Weekly Edition
Return to the Press page
| |||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal)
Glyn Moody writes
about the game Second Life, on
Linux Journal. "Unless you have been living under a rock for the six
months, you will have noticed that the virtual world Second Life is much in
the news. According to its home page, there are currently around 1,700,000
residents, who are spending $600,000 - that's real, not virtual, money - in
the world each day. These figures are a little deceptive - there are
typically only 10,000 to 15,000 residents online at any one time, and the
money flow is not a rigorous measurement of economic activity - but there
is no doubt that Second Life is growing very rapidly; moreover, we are
beginning to see it enter the mainstream in a way that has close parallels
with the arrival of the Web ten years ago."
(Log in to post comments)
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 28, 2006 21:12 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Yes a open source second life would be nice.
I could imagine a couple people making a good living renting out hardware and providing support services to people wanting to setup a digital world for themselves, but don't want to setup servers at home.
Otherwise a open source system like that could provide a nice way to have virtual worlds were people have stuff setup on their home system. Sort of warp back and forth between worlds.
Hell maybe do for IRC what MMORPG did for MUDs.
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 28, 2006 21:16 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Oh, I almost forgot about this.
Somebody has already been working on a 'open source second life' except that it was a project that existed long before those folks came around.
It's called 'Croquet' and is open source. http://www.opencroquet.org/
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 30, 2006 16:00 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] My impression is croquet is intended to be a lot more fundamental, far-reaching, and broadly applicable.
If you look at how second life behaves when people try to do unusual things with it, I don't think their technology is ever going be able to become a substrate for general communication and programming, which I believe is what croquet wants to offer.
Of course, research doesn't always bear fruit.
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal) Posted Dec 4, 2006 22:14 UTC (Mon) by petetron (guest, #8495) [Link] The fact that Croquet is written in Smalltalk severly limits its applicability to the wider computing world. Unless Smalltalk starts catching on (which is scheduled to happen sometime after, oh, Lisp takes over the world) this is going to turn off the majority of potential users and developers. It's hard to interface Smalltalk to non-Smalltalk languages. Furthermore, the fundamental design of Croquet is based on every client running a Smalltalk VM (so it can exchange executable bytecode) so writing an independent implementation of Croquet (say an alternate client) is either totally infeasable, or redundant (because an alternate implementation would have to be in Smalltalk as well).
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 28, 2006 21:51 UTC (Tue) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link] Isn't that what WorldForge is? I think it stems from the EverQuest era of MMORPGs. Today there are many others such as Eternal Lands and Planeshift, but I haven't looked at them.
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 28, 2006 23:07 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Yep.
Although Worldforge seemed to have nearly died off a couple times.
There has been not-to-long-ago a couple releases of a game based off of (I think) the Ogre3d gaming engine that uses worldforge stuff. It's called 'Ember'.
I tried to help out with Worldforge once a while ago. Hung around their IRC and stuff for a couple weeks and tried to make them models and tried to get ahold of people that knew what was going on, but it was pretty futile. It was more of a social club or something. I don't know.
But that Ember seems to have gone places and has a couple beta releases.
But the real distinction between something like 'Second Life' and big MMORPG like World or Warcraft is that Second life concentrates on social activities rather then gaming.
They have gone entirely in the wrong direction with all the buying and selling stuff with real USD. How does it make sense that they are charging you money to buy 'virtual land' and buying and selling islands for thousands of dollars? Doesn't make sense to me at all. Seems like a scam and when people are yelling 'You stole my IP! I am calling the FBI and telling them your violating the DMCA!". Literally I've seen people say that.
But for the social stuff that's pretty nice and it has been successfull in attracting information, definately.
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 29, 2006 0:39 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] <tongue location="cheek">A second life seems entirely superfluous given that a goodly number of us don't have a first life to speak of. :)
(what? why's everyone *looking* at me like that? :) )
Why I Need a Life (LWN.net) Posted Nov 29, 2006 4:08 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] Oh hi, nix! Fancy meeting you here.
Say, you wouldn't happen to know where I should look for vacuum cleaner
(I don't think we need three dimensions for the social element.)
Why I Need a Life (LWN.net) Posted Nov 29, 2006 10:09 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Indeed not. Usenet, LiveJournal, even (ick) MySpace prove *that* to a greater or lesser degree. (Nice example. :) )
Why We Need an Essay about Why We Need an Open Source Second Life Posted Nov 29, 2006 1:11 UTC (Wed) by jamesm (guest, #2273) [Link] "the free software community must become more involved with the existing virtual world projects, and invest much more time and effort in new ones."
Besides writing the code for all their infrastructure and giving it to them for free, and supporting it for free?
Why We Need an Essay about Why We Need an Open Source Second Life Posted Nov 29, 2006 8:37 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link] > Besides writing the code for all their infrastructure and giving it to> them for free, and supporting it for free?
