Opensource viewers

Bartholomew Gallacher 4. Mai 2008 0 Kommentare

Since the opensourcing of the client side of Second Life there have been some more or less interesting projects going on in forking the browser or developing it into something better/more.

Some projects especially are worth mentioning there:

• ShoopedLife. This is basically a viewer that people use who are concerned about their anonimity (haha!). Well, the original client sends some kind of information about your hardware (seems to be the MAC-address of your network interface and the primary partition ID of your first hard disk drive) to the LL server to identify your computer regardless of your login, so that they can permban you if necessary. ShoopedLife circumvents this by sending just some random address instead, so that you can still login even if banned. Griefers love this client very much because it allows them to still login in such a case. Of course, you cannot login with the old account but are then able to make just a new account with trash mail address since Linden Lab will be unable to identify your computer.
• realXtend viewer. The target audience of this project is much broader than ShoopedLife. realXtend is a fork of Second Life, so to speak, it has a Second Life compatibility mode builtin but also can connect to much more in graphic terms advanced OpenSim-grids, which is it real use for now. At the moment it’s only available under Windows, Linux and Macintosh are going to follow later. Although still in the beginning, this project already shows much promise and is for sure going to be a real competitor for Second Life.
• RestrainedLife viewer. That’s for the BDSM-lovers under the players. It let’s the master control certain aspects of the subs viewer, e.g. attachments cannot be taken off anymore, communication can be blocked of the subs and other aspects can be controlled by the master, too. So – not everybody’s kind of viewer, but for sure subs are going to love it to be in control of their master, if they bought the right in world tools for it, that is. This viewer is for sure not for the normal audience of Second Life.

Technorati : development, open source, programming, second life, viewers

Riding the wave or getting lost under it

Bartholomew Gallacher 15. April 2008 0 Kommentare

In business, like almost everywhere else, it’s either riding the wave or getting lost when it waves above you. Making a revolution or suffering a revolution.

Lindenlab for long has been riding the wave. Now, that the hype has somewhat gone, it needs to establish Second Life as a more stable platform than it is today, because the competition like OpenSim is catching up and up more and getting stronger. It still has its advantages above other platforms, but needs to communicate those more.

In her latest long essay long running citizen Gwyneth Llewelyn asks about if bad communication practice is the root of all evil, let’s just say for short, she’s got some valid points. Communication has flown to other kind of meanings, it’s still there, but needs to be polished up.

Another main problem she’s raising is Lindenlab’s missing to produce a roadmap and their inability to work out and work on timelines. That’s quite serious stuff.

One of the main problems with SL today is that it doesn’t really scale very well. This problem has already been known about the last two years and shows up everyday more and more when a certain avatar threshold of concurrent logins has been met.

The technic behind Second Life has some bottlenecks and shortcomings. Think about it as an analogy like a Ferrari powered by a lawn mower engine. Looks good and all shiny, but cannot deliver the promised power. Yuck.

What Lindenlab has got to do is to build a new engine, that’s hard enough, but also to put it in the car while it’s running, and that’s quite a hard feature to achieve. We’ll see if it ever happens or not.

Technorati : programming, second life

Nicholaz Beresford quits making his browser

Bartholomew Gallacher 9. April 2008 0 Kommentare

Nichlaz Beresford, a resident well known for his own sat of patches for the official browser, quitted some days ago very frustrated providing them.

Many residents mourn about the loss of this talented programmer and his browser, because for many people his browser gave far more better gaming experience, meaning mostly stability and speed, to Second Life than the official does for them. His work has been well appreciated in the community which used his browsers.

The reasons listed by him for quitting making a better browser are mainly:

• he wanted to create his own vision of browser, but has been unable to do so since he was mainly busy ironing out bug after bug after bug,
• the Lindens don’t really care for bug fixes coming from third parties any more, most times they just plainly ignore them and
• considering the bad state the browser and platform is in now he would have start all over again.

So, the community loses a quite talented programmer who probably would have been a very good bug hunter and much, much more. That’s sad.

By the way, there’s still no new CTO at Lindenlab, so it seems. Wonder how they manage to run so long without someone leading the techies.

Technorati : programming, second life