Aurora Sim Security: a Mirror World

Aurora sim has been advancing at break-neck pace since I last wrote about it and, with the release of 0.4, the platform now supports IWC (Inter Worlds Connector) in grid mode enabling travellers to teleport between any Aurora-based grid. To bring more compatibility between Aurora and Opensim, on which it is based, Revolution Smythe (lead coder of Aurora team) has released a bridging module too which enables Opensim users to Hypergrid to Aurora sims and back. Even the problem of porting content back and forth now seems to have been solved since before anything brought to Aurora couldn't be taken back to Opensim. It's breathtaking really to think how far the project has progressed in so short a time given that Opensim has taken four years so far. In just ten months Aurora has reached a state of advanced Alpha but security-wise it is, in fact, already far in advance of Opensim. For me it is almost too much and too fast to really grasp all the concepts. But there is a strangeness about Aurora that draws you in. It's like science fiction and everything you wanted in a virtual world unfolding before your eyes. Makes you feel like a stranger in a strange land.

Gaga joins the meeting on Nova grid. Revolution Smythe is the guy with the spiky blue hair but don't be fooled by appearances. Rev is a genius and a frantic coder with a knowledge of Open sim and Aurora second to none.

Revolution Smythe admits to not being a fan of Hypergrid since he considers it seriously insecure and IWC is intended to improve the security but, in any event, a lot more Opensim grid owners will be thankful for the HG bridge regardless of the security issues and we can expect more connection as a result. The Aurora team have said in their founding statement that they want to remain compatible with Opensim as far as is possible and the HG bridge will help to ensure that. Of course, there is a lot more to Aurora sim than HG or IWC and, with the decision to put Open Simulator project under the direction of the Overte Foundation, more cooperation between the projects is expected too. An example is the recent inclusion of the llCastRay(), a patch that will help improve the shooting of bullets, etc.

Opensim was developed under a BSD license which allows proprietary commercial use so other projects can be built on top of it and even forked versions of the platform which includes InWorldz and Openlife grids and, of course, Aurora Sim itself. However, the GPL license under which TPV (Third party Viewers) are coded does not allow derivative, proprietary commercial use and this was the reason for the six-month rule where contributors could not submit patches if they had been working on viewer code recently. Linden Labs are the owners of the Second Life viewer code and allow TPV coders to create their own style of viewer with added features. It is often said Opensim server code was back-ported from the viewer code but this is not strictly true since the platform code is all original and largely based on guess work about how the LL code works. But, I digress. Hypergrid is unique to Opensim and, apart from a brief period of collaboration with the Opensim HG protocol, Linden Labs has shown no interest since and, unsurprising really, the security - or lack of it - is a major factor.

Regular weekly community meetings are held on Nova grid which is Aurora based too. Not long ago just a few people came to these meetings but suddenly the numbers are growing.

There has been a lot of debate about HG security and most people are agreed it just can't be guaranteed in an open source project where anyone can make changes that are designed to steal content and infringe copyright. Revolution Smythe has stated the HG protocol is fundamentally flawed. Even by setting the Outward bounds permission to null which prevents content from leaving the grid in which it is supplied is only an attempt to plug the hole and the fact we see Avination - a grid owned and run by Opensim core developer Melanie Thielker -  has not yet opened their grid to HG demonstrates that commercial grid owners are still nervous about it. For grid owners who believe in a more Utopian Metaverse then the current flavour of HG is probably sufficient to satisfy them. They do, after all, share content freely and most would prefer an IP rights form of license anyway. However, business interests are growing more aware of the potential of virtual world platforms and they demand a high level of security for their virtual creations knowing content theft is a seriously damaging problem.

IWC takes a different approach than HG to security. HG works by calling content data from one sim to another. IWC, on the other hand, connects two grids together for the visitor. It is like the traveller has not really left their home grid and, though this is a very abstract concept and indeed complex, it actually offers greater security. What you appear to bring home you don't actually for it never leaves the grid in which it is supplied unlike HG where it does. And yet, you bought the content and have access to it, apparently, at home. Another way to describe IWC and, in deed, Aurora sim is to look at it as an integrated network of grids and sims. With HG in OS everything is separated. With IWC in AU everything is networked.

HG also allows avatar appearance to be called from the traveller's home grid which partly touches on the IWC concept but if you are allowed to take away clothing, skins and other body attachments inevitably they can be copied on the home grid. IWC calls the clothing, etc from the supplier's grid when ever you wear something that you bought or got supplied while travelling. The act of visiting and buying made your avatar part of the grid, or grids, you visit. Effectively, your content is spread all over the Metaverse but it looks like you have it all in one place - in your inventory which is not strictly true.

Mirror World...

Revolution Smythe is the inventor of IWC but even he admits it's still not a perfect solution but is much more secure than Hypergrid. Ideally, he told me, he would want to push to something else like Mesh Networking. With Mesh networks you are looking at the Metaverse grids a nodes which communication with each other. Each node is selfish and holds onto what its got but must act as a relay and collaborate to propagate data in the network. In other words it holds onto the content created there while sending data about the content over the network and relaying data from other nodes at the same time. Again, this is very complicated to understand, but perhaps a better way to look at it is if the nodes are like mirrors reflecting data. No matter where the traveller goes they will be visiting a node that carries data unique to their needs, to them, to their inventory. They are a part of the whole and never really own anything unless they created it. Content thieves can not steal a reflection.

What this could all mean for the future should not be under estimated. If Revolution Smythe and the Aurora team keep up at the rate they are progressing I am convinced they will have a platform that is so advance and secure that it's conceivable even Second Life could safely open it's vast asset servers  to the Aurora system if, of course, they both adopt the Mesh Networks concept. This would enable users who own large inventories which they have invested a lot of money in to use it anywhere in the network and finally Second Life residents would be able to travel. It would be good for Linden Labs and their merchants, and it would expand the open Metaverse creating a vast commercial market for virtual content. Linden Labs would just have to change their business model from renting virtual land (Sims) to providing data services.

It's quite something to see the clones of Rev come marching in!

1001 Bots...

Changing the subject to finish on, at the last weekly meeting on Nova grid attended by team developers and supporters, Revolution Smythe demonstrated the spawning of bots. It was quite a sight to see hundreds of bots which were all clones of Rev. Skidz, a core member, has also produced another great video which I am showing here. 1001 bots on a sim is quite an achievement!

