Beyond SL - OpenSim, Clones and Standalone.

From small and rudimentary beginnings about a year ago after LL published the SL source codes, the parallel worlds of new grids cloned from SL and downloadable off-line sims are now taking off.
I will now hand over to my RL 'agent' who wants to say more:

"Having read stuff on various sites I discovered OpenLife and Central Grid and sent some Ruth lookalike test avatars to go and look round. Basically identical systems to SL, but in their early stages of development.
Then I had a go at downloading the Open Life standalone sim - a free island on your own computer. After I got it up and running I discovered it was a relatively simple matter to add a neighbouring sim. I employed another Ruth who called herself Test User and she did some terraforming and building.
We made some reasonable trees from scratch using Photoshop and created a small woodland area. Using WindLight and a good computer this ultimate private island performs well. Work is progressing on a harbour area.
Inevitably, when she got to hear about this island, Conifer wanted to visit it, so we made her an account. We got her looking remakably similar to her normal SL self except her skin looks slightly paler and she has to make do with hair made only from standard SL sliders. In fact she has even claimed a small island at the corner of the sim where she's started to build something out of girders and concrete.
There are now at least 7 online 'worlds' using SL codes, plus a lot of people have probably downloaded standalone islands which will probably be able to be put online in future. I'm wondering how these developments will affect SL in the future and if anyone else has dipped their toes in the water.
......Controller, Lagwoot Agency"

I'm not sure what those girders and concrete are going to be yet. I enjoy my visits to this standalone island but I'm only a secondary personality there, the Test User woman seems to call all the shots and I don't want to argue with her. I still love SL for its social aspects and I think I'll leave the island to Test User, just returning for occasional visits to play with the girders and concrete!

From what I've seen, they are still missing many features and are riddled with bugs. Even more so then SL.

Maybe once things work a little better and some of the standard SL features work, it might be worth while looking into.

But keep in mind the costs for Bandwidth and Server Rentals... Still going to run you about $300 a month for a OK system with unmetered bandwidth.

More from the Lagwoot Agency:

"The clone grids like Open Life and Central Grid might be rudimentary, with stability problems and some SL functions disenabled, but the downloadable standalone sims work well, given an adequate computer. They are FREE and self-contained on your own computer. You get a few textures in the library but beyond that you need to make your own. There is no provision for connecting your standalone to the net, so if you want to try, it's a DIY effort.

We got Conifer along by choosing 'new shape' and manually entering all her vital statistics values copied from her SL sliders. The standard Ruth comes with a reasonble skin that was OK on Conifer.
........Controller, Lagwoot Agency"

Not sure if I want them to say any more about me and my vital statistics - it's getting a bit personal!

Not only that but most servers have backup power supplies so if the power goes out they keep running.

Anyone thinking "I can run my business sim on my own PC" better look into just how this would work.

Forget the "consumer level" of broadband. You'll need "business class" otherwise you'll be more laggy than SL is now. Most ISPs will throttle back your bandwidth if you're using alot of it on Consumer class. Also forget it if you're using a Satellite Connection.

You'll need some sort of power backup in case of a power outage.
If you get 100s of customers a day, what happens when your power at home is out for days??

You'd need a system capable of running as a server. Preferably with a SATA Drive, possibly a RAID system. Also might need ECC RAM (more expensive) to correct for data errors.

But I re-emphasise, the standalone sims run on your own computer. They don't connect to the SL or any other grid. What you do on them is self-contained. They are not part of any virtual business community or anything. They are free to download (at present) and they work well - like I said I've been to a standalone island of 2 sims and seen for myself.

So the future holds the promise of a standalone sim that can be accessed simply by launching it from your computer. Then what? You'd have to an awfully talented person to really make anything similar to SL. Let's see what you'd probably need to know.. terraforming, architecture, landscaping, plant artist, natural texture artist, architectural texture artist, sculptey artist, water texture and scripting, skin designer, eye designer, hair designer, dressmaker, shoemaker, attachment scripter, AO animator, furniture maker, furniture scripter, furniture animator....

well what i'd like to see is using the stand alone offline sims as a base for building. lets say it connected to the SL server, you could download all your invintory and character to this stand alone sim(s), close off the conenction and build offline, then when your ready you can bring your invintory online to the SL survers and upload your build into your SL invintory. now that would be neat.

imagine being able to create during SL downtimes or when you're not near a connection, or being able to build without someone coming along and saying "watchya' doin?" (yes i am an anti-social Ogre at times ) but still being able to use your own textures and previously created items

-Crunch

Yes - but lots of people do all those things in SL. 'Our' 2-sim island is taking shape nicely, with structures etc. We did trees by drawing them in photoshop and saving them as targas - they are as good as some of the commercilally available trees in SL.

I can see a market developing in texture downloads, including skins, as targa files sold for RL money. Obviously Open Sim is not for residents who just want to shop or go to clubs and shout 'HOOOOOO' and 'GRRROOWWWLS' but it's really not that difficult.

Open Life say they are working on an easy package that will allow people to link their standalones to the net or their online grid - not sure exactly what they mean.

I reckon LL ought to be in on this standalone thing before it gets too big - if they offer downloadable sims, with link-in facilities, complete with the full SL inventory transfer, at a reasonable price, then they'd do well. It would be much cheaper than them having to buy servers to run private islands from.

