11 ms·

Second Life on GitHub

294 points by ohjeez 4y ago

brirec 4y ago
TFA suggests that the official git repo for the Linux kernel is on GitHub. I wonder if they really did their research
- Shared404 4y ago
  Was coming here to say almost the same thing - pretty sure the kernels "de-facto home" is not in fact GitHub. Perhaps it was just a marketing person writing this who googled "Big open source github".
  - cfuendev 4y ago
    Lol, thought the same when I read "CPython".. Okay? Why not mention stuff like Godot and Monogame? Those are things the OSS-Gaming community are more familiar with. And why not say "The CPython Interpreter"? As if everyone knew what CPython was.
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  What is the reason for hosting it elsewhere? My cursory Google searches have failed me.
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    The historical reason is https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5654674 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546... Perhaps some of these issues have been fixed by now, but the Linux project has been going on just fine without GitHub (git was even invented for the Linux kernel project itself even before GitHub existed) so there doesn't seem to be any reason to switch even if all the mentioned problems were to be fixed
    - _Algernon_ 4y ago
      Some good old Torvalds roasting going on in that thread.
      - solardev 4y ago
        Yikes. I didn't know the dude was so prickly. Glad I'm not a contributor.
        __alexs 4y ago
        He's mellowed a bit as the years have gone on but yeah, he sure is a character.
        _Algernon_ 4y ago
        I do find them fun to read, but yeah being the target of one must be rough. Though it probably contributes to the quality of the Linux kernel.
        Longhanks 4y ago
        With his attitude, the kernel has reached enormous market share, excellent performance, high quality and worldwide adoption. I’m sure it will be fine without your contribution.
        solardev 4y ago
        Lol yes I'm sure it'll be fine too. It made me lose some respect for him, but he couldn't care less what I think lol.
        hutzlibu 4y ago
        No one knows "what would have been different", but it is very possible that the success happened not because, but despite of Linus rants. And if he would have had self reflexion earlier, I might now be able to recommend Linux to non tech people and enjoy a laptop without suspend and hibernation issues. Just a theory.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - codetrotter 4y ago
    Linux kernel development has been coordinated via mailing lists for ages. Linus wrote the git version control system specifically to suit the development of Linux. GitHub made git mainstream, and they made lots of great features for the masses. But there is no reason for the Linux project to change the way that they like to work just because of that. Still, a copy of the Linux source tree is also hosted on GitHub. So it seems to me that everyone gets what they want. Linux get to continue their development in the way that they like to do it. People on GitHub can easily find the copy of Linux on GH, and browse the sources there. And they can create forks of the Linux sources on GH too.
- Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
  The source is published to GitHub though, no? https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://github.com/torvalds/linux It's an easy mistake to make, the code is there and there's nothing to suggest it's a mirror.
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    That said, every PR receives a bot comment indicating that the GH repo is a mirror and the user needs to submit a patch to LKML. And yet there are currently 312 open PRs on the repo. I've always wondered how people manage to know enough about the kernel to be able to contribute a PR to it, yet don't know the GH repo is a mirror and seemingly ignore the bot response and leave their PR opened.
    - mdaniel 4y ago
      I'm surprised with the massive number of auto-close-bots on GH (combined with the kernel's development culture) that they don't just auto-close them I've also never understood why GH allows turning off issues, but not turning off PRs
    - scatters 4y ago
      People are aware the PR isn't going to be accepted; they just want to publish it somewhere.
    - ratcline 4y ago
      I believe this is often people who ARE in fact contributing via the mailing list -- but want a track record tied to their GH account.
seydor 4y ago
But afaik the second life viewer is not exactly open source, but instead only selected teams can participate. EDIT: the viewer code is LGPL , but forked Third party viewers are subject to particular terms https://secondlife.com/corporate/third-party-viewers https://secondlife.com/corporate/third-party-viewers
- culi 4y ago
  So it's open-source but not FLOSS
  - bombolo 4y ago
    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"
    - SquareWheel 4y ago
      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.
      - chungy 4y ago
        Considering the term originated with them, it's fair to say they get to dictate what it means.
        SquareWheel 4y ago
        Ah, things would be simpler indeed if words could be dictated.