Now, what would you do with all those bots?

Dose the epic battle for Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings come to mind?

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Aurora Sim: A Brave New Virtual World

When I first read about Aurora sim back towards the end of 2010 when the project was first initiated I was impressed by the long list of improvements over core Opensim that the development team, headed by Revolution Smythe (Rev to his friends), promised. I was not only impressed but more than that, I was quietly intrigued. However, I remained skeptical that such a small team could deliver on their substantial promises considering that core Opensim, on which Aurora is based,  has been in development for four years, and while improved greatly in the last two releases, still lacks so much that is taken for granted in SecondLife. Aurora team basically set out to turn Opensim on it's head and reconstruct it from the ground up.

Coming from a background in role play as I do the visual experience and ability to immerse one's self into a virtual world are very important to me. I want a high degree of realism which is still by far and away lacking in SecondLife. I want the kind of quality graphics and responsiveness one gets from games running on PC and Xbox but without the actual game they are selling of course. In short, I want a virtual world that is broader in scope, has better scripting and features that support the themes gamers and role players try to build for themselves and their fellow players. What I came to realize as I got more into the work the Aurora team were doing was that they are game focused and this got my interest up. Revolutions Smythe explained to me that, in the fall of 2009 before he started Aurora, he built a game off of what was the base of Aurora today. The problem was the viewer software couldn't handle it, he said. Fortunately, the Imprudence viewer developers agreed to collaborate and, by changing the licence slightly from that which Opensim uses, Imprudence/Kokua and Aurora Sim became sister projects in October 2010.

Aurora's developers set out with a broad set of ideas, the aim was to complete all that was missing from Opensim and the desire to bring about change that was not lead by developments in SecondLife alone. They replaced the Robust server, and underlining communication framework altogether. They rebuilt the scripting engine adding support for more functions including osFunctions and aaFunctions, and they are adding support for more scripting languages too including C# and VB. But there is so much more. "We are working on some advanced features," Revolution Smythe told me, "When we finish the generic properties module this will allow new properties to be added to objects very easily, such as the Cone of Silence (see video below), which disallows the viewer from seeing things inside the 'object'. The module will send the information about all new properties it has to the viewer and the viewer will have a new panel in the Build tools window, which will show all of the properties, so that they can be edited easily.  Its annoying to go add each and every property manually into the viewer." he went on, "This would allow an easy way to add things to the viewer, and in which any version of the viewer supporting the module would be able to see it. I fully intend to let the sim designer change settings so that the viewer sees exactly what they wanted to show like with setting parcels and altitudes for windlight (not LightShare(tm)). We have already added new settings like Region/Estate in Imprudence and we will add the ability to turn off the minimap and avatar name tags so that RPGs and things can run smoother (no cheating). You just have to lock the clients to Imprudence only which is easy with the viewer ban module (included)."

The unpredictable lady, Aurora Borealis dances in the night sky while Gaga day dreams about the shape of virtual worlds to come.

Aurora 1.0 was released early in 2011 and I reported my experience with it here at the time and, accepting it was a pre-alpha release, it really didn't do more than prove the concept and show that the team were in business. The next release a month or so later, Aurora 2.0, was a good general tidy up of the code with multiple bug fixes and something completely new, variable sized regions!

Looking towards a single 65k sq mt region from a massive
var-region on an Aurora grid up to 256 times the area.

Opensim has mega-regions which are clusters of sims where one sim is the parent and the rest are attached as child sims thus each region is still consuming server resources separately while with variable sized regions now under development in Aurora sim, or var-regions for short, they simply expand a single region up to 256 times a standard SL region area. That means that just one region is consuming server resources and, where it would take a lot of sims to build a really large space using the mega-region protocol, var-regions can expand to create truly massive spaces that would take hundreds of Opensim regions in a mega-cluster to create the same area. Aurora is already up to four times faster than Opensim. Also, by taking advantage of HTTP Textures, objects like buildings come into view more quickly too so increased performance like this lends considerable support to rendering such vast spaces.

Terraforming my Aurora standalone test sim was fast and smooth, better than I ever experienced in SecondLife or
even Opensim. I shaped equal to 3 standard sims on this 1024X1024 var-region in little over 5 minutes. The 
distant land is left flat to show the sheer scale of it. All that on single server too!

On May 21st Aurora 3.0 was released just seven months into the project which is both a testament to the concept and the sheer determination of the developers to make rapid progress. Windlight features have been enhanced and they surpass Opensims's Lightshare. You can see further than one region away. Groups, Profiles, Abuse reports, Search and so many of the things taken for granted in SecondLife and still absent or dysfunctional in Opensim are now working including more responsive land editing, an integrated backup system, an integrated combat system and true server side bots.

A Role Player's dream come true!

Imagine a city that builds itself with all the effects of traffic and the bustle of city life. Parts might be degrading while new parts are in construction, even city lights and neons flickering on and off, and transport hurtling along while everywhere bots appear and busy themselves as the anonimous populace. The nearest comparison is Sim City but this is something else. It is a living, breathing backdrop to a game world where role players can pursue their storylines in a realistic setting that surpasses anything you could ever expect from SecondLife or Opensim.

Imagine building the dark cityscape of Blade Runner on an Aurora 
sim where punks rub shoulders with Hara Krishas and replicants
are on the lose. Above you see the Gorean city of Ar on 
Role Play Worlds grid which Gaga visited last year. Now do this
build with the city builder module and see it come to life!

A plug-in like the city builder and bot engine will elevate virtual worlds closer to the experience envisaged in prophetic Sci-Fi novels like Neromancer and Snowcrash. One can imagine Blade Runner set in an Aurora sim world or truly astronomical spaces for role play games similar to Eve and other space opera genre. To that end Aurora has support for controlling the viewer, as mentioned above, to over ride settings so the visitor sees the world and interacts with it as the designer intended. The physics engine, ODE, though inferior to Havok, has received special attention and a lot of work giving more support for vehicles. Movement is smoother for avatars too including a smaller, lighter capsule that moves more realistically. Then there is the gravity effects that can be centred and have everything revolve round it. It will be a Star Trek fan's dream come true.

