development

Forterra Systems Inc. has announced the release of the standard developer's kit (SDK) for OLIVE, a virtual world platform. Using these tools a developer will be able to create a customized virtual world to suit their own purposes.

Forterra's software has been used for a variety of training purposes, mostly centered around emergency response and military applications. In contrast, however, one of their biggest implementations of the OLIVE platform is by Makena Technology, creators of There.

While this may not be the first virtual world SDK, it may mean that we'll see some more rapid and sweeping changes in There. MTV has made headlines in the past by building extensions to There like Virtual Laguna Beach.

Even if an extension on an existing world isn't the goal, the release of an SDK means shorter development time and more stable implementations of entirely self-contained virtual worlds of this type. At least one direct competitor to There can't be far off.

For some time it's been possible for development companies to build their own branded version of Orientation Island, a torturously difficult initiation rite that all new residents to the virtual world must complete before being granted full privileges. There are quite a few such projects, such as STA Travel, but Linden are keen to take this idea of decentralizing registration one step further. For some weeks now, they've been quietly accepting proposals from residnet groups, and granting license to use the API and be a part of the official registration process. Projects like Orientation Station are the result.

More details have now emerged via the official Second Life blog. The "experiment", a wording I'm sure puts a chill in those that have invested in developing implementations of the orientation island API, will last from 4 - 6 weeks, a period in which Linden hopes to gain insight into what works and what doesn't in terms of successfully turning the curious, into long-term, productive virtual residents.

LibSecondLife, the open source project based on the Second Life viewer code, that's regularly used to build "grid bots" like the Electric Sheep Company's Grid Shepard for example, have announced the launch of a new Developer Portal for the project. Naturally, the portal is a wiki, and "will be continuously updated with new content" according to the project's blog.

Many developers have been eagerly awaiting Linden Lab to make good on their stated intention to release the Second Life server code to the Open Source community for some time now. According to Ginsu Yoon, Linden Lab's VP business affairs however, the virtual world building company are "in the speculative stages" of the process as of yet. He also conceeds that "it sometimes takes us quite a while to deliver on our ambitions" in an interview with Ugotrade.

The client code, the software used to access Second Life has been open source for some months, and already ambitious projects using the freely modifiable code have sprung up. There's even a project to reverse engineer the Linden Server architecture called Open Grid.

The general feeling was that we may see the code go Open Source this year, but in light of Ginsu Yoons statements, that now seems unlikely.

Multiverse, an ambitious project from some of the original Netscape folks including Bill Turpin, to provide a 3D virtual worlds platform and trigger the kind of explosive growth we saw in the www back in the mid ninties has just completed series A funding for $4M led by Sterling Stamos Capital. Bits and pieices of news and rumor keep bubbling to the surface surrounding Multiverse, and indeed 10,000 development teams worldwide have signed up to beta test the platform when it becomes available late this year or in early 2008.

Icarus Studios has announced the release of a new "next generation" development studio for creating virtual worlds. Six years in the making, it promises to put world-building in the hands of creatives.

Regardless of whether you are building a MMO, simulator, collaborative or social environment, using the Icarus Developer Tool Suite will allow most of your project to be completed by non-programmer staff [...]

User-created content is a feature integrated into the tool set, along with a series of tools to cover various financial, social, and entertainment design philosophies.

Although this may be the first tool of its kind, it won't be the last. The MMO market is about to get quite a bit more competitive... and you thought there were a lot of MMORPGs out there already!

(via GameDailyBiz)

I spent a good portion of my weekend listening to presentations from some of Second Life's elite developers at the Life 2.0 convention (Metaversed coverage here) that runs through all this week put on by Dr. Dobb's. The highlights of the week long convention are yet to come, with a massive array of must see panels and sessions, but the weekend was for the developers, the builders, the folks that make our Second Live's more interesting, more beautiful and more productive. I saw almost all of the sessions and came away with a much better overview of the development potential within the virtual world and the feeling that try as I might, I'm not going to be able to resist delving deep into the code of the Metaverse - I'm a hacker at heart, and the weekends presentations by such notable developers and builders as Hiro Pendragon, Vymox Ming and Skidz Tweak and a chap from LibSecondlife.org who's name I forget, got me longing for the round the clock caffeine and code binges of years gone by...

