When Virtual Worlds Collide

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/collide.html




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Will Philip take up the challenge?

Lets hope so, otherwise Second Life will die when someone else does.

Nice one Anna, I was about to post this when I got home. I think this is already happening, but in a way it isn't. Darklife is in SL, which is like (in a very limited way) WoW. There's other game connections you could make, but currently they are very limited on what they can do.

Whilst I agree that consolidation will happen, I'm intrigued by the mention of The Open Source Metaverse Project as this is a project where the deliverable hasn't altered since 2004 and development appears to be sporadic to non-existant. It did get up quite a head of steam a year or so ago but that appears to have fizzled out pretty much completely.

It's a shame Eggy's taken a leave of absence as he'd be able to say more about what going on with that project as I believe he was quite involved with it. I also think the main person behind it is Azelda Garcia if I remember rightly, but I've not seen him on the forums for a long, long time now.

The elephant in the room is content.

Digital Rights Management.

You're not going to see a common VR where you can walk or teleport from SL to WoW (or their successors) until there's a way to keep you from taking a Hand of Satan with you, and to keep you from taking an expensive copy/no-trans object through the gate and having someone loot it from your corpse in Everquest III and come back with a free copy.

I agree... intellectual property is a tough problem to crack.

The web did just fine with no DRM at all. People still get paid, they just get paid to make new content for specific clients instead of selling 'boxed' media.

I'd love to see SL open up, it has great potential, but there's apparently no activity on that right now. I guess they're distracted with other things.

That's not true. They've said that they're already in the process of migrating the IM to Jabber (and open standard) and integrating the open source Gecko engine. LL has basically stated that they want SL to become more of a standard protocol so people can run their own servers.

The biggest problem with opening up SL for anyone to run is still retaining save intellectual rights to in world creations as well as the safe transfer of money. Honestly, I don't see how either could ever truly be safely opened up without some hook to a trusted third party.

Yeh, but SL has DRM and they consider their DRM (the "rights" system) a key part of SL. So any broader virtual world that includes SL in any meaningful sense has to have effective DRM to work... or, alternatively, SL as it currently exists can't be part of any future virtual reality that's actually open in the "free as in speech" sense.

That is, I don't see distributed open-source DRM as being necessary (in fact I don't see it as even possible), but because of this I don't see SL as being part of this larger virtual reality.

Closed source DRM is just a bit more security by obscurity secure than open source would be, something like that freaky hardware you were talking about earlier would be needed for a secure DRM system. If SL gets big enough, I'm pretty sure someone will find it worthwhile to write software that will do something like sniff the packet stream to catch prim parameters etc. The only thing that's secure is the stuff that just runs on the servers, just like many websites keep their content secure by having important code only on the servers.

Do you think there will be an open source virtual reality much larger than SL? Do you think that Croquet or some other similar project has that potential?

DRM without "security by obscurity" doesn't exist. If people can see it, they can copy it. An open source virtual reality, where I can write a server and join the grid (and if you can't do that it's not the kind of 'everything's one big VR' that we were talking about) can't have any restrictions on content distribution.
Absolutely. It won't be like SL, it will be more post-singularity and less bound to a "real world" model, because that "real world simulation" game with fair-play restrictions depends on the kind of control that you don't get with an open environment. But it'll be bigger than Second Life like the Internet is bigger than Compuserve and AOL. Second Life will at most be the AOL of virtual worlds (and that's not necessarily a bad thing).

Well, if someone wanted to, they could make some content DRM'ed by requiring people to download a DRM plugin if they want to play music on certain location for example.

i've long held the belief that SL is at best, the "Betaverse"..

is it possible that this is what SL 2 would be? retaining the world as we know it while releasing a new SL, SL 2, that would perform exactly as what's being discussed here.

maybe not, it could come from somewhere else, but SL has the leading edge at the moment and if LL plays their cards right we could see SL become the more than just "3.D"..

my friend and i have often debated how our characters from WoW and CoH would fare against each other.. how cool it would be t be able to transverse between worlds in some commonground.. SL 2 could provide that means.

it would need stricteer rules than SL proper, but would open new anevues of interaction.


possible? yes.. probable.. maybe.

Whelp, someone just pointed me to this thread. The mention of OSMP intrigues me as well
Hugh has recently ported it to .NET/Mono and it now has SL-style primitives. I'm not very involved with it anymore. I did contribute code and lots of PR stuff at one point, and Hugh does poke me with questions on what he should do now and then. But I don't have much of an interest in it anymore. Hugh is one of those people who are just too techie. Never wants to focus on simple, user-oriented features because they are boring. For instance, there are no new releases because packing stuff up into a release is boring! I'm not sure if I still have my copy of the latest version of OSMP but if anyone's really interested I could poke Hugh about it.

As far as I'm concerned, the chances of Second Life becoming the standard are slim to none at this point.


That said, SL is still a pretty happy sandbox and "preview" to the issues that will be relevant when someone gets it right. This week, companies going after the idea are springing up like weeds with radically different ideas.


We have the Croquet Project -- a nifty little application built on a coding standard that runs slower than JAVA. Great ideas there, just horrible execution. Honestly, they're better at flashy tech demos and impressive academics than successful software, far as I can tell.

