Hacker Friendly

Here is an interesting thread on the libsecondlife forums, posted by Michael_W:

I’m currently writing a basic server which uses libsecondlife.

It is currently at the stage that the official secondlife client can log into it (using a proxy for returning a xml-rpc response to the client so that it uses my server as the sim to connect to).

As the layerdata packets aren’t fully decoded yet, I’ve just saved to disk the layerdata packets from a sandbox sim, which I then send to the client when it connects.

Then the server will send some prims (objectUpdate packets) to the client (at the moment these prims were captured (and the data saved into a file which is used as the prim database) from one of the sims in the secondlife grid, but that was just a temporary way to get a large(ish) number of prims for testing with).

Then the avatar(s) can move around the sim.

So basically that is all it does so far, but I thought I would just announce that I’m working on it and how my progress is going.

Michael_W posted the (very alpha) source code here.

Time from the official open source client release to the first third party server component: three weeks. While it will still likely be quite a while before we have a fully open DIY server with all (or most) of the functionality of the mainland servers, this is very impressive work.

UPDATE 1/31: It looks like the project is now called OpenSim, and has been posted to the OpenSL wiki.

(via 3pointD)