Friday 29 April 2011

Opensim: Finding open metaverse grids...

With SecondLife in slow decline and the open metaverse growing it is hard to understand why the third party viewer developers are not working to help users find the grids that already exist. Moreover, we know new grids are in preparation and due to come online soon but unless they get the kind of advertising and exposure that Avination  recently got they will be hard pushed to get any notice at all as more and more new grids come on line. What I have argued for in the past is for the third party viewer developers to take a lead and do more with the grid list to help users to find more grids and the operators to gain extra exposure right where it would get the most notice, in the viewer itself.

Linden Lab's own viewer, the much promoted and maligned Viewer 2, has no grid list for obvious reasons. LL are not going to help their competitors but the best known third party viewers do support the grid list. The problem is that, while they do often give support to new server features, they don't actually support the open metaverse by promoting it. Most offer a hand full of pre-configured grids on their list but it is left to the user to add their own favourites and, while it's not that hard to add to the list, many potential recruits to the open metaverse would stumble at this point or just connect to those grids the viewer developers have chosen simply because they don't know of any others. This, of course, leaves out the many grids not favoured and, from what I have been reading, popular viewers like Phoenix are being particularly selective. And worse still, their are viewers being made available by the commercial grids that naturally are biased in favour of their own grid and, perhaps, SecondLife. Once again, competitive interest has lead to a raft of viewers that appear to cold shoulder the rest of the open metaverse.

Now, there can be other reasons to release a viewer like the need to support home grown features on the grid server. However, all viewers are essentially based on Linden Lab's viewer code and will be using the grid list feature first released in the Hippo viewer to support Opensim so it's hard to fathom why viewers like Imprudence, which is targeted at a wider audience, has been so slow to upgrade in the very area that would be most supportive. In fact we now see commercial interests like Kitely bypassing the login process altogether by inviting their customers to download a small application that takes control of their viewer regardless of the make. Kitely  makes it easy just to click a button to activate the user's viewer and log them in to their grid as if it were the only one that existed, SecondLife excluded too.

The old MeerKat grid manager

As far back as January 2010 I asked on the Imprudence forum if they might improve the gird list manager and make it possible for owners to add their grid to a database via a web page so that the viewer automatically populates the grid list. I thought that when users open their viewer they could use a search option either on the login screen or in the grid manager to scan the database in various categories. This, I argued, would keep the grid list up to date and save users having to find grid addresses to add themselves and, at the same time, allow owners to get exposure for their grids by adding them to the listing page on the web possibly with a description and even a logo. How great would that be to open your viewer and search for places to visit?

At the time I posted about this to the Imprudence forum I was told by one of the developers they would look into it later when other, more pressing, work had been done. One year on it hasn't happened but I did see a new post on the forum recently which indicated they were working on it. In response to a request to be added to their grid list a new grid operator, AvWorlds, was told their grid details had been added to a Kokua issue tracker list so they will be included on a new web site that was planned. From what I gathered the viewer will call on the database to keep the viewer list up to date just as I had originally suggested  but this is still in the works and probably will have to wait until the Kokua (SL viewer 2 compatible) viewer is finally released. Even then, the grid list improvements probably will be way down the list of priorities and the list may still not actually be searchable.

From my point of view, and no doubt that of grid operators, a searchable grid list would be the single most helpful advance in third party viewers when it comes to supporting the open metaverse and yet catering to SecondLife users or individual commercial interests still seems to get priority treatment. Imprudence, and MeerKat from the Metaverse Foundation before it, did give support but in recent times Imprudence devs seem to be struggling with uncertain priorities and a degree of burnout. MeerKat, which discontinued, had unique features some of which found their way into the Imprudence viewer but some features got quietly ignored such as the method of teleporting from SecondLife to Opensim grids and back. Even now people will argue that the inter-grid teleport feature is superceded by hypergrid and so it probably is but hypergrid doesn't actually permit teleports to SecondLife. However, with the advancement of Aurora sim and the release of Astra viewer from the team who originally developed MeerKat we are seeing both teams giving some support to Aurora Sim features such as variable sized regions so perhaps Astra devs will look at the grid list again. A really useful feature of it was the ability to store different names and password to associate with different grids.

This is what I mean by mixed priorities though. All third party developers must follow Linden Labs policy on TPVs and, enevitably, they will give priority to new secondLife features in viewer 2 which, unfortunately, was developed by a team of egocentric clowns known as 80/20 whose idea of what a viewer should be was something akin to a web browser and a cluttered mess of popup menus with thumbnails, icons and all manner of pointless gibberish that would appeal to Facebook users - so they hoped. But read how 80/20 saved SecondLife for yourself. Fortunately, the third party viewer developers seem to have heard the universal disaproval for the UI display, even if Linden Labs ignores it,  and are putting in great effort to disentangle the clutter from it. It seems to be getting priority treatment though while features needed by Opensim users are being pushed on the back burner.

