Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
But surely this is why they've released the source of the client side. This is the side that does the rendering and content display. I've seen wonders done to shabby content by an overhauled graphics engine. (Anarchy Online) On 1/9/07, swe [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, yup, I agree, I downloaded SL cause everyone was telling me of 'dead-end' vrml tech, so I wanted to check the hype: I was very surprized that they even have no shadows, which I thought they would have. Textures look often shabby, most of their 'houses' look like boxes, their 'trees' flow in the sky, not on ground. I guessed lots of people there, but so far I found round 20 in the start place, which cybertown had in better times too. As people wrote on VRML/X3D -list, the client in open source is only the useless part when you have a server-client system. Well, I still hope VOS will make a vrml2vos convertor some time... CU hermetic -- QOTD: Violence is the last resort of the incompetent -- Isaac Asimov GPG Public Key: http://www.jargonjunkie.com/rants/scones.asc Website: http://www.jargonjunkie.com/ ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
On 1/9/07, Len Bullard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Letting out the viewer is something of a SOP. I think the server-side is possibly more important given that there are any number of open source viewers out there for 3D platforms that are just as good or better. It is the management of the server farm that makes the difference, that and a big budget for marketing. yes the server side services *and* the networking: SL uses UDP, X3D has little in the way of networking capability - direct from the client. I have been trying for two years to get improved networking and web services capability into X3D, but it is arduous. It became a working group proposal a year ago and still have not got the WG approved. The Consortium is slow to recognise what, I think, is essential to its success. chris Yes, I think they are looking at migrating the building market, but the only thing that brings in the bigCos is the site traffic. Otherwise, to Sears, there is no advantage to being there. IBM can talk a lot about boardroom VR but they are a services company in this market and without other companies willing to host on private farms, there is no market. There is a lot of puff in the online worlds market. Of what value is it to own content that you can't move because it only works on that platform? So like a Macintosh or a Mall, without a big membership that is actually going there often, having a presence there is largely a decorative bauble, a loss leader for being 'in the know'. This market is relying on the naivete of the IT groups of the companies hosting there. The in-world economy is a fascinating experiment in waiting to see when the Feds will begin to look at it the same way they look at church bingo. They tend to wait until the value is high enough that they can safely take their cut without killing the game. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Or Botton Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 10:06 AM To: VOS Discussion Subject: Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source Granted, it was expected, but there is one major issue thats a big bad omen: And thats content copy protection. SecondLife has been largely tauted as a place where you can make a quick buck by creating and selling copies of content. This is mostly an artificial market created by placing DRM on objects - being able to flag a texture, model, script or an entire package as non copyable, modifyable or transferable. Personally, I am all for an opensource platform with no DRM involved. I believe that a VR platform can only become mainstream and widespread if it is open and free. But SecondLife's act is more self destructive because by nature they are not open and free. With the source out, it would be a rather easy task to duplicate models and textures of objects, pretty much breaking the DRM with a very casual effort from the programmer. This could be very damaging to their internal economy. Again, I do not support the concept of having virtual economies, but doing what they just did is more like shooting their own foot. Perhaps this signs that LindenLab now views the big gamers - companies and such as the real customers now? These people will have much less of an issue to enforce their copyrights then the regular person. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
On 1/10/07, Peter Amstutz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: One thing I've been wondering about -- while their primitives seem to be a pretty clever solution to the bandwidth problem, is their graphics architechture completely committed to being based on prims? With the rest of the world being based on straight triangle meshes or surface patches, their graphics model seems to be completely unable to keep up with the state of the art in 3D graphics. One thing I like about the prim model is that it can be converted to raytracing and CSG with little to no effort. (Yes, you can raytrace meshes. But they look like raytraced meshes.) -- Mark Wagner ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
