Do any of you have any experience with OpenSim? It’s a BSD open source effort to provide an alternative back end to Second Life and other virtual worlds. There are two or three grids up on the web and you can use the standard SL client to link to them.
My one caveat with it is that it either requires .Net or Mono. I’ve removed the usual Mono applications from my Ubuntu Linux installation and am somewhat loathe to put anything requiring it on the machine. (This is a personal choice, as I’ve mentioned before.) Anyone doing a Java version or alternative implementation that is open source?
See the much newer post: “Virtual Life with Linux: Standalone OpenSim on Ubuntu 9.10″
Thanks Bob! I didn’t know such a neat product existed.
I’m going to go check out OpenSim.
libsecondlife [http://www.libsecondlife.org] which opensim uses for the viewer to backend protocol is written in C#, so I guess that’s the reason opensim is a .NET application.
It’s alpha code, but the work these guys have done is phenomenal. My concern is if they will ever get it to scale. There seems to be just loads more Java OS resources supporting massively scalable server resources than there is on .NET, so a lot of opensim development seems to go into just writing and fixing server architecture when they really ought to be driving the simulator functionality and the scripting.
Always thought project darkstar from Sun would have been ideal here.
But thats me talking as a long term Java guy – only started to understand .NET as a result of this project.
There is a Java port of libsecondlife on sourceforge, but it doesn’t seem to be actively maintained.