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."

Re:My biggest problem with Second Life...

[TornCityVenz]

you might try different regions. I've found the building standards in some sims are far lower than others..Also some regions are laggyier than others, Primary due to uneeded topheavy scripts running or extreamly high primative counts. While it takes a minute or two to fully rez a good sim, once your in things run pretty smooth. True I am running a system that was built from the ground up for FPS gamming. If you on a out of the box home class Dell your results may vary. Also people tend to want to set their banwidth settings to high. Even with cable a setting of 500 seems to give the best results.

Re:Other servers won't matter

[TornCityVenz]

Lindens servers don't cost money though, Not unless you looking to own land. If your looking to run a specialized Sim I could easily see poeple renting some billboard room on the linden grid directing interested parties to an "off grid" server. Certainly if the ease to connect to these servers is there it will happen.

Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life?

[TornCityVenz]

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 [simteach.com] 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.

Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life?

[Jasonjk74]

So to answer your question, under-qualified holders of worthless masters degrees use second life to (unsuccessfully) create a semblance of academic credibility in a futile attempt to mitigate their self-loathing by substituting a virtual classroom for the real one no accredited university would ever let these pretentious assholes have. Honestly, how desperate for a power trip are such people as to force mid-to-late 20 year olds into a mockery of a traditional rule-centric "classroom" in a game primarily used for sexual gratification between human/animal hybrids.

Is Harvard an unaccredited university? Someone needs to tell them that, since they've conducted class in Second Life.

Re:Other servers won't matter

[Gwala]

There's actually a few alternative grids with a reasonable number of users.

osgrid.org [osgrid.org] is one of them, and is run on sponsored hardware (disclaimer: my company helps in sponsoring boxes for it), it's free to use and has a reasonable amount of content appearing.

Re:Other servers won't matter

[merreborn]

One glitch in the summary: it don't work that way. Being able to have your own SL server doesn't get you access to Linden's grid. And that's what people want: to be on the grid with everybody else they know

There's some truth to that, but with the hundreds of third-party Ragnarok Online servers [xtremetop100.com] out there, it's pretty clear that there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy to be "off the grid".

RO, for those unfamiliar with it, is a relatively unremarkable Korean MMORPG. Someone wrote a server emulator, and it spread like wildfire. The slashdot crowd may be more familiar with this in the form of Ultimate Online shards [wikipedia.org]

You're right, people do want community, but by and large, many are satisfied with, or even prefer, smaller communities, the likes of which can be found on 'private servers' or 'shards'.

If anything, SL is *more* susceptible to this problem, as the main game world doesn't really have anything scarce that can't be had on a shard.

OpenSim grids

[ckrinke]

There are a number of grids using OpenSim. DeepGrid and OSGrid have been in existing for over a year. Others less then that. The common OpenSim grids in order of their appearance are DeepGrid (http://deepgrid.com), OSGrid (http://osgrid.org), OpenLifeGrid (http://openlifegrid.com) and CentralGrid (http://centralgrid.com). There are several thousand users. Not large by SecondLife standards, but growing rapidly. And some of these grids encourage individuals, companies and universities to attach their sims at no charge as part of building a community and helping to develop the OpenSim software. Refer to http://opensimulator.org/ [opensimulator.org] for a complete list and the FreeNode IRC channel #opensim for a discussion on configuration and use including interop work between various grids, including, the SecondLife maingrid.

Worst programming environment EVAR!

[Digital_Quartz]

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.

Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life?

[bersl2]

No, he's criticizing the parent poster for not using "fewer" instead of "less": where possible, one should use "fewer" with quantifiable nouns.

For example, "less money", but "fewer coins".