Ever wonder what the backend of creating video games, and video game programming looks like? Enter Alice.

It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

Alice is free and open source. It is a stand alone application, and is available on many platforms. It uses much of the technology that was used in the making of The Sims2.

It’s used at many schools and colleges as a teaching tool. Instructions are similar to that of C++ and C# But includes a neat drag and drop interface for the actions, methods and properties. I made a short sequence myself in about 10 minutes.

Exporting to the web is a bit difficult because it requires the end user to have a lot of Java framework installed on their unit. Exporting as video isn’t functioning yet as the video’s are just too big.  You can view a bunch of Alice works on YouTube.

Here’s some more info direct from Carnegie Mellon:

I haven’t been active in Second Life for months now and figured I’d check up on it again. When I was reading other blogs I found a link to Opensim which is an open source project working on their own server similar to Second Life. In fact with every grid I checked out I used the Second Life client to connect. The servers I tried weren’t very busy but I was really only checking out how it compares to Second Life. There’s plenty of stuff that is missing and they are maybe years from getting everything to the level of Second Life.

Just by copying the shortcut for second life and adding some parameters you can log into one of these servers easily. Changing your appearance isn’t explained very well. You start off with a basic female avatar. You have to create a body, eye, skin and hair parts so you can wear and change them. On OSgrid you can play around with web pages on a prim! The most interesting thing I found was when I read articles about how they want to hook these grids up to Second Life and be able to move your avatar from one grid to another. It also seems like Second Life have plans of something like that too. With IBM and Microsoft interested in this project it looks very promising for the future.

After I played around with the other servers I decided to see if I can start a server of my own on my computer. I tried building with the source code but I got errors. Didn’t want to figure out why so I downloaded the already built server file. Got a server running on my windows system in minutes. Logged in and could walk and fly around a small island. To me that’s impressive and if these servers get more popular it could be very competitive to Second Life.

Fantastic article of the history of the open source grids
Wiki Page for OpenSimulator

Some of the active servers:
• DeepGrid
• OsGrid
• OpenLifeGrid
• CentralGrid

As part of the Second Life Birthday celebration, this libsecondlife event is an open discussion about libsecondlife. It will start with a short introduction and background information and then everyone will be free to discuss any aspect of libsecondlife.

Open Source, The GPL and Second Life
25 June 3:00 to 4:00 PM SLT

Gareth Ellison will be discussing how LL’s recent GPLing of the source code is starting to affect the community, both technical and non-technical members.

This talk will be general discussion about open source in SL and what future might hold, and the merits of the different FLOSS licenses will be discussed along with some SL-related projects which have been generated by the community.

“It is my firm belief that in opening up the viewer and supporting open source in general, LL have laid out the path for Second Life and systems based upon it to expand in a way other 3D worlds would never have dreamed possible,” stated Gareth.

If you’ve never played the X-Com series, then you might be able to draw parallels with this game with Civilization. Basically, the game play is turn based strategy where you develop, research, and hire with limited resources and try to beat the computer or other players in a battle for territory domination. Think of it like chess pieces where you’re not only creating pawns, but also placing them on the battle field and playing their strong sides and minimizing their weaknesses.

Game Mode: Not quite a MMO since multiplayer only supports up to six players and it’s more like server based match play. Good thing about turn-based games is that you have a little bit of time to think (on a timer) but strategy plays a key-role in these plays since it is more calculated. There is also a single player game and allows both Internet and LAN play.

Playability: The design of the interface is pretty straightforward although there are a few control screens and development screens that could be fixed to be a smoother interaction between screens and more consistency with the button placement. The game definitely brings back memories as far as how X-Com worked and was fashioned. The whole development/research cycles along with actual engagement scenes take a bit getting used to if you’ve never played the former but should be pretty easy to follow if you’ve played real-time strategy games such as Warcraft.

Cost: This is a GPL licensed game. Open-source.

Operating systems: Windows and Linux. There is even a beta for Intel-based Macs that is out.

Overall: For an open-source game, this is done incredibly well. Not many of the games have as much detail and maturity as this game with graphics that might not be directly in-par with the gaming industry, but it can pass as one of the top indie developers without breaking a sweat. Having been around since before 2004, this game definitely has a cult following. What more can you ask for, when it supports three different operating systems and allows online play? Nothing. Not a dang thing.

Where all will Linden Servers end up?

