Blog post by Philip Rosedale: Intensifying Open Source Efforts
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SuezanneC Baskerville
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Join date: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 14,229
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03-30-2009 20:23
From: Philip Rosedale As I've mentioned in previous posts, one part of my new post-CEO life is leading a small development team. Our first project was improving the website map.
After considering what to do next, we've decided to move our team's work completely into the public, with the hope that we can engage and support the open source community more directly than before, and move more rapidly in making SL better. We have created a new version of the Second Life client in a public repository where we will allow direct committing from community members alongside our own daily work. We have also created a new build system to keep this version continuously building when new submissions are received, with new builds available to everyone. We will also make this version available as a download alongside the official SL client, once we have it sufficiently stable. Additionally we will aggressively manage the quality of submissions to this new repository, working with the community to develop appropriate ways of testing, reviewing, and approving changes.
Our hope is that we can create a widely-used openly developed version of the Second Life client which is a compelling alternative for a broad set of users, and contains enhancements and development that then rapidly make their way back into the mainstream Second Life version.
Both my team and the existing open source LL team members will take a very active role in this project. This means providing lots of daily leadership and communication about direction, and reviewing and accepting or rejecting submissions.
As mentioned above, and in contrast to our existing open source efforts, this new project will feature:
* Ability for contributors to directly commit code to a public repository in which the Linden Lab team is also directly working.
* Automated build system which operates immediately on checkins and produces publically-accessible executables.
* Distribution of the new version alongside main SL viewer distributions.
* Automated unit and performance testing with public results.
The new version we've deployed into the public repository has a substantial set of enhancements to make the SL map zoom and perform much like the SLurl.com website map, and much better/faster than the map in the release viewer. This code needs QA and seemed like a great baseline for our work.
For more information on the project, visit the open source portal. You can also join the developer mailing list. Perhaps the LL staff working with the open source community can create a bleeding edge client that can display the main menu text correctly, reliably, and consistently for ATI cards using Catalyst versions 7.12 and above, and draw the terrain and objects quickly enough to give at least a hint of an illusion that you are in a persistent virtual world.
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Argent Stonecutter
Emergency Mustelid
Join date: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 20,263
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03-30-2009 20:30
Thanks for posting this, Suezanne. I don't bother reading the broken blog, and would have missed it.
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Set Serpentine
secondcitizen.net
Join date: 14 Oct 2003
Posts: 62
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03-31-2009 04:12
yeah. right  From: Philip Rosedale
Our hope is that we can create a widely-used openly developed version of the Second Life client which is a compelling alternative for a broad set of users, and contains enhancements and development that then rapidly make their way back into the mainstream Second Life version.
i would love a 'everything-not-on-this-parcel-does-not-exist' viewer that could run on less than 5mb/hr. id love to be able to sit in my workshop and work without getting updates on things happening in other sims and parcels, blowing my measly bandwidth allowance on unneeded, unwanted, and useless data. not everyone on this planet has an uncapped all-you-can-eat broadband package. |
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Boy Lane
Evil Dolly
Join date: 8 May 2007
Posts: 690
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03-31-2009 04:24
This comes just hours after the other fantastic announcement from Howard Linden about the great new 2009 viewer "which will implement the viewer-side of [LL's] changes for adult content. [...] ...we've been engaged with Big Spaceship to help us make a dramatic leap forward in our resident experience. Drafting on BSS's great work, we're also working with 80/20 Studios to help us design a new viewer interface that will delight both new and long-time residents."
Isn't that great news too? LL once again doesn't care to listen at all to residents and will force another round of unwanted changes created by some 3rd party companies to this 2009 round of viewers.
Hopefully the other announcement for the opensource repository will get some of the changes into this 2009 branch. I would not be surprised if a whole separate fork would come out of this. Will definitely be interesting to watch how LL is going to implement that whole thing and steer it's development.
For now I'm pretty scared about Howard's things to come.
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Infiniview Merit
The 100 Trillionth Cell
Join date: 27 Apr 2006
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03-31-2009 04:46
This may be one of those supercool moves that LL makes every so often.
By doing this they may be able to implement really cool improvements and features much faster than they would be able to do alone. In addition to things that they may not have thought of.
Without this this sort of open source participatory contribution process to the main viewer,
there is the very real possibility of all sorts of alternative viewers being available to use with SL.
Which is great for variety, but would be a very much a pain in terms of fragmenting
the common shared experience.
That is you might have a viewer with particular abilities not available with the main viewer. Such as the much sought after ability to have flexible sculpted items (for example).
But not so much if only a few other people could see that and then only if they had the right
viewer on.
But with this program instead of having to wait for the talent and prioritized expense outlays
to go into effect to pursue a particular improvement or new feature, anyone in the world
would be able if they are so inclined to donate their working code to the SL main viewer.
Naturally I forsee squabbles in relation to who did or didnt get included and why or whether
some person or another gets the credit for this or that feature. Stuff like that Always
Happens, but in the long run it can only be good for the majority of SL users.
