Tonya Souther On Latest News of SL 2.0

Tonya Souther, the head of Firestorm's Apple Client team, recently had a few things to say about Ebbe Linden's recent talk about SL 2.0, or "Next Gen" as Linden Lab prefers to call it. Of their plans to not make the new virtual world open source, "possibly never," Tonya expressed her disappointment on her blog.

"... it doesn't speak well for their openness to NIH ('not invented here') ideas on the new platform. Basically, they're saying 'we know what's best for you, so shut up and eat your Brussels sprouts'. We've been here before. Remember Viewer 2? Yeah, me too. There's a reason that Firestorm has the overwhelming majority of users on Second Life, and Viewer 3 (the descendant of Viewer 2) is in third place: LL's viewer does not fail to suck. Users told LL all about that, loud and long - and LL didn't back off and didn't listen."

Toyna went on to say she could understand why Linden Lab was keeping their viewer closed - gaining control of their platform. Not being in control of it with Second Life  put them in "a very unenviable position for a business." But given their track record of listening to their customers with their first virtual world, how well does this bode for their viewer for the new one?

"... there has to be a happy medium there somewhere. I'm disappointed they're not even trying to find it."

For Tonya Souther's in it's entirety, click here.

Multtiverse MMO Platform Closes, Becomes Open Source

According to Gamasutra, The MMO/virtual world development platform Multiverse had shut down last month. Started by a team of Netscape workers in July 2004, the platform was designed to allow people to "build and launch their projects more quickly and for less money than ever before."

Over the years, it took in several million in funding, and even had “Avatar” filmmaker James Cameron in its advisory board. It acquired the rights for multiplayer online games based on the “Firefly” sci-fi show, as well as Cameron’s “Titanic” and “Avatar,” but delayed development. Despite attracting the interest of “thousands of developers,” they weren’t “able to achieve a profitable business model” and so in December 2011 had effectively closed.

But the place will not be completely going away. Multiverse released their source code to their community, which made the Multiverse platform open source, “we have been updating and altering the code ever since, with the aim of carrying on the original dream - to give small-time developers the chance to make something big, and to show the development community that you didn't need to have millions of dollars to make the next World of Warcraft, or the next Eve Online. With the tools we provide, you can be just as good, if not better.”

In New World Notes, Hamlet Au thought the open source platform might be useful for Second Life builders, who could intigrate what they built on it into their builds on the Grid. He also mentioned that Second Life residents had created a “Firefly” roleplay community, as well as an “Avatar” inspired one.

To get the code, Click Here. You can also check their community on their forums.

Sources: Gamusutra, New World Notes, Multiverse

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