One of the reasons which is often given for the lack of adoption for Linux
Consider the following strategy: free software programmers replicate
1) They only write free engines which work using the original on-DVD
The above would solve all the installation problems which plague
Hm, I haven't played games myself for years. Does that sound very silly?
Why We Need an Essay about Why We Need an Open Source Second Life Posted Nov 29, 2006 12:05 UTC (Wed) by MKesper (guest, #38539) [Link] Excuse me, here you fall into the "Free Beer trap".To cite http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html :
"Free software does not mean non-commercial. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important."
For maintaining servers running Free Software, you will naturally have to collect money (be it from users directly or via other means as ads etc.). You pay money for services like (virtual) servers, although they might run completely on Free Software.
To put it short: Free Software does not mean gratis.
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 29, 2006 9:32 UTC (Wed) by lolando (subscriber, #7139) [Link] It could actually happen.
Nevrax is a company behind Ryzom, another MMORPG. This company is having hard times, to the point that it's probably going to be shut down soonish. But a few people are trying to collect donations (well, pledges), so the code can be freed, in much the same way as Blender was.
More info on http://www.ryzom.org/
Thanks for that link :) Posted Nov 29, 2006 13:07 UTC (Wed) by dark (✭ supporter ✭, #8483) [Link] I've made my pledge. I'm most interested in the free graphics. I can always write code, but I never know where to get the rest ;)
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 29, 2006 11:37 UTC (Wed) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link] The economics of a major game production are currently similar to those of a blockbuster movie. This would only work within an open source model where enough game players who can program or contribute stories and graphics want a hand in creating their own virtual game world. So perhaps the key to getting this to work would be for the seed effort to concern the game infrastructure - protocols and frameworks which prevent cheating but are sufficient to enable player creativity.
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 29, 2006 12:36 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Well that's how 'Second Life' works. It is almost totally user-created content.
They even charge real money for it. It costs money to get virtual land, and it costs money to load scripts and other things I beleive. But they entice people to create by allowing them to make money from other less-talented players by offering their virtual goods for sale.
But I think that most people do it just for the fun of it. People like making stuff and having other people play around with it.
From a technical standpoint probably their best trait is the easy-to-use creation tools.
Also note that although those games have 'movie' scale budgets most of them are very fomulaic, uncreative, and not realy that much fun. Except for a few stand outs most games could also be considured simply variations on the same 4 or 5 games.
I believe that open source as far as the code portion of it would be very usefull. The coding of the games and developement is only a very small portion of the overal development. Most games nowadays don't even realy code their own engines. Typically developers purchase engines then modify them to their needs.
So from a commercial stand point you could do open source game and charge money for content for that or charge money for subscriptions to online servers were you maintain a persistant world. That way you could recoup the costs of developing content, which would take up the bulk of the development efforts. (content usually ends up being mostly unique to paticular games and paticular scenerios.)
I remember back when I played Quake2. One of the nice aspects about it was that it was relatively easy to make new models for the game. Back when it was popular people would crank out a few a week, and every month or so there were a few models that would end up to be high quality and as good as anything produced by any commercial game maker.
People realy liked to make their own models to serve as avatars on the online servers.
Unfortunately with the popularity of Quake3 it kinda killed off that aspect of the game as making models for that game was apparently more difficult.
There are a crapload of people out there that like to doodle and think of interesting things to put in games and such. Plenty of mods for Quake3 games, like 'True Combat: elite' that are aviable at no-cost and are high quality...
But your not going to get the sort of critical mass you need if things are too difficult. The sort of people that are at making models usually aren't the sort of people that are going to be good at programming filters or figuring out file formats or reading through source code to figure out how to do stuff. (although there are people that can do that)
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 29, 2006 13:44 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link] > I believe that open source as far as the code portion of it would be> very usefull. The coding of the games and developement is only a very > small portion of the overal development. Most games nowadays don't even > realy code their own engines. Typically developers purchase engines then > modify them to their needs.
Precisely. And a single free engine could be adapted to run twenty or
If game fans in the free software community wrote an engine which could
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal) Posted Nov 29, 2006 13:23 UTC (Wed) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] I assume many people here have read Tad Williams's "Otherland" series.
This whole thing is spooky to me!
Not Second Life, we need the Metaverse Posted Nov 30, 2006 2:03 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] Second Life is the wrong model, Linden Labs pretty much seems to know that, but the Second Life model is commercially viable and they need to (at least have the potential to) make money. On the other hand a quite different model presents itself if you assume that you don't want to build something as a commercial proposition but just (like the web) because it's a good idea and everyone might want to participate.