On 1/11/07, Reed Hedges [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: chris wrote: On 1/9/07, Len Bullard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Letting out the viewer is something of a SOP. I think the server-side is possibly more important given that there are any number of open source viewers out there for 3D platforms that are just as good or better. It is the management of the server farm that makes the difference, that and a big budget for marketing. yes the server side services *and* the networking Cory Linden (I forget his real name) did a QA about open-sourcing the client, and someone asked him if they think that also open-sourcing the server would hurt SL from a business perspective, and he said No. But I wonder if they do have plans on doing it. Yes, that would be pretty interesting. X3D has little in the way of networking capability - direct from the client. It's true. X3D is basically silent about multiuser stuff. The main way of doing anything like on-line changes is a kind of AJAX approach: use a script to send requests back to a CGI program on the server for more data to display in the scene. There's a function in the scripting API which basically does this, called createVrmlFromString (or createVrmlFromURL?) or something like that. Ajax3D relies on the javascript/SAI (or EAI) API of the Web browser. But you can do it all with straight http and a combo of loadURL and createVrmlFromUrl. (as used on planet-earth.org and described in http://planet-earth.org/sg05/sg05EvolutionaryAccident.html http://planet-earth.org/sg05/presentation/EfficientHTTP.html http://planet-earth.org/sg05/sg05planet-earthInstructions.html). This uses just the two internal EAI/SAI calls and no issues with going to the Web browser for its javascript API. People have made some very workable multiuser systems that used VRML heavily in the past, and at least one or two of those are still around and kicking (VNet2 and VR4All; Blaxxun's thing?) though the networking and multiuser aspects are not standard. yes, all relied on the Web browser java script API, I believe and that kept on being broken by one industry player or another: e.g. when netscappe changed its javascript binding or when MS froze the java support, etc. So portable solutions were not possible. It is proly a similar situation today, but I would like to be shown wrong (e.g. show me a SAI solution portable across web browsers). I think that VOS could be a good multiuser networking front end for a VRML or X3D world running on the server-- VRML and X3D are designed to describe a scene, with scripts and routes in it to describe animations and interactions. The idea is to have that VRML system running on the server, and have that scene reflected in a set of A3DL VObjects. are A3DL ajax 3D objects? I agree somewhat: X3D, esp the XML coding, is best suited for interchange. It is rediculous to expect applications to be programmed in XML tho. VRML is better to program in, ditto for X3D CLassic, but python or something like that would be better. In designing the A3DL object model we took a few cues from VRML but we ended up trying to simplify and flatten things as well; some of the stuff that VRML does via extra nesting of nodes (like seperate Shape and Geometry nodes) we do via the polymorphic types of metaobjects. ok, I'd have to look it up - I don't know anything much about VOS except that it is basically something I'd like to see on the server side as part of a Web3D app. Anyway, I stopped working on the VRMLServer a while ago to go work on Web stuff for a while. I hope to go back to it soon but if anyone wants to work on it it's in the source repository. It's in a halfway state where it can load a VRML file and create some objects, but it's buggy. It uses OpenVRML to load and run the VRML scene. I want to look at collaborating on something like this in the future - after my phd (a few months). chris Reed ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
On Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 09:15:37PM -0500, Reed Hedges wrote: Cory Linden (I forget his real name) did a QA about open-sourcing the client, and someone asked him if they think that also open-sourcing the server would hurt SL from a business perspective, and he said No. But I wonder if they do have plans on doing it. snarkWell, seeing as how they aren't making any money off of Second Life as it is, it would be hard to hurt their business any more than they're already doing themselves./snark -- [ Peter Amstutz ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ] [Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet] [ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ] [ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey: pgpkeys.mit.edu 18C21DF7 ] signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
Hi, yup, I agree, I downloaded SL cause everyone was telling me of 'dead-end' vrml tech, so I wanted to check the hype: I was very surprized that they even have no shadows, which I thought they would have. Textures look often shabby, most of their 'houses' look like boxes, their 'trees' flow in the sky, not on ground. I guessed lots of people there, but so far I found round 20 in the start place, which cybertown had in better times too. As people wrote on VRML/X3D -list, the client in open source is only the useless part when you have a server-client system. Well, I still hope VOS will make a vrml2vos convertor some time... CU hermetic (stacks of crisp venture capital dollars) runs out? I haven't seen much word-of-mouth promotion of Second Life, and what I have seen has been mostly negative (of course I'm biased here). Rather there's been a lot of over-the-top hype and top-down marketing, rather than the sort of grass-roots support that suggests a sustainable platform. They desparately want to make SL seem bigger than it is, because people like a winner. But if the real numbers are right (250,000 accounts logged at least once in the last two months, 15,000 simultaneous users at peak usage) I can't help but think the user community is really, really small considering their multi-million dollar investment in hardware, software and marketing. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
On 1/9/07, Or Botton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jan 9, 2007, at 1:08 PM, swe wrote: Textures look often shabby, most of their 'houses' look like boxes, their 'trees' flow in the sky, not on ground. I guessed lots of people there, but so far I found round 20 in the start place, which cybertown had in better times too. I have to chip in into this one - Its true that most of the structures you've encountered may look pretty bad, but you have to remember that this is mostly because the creators of said buildings tend to be inexperienced users. The idea behind SL's live building system is to leverage creation to the point where any user who wishs to try it - professional or not - can build something without having to go through a long period of study. This does cause alot of low-quality and bad looking structures to populate the landscape, but its not because the engine cannot do any better. Feel free to look me up on the IRC channel and i'll show you around SL - some of the buildings built by the more professional artists may surprise you. Yeah, some have spent the time to develop the skill and the content. I saw some impressive SL stuff, which surprised me considering how primitive their primitive modelling components seem to be. chris ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
