While we are living our second lives, socializing, building, shopping, playing… there are things which are not so visible under our virtual sun. Some residents are having their fun far away from the eyes of us, on distant sims or even in the privacy of their own computers. While we are walking the grid, some of them are working on their own, private grids. Actually, they are making their own grids. And they're doing good. Two days ago, I had the pleasure to talk with Dalien Talbot who was kind to introduce me the OpenSim Project.
In short, OpenSim is an attempt to reverse engineer the server of second life. In non-geek speak, to make it from the scratch. Before you ask why would anybody do that, it's because otherwise we'll have to wait about two or three years more for Linden Lab to opensource the server code. Why do we need that? Well, that is rather complex question. I am afraid you'll have to wait until tomorrow to the next part of this story. Before that, let's see what has been done already. The idea of having a sim running on a computer other than LL's can be thrilling enough.
The OpenSim server can run on any computer with decent hardware and broadband. Depending on those two everything on sim will run more or less smooth. One can log into it with standard second life client. Sure, such server is completely independent from the rest of the LL's Second Life. You don't have your inventory there, nor your money. They stay where they were.
Since in SL all the inventory, appearance, etc. is stored on the server – there is none of that in OpenSim. You can take your soul and reincarnate into something completely different :) And the border control at inferno does not allow any handluggage :)
One more thing that stays in the databases of Linden Lab is your appearance. At this moment, the only shape you have in OpenSim is the default female shape, the one you initially rezzed with. Yes, the one with ugly hair which comes up when inventories are screwed up. Dalien was not only kind to tell me many things about the project but also to run a sim on his own server so I can take a peek.
What can I say? It is pretty weird feeling to stand on an empty parcel (65535 sqm) in default avatar. But it is hell of a feeling too! I could walk, run and fly. I rezzed a prim and edited it despite Dalien thought that editing is impossible :) Terraforming is also possible which I discovered when the hill under my feet disappeared and turned flat. You can talk too.
At this moment guys are working on implementing LSL and inventory. You can watch the progress on Tedd Maa'a blog. One thing that is not even close to being done is money. It is not just a technical question. We'll got back to that one in one of the following posts.
So, if you feel like a pioneer, use the list of available grids. At this moment, there are OSGrid and DeepGrid. See you there.
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