Beyond SL - OpenSim, Clones and Standalone.

The advantages most of these new worlds have is they can see the mistakes LL made in the past and don't have to make all their features 2003 SL compatible

That's exactly what I'm hoping for!

Unfortunately most of this is already being decided, and by people who lack a real connection with everyday SL-life in my opinion.

(It might seem low to judge like that, but if you look like a newbie who just stepped off OI after months or even years on SL, then you have no idea what the average consumer would want. I don't know either, but I do know what I want and I can tell when "geeks" are more interested in a new toy rather than making something that would actually work the people would want it)

Anyway, the current proposal is to restrict all existing content to the "creation grid" only (as opposed to trusted and untrusted grids), which means that nothing would be able to leave SL to go to a non-LL hosted sims, even if LL were to contract with another party who would agree to uphold the permissions system in the same way LL does (which is a sane requirement).

If you created something, then you could change it trusted/untrusted/all, but if you bought any part of it, it's not leaving SL.

And you could go and visit a non-LL hosted sim, but you'd arrive as ruth with no inventory.

Not a Linden quote, but one of the involved residents: "the scary numbers of the virutal web in the next 4-10 years will be 1 billion avatar accounts, 40-100 milion avatars online at any given moment on 50-100 million simulators".
Ironically that was said when the grid was crumbling under the load of a mere 60,000.

Are sculpted prims supported on these standalone sims?

My standalone 2-region island DOES support sculpted prims. I have the same sculpty hedges there as round my home in SL.

It does have quite a lot of bugs, though. Crossing from one region to the other results in being hurled into the sky. Sometimes I stand a metre or more above the ground. Duplicated prims often become phantom. Also I can't have attachmennts, although I believe the latest version allows them. Also I can't empty the trash folder, it just gets fuller and fuller. But I like my standalone.

The OpenLife grid: I joined and I look more or less the same as I do in SL except I have 'system' hair as attachments aren't working properly yet. It seems fairly stable and I hook up to a windlight viewer so some of the landscapes are nice. I hardly ever meet anybody in OL, I use it mainly for testing clothing textures. If you use the RealXtend viewer , it lets you make normal prims in 'build' up to 100m x 100m, so no need for megaprims.

The Central Grid grid. I joined and re-created my SL look there but now it won't let me log in. It seemed pretty unstable.

Uvatar. I found this, or rather my RL did. They got in as a ruth and looked round its six regions, but after that they couldn't get back in.

But I see all these as extensions of my Second Life, or perhaps a Third Life, where I, the real Conifer of Second Life, go into other virtual worlds with an avatar as close as possible to the real me of SL!!!!

What I'm saying is that if Second Life is a fantasy world for RLs to come into, then Open Life etc are a fantasy world for me, as a Second Life avatar, to create a virtual version of my virtual self in a virtual version of SL............head hurts!!!

I think it's fairly obvious why LL released the source.

- It's getting too big, they need to distribute the sims across the world, rather like the internet is today... Spread the risk
- It's so big they have reached the point where they know the only way to grow further is to make a fairly drastic change in how the product gets out there - relaxing control in a way is guaranteeing developer (I mean *real* developer) uptake and promoting further growth
- SL is aiming to become a standard like VRML was meant to be back in the days before we had broadband.

Show me any software related product that has evolved from anything other than a commercial need and I'll give you a free chicken. And no, don't bother pinting at open source stuff and uni-spinouts it just don't wash

When it's a bit more stable and can connect to the main grid I have no problem with the idea of running a few little co-lo servers with a few sims in - somebody mentioned $300 a month earlier, well that buys you you a pretty hefty Xeon X3210 QuadCore 2.13 Ghz on 4 gigs with unlimited bandwith and SCSI. I would guess that would have no problems running 1 full & 4 openspace per server - if not more - feel free to correct me / assess as I would be very interested to know. (You may even get change from your $300 for a baby server if you shop around)

Hell I may even buy one for the sake of it

I've had a small grid of OpenSim sims on my computer for a while, and it was novel for a short time, but until the clones get populations, they'll just be novelties like the grid on my computer. At the moment, the difficulty they have is that they are so far behind SL that attracting real populations hardly seems possible. They don't work very well even without people in them.

They didn't release the source. They only released the viewer source.

How are ppl running these opengrid sims then??? You must be able to get the server source from somewhere or do you mean you can only get pre-compiled code to run the sims?

added: I could probably google this but I'm at work and er... should be working

From OpenSim. OpenLife uses OpenSim, as do all the others, as far as I know - including the grid on my computer, which I could put online if I really wanted to. To the best of my knowledge, the OpenSim people wrote the programming from scratch.

Added:
It's written in such a way that OpenSim grids/sims can be interconnected, regardless of where they are hosted, but none of it can interconnect with SL, of course.

stop it! you're just making it worse!

It would help perhaps if you read my post Amy.

