OpenSim
Working with Open Source alternatives to Second Life
When people come to me talking about work in 3D, I can almost guarantee I'll hear the word "PowerPoint" in the first paragraph. What is it about this particular tool and why do they want it in 3D?
Start by separating this out. We're all very used to thinking 2 dimensionally. The desktop, the application, the image on screen, the chat window - most of the day-to-day work environment is very flat, predictable. Break out of the office, get folks together at a conference, we all cram into a room to watch a PowerPoint - one person delivering a message to...
Edit: March 09 - this post is a little out of date, some folks have had trouble as a result. I've tweaked the instructions so you are less likely to have problems from now on! Also, see opensimulator.org/wiki/MSSQL
Over the past week I've made some great progress on my OpenSim experiment. For starters, I've got my server configured in Grid mode, and I have all four five of the main servers running on SQL Server. This did require a bit of development - the inventory server was quite broken for SQL Server, so James and I fixed the code and submitted...
Over the past few weeks I've taken a big leap into the world of Open Source development and started messing around with OpenSim, the BSD licenced 3D virtual world based on Second Life, but reinvented from scratch using C#. It's an immense project that's been in development for a while, and it's starting to look pretty good.
Getting hold of OpenSim is relatively easy, especially if you're a developer and have used Subversion before. Grab the latest code, run the pre-build tool, build the solution and you're just about ready. Make sure you run the correct exe for your system (64bit...