Schlagwörter: Business

Business

Some new stuff and such

Well, what’s new anyway in the meantime in SL? 

  • Mono has been deployed to the whole grid. This means, that all LSL scripts now might run on this new engine, which makes computation of scripts up to 200 times faster than the former one. As a side effect, every script has now 64 KB of memory for data instead of 16 KB. But it seems that if you want to run Mono, you have to recompile the script for yourself. Old scripts are not going to be recompiled automatically, a thing, that perhaps might happen in the future, though, since it’s for sure not going to happen that both engines are going to be supported parallel for long, meaning the old LSL engine is going to fade out slowly. If you want to compile your scripts on Mono, you need a viewer of the 1.21-series at least. 
  • The Lindens have a new communication policy for their blog, it is undergoing a big relaunch at the moment in the background. While some are happy, that now Torley Linden cannot put up his "pink-green neon glowing junk of happiness" on the homepage anymore, others wonder what happened there in general. They are planning to change their ways of communication, again, well so far we have to see what is going to happen in October. For the meantime we have to live with it like it is.
  • People are wondering which kind of product SLim is going to be and when it is going to be launched. So far, there are only rumors around despite the fact that Linden Lab recently applied for that trademark. Most agree, though, according to the application it is going to be some kind of messenger. This is exciting, because a new product is really something that might come in handy for Linden Lab to stand out against the less complex competition for an audience, for which Second Life is too complex, power hungry, whatever, in general not appealing enough. A first preview is expected though within the next couple of weeks. Makes me wonder… is this a project which has been initiated by Mark Kingdon aka M Linden or did the foundation for it already happen under Philip Rosedale’s reign as CEO still?
  • The next big thing in the background might be the standarization of the protocol to build the intergrid, the thing at which they are working together with IBM.
  • Copybot is supposed to get support for cloning prim attachments of avatars. I wonder, if this is ever going to really happen.
  • Land prices still stay quite low. This is bad for land barons, who need to make money on sales, but good for the inhabitants and other content creators, too.
  • Oldtimer Gwyneth Llwellyn ran an essay named "No more limits", outlining some ways in which Second Life might develop in the future, for example more prims per sim (again), bigger or smaller sims than 256×256 meters, allowance of megaprims and getting rid of the limitations of LSL. Some of those might really happen sooner or later in the future.

Business

Copybot protectors

There’s still nothing more content creators in Second Life are fearing than the well known copybot. So still many vendors are using protection mechanisms, that worked with former versions of copybot by telling "!quit" in open chat, but those are not working anymore since aeons. 

But still many vendors don’t seem to know or want to know and are getting on the nerves of their customers with that unnecessary noise…

Business

Some new developments

There’ve been some new developments in SL lately which are worth mentioning:

  • IBM tested a transport of an avatar from the Second Life grid to their own grid, meaning it is now technically possible to teleport to an Opensim. Sounds quite good, but at the moment it’s just moving an ruthed Avatar, since assets are not shared at all between those and are unlikely to be ever shared at all. Otherwise expect a revolt of content builders in Second Life, but we’re getting closer to the Intergrid.
  • Second Life is growing bigger and bigger. This is of course good for the company and stabilizes their economic model. There’s been a shift from premium users to land sales. If you don’t really want to own land on the mainland (and who does that really…) has no need to get a premium account at all! Seems also that in world economy is now recovering slowly of the gambling ban. Well, the prices for many stuff are quite high now, higher than they used to be in about one year for example, looking good in Second Life becomes more and more expensive…

And also something funny I’ve found in another blog: "Entering chat range: Prokofy Neva." Quite a funny chat transcript about how to call things in Second Life and more…

Business

Compuserve, AOL, the Internet and Second Life

When I started going online back in 1994 the world was quite small. There were some local BBS around, I had my analogue modem with fast 14.400 bit/s, that needed to run over my phone line, and that was it. There’ve been services around, which were like bigger BBSes, like Compuserve or AOL, which ruled most of the market.

Then out of nowhere the Internet emerged. Compuserve, AOL and others were proprietary systems only, and the established companies needed to decide what to do. Well, they even didn’t notive the Internet and its potential first. Open standards, decentralized, not ruled by only one entity. This was something new and it wrecked their business models great lenghts. When the Internet started to became more and more important, the content of proprietary standards in AOL and Compuserve became less and less important and newsworthy since all this content drained into the Internet.

So what’s the lesson of it? A proprietary system is like an island. It might be nice for a while, but when something better becomes available, most of its content will shift definitely there, ruining your old business modell, forcing you to adapt. That’s why in my opinion Linden Lab is working at an open standard at the moment, because they don’t want to be the next Netscape. They still want to be in business in the next five years and this is definitely a way to achieve it.


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Business / Programming

realXtend: Second Life’s Apache?

