[sldev] Second Life competition (was: a rant)

[John Hurliman]

Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-04-06 at 23:49 -0700, Ettore Pasquini wrote: 
>   
>>> b) LL is falling behind in the feature races as competitors gather
>>>       
>> Who are the competitors?
>>     
>
> http://www.croquetconsortium.org/index.php/Main_Page
> http://metaverse.sourceforge.net/
> http://solipsis.netofpeers.net/
> http://www.activeworlds.com/
> http://www.there.com/
> http://www.redlightcenter.com/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotsoul
> http://www.blaxxun.com/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise:_The_Vieneo_Province
> http://player.thesimsonline.ea.com/
> http://www.habbo.com/
>
> Did I miss any? Not going to list every MMORPG, they're not really the
> same thing. (Similar to MUD vs MOO/MUSH/MUCK in the old days...) Okay so
> Sims Online seems kind of borderline. http://www.planeshift.it/ is
> interesting, it has an open source client based on the Crystal Space
> engine and the game actually doesn't look like ass.
>   

Why not include Quake 3 in the list? It's 3D, and you play online with 
other people... That's about the only similarities I could find between 
Planeshift and Second Life.

But seriously, if we pruned all of the entries there that don't support 
user created content (isn't that the point of Second Life?) what are we 
left with? Croquet, OSMP, There, and ActiveWorlds? Now that we have a 
list (please add in the ones I missed, I'm only recognized or read 
through a handful of those) we should talk about the best features of 
each and whether SL is lacking those features. I know Croquet has a 
really cool portal system. Although I would be really afraid of adding 
any more rendering time or bandwidth requirements to the viewer to 
implement actual portals, what about adding LSL support so when you 
click on a prim it offers to teleport you to a certain location in 
another sim? With some clever prim building and a screenshot of the 
remote sim you could make it look like a portal.

OSMP has an offline sandbox, I know a whole group of people are working 
steadily on that right now. I'm not familiar with There or ActiveWorlds, 
so I'll pass the suggestions on to the next person now.

John Hurliman