LOL you mean actually read something before forming an opinon????

Goodness me what is this Slashdot or something?

But if OpenSim is reverse engineered that throws a pretty major spin on it. Mind you I still suspect that the [very important announcement] may be something to do with releasing the server source - but taht of course is mere specualtion

It's not so much reverse engineered as writing the programme to do what SL does. I believe that much of it is freely available anyway - the 3D system, for instance. It's a copy rather than a clone. Some of it is intercepting what SL sends to the viewer, and writing programming to use it.

My main issue with OpenSim is that it's built on a flawed design.

It's SL's design that's ultimately at fault and not necessarily the Linden Lab of today. You could replace the entire workforce at Linden Lab and we'd still have the same problems.

The OpenSim coders do have a limited ability to change that design. Linden Lab can't change it without ruining their business model.

But we're always gonna have 256x256 regions and nasty sim borders. If anything those sim borders are gonna become even worse when you're flying from one region that's in the Australian outback to another region that's running on an old laptop under somebodies bed.

What may improve in future is bandwidth. It seems LL have limited their bandwidth in order to keep up with demand. If OpenSim can make it so that we can store our textures on servers of our own choice then it'll be possible to have our sims download 4x as fast.

That started me reminiscing In the early 90s I wrote an online graphic multi-user game in which characters (people) would walk from screen to screen - a platform type game. Each screen was invisibly divided into sections, and each section had a maximum of one exit to the next screen. When a person entered a section, s/he started to receive the data for the next screen, so moving from one screen to the next was instant.

It made me wonder how SL does it between sims, and if they do anything similar, or if too much of it is done at the point of crossing the border. Much of it is done that way, of course (we can see across borders), but an SL copy could maybe make a big difference in that aspect.

I guess it works in a similar way - as we can "see" into the next sim before we get to it that suggests that much of it has already loaded before you actually cross the border.

Added: Oh wait you already said that - or wasthat in the edit?

I can't envisage a time when sims run off laptops under beds - but running them off servers that you manage yourself is an interesting idea - I will pay more attention to the OpenSims whan I have more time. I did look in already once or twice but had same ruthed out lack of performance problems everybody else has had

While it is true that LL only released the client source, they also released the protocols between the server and the client, which enabled the server source to be reverse-engineered quite easily, and that is what has happened.

The Opensim server is still very much in an Alpha stage of development, Version 1.0 has not been released yet, and I would be surprised if it was released this year.

In addition to the OpenSim server RealXtend have also released their server software, which has several novel additions to it. The OpenLife server is based on the Opensim server.

I have been testing the OpenSim server, and I maintain a blog (Chapter & Metaverse)detailing step-by-step instructions on how to set up a standalone sim, and allow friends to log into it. (http://rock-vacirca.blogspot.com)

It is still early days, so do not expect it to be at the same stage of development as SL, and not all the LSL code has been implemented yet, but should be in the next major interation, Version 0.6.0.

It is also no longer true to say that all the avatars in OpenSim are 'Ruths'. I now have exactly the same shape, skin and appearance as I do in SL (and it is easy to do), and avatar appearance persistance across both client reboots and server reboots is also now solved.

Having said that, I am also testing several other alternatives to SL, which are not based on their code or their approach at all. Vast Parks looks good, as does Multiverse (my favourite of the new bunch) and I have signed up for the Sony Home beta tests.

There is also a movement gathering for a departure from centralised servers altogether, and move to peer-to-peer networks. This approach is exciting, as the main problem facing SL, ie the centralised Asset Servers, is eliminated instantly. Your sim resides on your PC and nowhere else. If yours goes down, the rest stays up. Some of the disadvantages of the peer-to-peer approach is that if you switch off your PC (server) your region disappears from the grid, another is that your ISP upload speeds may limit you if your sim is popular. However, all these issues are being actively looked at.

Rock

I added it, Amy - sorry.

I can see it happening in the future. I've said before that I see the 3D environment as the future of the internet, and sims/grids hosted in pretty much the same way that websites are now.

I think the way it works now is that when you fly into another region the sim has to download a copy of your avatar's attachments (including vehicle). But you're right, other than a little hard work, there's nothing to prevent LL from making it so that a sim downloads any avatar attachments (including vehicles) from the neighboring sims. This way the sim would be ready and there'd be no delay when you fly over the border.

The only downside is that it would be quite wasteful on resources to have a sim download the 40x8 avatar's attachments from the clubs in the neighboring sims when none of the clubbers have even considered entering your sim.

We need mind reading sims!. That's it!! I got it!

It would be quite wasteful, but as bandwidth speeds continue to get faster, it might be not too far away.

My often flawed memory is telling me that inventories are also transfered to the destination sim at the point of crossing - another potential speed up.

If find it all very interesting, Rock. Thank you for posting about it.

My money is on a revival of Active Worlds. Stop laughing!. I'm serious!