        rnd0 4y ago
        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.
Animats 4y ago
It's been open source since 2007. Linden Lab recently moved the sources from Bitbucket to Github. The Firestorm viewer sources are at "https://vcs.firestormviewer.org/ https://vcs.firestormviewer.org/". It's a major fork. Technical documentation of the client-server protocol is at "https://wiki.secondlife.com/ https://wiki.secondlife.com/" It's out of date, but it helps. The real progress is that the build procedure has been cleaned up. It used to require ancient versions of Visual Studio on Windows. Firestorm can be built on Linux. I've built it and submitted patches that went in. This is just the client side. The server is proprietary. But there's a compatible server, Open Simulator. It's not a clone; it's in C#, while the original is in C++. There are meetings for third party viewer developers. Both inside Second Life, and on OSGrid, which is a third party grid of simulators. That really is the metaverse - a federated system of 3D worlds. It's sluggish, because most of the people running regions don't have enough server power. Think Mastodon for 3D. I'm been writing a new client in safe Rust for the last two years. I'm trying to see how much can be done in parallel. The viewer isn't ready for public use yet. I've posted videos made with it.
- culi 4y ago
  I had no idea Second Life has been an open source game this whole time! It might be one of the largest OS videos games of all time then
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    The server components which are most of the logic are not open source. There has been a long running effort to have a compatible open source server.
    - Tostino 4y ago
      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.
      - 4y ago
culi 4y ago
> In 2022, the renewed general interest in the Metaverse translated into significant media opportunities for Second Life. Over 21,000 articles and other stories included Second Life in 2022 – nearly 5 times greater than the amount of media coverage we received in 2021. Out of all the metaverse projects being worked on, SL coming out on top would be an incredible development
- rnd0 4y ago
  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?
  - RamenJunkie_ 4y ago
    i mean, Second Life has come a LONG way since it's 2002 days.
  - slackfan 4y ago
    Yes. We had virtual worlds and an internet that wasn't yet completely broken. The Patriot Act was yet to be fully implemented, and we were recovering from the dotcom meltdown. Good a peak as any.
  - cdogl 4y ago
    This idea peaked in 2002. Second Life fills a valuable niche, and I’m glad it exists, but most people prefer videogames.
  - FranksTV 4y ago
    We're in the trough of disillusionment for virtual worlds. The tech just doesn't deliver on the promise yet.
    - Animats 4y ago
      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.
baeaz 4y ago
I don't know if things have changed but the last time I tried SL the client was so rough and awkward it seemed like an alpha. Even moving was laggy and annoying.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  The biggest contributor of lag is not having things cached or being in a laggy region. On first connect, it used to be practice to go to a busy scene (a mall) and then go do something in real life for an hour or so while the viewer grabbed everything and cached it. Regions can be very low lag or amazingly laggy, depending on a bunch of things (particulary misbehaving scripts).
  - Animats 4y ago
    The causes of lag in Second Life are complicated, and are, at last, getting a lot of attention right now. I've been working on that with a multi-threaded viewer in Rust.[1] After I started posting videos like that, there was a lot less "can't do" attitude from the Linden Lab devs. Now there's a "performance viewer" project out of Linden Lab, using many of the same techniques. Key concept: the backlog of assets to be loaded needs to be on a priority queue which gets reordered as the viewpoint moves. Otherwise you bottleneck loading stuff that you were previously near, not stuff near where you are now. There's a nice B-tree solution to this. Once you have that, everything in close-up is present and at high resolution. Hardware helps. 100mb/s networking and putting the viewer cache on an SSD will help a lot. There's still a big problem server side with the transient load when a new user enters a region. A mall or event with a lot of traffic can slow way down. The server devs are trying for more concurrency, but it's hard in an old single-thread 32-bit C++ program. It's striking that, despite all the "metaverse" hype, there are very few people, even among game devs, talking about the nuts and bolts of making this stuff work. The metaverse conferences are mostly about branding, NFTs, and moderation/censorship. [1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/sFPkECUxRUSxbKXRkCmjJK https://video.hardlimit.com/w/sFPkECUxRUSxbKXRkCmjJK
steve1977 4y ago
That’s the project where Facebook‘s Metaverse forked from, right?
- guenthert 4y ago
  The founder of second life was inspired by the virtual world described in Snow Crash, so both are forks in spirit from that novel.
