Second Life Faces Open Source Challenges 198
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."
Does anyone actually use Second Life? (Score:3, Insightful)
If so, why?
I dunno (Score:4, Funny)
obligatory: (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life? (Score:4, Insightful)
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You'd be surprised.
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Huh? Are you criticizing the parent for not using alliteration?
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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".
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amis
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Don't forget, it also offers flying cocks.
Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Because I like virtual whores! Okay?! Satisfied?!
Don't you judge me!
Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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If so, why?
Because it allows me, a 37 year old man, to make real world cash as a female "escort"...
Don't make a lot of cash, but 20 or 30 bucks a week for occasionally alt-tabbing and typing "ooh, yeah baby, I love it like that." isn't all that bad.
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Live music venue! As a musician, I find it quite an effective outlet because I can create an environment and perform in it.
Others give feedback, they enjoy it greatly as well.
Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life? (Score:4, Informative)
Worst programming environment EVAR! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
You might want to look into Croquet [opencroquet.org] then. It's based on Squeak, "worlds" can be distributed easily among various hosts, and it's open source. It's mostly designed as a collaborative / teaching tool. I'm always surprised that it never seemed to really take off.
Possibly not visually as slick (although...) as 2nd life but has *much* more potential.
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A contrasting view....
If you hope to do everything OO with classes, you're right. But even with the switch to the Mono virtual machine under the hood coming up July 23, which greatly increases performance and memory capacity, a single VM memory space will only be 64K. (Currently, it's 16K, one-fourth that of a Commodore 64!) That includes both compiled bytecode AND variable storage. Please correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm not snarking here), but I thought that object-oriented languages were not designed
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...It's outright painful to try and build anything of any complexity.
That being said, I think these FOSS variant servers could address that. The fact that the client communications protocol is open provides the opportunity for people of a like mind (e.g. who want a real programming environment) to build and gravitate to servers that support their world view.
The really nice aspect of all of this will be the ability to move freely between them - so you don't have to abandon your old friends/associations. You will be able to have your pie and eat it too.
I should preface this
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Hey, a fellow MOOer! I've been on Lambda since about 1993.
I think SL is somewhat like Lambda. Since there's a lower cost of entry, skillwise, there are a lot more people and a lot stupider people. But the programming is definitely reminiscent of moocode. It just sucks that LSL is so limited. If they were using moocode it'd be an enormous help: it was so nice to write display functions and statistics functions and then write code that called those to do data manipulation and presentation, and then use T
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Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life? (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly, even if it didn't work, you have an amazing amount of vitriol over what seems like a reasonable experiment in sociology. I'm reasonably certain the instructor wasn't going to dress in a furry suit and force students to have cybersex or something. The only major concern I have with the experiment is that Secondlife is buggy and requires a powerful machine, so technical problems could easily interfere with the class, especially if the students are running on lower end hardware.
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There are about thirty English language university campuses in Second Life. Most of them seem to be used as advertisements to get you to attend, with information about the buildings that they reproduced. There was one by the geology department of an Indiana university, I think. I didn't notice the ones I visited using them for class learning, though a few did have virtual classrooms that looked abandoned.
I noticed that Cisco helped make a virtual model of the planned Palomar Hospital, so that local resident
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I wish more folks would activate their sound/microphones. It is much easier to chat via voice than to try to keep up with 20 people typing away...and with voice I don't even have to be looking at the screen to respond.
Re:Does anyone actually use Second Life? (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
You have it exactly (Score:2)
Oddly enough this is actually the purpose for the Internet. And you thought it was exploiting the synergism of user generated content with paid advertising in a referent free rapidly evolving framework? Same thing. The Internet is for porn. [youtube.com]
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Nah, the Internet was never just for porn. It was also for piracy. And for pirated porn!
Just like the VCR was mostly for porn at one time.. and piracy and piracy of porn for that matter. But eventually enough other uses appeared that while never going away the piracy and porn faded into the background.
