Sometime last year, i took a leap of faith and made an account on Second Life. In essence, i wanted to find out what all the fuss was about.

Initial impressions

So like any other person, i downloaded the client and logged in. After going through the typical loading screens and dialogs, i appeared on the “Orientation Island”. It’s basically a place all new users end up which takes them though the basic’s of using second life – like how to fly, how to build things, how to interact, and so on.

Interestingly, Second Life is not your typical MMORPG where you kill rats, undertake quests, and perform other menial tasks. Quite notably, you can do things such as:

• Create and edit 3d objects
• Script objects using the Linden Scripting Language (LSL)
• Completely customise your character – you can even attach objects to your body to make furry costumes
• Sell people your creation’s for linden dollars which can be converted to real currency
• Buy and sell land

And so…

So in essence, its a virtual money making platform. I say money making as it was very evident that to do anything useful, you really had to spend some of your virtual cash, otherwise known as Linden Dollars. Need to upload a sound or texture? L$10 per item. Want to equip your character with some cool gear? L$$$. Want to buy some land? L$$$$. For reference, when i last checked it was $4.06 for L$1000.

Granted, you can pretty much go anywhere without having to pay for anything. But then it becomes a rather boring 3d chat client. Though then again, that is what it also doubles up as anyway. In fact, this video on YouTube pretty much sums up Second Life as a 3D chat client:

Unfortunately, due to the infamous breakin of linden labs servers, the password on my account was reset. This wouldn’t have been so bad, except that i couldn’t set a new one since there was no way i could verify the request (e.g i typed complete gibberish in the question field when i signed up), and thus i was essentially locked out of Second Life.

Onto OpenSim… and Open Source

Since i last managed to log into Second Life, a lot has changed. For instance, not long ago Linden Labs opened the source code of the Second Life viewer. Around the same time, an interesting open source project called OpenSim popped up which aims to re-implement the Second Life server code (along with the associated grid and login services), which means anyone can host their own Second Life simulation.

Like a lot of modern MMO’s, Second Life runs on a grid, so the simulated world is essentially split across several servers (typically referred to as regions). Each region simulates a particular part of the world. All the regions are supported by a small set of supporting services, which handle login, assets, and of course the interconnecting grid so everyone can walk between separate regions.

So after some further digging, i found this rather interesting project called DeepGrid. DeepGrid is essentially a freely hosted Second Life login & grid server. Anyone who hosts their own Second Life region (using OpenSim) can tell it to connect to DeepGrid and thus become part of the DeepGrid virtual world.
In plain English, they made their own Second Life.

I decided to have a look at this DeepGrid, so i made an account and pointed my client at their login servers. Sadly though, i bumped into my first issue: the home region (i.e. the one my character would initially appear in) was down, so it wouldn’t let me log in. “No problem” i though, “i’ll just choose another home region”. Naturally though, it took me a few goes at randomly picking a region from the long long list which actually worked (from what i could tell there was no way of telling if any of the regions listed were available, which pretty much sucked).

After finally managing to login, i was very disappointed. Pretty much all i could do was walk about and chat, although even then it was very buggy. The majority of features which made Second Life remotely cool simply did not work. And to top it all off i only found 1 other person in the simulation, who seemed to be stuck and showed no signed of life whatsoever.

I have a feeling though that if OpenSim improves drastically that free services like DeepGrid will provide a useful playground for NASA-esque simulations, as opposed to just relying on Linden Lab’s servers.

Finally…

I think that large distributed virtual simulators such as Second Life are very interesting from a development perspective. For example, it would be insanely easy to meet up as a group in the virtual world and collaboratively brainstorm solutions for real-world problems. For physical aspects, you could use the built in building tools and scripting facilities to approximate results.
Of course, it could be argued that you would be better just meeting up in reality – however doing so becomes increasingly difficult and costly when your team might be spread right across the world.

With regard to OpenSim, i hope it becomes ever more usable. Who knows, maybe in the future we’ll have GNU Life? :)