  - steve1977 4y ago
    Hmm... I read (and loved) Snow Crash, that's not how I imagined it ;)
- b800h 4y ago
  Perhaps when Linden Labs open-sourced the second life stuff, ChatGPT cached it and Meta asked it to write them a metaverse. EDIT: Well it does something... ```Sure! Here is a basic client for Second Life written in Python: import requests # Set the base URL for the Second Life API base_url = "https://api.secondlife.com https://api.secondlife.com" # Set the endpoint for the login API login_endpoint = "/login"```...
  - cafeinux 4y ago
    Everybody knows that to write a client for SL in Python you juste have to write: import sl-client Silly ChatGPT.
- jandrese 4y ago
  I wish. The Metaverse (Horizon Worlds) client is horribly primitive compared to the SL client.
- FooHentai 4y ago
  No, but when I saw where Meta's effort had got them it struck me they might have been better putting that development work towards modernizing an implementation of SL.
- 4y ago
branon 4y ago
Second Life has always really interested me, seems like it's got a quite the meaningful heritage behind it. If they are looking to move into the full VR/AR/Metaverse space, I can see that wisdom/prior art coming in very handy.
- T-A 4y ago
  https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-27-why-second-life-linden-lab-sold-sansar.html https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-27-why-second-life-linden-l...
jaChEWAg 4y ago
I wonder why Meta didn't fork Second Life to use for their 3D world rather than re-invent the wheel and in the end build a bad product.
- morelisp 4y ago
  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...)
  - Animats 4y ago
    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 parser for the new type. And, so, there have been no new message types since about 2016. Most game systems use [msg_type msg_length variable_length_message] so you can introduce new messages and not break old receivers.
    - n42 4y ago
      I am thoroughly enjoying all your contributions in this thread. I love getting a look into the architectural bits of a project/community of this scale that I don’t really know much about. Very interesting, thanks
      - Animats 4y ago
        As I mentioned previously, there's not much written about this. Which is probably why existing metaverse projects are so awful. It's mostly taking Unity or Unreal Engine, which are intended for use with carefully pre-built content, and somehow trying to make a large dynamic virtual world from those parts. The duct tape is troublesome. The primary technical designer of Second Life did a very good job. Then he had a disagreement with management and was fired. So he went to Facebook, developed their mobile client, became a Facebook VP, made lots of money, and was semi-retired for a while. Scaling to a big world is really hard. Big has two dimensions - area and density. The Second Life architecture scales well in area but not in population density. More than 20-30 users in a region will choke it. More are possible if most users sit down and doesn't move, because sitters are not getting physical simulation. So audience-type events work. Improbable was working on large crowds, but their solution is really expensive to run. Which is why they just do demos of Otherside for a few hours at a time every few months. Also, they use very simple avatars and do not, as yet, support vehicles. Took them over US$500 million to get to that point. They have dynamic regions - more people, divide the world into smaller chunks. That introduces a whole range of new problems. What if I have 20 people on my boat, and a region boundary moves under the boat while I'm crossing it? Stuff like that. Fixed region crossings involving multiple avatars and vehicles are troublesome in Second Life. People do try bus tours, but sometimes an avatar gets Left Behind at a region crossing. Linden Lab's devs have been trying to fix that for at least 8 years, without success. It's a tough problem in real time distributed system design.
xnx 4y ago
Zuckerberg must be kicking himself for spending so many billions on the metaverse right now.
- justapassenger 4y ago
  That money is being spent on VR/AR HW and software ecosystem, not one app on it.
LightG 4y ago
For any users, how active is it these days? I dabbled with it many years ago and ... Christ, can it really be 20 years since release?!?!
- rnd0 4y ago
  concurrency ranges from 23k to 45k or 49k at any given time. God only knows how many of those are bots/scripted agents though.
everyone 4y ago
Meta - "write that down write that down!!"
skrowl 4y ago
The amount of GitHub contributions may have something to do with how popular Second Life is for furries, and how many IT professionals are furries.
fsiefken 4y ago
With Firestorm, Open Simulator and Termux you could theoretically host your own world in VR on your Quest. https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2021/03/second-life-social-vr-oculus-quest-2-firestorm-instructions.html https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2021/03/second-life-social-vr-ocul...
leeoniya 4y ago
my second life is on Github as well :P
- Maksadbek 4y ago
  well said :)
low_tech_punk 4y ago
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.
TheDesolate0 4y ago
[dead]

