Coverage of news, issues and events occurring in virtual worlds or those who create those worlds
Since the open-sourcing of the browser code, the innovation that’s occurred in that area has been substantial. A recent browser iteration I noticed was one that blocks eyesores.
I’ve been a bit conservative and just used the stock standard LL browsers but I’m interested to hear about any third-party browsers you’ve used and why.
The uBrowser website states that uBrowseruBrowser “is an open source test mule that renders interactive web pages onto geometry using OpenGL® and an embedded instance of Gecko, the Mozilla® rendering engine. Its primary purpose is to help me integrate Gecko into my company’s software – a 3D virtual world called Second Life.”
The developer behind this browser experience is Callum Prentice. Callum is part of the Linden Lab team and he goes into great detail at the uBrowser website on how he sees this software integrating with the content and developments going on in SL. His aim is to have “residents … put interactive content anywhere they like – the much rumored “Web-On-A-Prim”. As well as allowing for the display of regular Web pages”.
If this is the case and uBrowser achieves the goals that Callum is setting. it would bring about a synergy between the realtime interactions in SL and the semi-static text, audio, video and graphics that make up the bulk of websites.
Put your hand up if you’d like web on a prim?
Reuters have published an interview with Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale from this weekend’s SLCC. Most of the interview is fairly predictable but it’s encouraging to see the acknowledgement of quality as the key driver into the future:
“We’re at a place where we’ve demonstrated that the virtual world can exist. Now we need to make it high quality so it does continuously support the activities and desires of the people who are using it. That’s what we’ve learned by listening for the last couple of quarters. We’ve got to increase the quality.”
Of course, I’d deluded myself that some mention may be made of further internationalisation of the servers but the only allusion to that came from Rosedale’s thoughts on open-sourcing:
“If you’re an entrepreneur, wanting to enter the virtual world and sell stuff to people, you’re going to want to find the largest possible audience. So you’ll be strongly drawn to set up your shop on the system with the largest number of people using it. There will be a tremendous desire by people to link those servers together and be on our network so they can have access to the largest base of people.”
Finally, on the legal issues around ageplay and gambling, he summarised Linden Lab’s intent to tie restrictions to avatars through verification of that avatar’s RL location. That seems the most sensible way of not forcing the whole grid into a universal lockdown in a range of sensitive areas.
If Linden Lab are planning some incredible revolutionary step in SL’s development, it’s certainly not apparent in Philip Rosedale’s thoughts. What would you have liked to have seen asked of him in the interview?
As Linden Labs say themselves, the short story on the technology is “killer skies”. The initial shots supplied certainly live up to that description:
The Windlight-enabled viewer is available “now” for PC users – though I can’t find the specific download link. No firm date on the Mac release as yet.
What’s not clear for Australian users of SL is the impact on bandwidth and whether lag will increase further. However, announcements like this do flag the oncoming wave of enhancements resulting from open sourcing SL. And here’s a YouTube video provided by Linden Labs to showcase Windlight:
The transcript of the Town Hall held earlier today provides a small glimmer of hope for Australians frustrated with the lag in SL. In response to a question on internationalising the server locations, Corey Linden provided this snippet:
“We absolutely want to deploy servers overseas. We have an architectural quirk in how we talk to the dbs — a layer of single threaded dataservers – that would suffer in situations with greater ping latency, so we need to fix that problem first, which is being worked on. Once that is fixed, we will begin international deployments. This is critical since over 65% of our use is from outside the US.”
Of course, Australia is very unlikely to be part of the early expansion – Europe and Asia are the obvious targets. However, the combination of Australian SL servers and the next-generation architecture should surely provide some relief in the medium term. The challenge is delivering the goods before competitors do.
There are growing reports of Linden Labs opening up their servers to open source. New blog ‘LA 2nd Life’ run by Australian, DanteJones Laszlo, outlines nicely the upsides of non-Linden Labs owned servers.
Whether open sourcing solves some of the greater underlying architectural issues is debatable, at least in the short term. Aside from lag, the deal breaker for a lot of SL users is the inablity to have more than around 100 people on any one sim at one time. Solve that and SL will truly come into its own.
The Easter weekend saw large concurrency on the grid and things held up relatively well, albeit with some glitches. As relative newcomers to daily immersion in Second Life, we’re behind the eight-ball in realising how restrictive the central server model is on community events specifically and end user enjoyment more generally.
An effective 50 to 60 avatar limit on a event is obviously restrictive, both for the people who miss the event and the fifty who may be dealing with significant lag during the event. Islands are now considered a great value proposition because of the likelihood of reduced lag. Our own in-world launch was modest but managed to crash the server once we got above 45 avatars. The ABC Island / Four Corners launch had quite a number of people trying to access the island unsuccessfully due to it being ‘full’.
Critics of Second Life say the issue is the centralised server model and I’m yet to see any significant rebuttal of the claim. Potential competitors like Outback Online are touting the peer-to-peer (P2P) model as being the solution, claiming a 10 000 avatar population at an event as being feasible. If P2P is able to replicate the virtual world experience at the level Second Life has achieved whilst dramatically increasing concurrency of population, then the stampeded is likely to be significant. That said, I wouldn’t be alone in both hoping and assuming that with Linden Labs going the open source route, a P2P model may be in the platform’s future. Or at the very least a significant performance breakthrough that makes more than fifty people in a room a bearable experience.
What are your thoughts on the issue – if a competitor offered better performance would you pull up stumps and go elsewhere?
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