With the news that Sun's Project Darkstar officially goes open source today (i believe you've been able to download and play for a while now) it occured to me that we should setup project metaversed. All we need, is a kindly benefactor to sponsor a server or two + bandwidth etc and we could work at installing darkstar, maybe Multiverse and Croquet and Ogoglio and start having some fun... erm, i mean.. evaluating these platforms live, in the open, for all to come see and experience.
Sound like fun?
Good. find us a couple of spare servers please....
Great idea... but what about OpenSim? And getting ready to trial the official Second Life server software when it's open-sourced?
Hey I knew i'd forget someone :)
A couple of quick system requirement observations.
I've found that a dusty old dual P1-500 500MB RAM linux box can work as a Darkstar/Wonderland server, at least for a few (~4) clients. Of course Sun recommends 1.5Ghz+, 1GB RAM and that should be a minimum for your public testbed. That's what I'm using serverside to demo stuff to clients.
For what it's worth, I've found the D/W client reqs to be pretty forgiving (a crappy XP celeron box with 500MB works ok) except for the video card which should be decent ( maybe like a 128MB vram, ATI x1500+).
I've found that the p2p oriented Croquet seems to have a higher cpu usage but runs fine on the same minimum client hardware as D/W.
Basically, any SL-capable box can work OK as D/W client (even as client + server) or Croquet peer.
Great project, look fwd to help. I will set up a demo Darkastar server next week. The description of Sun's MPK20 implementation looks loke a direct competitor to Qwack Forums (targeted to collaboration and corporate intranets), which is the most interesting / realistic metaverse application at this moment imo.
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Giulio Prisco
gp@metafuturing.com
metafuturing S.L.
http://metafuturing.com/
I'll contribute a couple of months on an Amazon instance if you want to try your hand at running the various servers on the EC2.