Peering Inside: The Second Life year in review (part 7)
Viewers, servers and technology
Second Life wouldn't exist without the technology. The people are the most important single factor, but the technology is the enabler. Linden Lab first announced the open-sourcing of the Second Life viewer and server software in 2005, and while they said that the initiative would take some years, they've been slowly making good on it during that time.
Additionally there have been a number of third-party efforts that are bearing fruit. The last 12 months have seen a surge of development work on viewers, infrastructure technologies and third-party tools and interoperability.
- Katharine Berry of the teen grid brought us AJAXLife, and DeltaPHC brought us SLeek. Katharine Berry quickly became quite the celebrity, but mostly abandoned Second Life later on due to issues with VAT and Linden Lab's neglect of the Teen grid.
- The SpaceNavigator 3D mouse got working support about a year ago, and has been a staple item for Second Life machinimists since then. Press releases and announcements followed about 10 months later.
- GetDeb began providing the Second Life viewer as an Ubuntu package.
- Voice chat rolled out in early August, though it was a long, long time before Linux users got any of that. Vivox repeatedly maintained that it had sent the goods to Linden Lab. Linden Lab maintained that it had not gotten them. Basically just like what's been going on since 2006 with Valve's Steam service and Strategy First over Jagged Alliance 2, only there's no end in sight to making that playable — at least Linux users eventually got their voice chat going. It was predicted that voice would fracture Second Life communities and exclude the many who had originally come to Second Life because of hearing or speaking impairments. Now, a year on, that seems to have been borne out.
- Linden Lab acknowledged open source contributors and followed that up with their Innovation awards.
- Linden Lab opened up the first pieces of server code, infrastructure and communications technologies.
- Linden Lab laboriously switched over to using eBay's FairMarket tech for their auction platform. Given the ties between eBay and Linden Lab, that's hardly surprising.
- Avatar puppettering was put on hold (read: canceled completely), however the code was recently released, though it isn't expected to be of much use to anyone.
- Lots and lots of Artificial Intelligence experiments and advances using SL during the last 12 months, including the simulation of famous dead people and cognitive studies.
- Linden Lab introduced the new Dazzle UI about eight months ago (now only a matter of a week or two from release), and in all that time, the hubbub hasn't diminished.
- The last of Linden Lab's class three servers was decommissioned.
- IBM's Chet Murphy was loaned to the CHTTP development effort being undertaken by Linden Lab.
- Linden Lab greatly extended (or made available) their web-services.
- Linden Lab suddenly started renumbering all their servers and networks without notice, apparently dumping their old network provider very suddenly. This caused trouble for a while.
- Quicktime security flaws made the papers — though every application that used Quicktime was at risk, it was Second Life that was singled out. It was a little while, but Apple didn't take too long to fix this.
- Linden Lab finds half a million or so missing pieces of user content under the sofa cushions.
- Linden Lab said that megaprims would eventually become a standard feature. Once a few niggling issues were sorted out.
- A bungled data file led to German users being at risk of having their account credentials stolen.
- RealXtend threw their hat into the ring with a custom viewer in progress that is designed specifically to work with opensim.
- The Linux viewer finally goes beta.
- HTML-on-a-prim rolled out, though in a very limited and awkward way.
- Linden Lab published a draft Open Grid protocol to get discussion going.
- Linden Lab released the llmozlib2 source code.
- Linden Lab chose to replace the aging Ruth placeholder avatar.
- Havok 4 finally rolled out on Second Life's Agni grid.
- The new Windlight renderer finally made an official release and if you did or didn't like it, you were encouraged to say so.
- IBM started hosting sims on their own servers — or so it seemed at the time. Actually it is no longer clear that the servers are their own, or indeed, that they are at any IBM-controlled premises. All we've been able to get out of Linden Lab so far suggests that the servers might actually be running at one of Linden Lab's offices or data-centers.
- Nicholaz Beresford, whose Second Life viewers are widely said to be the best that are available, threw in the towel on development — though he managed two final releases not long after that.
- The first successful cross-domain teleportation of a Second Life agent from one grid to another — with the grids not even running the same software.