Improving Physics...

Demo of the bots on an Aurora sim 

Improving the physics are a key objective of the Aurora devs. It's not enough to be able to walk, run and fly. Vehicles have to function well too and be responsive to the sort of environmental effects associated with the real world and even the distant reaches of space. In SecondLife they have Havok which Linden Labs can afford the licence for. Opensim is limited to ODE without the kind of improvements done by the Aurora devs. It works and that is the best that can be said for it. The Opensim devs take the view it is for those using Opensim to obtain the licenses and upgrade the physics. They just don't see it as important as other things like Mesh and Hypergrid. In deed, Opensim devs, for all their work and dedication, they just don't appear to see Opensim as anything different than SecondLife even though time and again I have heard it said, Opensim is different. No, it's not. It has the same look and feel, too many of the same quirks, and yet is lacking some very basic stuff that is actually useful, and, after four years in the making, Opensim still doesn't function as well as SecondLife. On the other hand Aurora devs do see Aurora as different but they still want to retain and improve what is good and useful. They want to do better than SecondLife. They want to take it beyond the familiar paradigm so that virtual worlds really capture the imagination and lead to deeper immersion. There is no denying that physics remain a stumbling block but the Aurora team do recognize that good physics are an essential component of the core server code and, not to be beaten by the power of corporate money, they are considering more options.

Aurora devs think very little of ODE even though they have done a lot of work to improve it, work that should have been done by Opensim devs had they looked at Opensim as something more than a social/educational platform. It is one of the founding aims of Aurora devs to improve the physics and, recently, I was in on a discussion in which Navidia PhysX was mentioned. From what I gathered, Revolution Smythe has already done work to integrate PhysX but there was still a lot to do and another dev that has been working with PhysX separately was able to point Rev to new code sources and testing facilities. So the outcome of the conversation gave me reason to believe Aurora will move to a new physics engine before too long or they will continue to improve ODE far beyond it's present capability.

 
Project Wonderland Capabilities from Nicole Yankelovich on Vimeo.
The Cone of Silence implemented on Aurora sim is basically the same as Wonderland seen in the video and I suggested to Rev the cone might also block the viewer from seeing inside the object too which would give privacy on mature sims and serve to increase realism in the virtual world as well. Rev agreed and said he thought it can be done but we will have to wait a bit longer for that one. Perhaps they will change to name to Cone of Privacy too.

Apart from the problem of physics there is also the question of compatibility with Opensim. On the original features list they did state their aim to remain compatible as far as possible but, at present, anything ported to Aurora can't be ported back and, where initially hypergrid teleports did seem possible, they now aren't. The devs decided to disable HG on the premis that until HG stops being incompatible with itself (there are several versions all mutually incompatible with one another) there is no way it can be made to work properly in Aurora. However, the devs have now introduced their own version of HG called Inter World Connector or IWC.

Inter World Connector...

IWC, they say, will be more secure than Hypergrid since security receives particular attention throughout the system. The details of IWC are still not clear at this time but what I gathered was that IWC generates a secure URL on the fly and there are varying levels of trust between grids that are both user and grid operator settable. These levels of trust range from full trust (level 4), where inventory can be sent to other grids with the avatar, down to nothing gets out (level 0). So, where HG has the Outward bounds setting in 7.1 it would appear Aurora has more options although I have no information yet what they might be. One assumes travelling avatars will keep their appearance in the same way that HG works where the skin, shape and clothes, etc, are called from the avatar's home grid so are not downloaded to the visited grid and can't be copied. In Opensim 7.1 grid owners can turn HG on but prevent items acquire on their grid from leaving it while the avatar can still travel with their same name and appearance. I can only imagine IWC will work in a similar fashion but with extra permissions. However, Rev has said it wont be compatible with HG.

Now, I have noticed that many people that are interested in Aurora are concerned about compatibility since they are, for the most part, familiar and probably comfortable with the way Hypergrid works even if they are less than happy with the function of Opensim itself. In deed, Hypergrid is not only an essential component of Opensim for many but without the means to travel via inter-grid teleports it's hard to see how any virtual worlds platform can ever lay claim to be the Apache of the emerging 3D web. Many users are running their own standalone sims attached to grids like OSgrid. Others run grids of their own too. In fact most grids run on core Opensim with a few exceptions like InWorldz and Openlife which have developed their own forked version so are probably too far removed to ever be able to participate in inter-grid travel anyway. If IWC is going to be incompatible with HG then, for many, that will be a serious drawback to adopting Aurora. However, when asked at a recent meeting on the Aurora test grid, the lead developer, Rev did say he could make a bridging module but he didn't say he would. In any event IWC has yet to be fully implemented so currently it remains an open question. But it is an important issue for many, me included.

Okay, so I want to show off the Trekie-style top again. I made it complete with my very own Aurora Sim logo specially for this photo shoot of Gaga on my standalone. Shame about the hair though but I don't have any full perms to download presently. Anyway, I want to make this a tribute to the brilliant coders at Aurora. 

Aurora is different in so many ways and yet remains open source. The developers are not content to build a bare nuts & bolts platform. They believe Opensim should have been more complete by now. All the devs have a long history in virtual worlds and started like most of us in SecondLife. They wanted better and brought their coding skills to Opensim in order change things and help build a truly open metaverse. Many have joined the Aurora team but still contribute to Opensim so there is still plenty of collaboration between the projects regardless of a parting of the ways. Most important to me is that they do seem to be listening to the community and, thankfully, they don't have to please any profit-hungry corporate overlords. They have similar views to the community and suffered the same treatment meted out by the blinkered mandarins that run Linden Labs. They tried hard to work with Opensim (and some still do) but the narrow focus thwarted their creative efforts to advance the code. They are visionaries and want more from a virtual world and they believe there is more to gain. My only worry is that while striving for perfection they don't lose sight of the hopes and dreams of the growing community that have already embraced the free Metaverse. If they throw the baby out with the bath water then Aurora risks becoming just another games engine. The socioeconomic model built by SecondLife is still part of the big picture while the virtual experience can and must improve. Connectivity is important too if the free metaverse is to thrive, and that requires a degree of compatibility in key areas especially content and avatar mobility across worlds. I have no doubt though that the Aurora team are on the right track and I believe the project will go far. And do it fast!

