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That SL server emu…

January 31st, 2007 (Visited 3055 times) Tags:

…is here, part of OpenSecondLife. Christian Westbrook from the Electric Sheep flock says,

The simulator does not interact with SL’s asset server in any way, supports server-side scripting via Lua, and uses simple flat files to store asset information at this point.

(via 3pointd.com)

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7 Responses to “That SL server emu…”

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3pointD.com wrote on February 1st, 2007 at 4:17 am:

Open-Source Simulator Project For Second Life: Hi, I’ve wrote to the guy and he sent me interesting answers about what are they… ¶ Hacker Friendly on Open-Source Simulator Project For Second Life: (via 3pointD) ¶ Raph’s Website on Open-Source Simulator Project For Second Life: (via 3pointd.com) ¶ Gabriel Cirio on So-Called 3D Virtual World Finally Goes 3D: Does qDot double client stereo allow interactivity, like with the regular client, or…

Reader Comments

Steven Callas said on January 31st, 2007 at 4:22 pm:
The flexibility and the “infinite possibilities” that Second Life is capable of doing has me wondering if major MMO developers will be using this Open Source version as a sort of sandbox for experimenting with new ideas to implement in their current or upcoming games. Who knows, having “2+ years of experience in OpenSL” might be a significant leverage point on a programmer’s resume when applying for a job in the gaming industry!
Raph said on January 31st, 2007 at 4:37 pm:

I think the answer is almost certainly “no.” SL is not a very good environment for the major MMOs for numerous reasons (#1 with a bullet being the fact that it’s a prim-reliant engine both on the network and content creation side).
John Hurliman said on January 31st, 2007 at 10:40 pm:
Raph, Second Life will probably never be as good as Maya or other professional design tools for content creation, but it allows you to test gameplay ideas very quickly. I could see it being used as a design sandbox for a lot of different things, in fact when we were designing the libsecondlife library we made 3D flow charts in Second Life.
Raph said on January 31st, 2007 at 10:58 pm:

It’s not that it can’t be used for prototyping. But the question of why prototype in an engine that works so differently from the final target would certainly come up. Core assumptions in how the engine works run contrary to the sorts of performance demands that most of the major MMOs would put on it. LOD, caching, number of hits to the card, number of individual packets streamed, all those things work against a major MMO using it… They could do it more cheaply with a “blue squares” sort of environment on one of the servers they already have.
robusticus said on February 1st, 2007 at 8:45 am:
It’s kind of amusing how there is all this backlash against SL for a billion different reasons but nobody ever mentions the engine. Ironically, it seems to me that’s the only real showstopper. I guess they sort of hint at it with “clunky user interface” critiques.

But then again, I suppose that’s the problem for every game these days. What will it take to make a builder world out of Unreal 3 or Crysis?

And where’s the Snowcrash Tram in SL? Public transportation could be a mechanism to add location value to real estate. Curious why it doesn’t exist in SL. I wonder if adding sanctioned private server instancing at the same time as adding a tram would balance the impact on the virtual estate market. Make it a city sized lobby, or set of lobbies, as a [theoretically] happy compromise.

So what are you leaning towards doing, Raph? You do realize iconic graphics are not exactly worldy, eh?
Raph said on February 1st, 2007 at 8:56 am:

Unreal 3 or Crysis have their own set of assumptions that make them bad for doing what SL does, certainly.

I do think there are engine architecture choices that could be made to allow higher performance with the sort of prim-based architecture SL uses…

I think worldiness and graphics have little to do with one another. Sl is almost entirely iconic, for example.
robusticus said on February 2nd, 2007 at 8:25 am:
I wouldn’t know. Epic is unlikely to license Unreal 3 to me. Which is unfortunate, because the terms “unreal life” and “unreal estate” would be amusing to use. Maybe version 4 will not require $10 million to belly up to the bar.

Yes, SL is almost entirely TOO iconic, which was my criticism. Photorealistic strip clubs will redefine the term irrational exuberance. While it may be a bubble (not with EA earnings dropping yoy), it won’t be popping any time soon. One might think me a starry-eyed idealist to call it a quantam leap, but that’s the way I look at it - as a realism scale.