So are the stand alone Sims are friendly for those who just like to create and build with no programing skills?
I loved the original Sims games only for creating virtual spaces.
There were also free tools and content, yes some sold subscriptions but there was lot
of possibilities and opportunities to create for those who enjoyed doing so.
It would be cool if their was similar content community and user friendly version for offline that anyone could use regardless if it was gear towards someone gaining profit.

another ideal application for these SIMs is trying out full SIM theme builds to see how they work before committing to 2k for a island in SL

and you don't need to add all the prim detailing or texture everything, use it for proportion and spacing

Building in standalone is exactly the same as in SL, with one or two glitches I've discovered - like unlinking an object moves all the prims - could be annoying! Linking works OK.

Texturing is the same too - there are some textures in the inventory library to start with, the rest you need to make or obtain. The standard Ruth can't be altered directly in appearance but by creating new shape, clothes, hair etc. and then wearing them they can be altered. I look the same in standalone as in SL except my skin is slightly paler and since avatars can't have attachments yet, may hair is just made from SL appearance sliders, not part-prim / part-slider as in SL.

The open source community is pretty strong..don't underestimate where these projects are headed.. not sure if anyone has seen this yet:

http://www.realxtend.org/

its a second life client running OGRE on opensim with real time shadows, mesh import and lots of other neat stuff. In two words 'very impressive'



-whyroc

Unfortuantely this is the way of many many open source projects. All the "neat and cool" stuff is worked on long before there is even the most basic of usable infrastructure.

I've played with some of these servers and they are very VERY far behind even having a usable system yet. I applaud their efforts but so far, nothing makes you appretiate SL more than spending some time on one of these private sim universes...

In another... several years maybe there might be something that is fully fledged and a real competition, but... if they get bogged down in the shiney they will remain even worse than LL for producing a usable system.

In other words, my experience with them has been very UNimpressive. Hacking in mesh support is nothing. Making the entire system usable and fully featured is "impressive" and about 1000 times harder.

I was able to log into Open Life for about 5 minutes and then crashed when attempting to edit my appearance. Never been able to get back into it since. So that's almost as good as SL where I spend hours building and then get locked out / banned / whatever :\

The standalone sim is great, get it, work it, play with it. It's easy.
Mine is called "Cranky Bay"
The standalone sims can connect with other grids now and are being developed with ogre as whyroc said.
This is where OpenGrids will differ from SL.
You can/will import full mesh objects, (it's already in their RexViewer edit menu. The "Rex" tab.) although prims and sculpts are still there. Avatar bots, designed as tools for you to collect email and messages for example. ONE avatar across the metaverse with secure wallet. (thats the plan) And they will all interconnect via TP. go read the full blurb, very interesting.

I wouldn't bag OpenSims too much yet for being less functional. Give 'em two years and compare then.

Six months is about the most that SL has, I would judge. The server code has to be releasable and relatively reliable at that point or it will fail as a general virtual world protocol.

After that, open sim servers can take as long as they like, but they'll just be a hobby interest.

No, I think SL has a brighter future because it has a community and a virtual economy. I take the point that a virtual economy would be difficult to operate securely with downloaded sims dispersed to users' computers. The other SL-based online worlds have a lot of catch-up to do - it's the standalone thing that I feel will be a success.

And we haven't even got onto the subject of copy-cat SL-like worlds like Hipihi or Novoking - Although these shamelessly mimic SL, they are separately developed from scratch and not based on the SL codes and system, like the clones are.

Now THAT is more what I'd like to see!

but can I have my friends over?

just for the records;
I have sold all my land in SL.
I have given up on SL and downgrading to free account
I'm uploading all my textures and all the stuff I can transfer from SL to OpenSim.

I have become a Foundation resident in OpenSim by buying my own sim there for U$90 first month and U$75/month afterward.
A sim there is the same as in SL; 65km sqr + 15,000 prims.

I've already started building the project I used to work on while in SL; the Horyuji temple complex in Nara, Japan.

Even with all the outage and few features implemented, it is obvious these VR startup are the future, not SL. SL used to be a pioneer, but it has become chaotic and unpleasant.


And guess what? You can use the RealXtend viewer to navigate in OpenSim and create prims up to 100m, and they behave like SL's "normal" 10m prims....

Take that SL...Good by!

/me wipes away some drool from his mouth

100 meter prims?

i'll be exploring opensim soon it seems

-Crunch

One wonders why LL made the codes public if a year down the line that has led to other grids being set up in competiton and free islands to put on your own computer.

Perhaps they thought that someone would soon invent a competitor system anyway, and better to let them use SL codes rather than other ones.

Update: I'm now spending most of my time on my own personal standalone grid, 9 regions in a 3 X 3 grid. the Opensim software has been improved many times over and now boast 45,000 prims capacity per region. From time to times I let others connect to my grid from the net. See my pick posted on Flickr! Also look for the Openlife Grid group and Opensim group on flickr! for a taste of what is going on there...

Just so that it is clear in everyone's minds, *NO* LL written source code was incorporated in to the OpenSIM programs. The only source code published by LL was the viewer code. You cannot create an OpenSIM just by taking source code from the viewer.

What the OpenSIM people did was reverse engineer (examine) the messages that the sim and viewer talk using, look at the viewer source code to help them understand how SL works internally, use published (by LL) technical specifications (blueprints) and use their own knowledge of how SL works from a user perspective to create the OpenSIM code.

The SIM source code in OpenSIM is not even written in the same computer language as LL SIM code and LL never published their SIM code.

There has been a lot of misinformation written about OpenSims and so I felt I should clarify a little.

please post a url to your photo's pratyeka would love to see them.

as i posted some months ago in this same thread, untill i can move items back and forth from a standalone sim to the main grid i won't be useing it, but i can't see that feature being to far away *crosses fingers that it might be [very important announcment] but doubts it*

-Crunch