SL Developments

The WindLight advanced atmospheric rendering technology that Linden Lab purchased in May has been made available as part of the SL Viewer source code, which is released under the GPL.

This will be welcome news to Freedom Lovers as it's yet further proof of Linden Lab's commitment to Open Source values, while at the same time pursuing dramatic improvements of the SL experience.

WindLight provides astonishingly realistic and beautiful atmospheric and natural lighting effects in real time which takes the SL experience and "cranks it up a notch".

WindLight is not currently available in the pre-compiled SL viewer, but Zen Linden in a posting to the official SL blog provides links on how to get the current source code which has WindLight and compile it.

While Voice chat in the SL Viewer is not currently supported in linux, WindLight is probably a better feature to have if one had to choose between them.

In breathtaking news for people who create content in Second Life, Torley Linden announced the advent of Sculpted Prims! In the past it's been difficult to create organic looking objects due to the rigidity of the available geometric primitives. Just a cube with rounded edges was difficult to do with a low Prim count. This is all about to change.

The Sculpted Prim FAQ mentions that the easiest way to create a 'sculpt texture' which is used by the 'Sculpted Prim' is to create a model in an external 3d package and use an exporter. They will provide an exporter for Maya and support Blender soon.

Since a picture (or video) is worth a thousand words Torley provided this YouTube example of Sculpted Prim creation.

A 300 foot tall Tux is just around the corner!

A 'Sim' in Second Life is a geographical instance that runs on a server. Currently, all Sims are provided by Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life.

Mark Wallace of 3pointD.com while attending the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference reports that Joe Miller, VP for platform and technology development at Linden Lab announced:

• We’ll be open-sourcing the back end so sims can run anywhere on any machine whether trusted by us or not.

• We’ll be delivering assets in a totally different method that won’t be such a burden on the simulators.

• Very soon we’ll be updating simulators to support multiple versions so that we don’t have to update the entire Grid at once.

• We’ll be using open protocols.

• SL cannot truly succeed as long as one company controls the Grid.

Joe went on to say:

[I] would like to emphasize 3 key elements:
• community, far more about the people than the tech
• user-created content
• marketplace

In January this year Linden Lab Open Sourced the Second Life viewer and has stated that their goal was to also open the server and the related protocols.

Certainly it's heartening to see that they seem to understand that "SL cannot truly succeed as long as one company controls the Grid".

Although I suspect it may be a little while before the SL server code is opened the day to day implications and ramifications, especially for in-world currency and transactions will be interesting to see come about. Quite a lot is now at stake, for example, just yesterday US$1,768,000 was spent in-world.

Opening the "back end" will allow the Grid's load to be spread as Companies and Universities to start hosting content. No doubt it will also mature the technology significantly and most likely lead to SL becoming the de-facto standard for a 3D metaverse.