UPDATE [Aug 8th 2011] Aurora Sim has moved on considerably since the article above was publish. Currently we are using 4.1 which includes many bug fixes, improvemnets, IWC in grid mode and a Hypergrid Bridge module to connect with Open Sim grids. See more recent articles...

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Metrics: A Changing Metaverse

It was interesting to read  Hypergrid Business' monthly survey of the virtual worlds of the metaverse. SecondLife lost 41 regions while Opensim based grids collectively gained 1,102 for the top 40 grids. But HB is actually tracking 144 grids of which 80 report region counts. What is particularly interesting about these surveys is the picture it paints of the changing state of the metaverse which is in a real state of flux.

OSgrid and Kitely lead with significant gains in regions while  Avination, which rose so spectacularly in the early months of the year, lost regions and active users. InWorldz continued slow but steady growth and Meta7 closed due to legal issues. At the same time more grids came online. So it appears users are moving about a lot and new people are experiencing the free metaverse for the first time. The big loser of course is SecondLife which, while losing 41 regions might not seem much, has lost 500 regions in the past year.

There are so many options now compared to a year ago and the cost of setting up has dropped significantly too so it's no wonder Linden Labs, which still charges $1000 to set up a region and monthly tier of $295, is losing out. SecondLife still enjoys high traffic compared to Opensim based grids but no one really knows what the free metaverse traffic figures are. SL can report their traffic as it's all under one roof but the free metaverse is a partially disconnected cluster of small grids with no overseeing server to collect data.

Gaga checking a club out in Avination. Yeah, the dance pole works!

Hypergrid helps to connect grids but a lot of the grid owners keep it disabled to prevent content theft and, of course, partly to keep their residents on their own grid. Commercial grids of course are in competition with each other and since they rely on renting sims to users they obviously have a vested interest to operate on the same business model as Linden Labs which means a walled garden approach. And yet, even that is not stopping users from moving about no more than Linden Labs can prevent it's residents discovering what is out there in the free metaverse.

With the release of Opensim 7.1 at the start of the month things could be about to change still more. With 7.1 there is greater security to prevent content theft while still allowing users to travel to other grids with their same name and appearance. Once someone has found a place to call home (virtual home) and enjoy the community it offers they are less likely to travel so much but with 7.1 the barriers to travelling are reduced. What you spent on fixing up your avatar, for instance, wont be limited to the grid you call home so you wont arrive at some grid you visit looking like crap and having to rush around trying to find freebies to get fixed up for the visit. Moreover, you wont necessarily have to spend any more money to look as good as you did at home. Avatars are vain - believe it!

On the other side of the coin you probably wont be able to take anything you buy with you when you leave a 7.1 grid either unless the owner has the Outward bounds permission set to allow it. Most commercial grids, if they upgrade to 7.1 probably wont allow it anyway but that's not to stop you visiting to attend an event such as a music gig or dance with friends and just hang out. You might want to attend a business meeting or an educational class. Perhaps you are a role player in some ancient theme like Romans or the fantasy realms of Elves, Steampunk, etc, etc. And you set out to interact in war or peace with a neighbouring grid that follows the same theme. It's really little different than teleporting to a neighbouring region in SecondLife. You just find yourself on another grid and can still look the same everywhere.

Role Players at Role Play Worlds grid

The owner of Avination, Melanie Thielker has gone on record saying she will enable hypergrid once the security is better and she said she would press for this earlier this year. As she is also one of the code contributors to Opensim then we have no reason to doubt her. But Avination has not yet adopted 7.1 so it remains to be seen if they will open up to the rest of the free metaverse. Certainly, if Avination dose I think they will benefit with increased traffic and, since Avination has a reputation already for gambling there is another reason to keep the door open. InWolrdz on the other hand is unlikely to become hypergrid enabled even if they could because they have chosen to fork off from the main branch and develop their own code on top of Opensim which means they may be too far removed to be compatible now. This may yet prove a mistake for them as the metaverse becomes more connected.

There are of course still limitations to Opensim which may not please people coming from SecondLife where they are use to most things working after a fashion. Most notable is physics which are still better in SL than OS simply because Linden Labs can afford the commercial licenses. Opensim is still limited to ODE which most developers regard as very basic. certainly, you see it's limitations when sailing a boat on Opensim-based grids which is clumsy at best. SecondLife has Havoc physics which is far superior but this could also be about to change with the rise of Aurora sim. In Fact a lot of things are going to change with Aurora sim!

Decent physics still give SecondLife the edge when it comes to sailing and sea battles

Even Hypergrid Business survey might have to change as a result of the advances in server code that is being rapidly developed by the Aurora team. Most notably, region sizes. You see, Aurora developers have managed to change the structure of regions which they call var-regions. These var-regions can be up to 256 times the size of a standard SL region. Unlike mega-regions in Opensim, which are clusters or child regions attached to a parent region in order to avoid the problem of border crossings, var-regions are just a single region that has been expanded up to 256 times the normal size. So, where Hypergrid Business collects data on total regions on grids this would be misleading in the future when looking at grids running Aurora sim code. On a Opensim grid if you see 256 regions you can certainly count them regardless if some are connected as mega-regions. On an Aurora-based grid you might see just one region and count it as one while, in fact, it covers the area of 256 regions. The metaverse is certainly changing.

I have a big article coming up later this week which is an in-depth review of Aurora sim that I have been working on for weeks so check back again soon. But I will leave you with video from Skidz Partz - one of the Aurora team - to get an idea of just what is on the metaverse horizon.

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/

Kitely: Virtual clouds over deep troubled waters

When I first read about Kitely I thought, what a great idea but the more I looked into it the less sure I became.

Kitely is an Israeli based start-up company financed out of the pockets of it's founders. They are leveraging the user ID system of Facebook to offer cloud-based virtual worlds to it's members and setting up your region is actually pretty easy once you download a small application from their web site. Then, after you login, you simply click a button and the apps calls up your viewer (assuming you have one installed) and you are into your very own region. No need to download anything. No set-up headaches. It's all done for you and you can start building and inviting friends right away.