294 points by ohjeez 4y ago

brirec 4y ago

TFA suggests that the official git repo for the Linux kernel is on GitHub. I wonder if they really did their research

Shared404 4y ago
Was coming here to say almost the same thing - pretty sure the kernels "de-facto home" is not in fact GitHub. Perhaps it was just a marketing person writing this who googled "Big open source github".
- cfuendev 4y ago
  Lol, thought the same when I read "CPython".. Okay? Why not mention stuff like Godot and Monogame? Those are things the OSS-Gaming community are more familiar with. And why not say "The CPython Interpreter"? As if everyone knew what CPython was.
cactusplant7374 4y ago
What is the reason for hosting it elsewhere? My cursory Google searches have failed me.
- ithkuil 4y ago
  The historical reason is https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5654674 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546... Perhaps some of these issues have been fixed by now, but the Linux project has been going on just fine without GitHub (git was even invented for the Linux kernel project itself even before GitHub existed) so there doesn't seem to be any reason to switch even if all the mentioned problems were to be fixed
  - _Algernon_ 4y ago
    Some good old Torvalds roasting going on in that thread.
    - solardev 4y ago
      Yikes. I didn't know the dude was so prickly. Glad I'm not a contributor.
      - __alexs 4y ago
        He's mellowed a bit as the years have gone on but yeah, he sure is a character.
      - _Algernon_ 4y ago
        I do find them fun to read, but yeah being the target of one must be rough. Though it probably contributes to the quality of the Linux kernel.
      - Longhanks 4y ago
        With his attitude, the kernel has reached enormous market share, excellent performance, high quality and worldwide adoption. I’m sure it will be fine without your contribution.
        solardev 4y ago
        Lol yes I'm sure it'll be fine too. It made me lose some respect for him, but he couldn't care less what I think lol.
        hutzlibu 4y ago
        No one knows "what would have been different", but it is very possible that the success happened not because, but despite of Linus rants. And if he would have had self reflexion earlier, I might now be able to recommend Linux to non tech people and enjoy a laptop without suspend and hibernation issues. Just a theory.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- codetrotter 4y ago
  Linux kernel development has been coordinated via mailing lists for ages. Linus wrote the git version control system specifically to suit the development of Linux. GitHub made git mainstream, and they made lots of great features for the masses. But there is no reason for the Linux project to change the way that they like to work just because of that. Still, a copy of the Linux source tree is also hosted on GitHub. So it seems to me that everyone gets what they want. Linux get to continue their development in the way that they like to do it. People on GitHub can easily find the copy of Linux on GH, and browse the sources there. And they can create forks of the Linux sources on GH too.
Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
The source is published to GitHub though, no? https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://github.com/torvalds/linux It's an easy mistake to make, the code is there and there's nothing to suggest it's a mirror.
- Arnavion 4y ago
  That said, every PR receives a bot comment indicating that the GH repo is a mirror and the user needs to submit a patch to LKML. And yet there are currently 312 open PRs on the repo. I've always wondered how people manage to know enough about the kernel to be able to contribute a PR to it, yet don't know the GH repo is a mirror and seemingly ignore the bot response and leave their PR opened.
  - mdaniel 4y ago
    I'm surprised with the massive number of auto-close-bots on GH (combined with the kernel's development culture) that they don't just auto-close them I've also never understood why GH allows turning off issues, but not turning off PRs
  - scatters 4y ago
    People are aware the PR isn't going to be accepted; they just want to publish it somewhere.
  - ratcline 4y ago
    I believe this is often people who ARE in fact contributing via the mailing list -- but want a track record tied to their GH account.

seydor 4y ago

But afaik the second life viewer is not exactly open source, but instead only selected teams can participate. EDIT: the viewer code is LGPL , but forked Third party viewers are subject to particular terms https://secondlife.com/corporate/third-party-viewers https://secondlife.com/corporate/third-party-viewers

culi 4y ago
So it's open-source but not FLOSS
- bombolo 4y ago
  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"
  - SquareWheel 4y ago
    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.
    - chungy 4y ago
      Considering the term originated with them, it's fair to say they get to dictate what it means.
      - SquareWheel 4y ago
        Ah, things would be simpler indeed if words could be dictated.
        rnd0 4y ago
        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.