Perhaps I'm just not seeing it, but I'm unclear what SL's eventual non porn purpose is and don't much of a piracy angle.
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What happened to Slashdot that this was modded insightful and not funny?
Seriously?
Why is everybody ripping on sl? Does nobody appreciate the "geek" factor of what it is? I keep up on news for it because the idea of it is awesome. A metaverse? A 3d browser? A place where someone can define a virtual world for me to walk around in? A place where I can go see a vision of people's ideal places to live? I can look at how people would portray themselves given no constraints (other then what content providers have
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Personally, I like SL because people can build beautiful artwork -- reproductions of 1850's-era Japanese teahouses, for instance -- that I can wander through without having to, y'know, fly to Japan.
It's also nice that since I've assiduously ignored all the morons and loudmouths and hung out patiently, I've met and become friends with a mechanical engineer who teaches computational flow dynamics and who answers lots of questions; a DJ who has great taste in music and has introduced me to a dozen bands I woul
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This was modded as insightful? You've got to be kidding. Yes, I'm sure that there are plenty of people on SL who are just looking for the 3D MMORPG version of phone sex. However, there are also plenty of people who are just sharing their non-perverted hobbies and interests in a 3D version of the web where you can text chat with the other surfers who are currently at the same page that you are at. I have blogged [blogspot.com] on this.
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You do realize that there are furries on Earth?
Are you posting from the International Space Station? if so, hi.
Other servers won't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
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. If most of their friends are on the Linden grid, they'll want to be on it too and not off in some alternate grid where their friends aren't. And any alternate servers will have to get past the hurdle of establishing a big enough community to attract people or they won't last long.
It's MUCKs all over again. SL has better graphics and a different programming language, but at it's heart it's a MUCK and MUCK social dynamics applies.
Re:Other servers won't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
I reckon if Linden's servers cost money and other servers don't, other servers will matter fairly quickly.
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And there's one of the rubs: it's not just connecting to those servers. It's all the avatar appearance and clothing and objects you own and places you've built. If those don't move transparently, then it becomes a huge headache for users to maintain multiple virtual existences. And they likely won't move transparently.
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> It's all the avatar appearance and clothing and objects you own
> and places you've built.
Nah, having the places be fixed isn't that bad. Not being able to move your avatar would be close to fatal but since the client has to pretty much have that stored within it is only a matter of someone adding a way to save all of the details and get it recreated on another server.
Objects will require some sort of central repository for portable objects because they can be scripted and the scripts stay on the se
Re:Other servers won't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Interesting. But where does peer-to-peer technology fit in?
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Caledon you mean?
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Firstly, your prices are outdated, it's only $1000 these days.
Secondly, Second Life has been in development for almost ten years, and is distributed free of charge.
You seem to not realize that Linden Lab has over 200 employees. Someone has to pay for the software development.
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Well, as someone who actually runs a content development business, I can easily explain the returns to you.
Second Life is great for Direct Marketing - users show very high levels of engagement. These days, brand managers are increasingly realizing that the $50,000 30-second spot is dead.
Advertising is a lot like teaching - you have a message to convey, and you want people to get it right, and to take their time. Buying a slot of time on TV supposedly gets to a lot of people, but less and less people actuall
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Re:Other servers won't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
You could link the non-linden grids together so you can jump from one to another or at least communicate between servers or even patch the linden client so that jumping between Linden and non-Linden without trouble.
You could go as far as to have the ability (with a patched Linden client) to receive messages from people on 3rd party servers.
Suffice to say, for those more concerned about free real estate rather than chatting, it would be logical that people could create their own servers and just have URLs linking them so that you could just look them up in the open DNS and you can pop on their web server and look at whatever they've got going on as well as whoever else happens to be there as well.
Imagine is Slashdot ran their own open source SL server where we could all stand around and post comments... Actually maybe that isn't the best mental image.
Still, the idea of a 3d world without centralization is pretty nifty. Kind of like the old world wide web.
