OpenSim Updates: Mesh, NPCs, Amazon Cloud Deployment (UPDATE: Watch These 40 Alien NPCs Dance to Dubstep)

Hypergrid Business has news of at least three pretty major updates to OpenSim, the open source spin-off of Second Life:

• Kitely, a low-cost, relatively low-friction OpenSim deployment platform, is now hosted on Amazon Cloud. This should make running Kitely worlds much faster, and as OpenSim innovator Crista Lopes explained, potentially much cheaper, than running a sim on the SL grid.
• The latest release of OpenSim supports mesh, and coming soon, code support for NPCs too. These are both two features heavily and recently promoted by Second Life, so it's interesting to see OpenSim keeping up. And yes, those are 40 alien NPCs in OpenSim, dancing to dubsteb as it happens: click here to watch.

Update, 3:30pm: Thanks to Nebadon Izumi, who did the alienc NPC demo and shot it, it's now available for viewing:

"Avatars wearing about 3500 prims each, for a total of around 140,000 prims," he reports. "Holy fricking crap," Hamlet replies.

Comments

[Maria Korolov]

Quick correction: Kitely has always run its region servers in the Amazon computing cloud (Amazon EC2). Now it's also storing its assets in the cloud (Amazon S3). It was previously using the traditional OpenSim asset database to store assets. Moving assets to the cloud as well eliminates that bottleneck and should make Kitely both faster and more scalable than ever before. There's a few other things they need to do to make their service fully functional (payments, voice, in-world and hypergrid teleports) and once they do, and prove it can be done, I expect other hosting providers and grids to start offering cloud-based grids. (Many are already offering cloud-based sim hosting for events or individual regions.)

[Cube Republic]

I can see sl going to the cloud

[Marika Dagostino]

Just clarifying that the music is drum&bass, not dubstep :P

[Maria Korolov]

Cube -- SL has experimented with cloud rendering. This is where the put the client in the cloud, and stream video from it to the user. This is a very expensive way to do it -- you have to run a separate virtual client for each user, set up a dedicated video stream, etc... -- there would have to be a fee for it.

I don't know if SL's architecture would allow for cloud-based regions. OpenSim is a more recent product, and is built in a modular fashion. That means that individual grid owners can use the pieces that they need, and add new pieces if they want to. They can put region servers in the cloud, and the asset servers in a database, or both in the cloud, or vice versa. They can have one server run many regions (in a megaregion) or have several servers running one region (the Distributed Scene Graph, which allows over 1,000 avatars on a region).

I don't know whether SL's architecture can be pulled apart the same way.

[melponeme_k]

Impressive.

But did they like, get permission from 20th Century Fox or even Giger, to use their IP in this fashion?

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I look forward to SL's response when you can run an entire grid for less than the cost of a single SL sim.. or half-sim... or quarter sim...

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I look forward to SL's response when you can run an entire grid for less than the cost of a single SL sim.. or half-sim... or quarter sim...

[meghana]

I get a lot of great information here and this is what I am searching for. Thank you for your sharing. I have bookmark this page for my future reference. Searchaws jobs in hyderabad