I just hope Imprudence and Astra devs will look away from SecondLife for a moment and ask themselves what they can do for Opensim and the free metaverse that would be really helpful. A searchable grid list and stored identities would be something a lot of us would thank them for but I wouldn't hold my breath to see it any time soon.

For a current grid list check this out http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/statistics/april-2011-opensim-growth-statistics/

15 comments:

  1. Hi Gaga,

    I agree with you that many grids have a hard time attracting users because of lack of viewer support. That is partly why Kitely decided to create its plugin. We needed a way to enable people to use their viewers of choice without having to wait for the cooperation of the viewers' developers.

    I therefore think your post misrepresents our intentions and what the Kitely plugin actually does. The plugin doesn't take over a user's viewer. It simply allows people to automatically log into a Kitely world, using their viewer of choice, by pressing a button on the Kitely site.

    Installing the Kitely plugin doesn't prevent you from continuing to access other grids using the existing login methods: SLURLs, manual login via viewers, etc.

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  3. Hi Ilan

    I'm sorry if you thought I misrepresented Kitely's intentions and I do understand why you needed to use an application to by-pass the login process. Certainly, the one click option from your web site makes it very easy to launch a viewer and open it straight into a Kitely sim. There is nothing wrong with that in itself but it did strike me as yet another way in which the open metaverse looses focus in the minds of potential users.

    I hope Kitely will be part of the wider metaverse and not become an isolated walled garden. Avination promotes it's own viewer and so too dose InWorldz and a number of others so I did make some points about all of this being counter productive in promoting the Open Metavesre. My main argument though was focused on the grid manager inside the viewers and the need for a searchable list in which all grids can promote themselves.

    I hope you will offer a grid address so we can login to Kitely sims from the viewer once you implement other ways to register avatar names?

    Gaga

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  4. Hi Gaga,

    We believe in openness and want Kitely to eventually become part of the HyperGrid so keeping it as a walled garden would be quite counter productive for us.

    We intend to provide a grid address that can be used to login to Kitely sims once our system has the capability to launch and setup sims as part of the grid login process. It is currently limited to doing so as part of the "Enter World" process that is initiated from our website.

    I hope this helps clarify our intentions a bit :-)

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  5. this is a rough one, a searchable grid. not sure of what any way is possible for that. independent grids are more like websites than Second Life sims there is this:
    http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Grid_List

    but it is self-administered and i bet way out of date. heck Enclave Harbour is somewhere on the OpenSim site but i can't even find it now!

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  6. The latest Imprudence Experimental saves usernames/passwords on a per grid basis. Apparently there will also be support for a protocol called hop that allows you to populate the grid list from something akin to a url -- see recent tweets from Armin Weatherwax. I don't understand the SL/OpenSim issue -- LL closed their end so it's a non-starter for the present. The SL Viewer 2 actually does have a grid list you can enable though I've no idea whether it can be populated with OpenSim grids.

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  7. Gaga --

    Here's my list of all the public grids that were reporting usage statistics in April (SpotOn3D did not release any numbers, and OpenLifeGrid has never released numbers, but otherwise it's pretty complete).

    http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/statistics/april-2011-opensim-growth-statistics/

    We review this every month, near the 15th, and update all the grid information.

    This is a list of the public grids, where anyone can create an account. It doesn't cover private grids, or semi-private ones that are open to HG visitors but only the owners have accounts.

    -- Maria

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  8. Thanks for the tips Anonymous

    I will check out the latest Imp' experimental. I will also have to look at V2 again. I hardly ever use it since I prefer Kerstin's TPV but I think the grid list on LL's V2 only lists server clusters on SecondLife grid.

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  9. Hi Maria

    Thanks for the link. I added it to the end of the article as click through to get an current grid list.

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  10. Gaga --

    I also have a couple of other lists, showing maturity ratings of grids, hypergrid accessibility, languages, etc...:

    http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2011/02/opensim-grid-info/

    -- Maria

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  11. hey! fix your twitter profile URL to this blog (and use twitter with your blog to alert dopes like me!) =)

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  12. It would be nice if the viewers would support some generic slurl format that indicates the grid, region and position. That would make things much easier...

    Click - Poof - Gone!

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  13. Oh hi Blue!

    Bit late with this reply, lol

    Yeah, he slurl format would be good so long as I can search.

    Anyway, I noticed you submit patches to core Opensim. Good on you!

    Are you still in the grid we met at?

    Gaga

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  14. No. Lately, I have been doing OpenSim development and catching up on some RL for a while :D.

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  15. Ah well, Blue. Keep up the good work and I hope to catch up with you again some time.

    *smiles*

    Gaga

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