Educational Gaming Commons - Press Start

OK, 2008 is supposed to be the year of the virtual world. Given the number of new offerings already, perhaps so. One thing I never expected to see was an outright clone of Second Life, down to the client!

CentralGrid has apparently reverse engineered the SL server architecture. You use the normal SL client, but must modify it a bit. I created a copy of the client and worked on that. Technically the modification is not that hard, but will pose a challenge to some.

So I enter the CentralGrid, er, grid, and I am Ruthed - I appear as the generic female SL avtar. No big deal, but I couldn't modify my appearance. Hope my wife isn't watching!

The rest of the experience is very much just like SL. Movement is a bit jerky at times, but it's very close to the real(?) thing. There's not much to do and explore yet - this is very early in the process, as both the world and the web site show. Still, people are buying and selling land, and there is even an educational (50%) discount.

I'm no lawyer, and the folks at CentralGrid appear to have used all open souce software, but I do wonder about infringement here. Will Linden Lab allow their server architecture to be cloned? Can they stop it? Do they even want to?

CentralGrid now has the ability to create many small grids and connect them. The concept of many grids, one world is certainly appealing. I could lock parts of my world down for research purposes, or heck, the entire world, yet still have public areas, still be "connected." As long as my inventory transfers from grid to grid, I'll be a happy camper.