At first I was reluctant because I didn't want to join Facebook but, apart from Maria of Hypergrid Business 's glowing report all I seem to read were somewhat negative comments about Kitely, mainly centred on the un-signed application and lack of a published TOS statement. But the apparent cheapness (which is probably not so cheap for any more than light use. See my breakdown further on) and it's ease of setup my curiosity got the better of me and I thought, what the hell I can always delete FB after I try Kitley out. So I went ahead and signed up with FB and visited the Kitely web site to download the application. My Norton firewall blocked it straight away because it was unsigned and deemed too new to risk. I had read about this so let it pass my anti-virus and set itself up. I will be absolutely honest now. It all went like a dream!

Kitely web site

First I clicked to enter Maria's sim and my  Imprudence viewer sprang to life called up by the Kitely application. It logged me in with my real life name and the sim rezzed super-quick. It really was happening faster than I expected for an Opensim world. There I stood fully dressed as my new avatar fit to begin my adventure. I started to walk expecting to waddle like a duck but not a bit of it! The sim downloaded an animation to my Imprudence viewer automatically and I was walking normal - perhaps a bit girly but it was a female walk. I toddled off to look around and rezzed a prim box to check that out - no problem, it was fast and efficient. Good stuff I thought and took back the prim (I don't like to litter in someone else's sim) then went to appearance and messed with my shape some to try that out. Fine,,, Perfect.

So, after a while I thought I should really leave now because here I stood for the first time ever with an avatar that bears my real name. What if someone comes along? Yeah, I thought. I best leave and so I did. I returned to the kitely site after closing my viewer and clicked something to get some credits. It told me my Facebook profile was not up to much since I didn't have a picture of myself and 20 real FB friends so all I got was 10 credits instead of the 50 I might have got otherwise. Anyway, so much for that, I clicked to create a sim and, my word! it was ready in, like, seconds or so it seemed. Up came my viewer and I was logging into my new Kitely sim.

Gaga at Maria's world pretendng to be a real world person

I was really quite excited even though I was now standing in the middle of a vast sea on a tiny island. But it was mine and I had gained it so quick I was just left dumb-struck. I just felt this whole thing was marvelous! So now I thought I would raise some land and try that out before doing a bit of quick building. I raised the land very quickly. It was not sluggish or jerky. Up it came and I smoothed it off but, before I could drop a prim on it, Bang! The viewer closed and that was that. I returned to the Kitely site and tried to re-open it in case I had just crashed but it told me my region had been suspended for lack of credits. Ten don't go far.

Having lost my credits and no way to buy any I thought to look at the Feedback which would be the start of my troubles. I saw a comment mentioning the same problems I had just come up against, lack of credits, no pic, no friends. And yet, the nice Mr Ilan was saying no problem, sorry about that, here is 600 credits so you can go right back and finish your trial. Let me have some of that, I thought! And posted a request. Now, what happens is Kitely uses a system for comments and feedback called "Get Satisfaction". Up came a box, I typed my request and it gave me choices of user ID. Now, with hindsight I should have click Facebook but usually with comment boxes it picks up my Google ID and I am so used to that I clicked to accept Google without really thinking. Big mistake! The damn thing posted my comment in my avatar name - Gaga Gracious!

I realized my mistake immediately and deleted the comment then went into a bit of a panic because I knew I might have connected my avatar name to my Facebook real ID, and so I had because when I checked my Google profile it suddenly showed my home location. I removed that and took my real picture off any profile I had it on in a flurry of activity trying desperately to cover my tracks, and all the while cursing Facebook.

Next I returned to Get Satisfaction to be sure that comment had been deleted and it immediately recognized me as Gaga. So I went off to dig around on the Get Satisfaction site to try an close the account. I got up the profile created for me and found I was due to receive daily emails from them. I clicked that off then thought to myself, this is outrageous! Get satisfaction had taken my Google ID, my email address and created an account with spam emails set on by default. So then I found a comment thread where some 90 people were asking to have their account closed. In fact, you can't close the account, you have to post a request and hope an admin dose it manually for you.

To cut the story short I am pleased to say the nice Mr Ilan got in touch and promised they would make updates to address the problems I encountered. He also said they would work on other ways to access Kitely that didn't involve Facebook so I have to thank Kitely for that and, well, as they said, it's a pre-beta test release and they value the feedback. Perhaps they should have foreseen the kind of problems I faced rather than giving themselves the task of damage limitation addressing these issues after the event answering a host of blog and forum complaints.

I can not fault the Kitely product in itself from what I have seen though. Few times have I ever entered an Opensim world and not experience problems or varying degrees of lag, as well as things taken for granted in SecondLife that just don't work on Opensim worlds but given that Opensim is still officially alpha code we have become use to it's failings while it continues to improve. Kitely manages to deliver a sim in super quick time and it runs very well. However, I don't personally think it will come that cheap if put to regular use on a daily basis. The way it works is that your region is called from the Amazon cloud and activated anytime you or a visitor wishes to access it and then it starts to cost you money. It costs you $0.20 for every user hour which doesn't sound a lot but adds up if you spend as much time as I do in my Opensim region or SecondLife (virtual worlds for people like me are very addictive!). I mean around 30 to 40 hours a week just for me! Even this though is not too bad on my own since it adds up to just $8 at most per week which is $32 a month and yet, if I am just working on content, I can still get a sim connected to OSgrid for as little as $10 a month. So now add a little traffic, say as many user hours again for casual visitors, and the cost has doubled. but, it's still not a lot of people.

Now, lets get serious and try to use a region to run a club or mall. Or maybe a role play game with players dropping in for averages of four hours every day. Multiply that by ten which makes a smallish game and the cost would quickly spiral upward. For example, in SL there is a general practice for role play sims to associate where one will send a raiding party to attack another sim (all done in the spirit of role play of course) and the raided sim returns the raid at a later time. This, typically, can involve as many as ten or more players fighting it out for some time but it may even end up involving captures and return negotiations to free prisoners. You think that doesn't happen? Well, I am involved in role play and I promise it dose, and, what's more, it can get even more involved on busy successful regions.

Charting the costs...

• Small store or home: 5 users clocking 50 hrs per week = $40 a month.

• Medium store or venue: 20 users clocking 200 hrs per week = $160 a month.