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Well... there are some controversial things that Linden Lab has done, e.g. the notorious statement about what is "broadly offensive", or restraining everyone on SL because of laws in a country where SL wants a presence--that may well drive a sufficient number of people to alternate grids.
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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.
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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,
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Todd Knarr (15451):
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.
For all its other issues, this is the #1 reason I don't like SL. And, it's the #1 reason I don't understand why so many companies jumped on this. Seriously, would you run your intranet on your own hardware rather than someone else's? Would you want to (at least *be able to*) run your personal web site on your own private hardware? I would. But hey, I'm a privacy nut and I know it.
vertinox (846076):
You could link the non-linden grids together so you can jump from one to another or at least communicate between servers or even patch the linden client so that jumping between Linden and non-Linden without trouble.
I don't think you can do that; I suspect the SL server code expects to run in data center
What's really going on... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Actually, that's not true -
One of the goals of the Architecture Working Group (which has members from IBM, OpenSim, Linden Lab, and others) is working on the inter operable protocols for removing centralization from the infrastructure (so it's more like IP: anyone can connect to anyone)
This test was a test of the first draft of the teleport mechanism defined by the AWG standard.
Link to the AWG group: here [secondlife.com]
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Yes, but the IBM project that this is related to is more about Virtual Worlds in general. The SL effort is low-hanging fruit because they already have a sizable commitment to both SL and OpenSim running internally, but the end goal is to develop a protocol for all Virtual Worlds to recognize.
OpenID? (Score:2)
Could we make it a bit more portable, though?
For instance: If I buy clothing in Second Life, or pets in World of Warcraft, why not allow them to cross over? (Subject, of course, to filters/censorship of the target server -- giant walking penises are generally frowned upon.)
Simple solution: OpenID and friends (XFN, etc). Allow a person to store their avatar, possessions, etc, on their own server (or on a free one, or a paid-for Linden one). If you want to allow commerce (selling clothing), require a signatur
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Ruth? The old Ruth or the new cloud thing?
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Nothing for the common user. I should have been more specific.
This may all end in tears... (Score:2)
If people can run their own servers, perhaps Linden will be more inclined to shout down the "undesirables", such as the BDSM and Dolcett clubs, telling them "you can run your own damn server, get off of ours". While that may not be so bad in the short term as the existing users migrate, it would be bad for their sustainability as other people who might be so inclined can no longer find them over the SL servers.
And who is to say when YOU will be one of the "undesirables"?
Mal-2
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LL's caught in the same bind Las Vegas got itself into a few years ago. For years, Vegas was the glitzy-slease capital of the world; people went there to sin and have a good time doing it. Then some bright marketing person decided they should market to families, too. Trouble is, you can't have Sin City and Disneyland superimposed without annoying both audiences. Recently, Vegas bought a clue, as evidenced by the sudden shift to the "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" ad campaign.
SL desperately wants
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For all the media hype about flying penises and furry sex, you have to go out of your way to actually find any. Maybe if you stopped searching for "BDSM" and "Dolcett" (whatever that is - an Italian motor scooter?), the "problem" would solve itself.
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Completely offtopic, I find it strange that I had to go to the Spanish Wikipedia to find information about Dolcett, because the English article was speedied in 2007, apparently after some argument (though of course it's impossible to tell.)
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BDSM clubs are undesirable? I thought that was the whole point of SL. That and furries.
Resources (Score:4, Insightful)
Running MMOs can take a lot of resources depending on what kind of functionality you want to provide. While in theory "anyone" could run their own server, logistically it won't happen.
And that's of course on top of the whole community issue. There needs to be enough flexibility so that my server has something different to offer than their server.
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Running MMOs can take a lot of resources depending on what kind of functionality you want to provide. While in theory "anyone" could run their own server, logistically it won't happen.
People their own 50+ player count gaming server all the time. They tend to be FPS games or Ultima "Offline" servers, but the technology is there for those who want to pay for the bandwidth and CPU cycles.
