Open-source alternative to SL?

Bitch bitch bitch, LL can't get this right, can't get that right, can't write a local cache to save its life, slow framerates, content doesn't work, things never work properly, endless crashes, etc..

So, what are the alternatives to SL, if it's just not good enough the way it is now?


Is there an open-source alternative to Second Life, that can offer the same level of environmental complexity and physics interaction, with in-world interactive modeling tools, and live streamed copyright-protected user-owned content?

AFAIK, there isn't any such thing. Will there ever be such a thing?


At least it'd offer LL an excuse to explain why things don't always work properly over here. "You think this is bad? You should go try OSL (Open-Source Life). They don't even have a functional in-world building system! Heh."

-Scalar

There are opensource engines one could use, but no one is bothering to develop them.
At least none that are bothering to tell us.

I expect the one to watch will be Croquet. It's still early (even though it's been in progress for a long time), but p2p networking, shared use of applications, use of an open source physics engine, voice/video, and iirc some built-in 3D content creation make it pretty compelling for an open source app. I don't believe it has any sort of DRM system like SL however.

And has had no real updates or progess in the last year.

i hear you can be a penguin there.

open source is cool because it is free and open source people do clever things like put penguins in.

because of tux.

because of linux.

and linux is open source.

so penguins are there.




get it?

CLEVAR! No, really!

>.>
<.<

The Croquet Project is the only open source alternative to SL that actually has real progress. Yes, there has been no real updates in a while, but supposedly the next release, hedgehog, is more or less finished and is supposed to be a vast improvement over the current release with a much better GUI for example. For some of the latest info about hedgehog see here, here and here. Croquet is currently pretty much controlled by a close group of developers, they are working on setting up the Croquet Consortium, which is supposed to take over the control of the project, similar to the way the Mozilla Foundation is responsible for firefox.

Croquet is actually lightyears ahead of SL in some areas, for example it is infinitely customizable unlike the very limited things you can do in SL. The online parts of Croquet aren't really online yet. There is a system in development that's a bit like SL, with a bunch of asset servers called WorldBase servers. Additionaly there's something called interactivity servers that's in some ways similar to sims in SL, their role is very similar to the distributed messaging system in SL sims. There's also supposed to be a DRM/permissions system like in SL, at least it's planned. Presence information and IM is supposed to be handled by jabber and is supposedly already working in hedgehog. There are some non-public experimental WorldBase servers up and running. I haven't heard of any work done on the interactivity servers, but it's supposed to be a modified version of the croquet client.

There's also some interesting work done by various universities etc, for example look for croquet on this page for things like parallax mapping.

Hmmm. Might be interesting. I'd still like to see a game dev team or someone working on somthing.

It is interesting. I did at one point when I was reading through Croquet's source code find some interesting information that led me to an unreleased snapshot of Hedgehog, it was so buggy I couldn't really use it for anything but it looked really cool. I guess right now they're just holding back the release to squash the worst bugs.

The sad thing is that there are those in the Linux community that probably think that's actually funny.

Croquet has an in-world building system called wicket(screenshot of upcoming release).

If anyone wants to have a look at some stuff that can be done with Croquet today, have a look at Citris Gallery Software(link to download 217MB), a kind of virtual museum made with Croquet. Userguide here.

edit: Just in case anyone's wondering. Even though they may look like it, the lights and shadows are not baked textures. By holding shift and the right mousebutton, it's possible to look up to see the lights and move them around and change the color etc.

I'm clever in the second respect. Zen coding == doctorate level programming. x.x

At least Phil acknowledges Croquet. If they make any real strides forward in the near future I'm sure we'll see something more from SL.

I've started my own open source alternative to SL. You're all welcome to contribute.

Here is what I've got so far:


#include <iostream>

int main()
{
std::cout << "You're in a dark lit room and there is a sex ball in the far corner\n";
}



Still plenty of room for improvement. Havoc 3 will be soon....

I'll get to writing the input controls for the user so he can bitch about how the game only has one sex ball. ^.^;