• Large store or club/RPG: 40 users clocking 400 hrs per week = $320 a month.

• Busy large store, club/RPG: 60 users clocking 600 hrs per week = $480 per month.

On the large store figure you are close to the monthly tier charge of  SecondLife  regions but I can't deny the fact that Linden Labs will charge that fee regardless if your sim sits empty or not. With Kitely you pay for what you use and that's it. Moreover, you don't have to find the $1000 setup fee LL charges so it's added value. Of course it could get more expensive than SL which doesn't seem likely but imagine regular spikes in traffic if you are running a music and dance venue. 60, 70 and 80 users, if Kitely can actually handle that sort of load, could start to clock a lot more hours and one would hope you are making serious money from the traffic to make it worth while.

On all the charges down to the Medium store figure you are still going to be better off in one of the established Opensim grids.  InWorldz will charge $75 a month and  Avination, $60. Even  Meta7 at $105 is still cheaper than Kitely on those user numbers and you wont be paying any setup fees in most Opensim grids either so Kitely looses that as a bonus to it's customers. And, in the short term at least, Opensim grids can offer more support since they have established customer services already and considerable content available not to mention established communities and well built sims and venues to visit.

For light use I definately think Kitely can offer a cost effective and valuable service given the speed and ease with which it is delivered. Typically, I think Facebook people might enjoy having the benefit of a virtual home they can fix up to their taste and have friends visit on occasion rather than relying on forums and text-based chat rooms, or even video conferencing, voice and web cam. Being able to walk  about virtually and emote realistic actions such has hugging, kissing and, well yes, even simulated sex too. I am not convinced though the vast majority of people can visualize themselves in the virtual setting let alone having any form of sexual encounter that way, or even manage the learning curve or embrace virtual worlds as anything more than a novelty. SecondLife has been around for near on ten years. It is perhaps the best known virtual world and yet it has never gained the kind of user base that Facebook has in half the time. Even now, SecondLife gets up to 10,000 hits a day on their web site and many do try it briefly so they are getting the people through. My view is that if the masses really wanted to use virtual worlds then SecondLife has been high profile enough for long enough to have attracted them and it hasn't so why should Kitely succeed where Linden Labs have so far failed?

Perhaps the short answer is that Facebook is basically a web site that offers a useful service. It doesn't require a viewer download or present any technical difficulty to the average person. Facebook provides a service to people engaged in real world activity. The vast majority are just that; real-world people happily net-working in that mind set. Now that is not to say some can't or wont try virtual worlds but the fact is the vast majority know about them but haven't bothered to any great extent. Perhaps it all comes down to mind set anyway. The majority want to socialize and make contacts in the real world while a significant number will happily play in challenge-based virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft purely in a gaming mind set just as others will prance about in front of their Kinect or Wii screen at home. In contrast virtual worlds like SecondLife probably only really appeal to people that live in their minds anyway. Call them actors or the true avatars if you like. I don't think the masses could or would ever want to see themselves as anything other than a real person in a real world.

For those real world people who might venture into virtual worlds given the ease of Kitely they probably wont have the intense interest or dedicated a serious user might have but I am sure they might have more modest needs so I guess the cost might not be so bad for them. Perhaps an occasional business meeting or for schools and collages it might be cost-effective too but I don't go with the argument a Kitely sim would be great for content makers to use as a secure workshop since people with that level of knowledge and dedication to virtual worlds are probably already using sim on a stick or have Opensim on their computer to use securely and at no cost at all. For others Opensim is already cheap enough since you can get a hosted region connected to OSgrid for as little as $10 a month and it's always up and can even be a cheap to run showcase for your work or even a store selling your stuff. In any event I think most would rather know what their bill is going to be from one month to the next and, since Kitely charges for time and user numbers, there is no way to be certain what your bill could be but that's not to say it wont appeal to vendors selling clean PG-rated stuff. Kitely, you see, is tied into the user TOS of the registration processes they leverage and, in Facebook, that excludes Adult content. But, lets face it, mature and adult content is a major part of virtual worlds and their trade.

We have seen Kitely has already nailed it's policy position to the mast while not yet producing a full TOS statement. Currently, like Blue Mars that has largely failed, Kitely has banned mature content. On the other hand, SecondLife is more advanced and has market lead including a degree of tolerance for mature content and a huge content base in place. It is already well known Linden Labs has it's eye on the Facebook minions. It would take very little for Linden Labs to upstage Kitely since all they need is a similar plug in to launch the viewer and LL is in a good position to strike while the iron is hot too. SecondLife has existing traffic, a large user group on Facebook and a viewer that has been re-worked (much to the annoyance of the majority of existing residents) to appeal to Facebook people. And, lets face it, what Kitely boils down to is a cloud server farm and a plug in to launch a viewer which still has to be downloaded anyway!

Would Linden Labs serve sims from a cloud? Hell yes, I'm sure they would if the potential revenue generated looked like it was worth it. I mean, how long would it take LL to develop a plug in given their huge financial resources? I doubt for one minute that LL has not taken a look at Kitely's methods and business model. Nor do I think other Opensim hosting business' are blind to Kitely's operation either. SpotOn3D and Sim-OnDemand have been serving sims from a cloud for some time as well.

I think Kitely has a lot of work to do - and learn even - so perhaps I am judging them harshly but I think they are demonstrating a degree of naivety if they think their policy of shutting out mature content and forcing disclosure of identity will work for them. Kitely is another walled garden that just happens to use Facebook member identity and boldly imposes their own values on potential customers. In that sense they have gone one step further than Linden Labs who still allow alias names in place of real names and thereby actively guards people's privacy. Anyone that is aware of the furore generated by the Red Zone controversy in SecondLife will know right away that many people in virtual worlds have more than one alt name and, for the most part, do so for legitimate reasons - often simply differing role play characters. It's actually a common thing in virtual worlds and it's taken as an assault on privacy if anyone attempts to link alts to a single IP address or a real world name.