Then there's the Multiverse project. Woo! Let's standardize MMOGs!... ... ..... eh. That's not even relevant to discussion other than as a bullet point.

Then we have things like OSMP and the Uni-Verse project, VOS, and a bunch of others all at various stages of the game, shooting for the same exact thing: a shared, granular, 3D worldspace that runs on end-user hardware. I think that's the most effective solution, since it drops the scalability issue in the user's lap.


Anyway. All I know is, someone is bound to get it right soon enough. If anyone here is freaking out that the time and effort gone into SL has been a waste... well. Just export your stuff with OGLE, or work on skills that are portable.

Simple.

I tend to agree, maybe even the "Alphaverse," but, y'know, "The Betaverse Messenger" just doesn't have the same ring to it... LOL!



There's a ways to go before we really see a unified Metaverse come to be, perhaps not even in my lifetime, but I firmly believe that it will happen.

P2

I think Second Life could potentially grow into maybe a million users, perhaps even a couple at max, before declining into a thing of the past. I am cautiously optimistic about the next Croquet release, I think it will be really interesting to see how it turns out. As for OSMP, Solipsis, VOS and whatnot. It would take a miracle for any of them to turn into anything big, I think it's much more likely that SL will be a standard. The only current thing I think has a tiny bit of potential is Croquet. Though the picture will probably become much clearer in the next few years, perhaps even something entirely new will turn up.

I doubt it. The lack of scalability and standardization in the Second Life system is rapidly becoming its Achilles' Heel. Further, SL is still a "black box" limited to the confines of a single worldspace owned by one company. I peg it more as an AOL-like system than one that will be the overarching standard. Really, it's AOL in the face of the rest of the internet.


One I was not aware of until recently is showing some great promise:
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Newsitem.607+M5507b2aa401.0.html

Uni-Verse seems about as far along as OSMP, but has the backing of several organizations, including Blender. It should be very interesting to watch that one develop.

I first came across uni-verse/loq airou on CGTalk not long ago. iirc it's a polymesh modeler. I'm much more interested in a feature-based, parametric modeler.

[Edit - thanks for the reminder, Jeffrey. I wasn't aware they'd just released binaries.]

I don't really see it as that far-fetched that SL could reach a million registered users or more(though probably more than half would be alts), it's already almost at 170k. I don't see SL ever becoming something that appeals to most people though, so even if they manage to handle all scalability problems it's gonna think hit a limit, though I think it's likely that SL can continue to grow for at least another year or two.

Yes, Uni-Verse in interesting. Although, from what I can gather it looks like it's currently not much more than a protocol for streaming 3d graphics and sound. Perhaps it will develop into something, or perhaps the protocol will be integrated in another system. It seems to me that they currently don't have any plans for how it could be used to create anything like a big scalable virtual world, but it's certainly worth following.

I also think VAST is worth checking out.

In terms of scalability, 1.9 was meant to address that. Hand offs are less centralized now, for example.

In terms of standardization ... there are not really a lot of standard protocols in this field that I am aware of. Are you thinking VRML? Or a standard language for parametric models?

In any case, implementing a protocol gateway isn't that hard to do, so I can't imagine "standardization" will be an issue, and if it does become one, it will be easily solved.

Some people might point to LSL .. and while I wish LL were a bit more thoughtful about the API, there really did not exist a language before which addressed the problem of interacting in a massively multiplayer world. Cries for c/java/c++/etc, I think, are generally wrong headed.

I suspect the biggest vulnerability LL has is Havok ... it seems to be the largest component which can not be "open sourced". If an open source competitor did start to gain traction (such as croquet), LL would have to think of a way to address that problem in a compelling manner.

As for dangerous competitors, look to Microsoft. The games division is consistently talking about doing all the things SL is doing, similarly valve has mentioned internal projects which sound very similar to what SL is about.

In fact, the toolsets for building in an interactive 3d verse are improving all the time. We may find that one day we wakeup and you can jump into a Quake/Halo/Half-Life/etc level and edit it realtime.

Sooner rather than later: Unreal Tools

Yes, that still sounds more design time than real time to me, but I have a feeling it's not that far away from what we have in SL.

"The editor has a multiple-window view reminiscent of 3D Studio or Adobe Photoshop, including a picture-in-picture view that lets users preview their created levels in real time, as well as monitor (and modify) exactly when each section of a level will load, so that areas can be streamed continuously by judicious linking rather than forcing geometric pop-up as large chunks of levels get loaded abruptly."

Compared to bsp compile times of only a few years ago, this sort of stuff is amazing to me.

Yup, these are great leaps .. the tools are getting better.

I also think a micropayment economy will develop around these tools, so you can purchase levels, weapons, monsters, scripts, etc in the same way you purchase items in SL, and Microsoft sounds like they're moving rapidly into this space.

Stilll, SL has a first mover network effect going on by maintaining a unified single shard existence.

This is quite powerful. Some people say we might hit a million and stop. I say, if we hit a million, we'll rocket to the moon just on the power of the network effect alone.