First step toward an open Second Life server
Sep
Well, this is exciting! A tip from the inimitable Moo Money at yesterday’s Machinima Talk event led me to Opensimulator.org, which appears to be a fairly successful attempt to build an open-source, publically-runnable Second Life server.
As we mention in the book, having the ability to run an SL server locally will make a huge difference in terms of its usability for Machinima creation. (For those who haven’t heard, we find Second Life interesting and potentially great for Machinima, but it does have a LOT of problems as a Machinima platform right now.)
Being able to run Second Life as a local service on your own hardware will substantially change the SL Machinima game. It’ll take network latency out of the equation, mean that you won’t have to pay for land on which to shoot, give you total control of your environment, theoretically allow you to run computer-controlled avatars - basically give you all the advantages of both Second Life and a LAN-based game, combined.
OpenSimulator doesn’t seem to be there yet - it’s still in alpha testing, and the site says “Some stuff works, a lot doesn’t” - but there’s clearly a lot of development going on, and there are publically-accessible servers running. Something to keep an eye on.
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Now we’re talking!
I knew that it was only a matter of time before the open-source community did clever things with SL. This is going to open up SL machinima creation for a lot of people - expect to see the impressive and the shiny very soon.
I agree, this is HUGE. And to elaborate on the “computer-controlled avatars” bit, yeah since the client software is already open source, that means (theoretically, at least) someone could engineer a client BOT actor… one which would (hopefully) not work properly in the public grid, but would be able to break some rules in the safe confines of a private grid in order to function. It could very well be, though, that this isn’t even necessary, given that the script language already built into the SL world is so powerful.
I’m going to attempt to set up a private grid on a LAN w/ the MYSQL backend some time before the end of the year; I’ll report back here and on my blog with results.