This By Eric Reuters back about 1 month ago (very interesting...) - On Tuesday, Steve Smith of BCX Bank had to shut down operations in Second Life. But Smith isn’t going quietly into the night. Smith has purchased 11 sims on Central Grid, a rapidly-growing world based on the open-source package OpenSim. In Central Grid Smith hopes to expand his financial empire in a way never possible in Second Life, offering not only interest on deposits but printing his own currency a la Linden Lab, tentatively to be called the “Central Grid Dollar (CG$).” “[The ban] forced us to reevaluate things and step up our game a little,” Smith said. He’s still working out the details, but Smith’s plan is to peg the Central Grid dollar to the American dollar and back up all currency sales with real-world cash. “Unlike Linden, we will not be able to print extra money unless it is backed by real US funds,” he said. Second Life experienced explosive growth in the first half of 2007 by customers attracted to Linden’s libertarian ideal of “Your World, your imagination.” But Second Life’s success attracted increased scrutiny, first from the media and then real-world governments, prompting Linden to move against gambling, unlicensed banking, and depictions of adult-child sex. Among Second Life residents, anxiety runs high that unlicensed stock exchanges or the thriving adult escort industry may be next to be targeted. For Second Life’s banks, OpenSim grids provide a way to continue on in the field of virtual finance without the need to secure Linden’s approval. Smith is also looking into OpenlifeGrid, a 135-region OpenSim world, and BCX competitors like Mike Lorrey’s (Second Life: Intlibber Brautigan) BNT Financial are eyeing a move to OpenSim as well. Whether Smith’s plan will come to fruition remains to be seen, but his real-world investment in Central Grid represents a major gain for OpenSim grids. Since going live on the first of December, Central Grid, or “CG,” has expanded to 320 regions, said Cathy Morantz of Nevada-based Central Grid Inc. Morantz goes by Maltos Sosa on both CG and SL. Central Grid sports an openness that echoes Second Life’s pioneer days. Casinos, if operated from a legal jurisdiction and if they ban American avatars, are welcome. “We see this as nothing more than web hosting and a search engine,” Morantz said. However, the search engine may not work. OpenSim worlds like Central Grid run on new technology, looking and feeling primitive compared to Second Life. Avatar movements are jerky and imprecise. The “search” function is completely non-functional. The inventory server is so new that while you can carry objects across regions, it’s still impossible to transfer items from one avatar to another, quashing any economic applications until fixed. Morantz said her team sunk US$12,000, not including programmer salaries, into the start-up. By the end of her first month Central Grid returned US$18,000 in revenue. OpenSim worlds like Central Grid work by allowing its users to host regions on their own computers, with Central Grid Inc providing the centralized inventory server and grid architecture that allows avatars to seamlessly walk from one region to another. It’s also possible for Central Grid to host and maintain regions for its customers, at rates far lower than Linden Lab’s Second Life Grid. “Let a thousand virtual worlds bloom” is the oft-repeated mantra of the OpenSim team, as developers envision online games similar to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft or CCP’s EVE Online based on the OpenSim platform. One advantage of the software is it has been designed from inception for avatars to move from one grid to another. Linden Lab committed itself to “interoperability” in a deal with IBM in October, which might result in a link between OpenSim worlds and Linden’s Second Life Grid. After Linden Lab brought the Second Life viewer into the open-source domain last year, coders got a better look at how Linden’s virtual world functions from a technical perspective. While some concentrated on the viewer, enough information was released that programmers realized they could approximate much of the way Linden Lab’s servers work. The OpenSim project is an independent attempt to create virtual worlds servers that work with the existing Second Life viewer. “OpenSim isn’t quite about cloning Second Life,” said Adam Frisby (Second Life: Adam Zaius), a prominent OpenSim developer. “We share a lot of features with SL, we have support for the SL client. But the goal is a more generalised 3D hosting platform, software to enable you to host virtual worlds of any type.” But for better or worse, some of OpenSim’s first backers are those pushed out of Second Life by an increasingly restrictive Linden Lab. For BCX’s Smith, being nimble and up-to-date on technology trends is par for the course for a virtual financier. “Early adoption is our biggest strength,” he said." Source: Reuters
No comments:
Post a Comment