SecondLife was not built on any notion of social networking. It was built on the art of making virtual content for money that served all comers with both passive and mature content. This included also a lot of escort venues, red light clubs, BDSM, etc, etc, and some seriously aggressive role play thrown in while making it possible to create a degree of realism that made it interesting and enjoyable. That's why there is a viewer called Restrained Life and the Emerald viewer was so successful with it's bouncing boobs feature. A lot of what SecondLife is about is pure unashamed erotic escapism and even Linden Labs has tried to curtail it some after they started letting kids on the main grid and putting feelers out to the FaceBook community but, while it might be making some headway into FaceBook territory, it is loosing people to Opensim grids which, to put it frankly, are leaving SL because they are sick of LL's ever more restrictive Terms & Conditions. That is to say, paying high prices to Linden Labs and being controlled by the perceived values that suit their current business model.

People want freedom. Not to abuse it although a tiny minority always will regardless of your TOS policy. People can have more freedom by running their own server and sims and, with hypergrid, they can still be connected and not isolated behind garden walls paying good money and lip service to someone elses values. This is what Kitely is going to come up against and it wont be limited to that either. They will need content sellers and the best still resist leaving SecondLife while those that have, well, yes, many sell mature content!

Opensim is still not out of alpha and yet Kitely appears to be selling it as beta software fit for use on a par with SecondLife and established Opensim grids, most of which are advancing the software to improve stability. Teleports are, as yet, impossible and so too are border crossings because their apps is forcing a by-pass of the viewer login process which means there is no grid as such, just a collection of standalones called from the Amazon cloud. Presently they demand fall identity disclosure through FaceBook, picture of self and 20 real friends. And they don't allow mature content. Add to all that the possibility of running up a huge bill while your not looking and I have to say I don't think it will work out that well for more than light use. But, in all honesty, it is too early to tell and I think the jury is still out.

Traffic: Opensim Grids Up. Second Life Down!

Trying to get an accurate picture of traffic to Opensim-based grids is pretty hard so I always look forward to the statistics published each month on the  Hypergrid Business. Maria publishes metrics for the top forty grids indicating how well they are doing at the end of each month charting loses and gains in regions as well as the gains in user registrations. It's by no means certain if the metrics are 100% reliable but there is no doubt that the trend is upward over all.

I have collected my own figures too taking a daily sample of peek and off peek traffic for about six months and before that on occasion during the previous year. Back in September 2010 I counted traffic for a sample of round twenty grids and got a daily average of about 600. Back in January of this year that figure had risen to just over 1200 for the same sample. It's still not a big number and Second Life remains significantly more with approximately peek traffic of 60,000 and off peek at 30,000 but what is important in these figures is that Second Life is static while Opensim has doubled.

Second Life enjoyed peek traffic of around 80,000 back in 2008 so the current figures show a big fall in regular users. A few days ago I checked SL again at an off-peek time and got a figure of just 27,751 which just goes to show it isn't looking good for the virtual giant. In contrast, Maria's figures show Opensim grids consistently making gains, that is, more regions than Second Life which has actually lost over 500 over all in the past year although many of those are probably education and none-profits since Linden Labs doubled the tier from the beginning of January. Most of the Second Life losses seem to be gains for Opensim grids though.

One grid that stands out having the highest growth rate of any Opensim grid ever in a very sort period and that is  Avination which had been hovering along with about 250 regions and no more than 1200 registered residents up till December 2010, then suddenly it took off gaining over a thousand regions from January to March. The number of new registrations has also exploded to over 20,000 to date. I visited Avination back at the beginning of January just before it took off and wrote about it here. At the time the daily traffic was a mere 35 peek and down to 18 off-peek but over the month it just kept rising so by the end of January it stood at around 200 peek rising to 395 mid way through February. It has dropped off some since but still manages up to 350 at peek times.

Gaga at the slot machines in an Avination gambling region

Avination growth is attributed partly to a promotional campaign which ran radio commercials in Oregon, USA that were also aired on Web radio and in-world radio stations in Second Life. Avination puts virtual-goods Merchant's interests first. puts restrictions on making freebies readily available and goes further imposing charges to download inventory. This is partly to protect the merchants but also to help prevent copybotted items finding their way onto the grid, they claim. To this end, Avination is probably the only grid that charges for downloads and groups, an action which has brought plenty of attacks from disgruntled users objecting to these charges when other grids don't. But Avination has come in for a lot more attacks over it's policy allowing gambling in the form of Zyngo and other types of slot machine play. In deed, when I recently visited again I found search awash with gambling and red light sims to visit so, clearly, Avination wants a slice of the second Life Adult market and it comes as no surprise that gambling interests that can no longer do business in Second Life have been quick to set up shop in Avination.

Avination currently charges $60 rent for a sim with 15,000 prims (free set up). So, they must be turning over in excess of $50,000 a month already and this appears to be the bread and butter of Opensim commercial grids and has not gone un-noticed by others which are due to go live soon. However,  InWorldz, another commercial grid, has already been in business for nearly two years and started with a hand full of people that left OpenLife grid - a forked version of Opensim - which started up at the time of the Open spaces fiasco in Second Life around the end of 2007. Apparently, there was some connection between the InWorldz founders and the owner of OpenLife and a falling out which came to a head and caused the departure. InWorldz began as a small grid based on the official Opensim core server code and went live early in 2009. It grew slowly at first then took off last summer gaining around 800 sims which helped them break even and finally make a modest profit enough to pay wages at least.

InWorldz charges $75 rent per month (no setup fee) but offers 30,000 prims for mainland sims and 30,000 to 45,000 prims for pivate islands. The high prim offering has caused a few raised eyebrows from Opensim core developers and those opposed to walled-garden grids who insist no Opensim grid can reliably handle more than 15,000 prims which, incidentally, is the maximum that Second Life offers. What they say is, while it is possible to set a sim to permit more than 15,000 prims, it is not advised since it puts a heavy load on the server. This becomes more critical when people are asked to pay rent for sims on shared resources where a heavy user can impact on the rest causing excessive lag for all. Anyway, that aside, InWorldz has some coders that came with the migration from OpenLife and they promised to improve the core Opensim code and put right all the bugs and missing functions they insisted had not been adequately dealt with by the core developers when they accused them of concentrating on "shinnies" such as media on a prim and Hypergrid rather than cleaning up the core which they described as a mess. InWorldz no longer takes the Opensim core so has become a forked version too which is exactly the same as what happened with OpenLife.