Animats 4y ago

It's been open source since 2007. Linden Lab recently moved the sources from Bitbucket to Github. The Firestorm viewer sources are at "https://vcs.firestormviewer.org/ https://vcs.firestormviewer.org/". It's a major fork. Technical documentation of the client-server protocol is at "https://wiki.secondlife.com/ https://wiki.secondlife.com/" It's out of date, but it helps. The real progress is that the build procedure has been cleaned up. It used to require ancient versions of Visual Studio on Windows. Firestorm can be built on Linux. I've built it and submitted patches that went in. This is just the client side. The server is proprietary. But there's a compatible server, Open Simulator. It's not a clone; it's in C#, while the original is in C++. There are meetings for third party viewer developers. Both inside Second Life, and on OSGrid, which is a third party grid of simulators. That really is the metaverse - a federated system of 3D worlds. It's sluggish, because most of the people running regions don't have enough server power. Think Mastodon for 3D. I'm been writing a new client in safe Rust for the last two years. I'm trying to see how much can be done in parallel. The viewer isn't ready for public use yet. I've posted videos made with it.

culi 4y ago
I had no idea Second Life has been an open source game this whole time! It might be one of the largest OS videos games of all time then
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  The server components which are most of the logic are not open source. There has been a long running effort to have a compatible open source server.
  - Tostino 4y ago
    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.
    - 4y ago

culi 4y ago

> In 2022, the renewed general interest in the Metaverse translated into significant media opportunities for Second Life. Over 21,000 articles and other stories included Second Life in 2022 – nearly 5 times greater than the amount of media coverage we received in 2021. Out of all the metaverse projects being worked on, SL coming out on top would be an incredible development

rnd0 4y ago
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?
- RamenJunkie_ 4y ago
  i mean, Second Life has come a LONG way since it's 2002 days.
- slackfan 4y ago
  Yes. We had virtual worlds and an internet that wasn't yet completely broken. The Patriot Act was yet to be fully implemented, and we were recovering from the dotcom meltdown. Good a peak as any.
- cdogl 4y ago
  This idea peaked in 2002. Second Life fills a valuable niche, and I’m glad it exists, but most people prefer videogames.
- FranksTV 4y ago
  We're in the trough of disillusionment for virtual worlds. The tech just doesn't deliver on the promise yet.
  - Animats 4y ago
    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.

baeaz 4y ago

I don't know if things have changed but the last time I tried SL the client was so rough and awkward it seemed like an alpha. Even moving was laggy and annoying.

vorpalhex 4y ago
The biggest contributor of lag is not having things cached or being in a laggy region. On first connect, it used to be practice to go to a busy scene (a mall) and then go do something in real life for an hour or so while the viewer grabbed everything and cached it. Regions can be very low lag or amazingly laggy, depending on a bunch of things (particulary misbehaving scripts).
- Animats 4y ago
  The causes of lag in Second Life are complicated, and are, at last, getting a lot of attention right now. I've been working on that with a multi-threaded viewer in Rust.[1] After I started posting videos like that, there was a lot less "can't do" attitude from the Linden Lab devs. Now there's a "performance viewer" project out of Linden Lab, using many of the same techniques. Key concept: the backlog of assets to be loaded needs to be on a priority queue which gets reordered as the viewpoint moves. Otherwise you bottleneck loading stuff that you were previously near, not stuff near where you are now. There's a nice B-tree solution to this. Once you have that, everything in close-up is present and at high resolution. Hardware helps. 100mb/s networking and putting the viewer cache on an SSD will help a lot. There's still a big problem server side with the transient load when a new user enters a region. A mall or event with a lot of traffic can slow way down. The server devs are trying for more concurrency, but it's hard in an old single-thread 32-bit C++ program. It's striking that, despite all the "metaverse" hype, there are very few people, even among game devs, talking about the nuts and bolts of making this stuff work. The metaverse conferences are mostly about branding, NFTs, and moderation/censorship. [1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/sFPkECUxRUSxbKXRkCmjJK https://video.hardlimit.com/w/sFPkECUxRUSxbKXRkCmjJK

steve1977 4y ago

That’s the project where Facebook‘s Metaverse forked from, right?