The Metaverse is (would be) a distributed system, in which (like the web again) the common binding is a family of protocols and markup languages for interoperability rather than some particular entity, location or software. Instead of a single coherent 3D world you can visit it's a larger universe of hyperlinked worlds, connected or even overlapping but run by different people around the world. Maybe some parts of the Metaverse would be a lot like Second Life, since people seem to like it. Human-scale avatars hovering rather clumsily through a toy-box world. But being a distributed system, rules would only be local. Maybe in other parts of the system most visitors would be disembodied, passive observers watching e.g. a realtime concert. Or hundreds of school children controlling animals participating in an educational simulation of pre-historic Earth.
Lots of SF has been written about this sort of idea, but no-one's really building it yet. Perhaps the increasing ubiquity of 3D accelerated graphics hardware will bring it about in the next decade or so. Second Life demonstrates that people are willing to build a virtual world even with very crude tools, but a Metaverse would need more powerful tools and a protocol which achieved a lot while remaining simple enough for lots of people to implement it in order that the rich possibilities are explored.
A big unsolved problem in this space is identity. Linden Labs of course have a user login (even if you can trivially obtain more than one), a distributed system doesn't have that, and it would ideally want something that's more or less universal, very secure yet very easy to use. Hard.
Not Second Life, we need the Metaverse Posted Nov 30, 2006 4:35 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Well existing crypto technology can take care of that.
I beleive that a company could very well create a open source thing like this were people are allowed to setup their own servers and such if they want.
However most people aren't going to be willing to do that.
So whoever would be experts in this new world would be able to make good money in maintaining and renting out real hardware resources for people that want to be 'demi-gods' of their own domain, but don't want to deal with the technical details.
Also a great deal of games and role playing will require a persistant world for long term game play, just like you do with current commercial MMORPG. So you can easily charge subscriptions to maintain and police these persistant virtual worlds and people will be happy to spend the money for the services you provide.
Well for the part of the protocol you simply intregrate GPG for generating private public keys for identity management. Every message you do you provide incrypted and big file transfered would be signed by you. It would be part of the protocol. People would be able to create ones willy-nilly if they felt like it. No restrictions.
Then for part of the services you provide you charge a small one-time fee to sign their keys so that people can refer to your servers to confirm identities.
Now this is purely optional, of course, you'd have it open so that anybody can use their own GPG keys. But people will be happy to pay for it because it would be used to authenticate for game servers and such. And it would help people conferm their identity.
(of course you have to be very carefull to stress that this is convience only and not try to present it as a solution to identity management like SSL certs are prortrayed to be (mostly fasely IMO))
One of the big problems people have in online games are trolls and cheaters. Now with everything being open sourced it'll be very difficult to make games cheating-proof (which is pretty much impossible right now anyway).
So currently somebody joins a online server, they troll, they cheat, they piss everybody off and gets kicked. They go through a proxy or change their IP somehow and then they join right back on. Rinse and repeat. This stuff can go on for hours and ruin everybody's fun.
But if the server required that you have a signed key as authentication to join then they can simply deny your key if you cheat or troll and there is nothing you can do about it, it would be very hard to work around it. So in order to rejoin the server you would have to setup a new certificate and pay another 5 bucks to get it signed before they would be able to re-join the gaming server. That sort of thing would get old REALY fast.
People like to troll and such, but if it costs them 20 bucks a day to do it they are just going to go and do something else.
Go look at the success of the somethingawful.com forums for a good example of how well this can work in a online environment. I wouldn't say that somethingawfull is a shining example of what is good with the internet, but they are one of the most popular places on the internet and it is the only big forum that charges money.
So they don't advertise. They don't go out and look for new members or anything like that. Originally it started off as no-cost, but it was plagued by trolls and such.
As it turns out the majority of trolls are 15 year olds. Most 15 year olds don't have credit cards. Solution: Charge a one time fee of 10 dollars and your a member for life (or until you get kicked).
Pretty simple concept.
Well that is one idea...
Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (Linux Journal) Posted Dec 4, 2006 21:51 UTC (Mon) by petetron (guest, #8495) [Link] I'm the principal developer of the open source Interreality Project (aka Virtual Object System or VOS) (http://interreality.org). I've been working on this problem since about 1999 with moderate success, so I can comment on my experience...
Fundamentally, people vastly underestimate the complexity of the problem. A comprehensive solution requires the time and deep understanding of 3D engines, networking protocols, databases, language design (for scripting), operating systems, security, encryption, identity management and for all of this to be able to scale to hundreds or thousands of users. There's also the mundane issues of developing complex cross-platform software that can be a real drag on development. A 3D metaverse system is at minimum at the same scale of complexity of Apache and Mozilla (combined), and it's taken fifteen years for these programs to get to where they are!
Because of people's experience with online games, the bar for what is considered interesting is also very high, so people's desire to suffer through and volunteer to improve open source efforts is reduced.
I feel that Second Life and online games like World of Warcraft are sort of like what Prodigy and Compuserve were to the Internet prior to the web. Flashy, proprietary systems that serve as a transition to whatever open system eventually develops.
|
|
||||||||||||