Thanks for this review [LWN.net]

Thanks for this review

Posted Mar 27, 2008 7:17 UTC (Thu) by robla (subscriber, #424)
Parent article: Toward a free metaverse

Thanks for taking another look in this area. I regretted the way I handled the previous conversation, and I'm glad to see a more detailed look here. For those just joining us: I work at Linden Lab (the people who make Second Life).

A couple more things to state about Second Life: we're working pretty aggressively toward opening up the protocols and formats via the Second Life Grid Architecture Working Group, which has pretty robust community participation. We've also released the source code for some key bits of our server architecture, which turn out to have usefulness well beyond virtual world technology. Eventlet is a coroutine-based library for implementing non-blocking I/O in Python, which we use extensively for protocol development. Mulib is library using Eventlet, which makes it really easy to implement web services.

As a longtime free software advocate, one of the things I find the most interesting about Second Life as an open source project is that it flipped from proprietary to open source from a market-leading position. This is quite different from how corporate open source is often done; it's usually either as an underdog or as a former market leader trying to revive the magic. I'm really hoping the free software community sees the opportunity in starting from a market leading position rather than having to claw upward from almost nothing. There's a lot of work to be done before Second Life is fully open, and the community will need to keep us honest on this front, but I believe we'll get there much more quickly working together than we will by taking a scattered approach.

With respect to stability and graphics cards, the issue there has much to do with support for OpenGL in the driver, which varies pretty widely from graphics card to graphics card. On my machine at work, I'm able to run Second Life quite well under Linux, and it's what I use for my daily work now (we have distributed offices at Linden Lab, and thus meet quite regularly in Second Life in the course of doing business). Hopefully the presence of more and more 3D graphics on the Linux desktop (e.g. Compiz and apps like Second Life) causes more attentiion toward fixing driver issues.

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Thanks for this review

Posted Mar 27, 2008 15:23 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

It is in the area of businesses doing business online. I don't know of many IBM, Novell,
Embassy of Out Slovobia's in World of Warcraft or the other game worlds which are the lion
share of MMO.

Market leading general purpose virtual world

Posted Mar 27, 2008 16:54 UTC (Thu) by robla (subscriber, #424) [Link]

There are fixed-purpose games (e.g. World of Warcraft) that are larger, but I don't believe
there are any general purpose 3D platforms that are.

Open source drivers

Posted Mar 27, 2008 17:03 UTC (Thu) by robla (subscriber, #424) [Link]

We don't purposefully restrict Second Life to certain drivers; it's just that our tech support
people aren't eager to advertise support for drivers that either are known buggy or that our
QA folks haven't had a chance to test.  If there's a video card/driver combination that you
personally know work with the Second Life viewer despite not being advertised, let us know by
filing an bug report against our website here: http://jira.secondlife.com 

The OpenGL support in the open source drivers is already known to be well behind the
proprietary drivers, sadly.  Fortunately, the source code for the Second Life viewer is all
there for debugging/fixing purposes, and we'll gladly accept patches that fix the problem.

Re: Thanks for this review

Posted Mar 30, 2008 16:20 UTC (Sun) by Kamilion (guest, #42576) [Link]

"Hopefully the presence of more and more 3D graphics on the Linux desktop (e.g. Compiz and
apps like Second Life) causes more attention toward fixing driver issues."

"Oh, there's plenty of attention. But there's nothing that our attention can do for the
proprietary drivers for the cards you list as a requirement. If there are issues with
open-source drivers, that's another story, and we'd love to hear and fix them."

In my opinion as a long-time Second Lifer and 3D gamer, it's my firm opinion that Intel
integrated graphics hardware has been utter crap. Yes, Intel is releasing their driver source
early and often, but if the hardware performance is so abysmal, it's no surprise applications
like Second Life require a *REAL* GPU (That doesn't lack serious functionality like hardware
geometry processing: no hardware texture and lighting or vertex shaders in the GMAs based on
the 9xx series, which is most of them) from the likes of nVidia or AMD/ATI. Personally, I'm
stoked about AMD/ATI's 'new' stance on FOSS drivers, as well as the eventual promise of
nouveau and Gallium3D. I've got one of the new G780s on order, and I'm itching to stuff it in
a case, install Hardy on it, and fire up SL to see how it compares against my current laptop,
a fujitsu lifebook S2020 with a ATI Radeon Mobility U1 / IGP320M, which is basically a Radeon
7000 stripped of it's hw T&L. Fortunately, Mesa takes up the slack and all is well. It should
be noted SL won't run *at all* in windows with this laptop, whereas even with software
fallback texture and lighting in Mesa, I'm pulling 10-16FPS with Second Life's recent
windlight addition which added 2D avatar impostors. Now if I could only replace my own avatar
with a 2D impostor I'd be getting over 25FPS with mostly software rendering!

Also, Rob...
Subscriber #424? Wow. Never knew you read LWN! I only recently could afford to become a
subscriber myself (Thanks to the income I bring in from scripting in SL!), this is my first
post as a subscribed reader, I'm not even sure what my own subscriber number is yet... :D

-- Kamilion Schnook, who feels very abused by the LSL scripting language...
My kingdom for a SWITCH/CASE statement, or at the very least hashes or nested arrays! I had to
write my own 'fake' associative hashes to implement YAML! MY MIND STILL BURNS FROM THE HORROR!
THE HORRRRRROR! :D