guenthert 4y ago
The founder of second life was inspired by the virtual world described in Snow Crash, so both are forks in spirit from that novel.
- steve1977 4y ago
  Hmm... I read (and loved) Snow Crash, that's not how I imagined it ;)
b800h 4y ago
Perhaps when Linden Labs open-sourced the second life stuff, ChatGPT cached it and Meta asked it to write them a metaverse. EDIT: Well it does something... ```Sure! Here is a basic client for Second Life written in Python: import requests # Set the base URL for the Second Life API base_url = "https://api.secondlife.com https://api.secondlife.com" # Set the endpoint for the login API login_endpoint = "/login"```...
- cafeinux 4y ago
  Everybody knows that to write a client for SL in Python you juste have to write: import sl-client Silly ChatGPT.
jandrese 4y ago
I wish. The Metaverse (Horizon Worlds) client is horribly primitive compared to the SL client.
FooHentai 4y ago
No, but when I saw where Meta's effort had got them it struck me they might have been better putting that development work towards modernizing an implementation of SL.
4y ago

branon 4y ago

Second Life has always really interested me, seems like it's got a quite the meaningful heritage behind it. If they are looking to move into the full VR/AR/Metaverse space, I can see that wisdom/prior art coming in very handy.

T-A 4y ago
https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-27-why-second-life-linden-lab-sold-sansar.html https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-27-why-second-life-linden-l...

jaChEWAg 4y ago

I wonder why Meta didn't fork Second Life to use for their 3D world rather than re-invent the wheel and in the end build a bad product.

morelisp 4y ago
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...)
- Animats 4y ago
  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 parser for the new type. And, so, there have been no new message types since about 2016. Most game systems use [msg_type msg_length variable_length_message] so you can introduce new messages and not break old receivers.
  - n42 4y ago
    I am thoroughly enjoying all your contributions in this thread. I love getting a look into the architectural bits of a project/community of this scale that I don’t really know much about. Very interesting, thanks
    - Animats 4y ago
      As I mentioned previously, there's not much written about this. Which is probably why existing metaverse projects are so awful. It's mostly taking Unity or Unreal Engine, which are intended for use with carefully pre-built content, and somehow trying to make a large dynamic virtual world from those parts. The duct tape is troublesome. The primary technical designer of Second Life did a very good job. Then he had a disagreement with management and was fired. So he went to Facebook, developed their mobile client, became a Facebook VP, made lots of money, and was semi-retired for a while. Scaling to a big world is really hard. Big has two dimensions - area and density. The Second Life architecture scales well in area but not in population density. More than 20-30 users in a region will choke it. More are possible if most users sit down and doesn't move, because sitters are not getting physical simulation. So audience-type events work. Improbable was working on large crowds, but their solution is really expensive to run. Which is why they just do demos of Otherside for a few hours at a time every few months. Also, they use very simple avatars and do not, as yet, support vehicles. Took them over US$500 million to get to that point. They have dynamic regions - more people, divide the world into smaller chunks. That introduces a whole range of new problems. What if I have 20 people on my boat, and a region boundary moves under the boat while I'm crossing it? Stuff like that. Fixed region crossings involving multiple avatars and vehicles are troublesome in Second Life. People do try bus tours, but sometimes an avatar gets Left Behind at a region crossing. Linden Lab's devs have been trying to fix that for at least 8 years, without success. It's a tough problem in real time distributed system design.

xnx 4y ago

Zuckerberg must be kicking himself for spending so many billions on the metaverse right now.

justapassenger 4y ago
That money is being spent on VR/AR HW and software ecosystem, not one app on it.

LightG 4y ago

For any users, how active is it these days? I dabbled with it many years ago and ... Christ, can it really be 20 years since release?!?!

rnd0 4y ago
concurrency ranges from 23k to 45k or 49k at any given time. God only knows how many of those are bots/scripted agents though.

everyone 4y ago

Meta - "write that down write that down!!"

skrowl 4y ago

The amount of GitHub contributions may have something to do with how popular Second Life is for furries, and how many IT professionals are furries.

fsiefken 4y ago

With Firestorm, Open Simulator and Termux you could theoretically host your own world in VR on your Quest. https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2021/03/second-life-social-vr-oculus-quest-2-firestorm-instructions.html https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2021/03/second-life-social-vr-ocul...

leeoniya 4y ago

my second life is on Github as well :P

Maksadbek 4y ago
well said :)

low_tech_punk 4y ago

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.

TheDesolate0 4y ago

[dead]