Threat to SL: Letting Multiverse Beat Us

LOL, don't flatter yourself too much Feynt. I think you over-estimate the difficulty of OpenGL and under-estimate the creativity and ingenuity of SL residents (I say that as somebody comfortable with GL by the way).

Generally, I think giving more powerful world building tools won't lead to the 'talent divide' you seem to be talking about. The difference in build quality inside SL in the past 6 months alone has apparently been large (I'm too new to say) as people learn. The same is true of scripting. If there's one thing I've learned so far in my career as a programmer, it's that more powerful tools only sometimes correlate to being able to achieve more powerful results. Look at the number of talented coders using vi, for instance <duck>

Anyway, I doubt LSL the language will become much more powerful - maintaining their own language just doesn't make sense for the 'Labs long term. I'd expect to see .NET languages be phased in in parallel to LSL. They'll continue to add new APIs of that I'm sure, but this won't lead to some magical ability for some people to dominate the market as existing scripters will continue to learn and adapt to the new tools that are available.

Final note - LL would be insane to provide direct GL access. For one, they may choose to use Direct3D on Windows in future. For another, it would allow objects to attack the client graphically (rendering a large black box over the screen) or worse exploit buffer overflows or crashes in video drivers.

I just watched a presentation about croquet, facinating stuff. I found myself says "YES, this is exactly what I have been looking for!" more than a few times. The creative side of this project is something I am very much looking forward to. It's the colaboration that will make things really interesting. In the educational form I see Croquet far surpassing SL's abilities. That's not to say that SL cannot evolve because I still believe it can someday.

Cat

This discussion (all 7 pages of it) is confused. No, not people's opinions about Multiverse or about whether it competes with SL or not, everyone's posts on that have been perfectly clear. What makes the discussion confused is the implied premise that SL shouldn't be "beaten".

Second Life is a centralized, proprietary, closed, largely non-scalable and early prototypical implementation of a community-built virtual universe. I love it, because it is the closest thing to what will one day be the 3D equivalent of today's web.

But I'm not wearing rose-tinted spectacles --- I know exactly what SL is, namely an early point on the 3D universe map, a very primitive and restrictive point like all first steps necessarily are, but nevertheless one that is dear to my heart simply because it led the way to the future.

1. Does SL deserve to exist in its present form for long?
   
   Of course not, except possibly in a museum. The world races on. Nothing in computing or communications remains the same for long.

1. Do Linden Labs deserve to be at the forefront of developments in this area?
   
   You betcha, few companies have this sort of foward-looking futurist vision, it's extremely impressive. I wish them all the best, and they certainly have every opportunity now to be at the forefront.

1. Will Linden Labs be at the forefront of developments in this area?
   
   Not a chance, not if they continue along their current path, because they have no intention of fostering an open community and leading it, and therefore they will be overtaken by it.
   
   Their openly expressed plan is to remain closed until an open competitor appears, but by then it will be far too late for them to be leaders in that development community. They will have to follow, or they will die.
   

So, to wrap up ... I don't know and I don't care whether Multiverse is a competitor or not in this area. The reason why I don't care is because Multiverse is as closed and as proprietary as SL is, or even more so, and therefore will in due course be superceded by an open community 3D universe. As will SL.

That is simply inevitable, because you can't compete against 10,000 development enthusiasts and 100 million joes and judys writing content for them. Think of the web.

LL and SL are like the old national PTTs and their locked-down X25 networks, which the PTTs so wanted the world to adopt under their tight control. The world didn't want any of that, and the Internet exploded because of the lack of centralized controls and the resulting flowering of enthusiasm at the leaves of the network tree.

There's more than just a moral here, there's a very close analogy. LL hasn't (visibly) learned this yet, and this discussion doesn't reflect it either.

The current SL will bear very little resemblance to whatever system makes the breakthrough to mass universal popularity. There's no point even hoping that it might, because its current architecture doesn't even reflect the most basic need for distribution of content and control.

If LL wishes to stay at the forefront, it needs to be out there in the community now, defining extensible protocol specs for inter-world communication so that its existing systems have a hope of growing into the new distributed architectures. And it needs to do so quickly, before someone else takes on the mantle of community leader.

The future is at the leaves of the tree, and look there for the rewards too.

Right, I knew I was being over-sensationalist with this statement/sentiment. Since I made it though, I realised I was talking out of my arse. I mean; There's still going, isn't it?

And Morgaine, that was an awesome post.

Hehe. You are concerned about the lack of control over output, and I'm concerned about the lack of control over input --- see my longstanding General Mousebutton API thread(s).

Good input and output controls are pretty fundamental to effective gaming. What we have currently is, with the best will in the world (eg. DarkLife), simply not effective for that.

Hmm, maybe a thread on "Would you switch to a competor to SL, similar in major features, with good input controls such as in the General Mousebutton API thread?"

That comment belongs in a world with a strict producer/consumer divide, where companies offer products without any regard to what their customers want, and where consumer feedback is greeted with a closed door.

That's not today's world, and quite possibly has never been the world, at least in the "west".

A better question then might be:

- How can we (the software designers and programmers on the forum) better influence LL to provide the missing functionality (or equivalent) in SL in order to better support interactive gaming and related applications?

Or perhaps:

- Should we create some relevant projects at Sourceforge to capture some of the desired functionality as plug-in libraries, and hope that LL might add in our functionality?

Of course, the latter suggestion would carry huge risk for LL, because the SF code is highly likely to be GPL'd and therefore LL would have to rewrite their own version since they will not go open-source, whereas a GPL-happy competitor would be able to use the FOSS code directly. It could be the start of the end for LL.

Several other relevant questions/possibilities come to mind. Yours isn't one of them.

Seems this is on everyones mind. But if you have ever met a linden in world they are cool/smart/risktaking.....

If the Lindens we meet are that iconic and cool imagine the lindens who we nvr meet inworld or even inforum. They prolly got another genius idea to add to secondlife without us knowing it in operation right now. As for potential competition its actually good for lindenlabs. The more sm1 else markets their stuff the greater the chance that new customers will come to 2nd life instead of going to....say multiverse....or anyother wannabe competition.

I say this is an opportunity that SL can take advantage of.

(this is my opinion and I am stickin to it)

That only works for competition from other equally small outfits. LL could probably hold their head above water against such small-fry incumbents because they already have a working system and a fan base.

But it wouldn't work if an industry colossus came into this market space ... let's say IBM for example, or even Google. LL would sink without trace.

And it won't work the day that the open source community finally gets their act together and creates that mythical metaverse that we're waiting for.

Indeed, even a hypothetical 3D virtual world built by IBM would sink without trace if it tried to compete with a hypothetical FOSS one, because IBM is small fry compared to open source. IBM knows better than to compete with FOSS though --- they ride on its back instead at every opportunity now, because they're clever people.

LL needs to be slightly more clever. The opportunity to lead the world towards a FOSS community metaverse won't last forever.

Edit: Whoops, I may have just encouraged IBM or Google to kick this off ... wouldn't that be interesting? There are untold billions to be made once this explodes like the web did, ie. at the leaves of the tree.