On the plus side InWorldz dose have the reputation of being friendly and welcoming to new comers and they have attracted several role play groups to their fold, including, the Reaglen Shire tiny community and elfclan. The owners appear to go out of their way to be helpful and are quick to show noobs where to find freebies to fix up their basic "ruthed" avatar. Avination by contrast is not so welcoming and some have said their business-like attitude is reflected in their welcome sim which, I can vouch, dose seem bleak and rarely has anyone to greet noobs. But, bleak and un-welcoming as Avination appears they do have their plus side. For one, you get a de-noobed avatar to begin your adventure with so freebies are not your first consideration. For an Opensim grid lag is surprisingly low though and I personally have only ever crashed once when my viewer froze trying to access search. A change of viewer fixed it and all was well again. I had no problem with search after that.

InWorldz dose suffer a great deal of lag and many have noted this which is probably due to the high prim load on the servers and not necessarily to inadequate resources in general.  OSgrid, the official Opensim developers test grid that lets anyone to connect a home standalone sim, also suffers horrendous lag on some of those standalone sims which are most often hosted on home PCs with standard home DSL connection. Sims like these can only handle a low prim environment and two or three avatars at most before lag becomes a problem. As far as concurrency is concerned, OSgrid fairs quite well with peeks of around 150 users online. But this is miss-leading really because the main grid can't account for all the Hypergrid connected regions and there are a lot.

One other grid I should mention is  ScienceSim which has backing from such big names as Intel and IBM. I noticed the grid has dramatic swings in user concurrency, ranging between 100 off-peek to over 1000 peek. This may be due to load testing - I don't know for sure - or their connection with education. I'm not really up on what happens at Sciencesim but I do know Diva Canto, creator of Hypergrid, set an outward bounds permission for them recently which allows Hypergrid teleports into the grid but prevents inventory gained on the grid from leaving it.

New grids are coming on to the free metaverse all the time and each seems to be either catering to a particular niche or, in the case of commercial grids, selling themselves as a particular business model they believe will attract customers. InWorldz focuses on community while Avination focuses on content sellers. Both these grids sim prices are about level pegging though. Meta7 on the other hand is more expensive with charges $105 for a sim but they do focus on technical advances. Another grid aiming to go live soon also has higher sim charges, AvWorlds will charge $120 for a sim but the owner says he will give up to 25% discount to large land owners that rent out parcels at lower prices. They also promise to encourage in-world sales by only showing pictures of virtual goods on their web site and a link back in-world to the store in order to keep buyers patronizing the malls and business sims. No doubt there will be winners and losers but the free metaverse is really starting to take off so the traffic away from SecondLife is set to accelerate.

There are many more grids but most are small or hidden behind fire walls such as those run by colleges, universities and business interests so it is hard to really get a reliable figure on over all concurrency for Opensim grids but it must be in the thousands now. SecondLife can show a figure for the grid because it is all under one roof but Opensim grids can be set up by anyone with a server and a connection and this is what makes it near impossible to build an accurate picture of it's total traffic. However, what is absolutely certain now is that free metaverse based on Opensim grids are posing a serious challenge to SecondLife and it's getting bigger.

Aurora Sim - breaking the mould!

I have been following closely the progress of Aurora sim which is a branch development of Opensim and promises some new and advanced features that will surly break the mould. The list of features is impressive and includes restructuring for greater efficiency, many bug fixes and pretty well all that which is missing from core Opensim. To that they promise to upgrade the physics, add centred gravity and mega regions of a totally new type which promises spaces up to 256 times standard SL regions.

The lead developer, Revolution Smythe felt mega regions were a hack and there had to be a better way. The team has worked out a way to have variable region sizes and even the possibility of none-square border shapes which fits in with the centred gravity possibility to create massive Space-like regions with planets and orbital objects such as asteroids and space craft in a much more realistic environment than the current flat spaces of SL type regions.

The aurora team have their own test grid known as Aurora-sim development grid which I added to my Hippo viewer and visited but there was not much to see at the time. It just amounted to a few standard regions. However, on the Aurora team web site they announced that on the 14th February they tested the first variable region. The test grid is at http://login.aurora-sim.org:8002/ and you need to add that the an Opensim compatible viewer and the web announcement is here Aurora sim variable region sizes

Gaga in Aurora Virtual World grid wondering around. Nothing exciting - yet!

Currently, and surprisingly, there are actually two new grids - one of them commerical - running the pre-alpha Aurora sim branch. Ansky and Aurora Virtual World, the later being owned and run by Enrico Ranucci of the New Voice OpenSim hosting company, better known for their $10 hosted sims attached to OSgrid. I visited AVW too and it really did not work well, apearence was borket and I couldn't keep hair in the right place but it was a fun experience. I did notice they are currently giving Free parcels with a generous 18,000 prims to play around with though.

Maria of  Hypergrid Business  blog has written an in-depth article on Aurora sim and raises some important issues about it regarding software licenses.

Kokua, the projected viewer based on SecondLife 2x from the Imprudence developers announced back in November 2010 they would be supporting Aurora sim and working with the Aurora team but, currently, they have not done anything other than consentrate on getting Imprudence 4 released so they can wrap up their work on SL 1x code and switch their attention to Kokua.

Hypergrid

Back in December I asked if Hypergrid would still be a feature of Aurora sim and was told not until it stops being in-compatible with itself. The developers claim they aim to stay compatible with Opensim core but after reading Maria's article I have my doubts. Anyway, in January I was told that Aurora sim is compatible with HG and that person had successfully hyper-gridded to another grid but now, in Maria's article, Ansky grid owner, Andrew Simpson who converted to Aurora sim server on the 17th February said the current version did not support hypergrid and, where Ansky was formally accessible via HG, it was now shut off. He went on to say there were still problems with HG anyway so he wont miss it at the moment.

Conclusion

I think Aurora sim is an exciting development but it remains to be seen if the team can actually deliver on the impressive list of features. That said, I keep wondering what SecondLife would be like today had Linden Lads shown the foresight and taken in some of these amazingly talented people and given them free reign to advance the server. Alas, I don't think any of these ideas could happen in SL and the open source community will forge ahead and break new ground for the benefit of the free metaverse. I think they are true pioneers.

Full list of features on Aurora Sim