Hi Or Botton, hmm I should install an IRC, or maybe you can give me hints where to see better stuff in SL. I like to be surprized. Sorry if I did such a flame, but its a reaction of all the hype SL creates. CU hermetic On Tue, 9 Jan 2007, Or Botton wrote: I have to chip in into this one - Its true that most of the structures you've encountered may look pretty bad, but you have to remember that this is mostly because the creators of said buildings tend to be inexperienced users. The idea behind SL's live building system is to leverage creation to the point where any user who wishs to try it - professional or not - can build something without having to go through a long period of study. This does cause alot of low-quality and bad looking structures to populate the landscape, but its not because the engine cannot do any better. Feel free to look me up on the IRC channel and i'll show you around SL - some of the buildings built by the more professional artists may surprise you. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
It was expected. It gives them a way to push the financing of the development off to organizations like IBM and to claim they are an open platform. They need to do something to stop the burning of the VC capital and they have to solve out some very difficult technical problems. Expect yet-another-big-burst of CNet articles. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Or Botton Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 9:38 AM To: VOS Discussion Subject: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source LindenLab have just opened the source code for the SecondLife client. http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource/ This step has actually surprised me - I didnt think that they were anywhere near doing this for the next two years or so. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
Granted, it was expected, but there is one major issue thats a big bad omen: And thats content copy protection. SecondLife has been largely tauted as a place where you can make a quick buck by creating and selling copies of content. This is mostly an artificial market created by placing DRM on objects - being able to flag a texture, model, script or an entire package as non copyable, modifyable or transferable. Personally, I am all for an opensource platform with no DRM involved. I believe that a VR platform can only become mainstream and widespread if it is open and free. But SecondLife's act is more self destructive because by nature they are not open and free. With the source out, it would be a rather easy task to duplicate models and textures of objects, pretty much breaking the DRM with a very casual effort from the programmer. This could be very damaging to their internal economy. Again, I do not support the concept of having virtual economies, but doing what they just did is more like shooting their own foot. Perhaps this signs that LindenLab now views the big gamers - companies and such as the real customers now? These people will have much less of an issue to enforce their copyrights then the regular person. On Jan 8, 2007, at 5:52 PM, Len Bullard wrote: It was expected. It gives them a way to push the financing of the development off to organizations like IBM and to claim they are an open platform. They need to do something to stop the burning of the VC capital and they have to solve out some very difficult technical problems. Expect yet-another-big-burst of CNet articles. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:vos-d- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Or Botton Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 9:38 AM To: VOS Discussion Subject: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source LindenLab have just opened the source code for the SecondLife client. http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource/ This step has actually surprised me - I didnt think that they were anywhere near doing this for the next two years or so. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
Letting out the viewer is something of a SOP. I think the server-side is possibly more important given that there are any number of open source viewers out there for 3D platforms that are just as good or better. It is the management of the server farm that makes the difference, that and a big budget for marketing. Yes, I think they are looking at migrating the building market, but the only thing that brings in the bigCos is the site traffic. Otherwise, to Sears, there is no advantage to being there. IBM can talk a lot about boardroom VR but they are a services company in this market and without other companies willing to host on private farms, there is no market. There is a lot of puff in the online worlds market. Of what value is it to own content that you can't move because it only works on that platform? So like a Macintosh or a Mall, without a big membership that is actually going there often, having a presence there is largely a decorative bauble, a loss leader for being 'in the know'. This market is relying on the naivete of the IT groups of the companies hosting there. The in-world economy is a fascinating experiment in waiting to see when the Feds will begin to look at it the same way they look at church bingo. They tend to wait until the value is high enough that they can safely take their cut without killing the game. