you need more cup holders, like Bit Torrent and Vuze.
That's why we need net neutrality!
And why would terrorists download a special client, usually made for graphics-intensive computers, and pay a monthly fee to hop in and "PM" Osama405_bigluv their nefarious plans? I thought terrorism's aims were generally low-budget and crass, not web 2.0.
:P Whenever there's a bunch of people trying to get a meeting done, it's done in Skype, or email, or IRC, or Basecamp.
Ever heard of IRC? Email? Smoke signals?
Just chatting in virtual worlds is too time consuming if you want to convey information quickly and easily. I should know, I work in them.
..."More like get a First Life roflburgers!" comments.
I know it's hard to believe, but business DOES transpire in virtual worlds, just like it does in (gasp!) Skype and (double gasp!) AIM.
...is to finally put to rest the raging "is a keyboard and mouse better than a gamepad" FPS flame wars.
:)
If Halo2 PC is compatible with the Xbox/Xbox360 version, you're going to see a lot of very pissed off Xbox/360 players getting pounded into the ground by a 15 year old with a mouse.
Maybe I've slipped into an alternate dimension, but wasn't there a Warhammer MMOG game being developed like... 4 years ago?
...it's a thingie.
In all seriousness, I'm kinda glad they skipped SL. Yes, it's a program where many, many (many) people derive a ton of entertainment from, but it's also being used by an increasing amount of huge companies to do business and advertise their products. So it's not so much of a game as it's a platform, I guess.
Kinda like how some people derive tons of pleasure from compiling C++ programs. Doesn't make it a game to be placed next to Doom and WoW...
Disclaimer: I make a living designing spaces for those companies, so sure, I'm a smidge biased.
You're looking at the general landscape of SL and going "zomg it's not as pretty as WoW."
This is because SL is created by amateur hobbyists, and WoW is produced by a 100+ member team of paid professionals.
It's like comparing the works of Da Vinci to your seven year old's crayon scribblings.
If you go to places where care, thought, and professionalism were done in SL, you can find graphics that can easily rival most MMORPGs on the market. Nakema, Millions of Us Island, Reuters Island, Numbakalla, etc. are all excellent examples of what you can do with the technology there.
Yeah... the thing is, further, that the folks who "get it" and make the content tend to not want to be bothered by real corporations coming in -- indeed, they become direct competition.
Linden Lab has been "close to" profitability running on two years now; they remind me of Amazon.com. The interesting thing is that LL doesn't really financially benefit all that much from these huge companies moving in -- rather, these companies are being brought in by other companies, usually run by SL residents. The most LL sees out of this is a few more islands as revenue and the pains of more press releases driving more newbies to their door before they're ready for them.
There hasn't updated it's technology significantly since early 2004 (with the exception of MTV's Laguna Beach). They've lost most of their developers since almost going under, and haven't really grown much.
Their main impetus to growth is the insistence of screening all custom content before approving it, and then taking a commission for each sale. It tends to limit growth as most people are interested in sex stuff (look at SL).
That's the way it should work, yes. But any sort of "professional" or "artistic" content gets pushed aside by the free market. People in SL who are the consumers just want to, generally, get their fetishes on, hire hookers, dance at clubs, and gamble at casinos. That's it.
Art museums, discussions, roleplaying, etc. all still happen, but they are, as a rule, harder to find.
...(3.5 years and counting), I've seen it explode from scarcely 50 people online at a time to now more than 20,000.
:)
Since it began it's always had a hard time keeping new users. I think the way it's setup (completely user-created content, so there's less of a "wow" factor to people who just want to consume) means that you either "get it" and stay there, or you don't and leave immediately. The 10% churn rate cited in the article soudns about right; I've introduced something like two dozen people to SL, only one (my gf) stayed on, and that's probably only because I'm such a big fan of it.
SL needs a more compelling new user experience (professionally done content, some sort of direction, quests, whatever) if they want to keep people there for more than five minutes. PRoblem is, no matter how much professional content you throw at the newbie, once the newbie experience is done, you're still thrown in the middle of the content quagmire of SL; cube houses, poorly textured sex clubs, and rigged casinos.
For someone who just wants to experience things, unless you're incredibly social, you won't last in SL. For the creative types there's more of a stick.
Generally speaking, though, if you have to ask "what's the point of this place", you dont' get it.
...sounds like they don't even have a programmer on board yet. Game companies are made every day; let's wait until they actually release something other than a press release.