This is Good News.
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Jesse Barnett
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Join date: 21 May 2006
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03-31-2009 04:48
Can't believe everyone has missed an extremely important offshoot of this. The first project that is going to be the test bed for user committed patches is the vanilla sounding HTTP Texture Development branch. If you have the patience to follow the bouncing ball of links through the various wiki entries you end up on this page: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/HTTP_Texturewith this statement: "The initial idea of the project is to allow the viewer to point to any image file of any format anywhere on the internet, pull it using the http protocol and use it as a regular texture anywhere textures are used."
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Conifer Dada
Hiya m'dooks!
Join date: 6 Oct 2006
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03-31-2009 04:52
It all looks like good news to me, though I'm not really very tekky.
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Wandered Miles
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Join date: 9 Dec 2008
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03-31-2009 04:52
From: Jesse Barnett
"The initial idea of the project is to allow the viewer to point to any image file of any format anywhere on the internet, pull it using the http protocol and use it as a regular texture anywhere textures are used."
That would be great. It's something I've wanted to see for a while. No more having to rely on LL's 1500kbps network. |
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Boy Lane
Evil Dolly
Join date: 8 May 2007
Posts: 690
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03-31-2009 05:08
I'm 100% pro Philip's blog, but I'm afraid there are too many things in the background that may lead to something else than the all new shiny opensource viewer. As I said, read the other posting from Howard and this is driven by commercial interests.
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Infiniview Merit
The 100 Trillionth Cell
Join date: 27 Apr 2006
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03-31-2009 05:08
From: Jesse Barnett Can't believe everyone has missed an extremely important offshoot of this. The first project that is going to be the test bed for user committed patches is the vanilla sounding HTTP Texture Development branch. If you have the patience to follow the bouncing ball of links through the various wiki entries you end up on this page: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/HTTP_Texturewith this statement: "The initial idea of the project is to allow the viewer to point to any image file of any format anywhere on the internet, pull it using the http protocol and use it as a regular texture anywhere textures are used." As a texture seller the first thought of this sounded bad as if encouraging people to ignore copyright issues. However after further consideration and reading more of the technical issues and exclusions involved I think it might have other useful purposes than just grabbing images off the net. Possibly an enabling technology for HTML on a prim? |
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Qie Niangao
Coin-operated
Join date: 24 May 2006
Posts: 7,138
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03-31-2009 05:38
From: Jesse Barnett [...] http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/HTTP_Texturewith this statement: "The initial idea of the project is to allow the viewer to point to any image file of any format anywhere on the internet, pull it using the http protocol and use it as a regular texture anywhere textures are used." Thanks for that link, Jesse. I really did try to "follow the bouncing ball" to figure out why the whole thing was called "http_texture" but never found that explanation. (and jeepers, if I didn't know better, I'd almost think Philip listened to my suggestion @ /352/51/303761/5.html#post2314209!  ). |
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Raudf Fox
(ra-ow-th)
Join date: 25 Feb 2005
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03-31-2009 06:17
*reads* Hmm.. I know this much: If there come a time when there is a third party "official" viewer and an open source "official" viewer, I'm going open source. At least with open source viewers, you know the people working on it have actually been in SL and have used the client. Can't say that about third party.
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Sling Trebuchet
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03-31-2009 06:31
From: Infiniview Merit As a texture seller the first thought of this sounded bad as if encouraging people to ignore
copyright issues. However after further consideration and reading more of the technical issues
and exclusions involved I think it might have other useful purposes than just grabbing images off the net.
Possibly an enabling technology for HTML on a prim? Maybe more a simpler way to display an out-world image without the viewer having to run their client media player to see HTML on a prim. It would be a simple automated way of displaying dynamically generated images without having to go through the texture upload cost and procedure. Imagine if the facility was extended to all textures in SL - including sculpts. One could drive a 3D visualisation of data without having to script something to rezz/modify a bunch of prims.
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Infiniview Merit
The 100 Trillionth Cell
Join date: 27 Apr 2006
Posts: 845
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03-31-2009 06:58
Yeah Sling that does sound cool.
It makes me wonder about the possible exploits it may enable as well tho.
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Argent Stonecutter
Emergency Mustelid
Join date: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 20,263
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03-31-2009 08:43
From: Jesse Barnett
"The initial idea of the project is to allow the viewer to point to any image file of any format anywhere on the internet, pull it using the http protocol and use it as a regular texture anywhere textures are used."
This ABSOLUTELY needs to be optional, and require explicit action from the user to turn it on. People are already using media streams to IP-stalk people, identify co-workers, 'out' alts, and escalate exploits. This would turn that from a manageable problem to something that's utterly unavoidable. |
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Nika Talaj
now you see her ...
Join date: 2 Jan 2007
Posts: 5,449
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03-31-2009 10:07
Comments are still open on the blog, where Lindens are more likely to read. Though, Suezanne, you may want to post a link to this thread on the Blog.
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