Second Life Watching Their Rearview Mirror? Outback Online

The online Newspaper The Age reports today more interesting details on Outback Online. After a conversation with Randal Leeb-du Toit, Yoick CEO,(Yoick is creating Outback Online) says “Second Life is a village - and he’s nearly finished building Rome,” and reveals that Outback Online will be using peer-to-peer computing to harness the power of each user’s PC.

What this means is that Outback will not be dependent on central servers, but networks of PCs. “A P2P-powered virtual world draws on the network power of all participants - and could handle 100 times the visitors of the central server model,” Yoick claims.

National ICT Australia (NICTA) developed the online game technology over three years to test scalable and economical applications. Mr Leeb-du Toit, NICTA’s business development director, added a powerful graphics engine and spun-off Yoick. quote from The Age

“Outback Online is a virtual world system that will be on your computer 24/7, and we don’t yet know what changes that’s going to bring, but we’ve got an inkling that will be pretty profound,” Mr Leeb-du Toit says.

Phil Morle, a consultant who worked on Outback’s development, says:

You can develop private outbacks for friends or a concert for 5000 visitors. The P2P architecture overcomes some obstacles that prevent such a gathering in Second Life…and the visual quality is greatly improved.” With an Outback being the equivalent to a Second Life island.

Second Life has a low-res look to it whereas sometimes I just stand there in the rain and watch the sun go down in World of Warcraft because it is so beautiful. Our stuff is rich, 3-D and graphically more like something you’d see in World of Warcraft.

Usability was also a focus. I want my kids to be able to design an experience in Outback. They can’t even figure out how to move in Second Life.

Phil Morle was the former Kazza CTO, and has assembled an expert P2P experienced team that includes Marty Poulin, former technology director at Disney’s Buena Vista Games,as development director of Outback Online.

There are drawbacks to the P2P system, as it is a more complex network architecture, such as the data you may need to update your scene may be behind someone’s fire wall. Lag with data queries is bound to be a real challenge, but if these challenges are able to be dealt with then Outback will have the opportunity to become a real competitor to Second Life, and if the pre-trail hype is even close to accurate possibly leave Second Life in the dust.

Update 2/26/07 11:38am PST
I was talking to fellow VTOR author TD Goodliffe and he mentioned his Outback Online piece which has some other related links readers might be interested in, so I decided I should link that Post here.