Hiro Pendragon presenting at Life 2.0 More images here.

As we move out of the weekend, the lineup of events, sessions and panels looks hot.. and Metaversed will be there to cover individual panels that fit with the business oriented news we cover here. One such panel is entitled "Second Life as a Platform" and Im hoping it will give us some insight into where this is all heading. Stay tuned..

Some excitement is starting to build as details emerge of Linden Lab's plans to incorporate a new type of building tool within Second Life that will make the rapidly expanding world more compatible with other 3D environments and open the design doors to more sophisticated and standardized tools.

Tao Takashi, who's recent chance conversations with a Quarl Linden has lead to the growing buzz says "it might mean that creating these sculptured prims is not for everybody. I guess the main way would be to use a 3D program and export it and this would mean also that more learning will go into making these things. At least you can do it with free tools aswell, such as Blender, so no money is involved. Additionally texturing such a prim might be more difficult than as it is now as there aren’t separate faces anymore but you’d need to do real 3D mapping as you do with 3D programs. So all in all it might raise the bar for some."

The technical details are a little beyond my basic knowlege, but the end result should be a much more flexible, mature and standardized system for building objects in Second Life that will at once make it harder for lesser talented builders to work with as well as make what can be done infinitely more complex, beautiful and useful. In answer to the question of why Sculpties, or Sculpted Prims, the names for the new forms, are being used, the Wiki page says:

Because there are a myriad of existing tools for handling images. Image compression, streaming, progressive loading, and animation are all well-explored problems. For example - we could create a quicktime stream which fades from one sculpt texture to another - attached to a sculpted prim, the prim would "morph" from one shape to the other. Or, as another example - it would be easy to have a flash animation generate a sculpted prim - and when a resident touches a spot on its surface, the shape could wiggle and ripple appropriately. This is the direction we are headed.

So as you can see the scope of possibilities this change will make could be immense.

Dr Dobb's has announced details of the line up and schedule for the Life 2.0 Second Life Developer Summit to be held inworld from 28th April to 4th May this year. The event will kick off with an 8hr Linden Scripting Language (LSL) weekend bootcamp dubbed "LSL University" and then continue on for four days of panel discussions featuring the brightest thinkers in SL development.

Topics include:

• SL as a platform
• 3D UI innovation
• Transactions and v-commerce security
• SL based games development

And good news for those that either can't make it, or just prefer to observe: You can grab the whole content from Life 2.0 by registering for the event on the site.

I wouldn't miss the LSL bootcamp for the world, but then Mrs 57 Miles is expecting to give birth around that time so lets just hope hes late :)

On any given day you can find a half dozen articles in the mainstream press, and a dozen more blog posts that could loosely be described as introductions or primers on Second Life. One of the best I've read is John Jainschigg's essay that focuses on the development possibilities in the Metaverse.

Wasn't this the kind of thing that was being said of MUDs in the early '90s? Didn't some of us, to our later embarrassment, even join in the cheerleading for LambdaMOO and VRML and Virtus Walkthrough? What reason is there to think that Second Life is going to achieve anything more than those technologies did? The simple answer is that it already has. Merely as a gallery of architectural and conceptual and electronic art, Second Life justifies its existence. Go and see what people have built. It's pretty amazing.

As a hacker, the possibilities and opportunities to create in SL have me attending class after class after virtual class trying to get up to speed with the way it all works. Im no genius coder, but Im not to shabby either. From a coders point of view SL is indeed a paradise.

The Electric Sheep Company's 3Pedia /a> ideas factory should launch later this week if they get enough submitted ideas. Jerry Paffendorf says they have around 30 so far and are appealing for Metaverse enthusiasts and entrepreneurs to get them to 100.

IBM launched a "Codestation" for developers today in Second Life. Universities like Rockcliffe, where I've been picking up a ton of information and education just either got a major competitor, or a fantastic resource. I'd say they got the latter, according to the InformationWeek piece linked above IBM will be making code objects available from a library, inviting developers to contribute and encouraging collaboration. There's even a pavilion for technical presentations and a neat sounding maze where developers can build and race robots!

It's very encouraging to see this kind of investment in the development community, it can only signal good things to come...