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Second Life on GitHub

community.secondlife.com

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Re: Second Life on GitHub

#91

Post by bombolo »

SquareWheel wrote: post #16
bombolo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, open source means a specific thing. You're perhaps thinking of "source available", which means "you can read the source but have to comply to a bunch of stuff"

Not really. A lot of folks, including myself, don't subscribe to the OSI's definition of open-source because it just doesn't match the common usage. Open-source takes many forms, and source available is just one example.

Well you can just redefine the meaning of arbitrary words, but the result is that nobody understands your attempts at communication.

I personally prefer to be effective at communication, so I don't just use words to mean something different than what everyone else thinks.

Re: Second Life on GitHub

#92

Post by Tostino »

T-A wrote: post #33
Tostino wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's incredibly surprising that it doesn't have one. I was involved in the l2j and wow emulation communities back in the day, and there was just so much effort going into it.

It does have one: http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

Cool! Sorry, it's been 10 years since I last paid attention to them, so I have no idea where those communities have migrated to.

Re: Second Life on GitHub

#93

Post by mfo4321 »

Karunamon wrote: post #83
rnd0 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they can be -that's why we have dictionaries. Terms DO have meanings whether contrarians and the argumentative want to acknowledge those meanings or not.

Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. The meaning of terms outside of specific fields like law is based on consensus, not authority. Merriam-Webster doesn't own the English language, and neither does OSI.

[dead]

Re: Second Life on GitHub

#94

Post by Animats »

FranksTV wrote: post #87
rnd0 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I love me some SL, it's a sad sad statement about the current state of tech world that SL is the best we can do...did we really peak in 2002?

We're in the trough of disillusionment for virtual worlds. The tech just doesn't deliver on the promise yet.

That is not the real problem. The real problem with virtual worlds is fun. Or lack thereof.

Virtual worlds are not entertainment media. There are entertainments within them, but the worlds themselves are neutral. That's true of Decentraland, Second Life, Sominium Space, and even VRchat. You have to make your own fun. Or find some place where someone else has made something fun.

The world itself is completely indifferent to you. It's not like playing a game, where the game forces you to do something immediately. It's like arriving in a new city on a bus and being dropped off at the big bus station. (Second Life's Social Island 10 is the Port Authority Bus Terminal of Second Life.)

This completely throws many new users. They want to be entertained, or told what to do. If your idea of a good time is being given access to a good workshop, Second Life can be very satisfying. Minecraft players do fine in SL. FPS gamers, not so much. If you're not very creative, it can be extremely frustrating. A majority of the population is not that creative.

Second Life has a social scene, and until you figure the place out, you're on the outside looking in. This drives many new users nuts. Some try being annoying. Then they discover the hard way how Second Life handles that. They get banned from a club by the club owner. They find that some clubs share ban lists, and now they're locked out of multiple venues. Anyone can ban anyone from their land for any reason, and Linden Lab will not interfere. Linden Lab itself does do some rule enforcement, but you have to file a complaint and wait a few days until the tiny Governance unit gets around to it. This is for situations where you'd call the cops in real life. There's no outsourced army of minimum wage moderators armed with ban hammers. It's all social pressure.

You can get a vehicle and just drive around. You'll pass houses, stores, gas stations, art galleries, coffee shops, farms, malls, vacant lots... Just like real life. It turns out that if you let people build, mostly they build familiar stuff. There are castles, fantasy areas and space stations, but mostly, people replicate suburban America.

Much of Second Life is rather banal. Linden Lab decided to build an island of unfurnished suburban houses with nice landscaping and rent them out, for people who wanted a pre-built lifestyle. After five expansions, there are now over 60,000 of those, with each user paying about US$100/year. People have parties, BBQs, and other suburban stuff. Really.

The technology is not the problem. Figuring out what to do once you have the technology is the problem.