Gentle reader,

today I want to talk a little about the realXtend project which came upon my radar recently and impressed me great lengths. Their goal is, put in simple terms, to develop the InterGrid about which Gwyneth Llewellyn spoke recently in one of her own blog posts. Well, she even mentions the project in her post.

The InterGrid, put in simple terms again, is the ability to make your own region/regions/grid and take your avatar on grid A, B or C and also take the inventory of it with you. This means your avatar becomes quite more flexible, it can travel around the different grids if done correctly, but also there’s quite much work to do until that goal is going to be achieved. This project is using OpenSim as their platform for serving regions, they’ve already enhanced it with quite much advanced and sophisticated features and also forked the Second Life viewer into an own thing, although this can still connect to the Second Life grid in a compatibility mode.

The realXtend project is backed up by two Finnish companies and around 20 people working on it, programmers, content creators and graphic designers, so a good size but still small compared to the staff of Linden Lab.

Contrary to the culture of Linden Lab, though, they’ve got a roadmap, and since they’re contributing to OpenSim, parts of it overlap with the roadmap of that project, too. Having a roadmap never hurts, on the contrary, it is always nice to have and a good thing for all participating people.

In a recent interview one of the driving forces behind realXtend, the CEO of one of the companies backing it up named Tony Manninen, gave us a very interesting peace of his mind and his over all vision for the project:

Me: And how will the work you have done on the avatar server alleviate this problem unless SL, WoW and other cooperate on interoperability?

Tony: Think of it more like the 3d web. realXtend/OpenSim is like the Apache of virtual worlds, rexViewer is the Mozilla or Firefox of whatever. When "surfing" the web, you are not constantly required to prove and change your identity when loading different pages.

And this line is quite interesting for all of us. Apache is today the work horse of most web servers on the planet, its market share is around 51% in April 2008. But what many people don’t know is how Apache started and how it became the king of the hill. In former times, when Apache was non existant, there’s been another 800 pound gorilla of webserving software called NCSA httpd. This was back then the leading webserver under an opensource license. Apache just started as a patchset (Apache was just the nickname for "a patch" first only or more precise "a patchy server") way back then for NCSA httpd, adding features many people wanted but the maintainers of NCSA httpd were unable or unwilling to include. So over the time the patch set became more and more important, popular and turned into an own piece of software, winning big grounds against its father until NCSA httpd became obsolete and went into insignificance.

So, what does that mean when talking about Second Life? Simply: realXtend could be the nail into the coffin of Second Life.

So, what’s in realXtend viewer and OpenSim already, that would be nice to have in Second Life, but isn’t there (yet)? Among already implemented features those biggies:

  • the ability to host your own region somewhere on a server of your choice and to connect it to the grid (many would like that since the tiers you’ve got to pay for Linden Lab are quite expensive),
  • the use of a more advanced opensource renderer named OGRE, which also is going to support DirectX rendering on Windows platforms,
  • coming with this renderer real time lights and shadows of objects,
  • web on a prim,
  • builtin VNC viewer for desktop sharing,
  • VOIP client and 3d audio rendernig,
  • meshes instead of prims – this means you can build far more advanced structures, also build stuff in normal programs instead of the client and import them, which adds to a good graphics experience quite much, but also means a slightly longer loading time perhaps, but still many would applaud them in SL and with right,
  • quite more sophisticated avatar meshes, everything can be an avatar, e.g. also mushrooms (this example is included) or a bad snowman,
  • Python scripting,
  • teleports between realXtend and Secondlife,
  • script controlled teleports,
  • centralised avatar storage to move the avatar between different grids,
  • multiple streaming URLs per parcel,
  • and others,

but those are the real biggies. If you also take into account that it just took realXtend to implement those features around four (!) months of time you’ll really have to wonder why Linden Lab hasn’t done that themselfes already!

Among the roadmapped features you’ll find those things:

  • Direct3D rendering on windows platforms,
  • support for OGG Vorbis,
  • support for video codecs beside Quicktime,
  • Weather support,
  • inverse kinematics,
  • avatar face/head animation based on live video camera data,
  • lip sync for VOIP,
  • cloth physics,
  • vehicle support,
  • the ability to hold more than 100 avatars at the same time in one region by splitting up the region on several hosts and letting them do their work,
  • and others.

So what we’ll have here is a real ambitious project to build the InterGrid with nice goals, but they’re not only having a roadmap, seems they’ve already been able so far to deliver their planned features and are going to be in the future, too, in many parts they’re already ahead of Second Life quite much.

To put it short: what we’ve got here is a major competitor emerging for Second Life and even more so on a very rapid speed! Linden Lab is still ahead of its competition somewhat, but realXtend is gaining ground and its gaining it quickly so that Linden Lab should really be make up its mind now what they’re planning with the platform in the future, otherwise it is quite possible that they are going to face the same fate as NCSA httpd or Netscape: the technic will remain, but innovations are coming from other sources and the people behind the initial project are loosing the grip on it.


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