The Linden Lab CTO, speaking in the Singapore iX conference, spoke about the majority of the numbers of residents of Second Life being from outside the United States and “So the vast majority of our usage is overseas [and] because of that, we need to start hosting servers in foreign markets,” he revealed.

This isn’t going to create a different Second Life, parts of the virtual world will be ‘closer’ instead to the residents. This would address any latency issues, so users in this part of the world will not experience a time lag–especially when the network is congested–when they access Second Life’s server infrastructure

For us, being able to deploy servers both to Europe and Asia is a critical next step for us. We have some architectural changes we need to make in order to allow that, but we’re working on that right now.

What do you think? Will Linden Lab host servers around the world? Or Will they just host to help control latency until open sourcing the server code?

I hate to say it but 1.16.0.5 client for the linux-alpha is up to its old ways again I think. I really don’t fancy the memory leaks either but not sure if it’s just a matter of the ATI card now, or if it’s going back to its old ways. For an alpha, you would expect choppy and non-functioning clients but back in 1.13, it was running… VERY smoothly. Strangely enough, with each version upgrade, there came some memory leaks that kept coming and coming. You would launch the client, it’d be great for a little while, then suddenly would slow down and be seriously choppy. Being the only application running on a P4-1.5G ram machine dedicated strictly for testing, it’s hard to imagine what else could be doing this.

Well, then there was seriously rejoicing in the 1.15.02 and 03 versions. The leak was gone it seemed. There was much rejoicing…

But it doesn’t stop there! No, the leak just refuses to be shoved aside. No, it came back for a sequel. The brilliant 1.16.0.5 client has it again. Ick. Anyone else running into this issue? I seem to recall a forum post I started a while back in version 1.14 that spoke of this, but unsure if anyone has had the chance to encounter this beast. It doesn’t make it unplayable…. if you don’t mind choppy and laggy graphics. Nothing has really changed as far as X-server and fglrx driver versions so you want to seriously wonder what exactly is keeping it from working and why it’s been in alpha for so long. No wait, don’t answer that last one.

Seriously though. Has anyone else encountered this problem? I’m too lazy to fire up a debugger while the client is running to see what exactly the internals are doing that’s chewing up the resources.

The University of Michigan 3D lab has taken advantage of the released source code by Linden Labs and student Gabriel Cirio and Eric Maslowske have developed a stereoscopic version of the viewer that will work with a large-screen stereo projection system. This system uses passive stereo based on polarizing filters and was built from off-the-shelf components.

[via Open...]

Thank goodness such a large percentage of registered accounts never stick around long enough to appreciate Second Life. There were 30,281 people online at one time yesterday and I don’t know about you, but textures were loading slow as all heck for me. I was having a hard time trying to move across a room, but teleporting was no problem. Can you just imagine what it would be like with 500,000 online at the same time?

Don’t think I am bashing Linden Lab, I think the Lindens are doing an amazing job trying to move Second Life forward, but lately I have been longing for the days when there were only 1,000 online at once.

Scaling Second Life to the influx of new residents has to be an extremely difficult job, and I do not envy the task the Lindens take on each and every day. I do wonder just how long they can keep Second Life functioning at the pace the growth is expanding. Although, I have been bitching and moaning with each new update they have done for the last year; they have managed not to totally crash the system.

I am fairly certain they were seeing themselves having trouble keeping up, and that is the reason (IMHO) they open sourced the viewer. I have no idea how soon they will benefit from that action, but the faster they open source the server code the sooner some of the great minds can assist in making Second Life better functional. Linden Labs, don’t wait to long to seek the additional help. We want a better Second Life!

Not all are convinced that opening the server side of Second Life makes financial sense for Linden. “Server-based virtual worlds reliant on subscription fees aren’t a good match for a fully open-source business model,” said Raven Zachary, an analyst for the 451 Group. “The value to the vendor is in restricting access at some level to the worlds themselves.”

It is this writers opinion that Raven Zachary is a bit short sided by his comments. First off, how does moving the software to an open-source model exclude a vender’s ability to use the subscription model? Isn’t that a bit like saying that OSCommerce and Zen Cart are no longer ecommerce solutions, because they are open-source? Just because a software project is open-source does not mean that you cannot limit or exclude access to or charge for the functions and services that it provides. Is it not the content and features of Second Life that should determine the ability of Linden Labs to continue to operate a subscription-based model?

