Click here to directly teleport to The Forge, a sim in Second Life that's rocking a cool if kinda wacky build: It's Minecraft, recreated on an SL island by an SLer named Zarkinfrood Miami. (Oh yes.) Both an SL and Minecraft fan, it's made to resemble his Minecraft server, which Mr. Miami actually recreated in SL as a present to a friend:
"Several of my SL friends play on a Minecraft server together," says Miami. "A real life friend of mine and co-owner of the sim had a terrible RL birthday. As a belated birthday present to him, we dressed up the SL sim like our Minecraft server." For the party, they were racing Minecraft carts around, Mario Cart-style. (In other words, playing a Mario Cart-type game in a Minecraft-type game in Second Life.) There doesn't seem to be much action there now, but maybe if more Minecraft fans show up, the cart may race again. Click here to get your metaverse Minecraft on.
Minecraft gives you about seven times the surface area of the planet Earth to build on for a one-time payment of... what is it now? $15?
Homework for the terminally geeky: figure out what the monthly tier would be for Second Life sims with a total area seven times the surface of Earth. I'd do it, but I hate exponential notation.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Wednesday, March 07, 2012 at 06:56 AM
doesn't opensim have a super simple way to run a local server? that would give you about eight times the surface area of the planet earth for a one time payment of $0.
Posted by: qarl | Wednesday, March 07, 2012 at 07:35 AM
A vanilla Minecraft server's land area is meant to be infinate. It ends up being finite only because the 32-bit world coordinates end up overflowing. The world size is about the surface area of Neptune.
Posted by: Adeon Writer | Wednesday, March 07, 2012 at 08:58 AM
Minecraft is amazing, with a modding engine coming soon. Virtual World mod for minecraft? They already have mods that allow people to cordon off virtual property
Posted by: Metacam Oh | Wednesday, March 07, 2012 at 10:17 AM
The infrastructure is different, of course... but in principle, you could create a virtual world in which you give away for free more land than any individual could build on in a lifetime.
Estates, hell. Give us planets.
Optimize data storage and traffic distribution until performance screams, and tax commercial transactions for revenue (maybe build up a permanent operations trust fund). Actively build bridges to the broader Internet so it's painless to step into the world from an embedded window in a web page. Enable and assist creators until they can achieve levels of quality and performance as good as or better than leading MMOs.
We have the technology. We can make virtuality better than it was before; better, cheaper, faster.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Thursday, March 08, 2012 at 06:17 AM
Sim on a stick is a already settled group of programs that allows any, be on windows or linux, to set a local grid, on any computer, that can be used just as local grid (will not connect to internet unless the user wish so!).
It runs, if any wants, form a simple Sub pen!
Posted by: foneco zuzu | Thursday, March 08, 2012 at 08:33 AM
As far as Minecraft goes, just two words sum up how awesome a thing it is: cat fountain.
Posted by: Csteph | Friday, March 09, 2012 at 03:32 AM
Credit also goes to Lenora Flanagan for landscaping and keeping me working when I would rather be playing.
Arcadia: I accept your challenge! Assuming all of the land is not mainland, you'd be looking at a cost of $120.73 billion dollars a month to rent as much land in SL as you would in MC. I'm reasonably sure that the startup costs would eat you alive though ;)
Although they both provide a fantastic interactive experience, comparing SL and MC is like comparing Legos to dirt and sticks in a sandbox. Each has their own particular appeal, and both are completely dissimilar.
Minecraft is fun, but it is a game, not a tool. Yes, I have seen Youtube videos of running processors, but the practicality and usefulness outside of a game setting is almost zero.
Second Life and OpenSim on the other hand are complete software packages for design, programming, and communication. I have a Sim-on-a-stick that I use for real life work(store layout and training).
I'm glad to have both, and couldn't trade one for the other.
Posted by: Zarkinfrood Miami | Saturday, March 10, 2012 at 11:10 AM