For anyone who has or is playing second life, have you ever wanted to own your own island? Who wouldn’t? Free control over a massive area of space. Of course there’s some crazy 1000 dollar set up fee plus another $200 a month (or so). It’s pretty cost prohibitive.
Frankly I don’t see how anyone would ever think it was a good investment. Spending 30 bucks on ebay for some awesome World of Warcraft weapon MAYBE but 200 a month plus set up for a virtual private island?
But what if it were possible to set up your own island, for free, and host it yourself? That’s what the folks at Open Second Life are working to do, for the most part. I was skeptical at first about how easy it would be to run this myself but it turns out it’s as easy as running any other program or application, possibly easier since there’s no actual install or set up to be run.
After downloading the server program I connected via my Second Life client as instructed by the how to. And I had my own personal island, all ready and waiting. Ok, this software doesn’t connect to the main grid at all yet. This means I can’t go anywhere else or interact with any other people (though I imagine multiple computers on a network could connect to it).
As of yet there is also a lot missing from the system. There’s no animations or clothing or textures. You’re a stiff naked crucified floaty person. Creating clothing is locked out. You can’t upload textures or anything since you won’t have any in world money (the Wiki had a few things suggesting there’s a way to give yourself play money). You can build things. You can’t joint hem together like normal build operations but it’ building none the less. Also the objects don’t replicate like normal while holding shift, making relative position objects gets a bit tricky in this respect.
Still, it’ a start. With publicity, more people will work on this and possibly in a short while a full fledged server program will be available with all the bells and whistles. Even if Linden Labs never allows these “rogue servers” to connect to the main grid it would still make for an awesome free unlimited sandbox area.
February 8, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Interesting…
Figured someone would end up charging for something like that.
February 15, 2007 at 5:10 pm
$200 is crazy. Like you said, I can see *maybe* paying for an item or items if you’re desperate enough to find it and the cost isn’t outrageous. But $200… no thanks.
I’ve never played Second Life but considered giving it a spin. What do you wind up doing doing in there?
February 15, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Mostly I end up building or exploring random places. I try to interact some but I find the place seems to be very…. cliqish. I don’t know if that’s the right word…
February 15, 2008 at 6:30 am
It sounds interesting and may be this sort of interactivity will be next generation kid’s environment. Nevertheless, I do enjoy the hard life I’m living now in Eastern Europe, real life, no restarts, no recently unavailable …