More VWs
Written on April 12, 2008 by Katherine W. Prawl
After one of my friends in SecondLife, Opal Lei, asked me if I’d seen OpenLife and I had to say no, I decided to take a look. We at the ISM have been talking for years about finding if not an alternative, at least an adjunct to SecondLife, since having all our IP eggs in one fragile, proprietary basket is a very scary thing. So when Opal said this new VW, based on OpenSim servers (which is a reverse engineered version of Second Life), had regions for sale for very low prices for early adopters, I had to see.
Sure enough, one can buy a whole region (equivalent to a SecondLife sim, or 16 virtual acres, 256 meters square) for just USD $90 for the first month, and $75 per month thereafter. That’s compared to Linden Lab’s new low price of USD $1000 set up and $195 per month land use fees. Of course, not much is working in OpenLife yet, and there are almost no residents, but I got so enthusiastic at the thought of a viable alternative world that I went ahead and signed up to become a “Foundation Resident” — one who owns a region in the first wave of land sales. My region is called “Queenstown”.
The text on the sign in front of the big ISM logo block reads:
This land was purchased on behalf of the International Spaceflight Museum R&D expeditionary force.
The International Spaceflight Museum (ISM) was created in Second Life in September 2005.
For information, IM Kat Lemieux in either Open Life or Second Life
But first, I should tell you how I got into the world. User accounts are free, just as in SecondLife. The client application in the OpenLife website is for Windows only. I did boot up my WinXP virtual machine, and dutifully downloaded their client, but I couldn’t get it to run. However, when I went looking for help I discovered a page in their wiki that described how to use the Second Life client by adding a single line to a file in the “Resources” folder in the Mac OS X application’s contents. It worked like a charm. It’s just as easy to do this on Windows or Linux by adding the same target definition to the application’s shortcut or (in Linux) command line.
However, while rummaging around in the OpenLife website, I found information about the OpenSim Standalone server code. This software does require Windows, though, and while one can set up a sim or a region of up to 4 sims using it on your own server, at present this cannot be connected to the OpenLife grid. What is more, according to one of the residents I met in the world, the plans to enable linking a server to this grid are far, far down the road.
While I was in the world, playing with my new region, I met someone who is also a member of the Association of Virtual Worlds. When I went to the association’s website to add him to my friends list there, I joined a new group on that site about Central Grid, which is described as “… a virtual world platform where recreational and business users create 3D communities or grids which are all interconnected.” Naturally, I had to try that one out, too, and see what was there. I instantly was overcome with buyer’s remorse over my OpenLife (OL) region purchase, since Central Grid appears to be much further down the development road than OL. However, their prices are rather higher than OL, although still far less than Second Life. Central Grid also uses the SecondLife client, with a one-line change to define the target definition, just like OpenLife. The only difference is the URI. Maybe I didn’t make such a gross mistake after all.
But I wasn’t through. From there I went to the OpenSim website, where I discovered a page that lists several more open source projects based on the OpenSim server. OpenLife is listed there, but Central Grid is not. However, another VW, OSGrid, looked very intriguing because according to its description, “Sims are all owned by individuals, companies, universities and are connected at no charge. [except the plazas, which are community regions]“. So, I made yet another copy of the SecondLife client, changed the line in the target definition, and went to have a look. I was impressed! This may be the place where I recommend the ISM put our efforts once we figure out how to create a Standalone sim. In the meantime, we can play in Queenstown to see what we will be up against when we try to recreate some of the ISM in another VW.
it occurs to me, though, that since all these worlds are based on the same code, and eventually all of them say they will allow 3rd party servers to connect to their grids, maybe we can just use one server for them all? Or perhaps it would be necessary to have a copy for each grid, but the group could do its work in one Standalone iteration, and the administrator could copy it to connect to the other grids on a regular basis, or better yet define a cron job to do it, in effect creating mirror sites. This might be the way all these grids are eventually connected to one another.
Someone speculated that in future your personal inventory would be saved to your own hard disk rather than being in a central asset database, thus allowing you to carry all your “stuff” from world to world. Being a person who tends to log in from different computers, I would hope that instead we would find some data grid in the cloud to store our things, so we aren’t tethered to a single machine. Since the inability of Linden Lab’s asset database to keep up with demand seems to be one of the major problems with scaling Second Life, maybe this would be just as difficult for an open source community to manage, but maybe it would be planned out in advance better for all the OpenSim based grids, since now we have a better idea of what the metaverse probably is going to look like for the immediate future than Linden Lab knew when they were designing their system.
One can hope that we will be able to learn from Linden’s experience, even as we take their open sourced code to go beyond the SecondLife world. However, given the unfinished state of all these worlds and the limited number of people using them, I think we (the ISM) will be in SecondLife for a long time to come, even if we experiment with additional virtual locations.
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April 13th, 2008 at 12:31 am
Linden Lab is reducing the setup costs on sims to 1000 USD, but they say the monthly rent will stay the same: 295 USD (or 195 if you have one of the old grandfathered sims from before November 2006).