1) Free is good; isn't slashdot all about the open source movement, blah blah blah?
2) Working for me right now.
3) Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And, the world is made by amateurs, not professionals. Sturgeon's Law.
4) If people stopped grey-gooing the grid, this wouldn't be an issue.
5) All games and chatrooms are meaningless.
6) Because Lord knows, there aren't any deviant sexual people in real life...
7) The act of creating isn't doing anything? Awesome, I'll be sure to send that memo over to Da Vinci.
8) Because the contingent there were racist homophobes who shot their neighbors?
Sheesh.
I suppose that's one way of looking at it.
People use SL for primarily three things now.
The first is socializing. People love logging into SL and chatting in a 3d environment. Why? It's expressive. Why do Slashdot users hang around in programming IRC rooms, or post on Slashdot? Community. Participation. Chatting. Whatever. SL users do that all the time. Except now they can have a visual interpretation to their words; humans are a visual creature, after all.
The second is creativity. I've run into so many creative people using SL as a creative release (myself included). If you have a creative drive of any sort, SL is a huge sink of that. Houses, motorcycles, characters, machinima, whatever.
The third, becoming more prevalent now, is moneymaking. People make money in SL in two ways: producing compelling content (avatars, clothing) and selling a boatload of it, or by doing promotional work for companies wanting to get their foot in the door (companies like Millions of Us and the Electric Sheep Company do this). The former is less lucrative than the latter, currently, but is also less likely to be affected by the obvious bubble this is causing.
In short, SL is what you make of it. Sex house? Sure. Creative playground? Yep. Marketing gimmick? You bet.
So's real life.
And warner brothers, and nike, and Fox Studios, and the BBC, and NPR...
Lots of companies are in there now... true, mostly it's just promotional fluff, but some of it is actually pretty relevant.
No, SL is free. You don't even need a credit card anymore. You only pay if you want to buy the virtual currency or buy virtual land. Otherwise, rock out. :)
Er.
:) Unless you'd like to give it to me...
1) is against the ToS, and would have you banned (in theory).
2) Only a moron would fall for that, seriously... Then again....
3) That, uh, doesn't work.
>take the "real" estate economy. those who got in early were able to snag up >properties that have exploded in value. but now that so many people are >playing the land game to go in now and make a living out of it requires a >HUGE investment in money.
Except not really; land is currently being brought online at about 64 acres a day. There is no shortage of land; if you want to be in the land business you have to go by volume. Furthermore it's easy to start small and work your way up. Anshe Chung, SL's biggest land reseller, started the game (almost a year after launch, btw) being a virtual dancer/escort. Then she started buying small plots of land and selling at 10% markup. Rinse, repeat, grow.
Now she owns her own continent and pulls down about $US 200,000 a year.
>for you to make 10$, ten people need to spend 1$ each (or one person 10$, or >something along those lines), for each of those ten to make 10$ then 100 >people need to spend 1$ each, thats a pyramid. Those who made their money can >cash out and pocket their profit, taking money out of the system and leaving >those behind to get more people to join to fill the gap.
Except the money that's "cashed out" is instantly recirculated back into the economy, because you're selling it to another user. There is no gigantic vacuum sound that the economy makes. The only time money leaves the economy is when you upload a texture/sound/animation, or buy land from the game company directly using the in-game currency (very rare).
People entering SL today are generally more successful 6 months from now, than someone like me who joined just after SL started was 6 months from then. The world is increasing, so you get more people buying your stuff, so you make moeny faster.
Actually, those coming in now have the best chances, ebcause they're not bogged down by the "i was here first" mentality that a lot of us old timers have.
SL's just based on a creative class economy, rather than greed.
May the most creative people win.
Not true.
The most important resources are information and creativity.
When I make something I'm creating value, thus making you want to (hopefully) buy it.
It's not a pyramid scheme: there is nobody "at the top". Instead, folks who want to get creative can be financially rewarded for their time and effort.
Incorrect on a few counts :)
The total number of people that've signed up is a bit over half a million. Yeah, still tiny. But still.
Anyway, the peak concurrency rate is about 6000 people. This is similar to a single shard of World of Warcraft. But consider that there are no "shards" in SL.
Finally, the community keeps poking Linden Labs to release actual user data, and they finally came out and said that there were 60,000 unique accounts that logged in at least once in the last 30 days. So a bit smaller than 200,000 active accounts.
Nevertheless it's growing fairly quick. The servers currently simulate an area about the size of Boston. A year ago it was maybe 1/5 that size.