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Or Botton Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 10:06 AM To: VOS Discussion Subject: Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source Granted, it was expected, but there is one major issue thats a big bad omen: And thats content copy protection. SecondLife has been largely tauted as a place where you can make a quick buck by creating and selling copies of content. This is mostly an artificial market created by placing DRM on objects - being able to flag a texture, model, script or an entire package as non copyable, modifyable or transferable. Personally, I am all for an opensource platform with no DRM involved. I believe that a VR platform can only become mainstream and widespread if it is open and free. But SecondLife's act is more self destructive because by nature they are not open and free. With the source out, it would be a rather easy task to duplicate models and textures of objects, pretty much breaking the DRM with a very casual effort from the programmer. This could be very damaging to their internal economy. Again, I do not support the concept of having virtual economies, but doing what they just did is more like shooting their own foot. Perhaps this signs that LindenLab now views the big gamers - companies and such as the real customers now? These people will have much less of an issue to enforce their copyrights then the regular person. ___ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source
That's a fair comparison, Peter. There are many lastGen web marketing games being played and some even older Hollywood tricks like the dust-up between the Graefs and the media that published pix and vids of the famous flying penises griefer incident imposed over her avatar image. CNet poses it as 'virtual world' rights incident and a copyright infringement which it isn't but it gives CNet another excuse to put up yetAnotherSL-related story. The Hollywood Catfight for Publicity is a well-worn trick. Currently we are in a simultaneous phase of do-overs (VR_The_New_Thing: WE DO IT RIGHT THIS TIME!) and brand devolution as stalwarts such as CNet become web'loids manufacturing stories and controversies to get eyeballs. Depending on your point of view or market, having real-time 3D come to the front of the pack in this environment may be a curse or a blessing. The good news is that the technology is being taken seriously again as a market in the business development offices of major companies; the bad news is the MAC-Is-The-Platform-of-Choice, aka, the closed systems marketers, are leading the charge. Lots of pundit sites such as Terra Nova are repackaging worn clichés but getting academic grants for them. Bruce Damer is looking for help in documenting the History Of Online Communities. There is sort of a bum's rush by some to be seen as the Gandalfs of VR and I have to suspect some of them are Sarumans In Saris but hey, they keep the presses running stories about VR and real-time 3D and that is good for all of us. Meanwhile everyone is trying with every blurb private or public to kill VRML and X3D because the Web3DC is sitting on the ISO gold standard; so, when IBM steps forward and claims that there are no standards for 3D On The Web, IBM looks sort of stupid. The truth is, there are but they are royalty free and unencumbered and that messes with their plans to get that 99% because there is no complexity moat for the client side, and that violates the classic Warren Buffet rules for evaluating a start-up or technology (barriers for competition). For niche players, the off-the-web applications of web technologies have promise and have gotten serious attention because of major contracts in the Federal markets. The entertainment industry still doesn't quite know what makes this NOT a game market and most of the nova-pundits don't either. This will be the year when a lot of it sorts out. In times of change, I say find your natural allies and work together to keep the market and/or your technology on track for whatever it is you mean to do with it. Me: just building a prototype world for fun and illumination. VRML97 still works for that and I may move it on to X3D. After building worlds for a hobby for a long time now, I know that I want to be able to pick up a project even if it is a decade old and finish it or recycle it. For that I need real standards and technology that keeps working. For that, ISO is gold. They are slow but very predictable. Do what you do with enthusiasm and a deaf left ear. len -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter Amstutz Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 2:29 PM To: VOS Discussion Subject: Re: [vos-d] SecondLife client goes Open Source Interesting. This reminds me of the .com mantra Get Big or Die -- which usually meant expanding quickly and burning through millions of dollars to try and capture 99% of a market that hasn't yet even been proven to be profitable. In a couple years we'll be able to look back and figure out where Second Life is on launch parabola -- has it archived escape velocity and will be the next Amazon or Yahoo, or come crashing to earth when the fuel (stacks of crisp venture capital dollars) runs out? I haven't seen much word-of-mouth promotion of Second Life, and what I have seen has been mostly negative (of course I'm biased here). Rather there's been a lot of over-the-top hype and top-down marketing, rather than the sort of grass-roots support that suggests a sustainable platform. They desparately want to make SL seem bigger than it is, because people like a winner. But if the real numbers are right (250,000 accounts logged at least once in the last two months, 15,000 simultaneous users at peak usage) I can't help but think the user community is really, really small considering their multi-million dollar investment in hardware, software and marketing. Also I agree that they're walking a fine line between the natural laws of cyberspace and real-world legal systems, and this could really burn them at some point down the road. Whenever someone tries to bend cyberspace to conform to their idea of what should and shouldn't be allowed (as opposed to what is naturally possible or impossible) cyberspace ends up worse off for it. On Mon, Jan 08, 2007 at 12:42:10PM -0600, Len Bullard wrote: Letting out the viewer is something of a SOP. I think the server-side