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Second Life is fundamentally different from other client-server gaming architectures.
For starters, the server is not a stand-alone application. The backend consists of a wide variety of servers, namely, all content is centrally stored on an Apache cluster, there's a MySQL cluster for metadata, there's a server just for message routing and topographical server adjacency, and the actual physical simulator which is a fairly heavy application.
It's not possible to simply run a batch file with the server and the
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Which is why server interoperability is so critical. If everybody can serve their own _piece_ of the world, and interconnect these, then unless you get the equivalent of Slashdotted, everything chugs right along.
MySpace 3D (Score:4, Funny)
Coming soon to a tacky interweb near you!
future of virtual worlds (Score:2)
After seeing Wall-E, I'm thinking we need to make sure virtual worlds remain only a tool to cross distances and not the destination in itself. It can save on gas and enable us to live and learn in distant locations, but the idea of Virtual living is the beginning of a downward spiral.
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1) Wall-E had nothing to do with virtual worlds.
2) One shouldn't base real-world hopes or fears on unrealistic movie plot elements.
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1) Wall-E had nothing to do with virtual worlds.
Err...did you see the movie? People were so wrapped up in their video-fed lives they didn't even know there was a pool or, in fact, that they were using their "monitor" to talk to the person right next to them on their "virtual vacation".
2) One shouldn't base real-world hopes or fears on unrealistic movie plot elements.
I wake up, shower, sit to check my email and news at home on the laptop, sit to drive to work, sit at work staring at my monitor, sit to drive
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I did see the movie. The humans were not immersed in virtual worlds; video-conferencing is not VR. There was nothing to suggest that they were involved in a three-dimensional interactive environment like SL. Unless you want to consider any kind of live conversation -- e.g. talking on the telephone -- a "virtual world"?
I wasn't referring to mere lack of physical activity, although that
It's time for a third life (Score:2, Insightful)
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> Pedo-hysteria was running wild throughout SL, and then they banned gambling.
Because Linden Labs is based in a civilized country. Unless they totally relocate to some third world pesthole where they can just bribe people to look the other way (and good luck getting good connectivity and clearing credit cards) they have to live by meatspace laws. That leaves the kiddie fuckers banned pretty much everywhere. And since they are in the US they can't run online casinos either. Just sticking the word 'vir
OpenSim grids (Score:2, Informative)
1998 wants it's graphics back (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Did your 1998 computer have a "NASA" or "DoD" sticker? :)
Let's have a contest! Which of the following pictures depict a 1998 game character and which is from a Second Life avatar?
See if you can guess!
http://www.fpsteam.it/img2006/sin/sin_elexis_bathroom_04.jpg [fpsteam.it]
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3246/2670018726_c289810160.jpg?v=0 [flickr.com]
(There is no such thing as Linden content, if you mean the Welcome Area, it was built like 4 years ago by a friend of mine, as a contractor... when SL had a completely different engine...
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Here's a hint: Don't buy non-transferable items. Noone is forcing you to spend your hard-earned L$ on anything. Plenty of free stuff lying around for people to use.
This isn't any different from you not h
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One of the biggest issues I have with the build tools is that the prims that are the basic building blocks take up more verts then if I could just model what I wanted to in the first place.
This isn't the case every time but if you want to build something which has a lot of different curves in it you have to do some really ugly things to get it looking right and then it takes ages to download for anyone that visits. It's so stupid and Linden should just as you said, let people import simple .obj files.
There'
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No the reason for the 1998 graphics is that, unlike almost every other game, all the content has to be streamed from the server, and it can barely handle the current load, let alone what they would see with higher quality graphics. I've played many games that looked much better and performed better on older hardware than Second Life.
All I can say to those Second Life users is... (Score:2)
Without rights restrictions SL has little value. (Score:2)
SL is an artificial economy. If you can copy items and easily add new 'land', then those things have no value.
Replacements for SL will have trouble attracting creators as SL has or those items having any "status" or "$$" value.