One thing that move to open-source will do for Linden Labs is to accelerate both the development and adoption of Second Life. Sure, there will be those that take the project off in their own direction to add functions and features that Linden Labs may not wish to allow to the Second Life code base, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. It will bring some healthy competition to the project and competition breeds excellence.

Just take a look at the shopping carts mentioned earlier, it is my understanding that Zen Cart was a fork of the OSCommerce project. The results: now we have two shopping carts that serve the needs of a much larger user base and far more people are now happy with their ecommerce solution. Plus I am sure their exist a number of smaller installations that were customizations of both carts.

Take a look at Multiverse for instance. They offers a platform that empowers independent developers to create high quality MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) and non-game virtual worlds at a fraction of the cost and time. This model allows developers to monetize their efforts using a subscription-based model. Perhaps the Linden Labs move to open-source was in direct competition to Multiverse, as it will also empower independent developers in a much different way.

I agree with the Linden Labs CTO (Chief Technical Officer), Cory Ondrejka, who was quoted as saying:

But Ondrejka said there’s a “long list” of revenue possibilities. “There are lots of ways to make money on the Web that have nothing to do with hosting–domain registration, search, services.”

Besides the obvious ways of generating revenue through an in-world advertising model or the sales of goods & services, there exists a number of possibilities. People just need to let go of the old mindset and begin to think outside the box. If you don’t, you will not make it in the approaching paradigm!

It seems that on Monday Linden Labs released the client software, which is the component that the residents use for viewing and interacting inside the virtual world, as an open-source project. Linden Labs say that there are plans to follow suit with the server software, which is the component that powers the virtual world itself, but shall do so cautiously and gave no indication of any time frame for this upcoming release.

What this means is that now outsiders – those not employed by Linden Labs, will be able to modify the client software and add features that they feel are both needed and helpful or beneficial. This type of move does not guarantee the future success of Second Life, but turning to the open-source community has worked very well for projects such as Linux, Java, Apache, and several others as it allows a rather vast intellectual base or community of proven talented developers access to this code base.

It is reported that Cory Ondrejka, the Chief Technology Officer of Linden Labs, holds the hope that this move will initially bring much needed bug fixes to the Windows version of the client and a much better Linux version of the client software. In the long run Cory Ondrejka expects many more significant changes to the client.

It has been my experience that the Linux client requires some immediate attention. I was only able to get a linux client functioning properly once on a Suse 10 box. After that I had to resort to using the Windows client under Wine, but with every weekly update came a never ending onslaught of problems. It seemed to me like a Linux client was an afterthought, but it they did appear in the forums that they did put forth some effort to work with the Linux users. Since the Linux community consists of a number of diehard gamers, hopefully this new Linux client shall not be too far off.

Was this a wise move by Linden Labs? This VTOR contributor, being a big supporter and member of the open-source community, says yes! This move should bring the involvement of many talented programmers, which can accelerate the development and adoption of the software. Plus, as recent history has shown us, the open-source community and it’s vast intellectual resources tend to fix bugs & exploits somewhat faster than proprietary venders do.

This move seems to be a rather logical progression for Second Life since the very nature of this virtual world promotes it’s residents to use their talents and energies to build and control their in-world experience and existence. Now those who have written millions of lines of script code to control in-world objects, can use their talent and creativity to enhance the way that they interface with the virtual environment that they helped to create.

I would like to see the client evolve into a plug-in model. This way each resident can build or customize their client to suit their needs, desires, and resources. Something like that used by the web browser FireFox. I think this alone would reduce the number of difficulties that residents currently encounter.

Now upon releasing the server components as open-source, some may feel that griefers will be able to sneak things into the code base. But as long as Linden Labs maintains a sound version management and review policies, this will be rather impossible and there shall be far fewer outages and calamities then residents have experienced over this past year when a new version was rolled out.

I personally feel that this move will bring a much needed solution to Second Life’s scalability issues. Plus this could open up things for creating sim specific functions or features, yet still maintain a continuity with the adjacent sims, which opens up a whole new level of possibilities.

On top of everything else, this move opens the door for major players in the world of technological development like Sun Microsystems and IBM, who are not only staunch supporters of open-source, but have a presence in Second Life and an interest in virtual reality. I think that this alone might offer the biggest technological boost to Second Life. Hopefully we shall see the effects of this very soon.

I congratulate Linden Labs for this wise decision!