01 February 2007

Second Life in a Box: OpenSim

The recent opening up of the Second Life Viewer code was big news, but the thing that everyone is waiting for is for the server-side stuff. Well, that may be a while off - see my interview with Cory Ondrejka for some more background on this. Meanwhile, though, the libsecondlife group has taken under its wing the OpenSim project, which as the home page puts it laconically:

OpenSim is a project to develop an Open Source Simulator.

This is great news, because it means that people can start developing other Second Life-like virtual worlds, completely independently of Linden Lab. It will also mean that people can start to explore some of the thorny issues of multiple, compatible virtual worlds now.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I do enjoy the libsecondlife plug, but technically this project is a separate thing. The connection is that it uses the libsl library for packet encoding and decoding, but the project has it's own leaders and developers and we only hear about it when something breaks on the libsecondlife end :-).

Glyn Moody said...

Thanks for the clarification.