Put another way-- I can play EQ on a simulated server and give myself anything. But what would the point be?
Re:Without rights restrictions SL has little value (Score:2)
Yeah, because a service where anyone can copy information instantly and anyone can easily create content without worrying about limited resources is completely worthless and nobody makes any money there doing anything except selling "real world" goods, which also wouldn't count for some reason.
Re:Without rights restrictions SL has little value (Score:2)
Perhaps you want to do a sociological experiment to see what a post scarcity society might look like?
Or perhaps the experiment is to expose a bunch of people who live in an artificial scarcity world to a post scarcity world and see how they react back in real life.
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Close, but not quite. In economics, value is purely subjective; the most one can do is determine a lower bound based on what someone is willing to pay. That which can be attained without cost tends to have no demand, which is just another way of saying that no one will pay for it. If pe
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People will create because that is what people do.
They do not have to be compensated to create.
However-- It's the difference between Star Wreck and a Hollywood picture.
The difference between an enthusiastic amateur and a professional.
If you are happy with free 90%-95% complete creations then cool.
You are not going to get people to slave over that last 5-10% to get things "perfect" without giving them compensation because people have to eat and that last 5-10% takes a lot of time to do.
SL works because the a
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"Also some regions are laggyier than others, Primary due to uneeded topheavy scripts running or extreamly high primative counts."
Nope. more often than not it's multiple sims running on an underpowered server. Most people buy the cheap-o option which is like a quad-core opteron with 24 other sims running on it.
Re:My biggest problem with Second Life... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Nope. more often than not it's multiple sims running on an underpowered server. Most people buy the cheap-o option which is like a quad-core opteron with 24 other sims running on it.
Umm, you have no idea what you're talking about. There is no "cheap-o option" if you want to connect to the SL grid - currently all server space on the main grid is leased directly from Linden Lab and each simulator has a processor core dedicated to it and runs on an individual server instance. Running Debian IIRC.
Parent is absolutely right - a big reason SL has such inconsistent performance from sim to sim is that many of the builds are NOT done by professionals with performance in mind, and use needlessly costly scripts and high numbers of visible prims. Even more so, people will use insanely large numbers of insanely hi-rez textures, which not only adds download time but also works video cards much harder than a proper game does just in terms of shuffling gigabytes of texture data back and forth.
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Not quite. The poster is refering to OpenSpace sims, which do run four to a processor (as opposed to normal sims of 1 per processor). These come with less than 1/4 of the usual prim allocation and are apparently intended to be for light personal use or 'open landscape' type sims. However I don't think this is a common cause of lag as you can only buy an openspace sim if you already have a normal one and they are relatively unusual still.
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You're right, I forgot about OpenSpace sims. Sorry for the slam Khyber. Someone mod me back down haha. But yeah, in my experience laggy sims are still generally about poor use of textures and extremely prim-heavy builds (neglecting those cases where for some reason the sim just happens to be chock-full of people at that moment). Script performance is a real variable but it doesn't show up in what most people would regard "lag".
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The basic graphics do look pretty bad, which is why it is so impressive when someone does
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Because most popular FPSes these days don't allow custom avatars, as that would make it trivial to cheat (create an avatar of a flea, say, or an invisible man).
Because, a VoyagerRadio says, you'd have griefers blowing you off a platform every five seconds.
Because the interactions in SecondLife are not limited to "Shoot", "Punch", "Cheer", and "Pelvic Thrust".
Because games don't generally allow completely custom scripts to run, especially server-side.
Because SecondLife is open source, which, again, would be
Re:I don't get the virtual world stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
You young whipper snappers.
In my day, we used IRC.
Now, GIT OFFA MUH LAWN!
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If you were really using IRC, you wouldn't have the (virtual) lawn...
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Yeah, really. My 2 cents: there is a function in our lpc-based mudlib called when a player dies, which takes away some experience, prints some messages, writes to appropriate logs, etc. Its name is second_life().
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