Re: Second Life on GitHub

#95

Post by thrdbndndn »

sureglymop wrote: post #17
bombolo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, open source means a specific thing. You're perhaps thinking of "source available", which means "you can read the source but have to comply to a bunch of stuff"

Can you define what exactly open source means in that case?

source is open as "open to read, download, and run" (and even modify as soon as you're doing it privately)?

Re: Second Life on GitHub

#96

Post by poisonborz »

Animats wrote: post #40
solardev wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a "firestorm viewer"? Is a "viewer" a Second Life term for "game client"? And is Firestorm a particular FOSS client for the game? If so, that's really interesting... like you can access the same shared Second Life world but through a custom client? Does it reuse existing game assets or you free to reinterpret character models, textures, effects, etc.?

A viewer is like a web browser for a 3D world. It's like a game client, but it doesn't have any game logic or content. As with a web browser, all content is downloaded from the servers. Firestorm is a third-party viewer with a sizable development organization. See "firestormviewer.org". Quick overview: Second Life / Open Simulator worlds are divided into "regions". Each region is 256m on a side on Second Life, and ca…

Thanks for this, inspiring what OS even in such a niche topic can do. This is much closer to the real metaverse idea. Zuck's 10 billion/y vaporware will rot in a few years while such communities will chug along.

Re: Second Life on GitHub

#97

Post by sgtnoodle »

Animats wrote: post #51
morelisp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the clients, but I've worked with a few ex-LL people and heard nobody really likes what the protocol became, and also lots of core parts of the LSL execution model they regret. Presumably Cory thought he could do better the second time around. (And maybe he did! I'm not sure Facebook's metaverse problems are technical ones...)

One tiny design error had huge implications. The UDP messages are multiple messages per packet with the form [msg_type variable_length_message] There is no message length in the message. So, to parse the message stream, the receiver must know how to parse each message type in detail, and can't skip message types it doesn't understand. Thus, no new message types can be sent until everything that receives them has a pa…

Seems like a good case for protobufs. Maybe there weren't any good IDLs back when they originated the protocol, though.

It seems like there's an easy way to retrofit the protocol without breaking it for older clients (as long as older clients truncate packets once a message type is unknown). Put a new message type at the end of the packet, with a list of message start offsets in it. By including its own offset as the last element, the start of the list is easily found. The first message offset could be omitted, since it is implicitly zero.

Re: Second Life on GitHub

#98

Post by low_tech_punk »

This brought me nostalgia.

I tried SL in 2011. I was able to get some avatar add-ons for free. My favorite add-on was a Tux (Linux mascot) doll. Due to poor 3D graphics, the doll looked like its semi-detached to my avatar and moves with my avatar without any animation. It was ridiculously irrelevant, but I enjoyed the game.

Curious if anyone else had that same add-on.

Re: Second Life on GitHub

#99

Post by xigoi »

bombolo wrote: post #91
SquareWheel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. A lot of folks, including myself, don't subscribe to the OSI's definition of open-source because it just doesn't match the common usage. Open-source takes many forms, and source available is just one example.

Well you can just redefine the meaning of arbitrary words, but the result is that nobody understands your attempts at communication. I personally prefer to be effective at communication, so I don't just use words to mean something different than what everyone else thinks.

> I personally prefer to be effective at communication, so I don't just use words to mean something different than what everyone else thinks.

And “what everyone else thinks” is mostly different from the OSI definition.

Re: Second Life on GitHub

#100

Post by erwincoumans »

Animats wrote: post #94
FranksTV wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're in the trough of disillusionment for virtual worlds. The tech just doesn't deliver on the promise yet.

That is not the real problem. The real problem with virtual worlds is fun. Or lack thereof. Virtual worlds are not entertainment media. There are entertainments within them, but the worlds themselves are neutral. That's true of Decentraland, Second Life, Sominium Space, and even VRchat. You have to make your own fun. Or find some place where someone else has made something fun. The world itself is completely indiffer…

Thanks John. SL devs should check out Roblox, plenty of fun experiences in there.
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