Year: 2008

I’ve been hanging out in Second Life for more than 3 years, and I’ve been living for almost two years in a virtual land area (parcel) locate in a “sim” named Feted. This sim, a 65536 virtual square meters region, belongs to an estate company named Dreamland, which belongs to Anshe Chung Studios. Anshe Chung is a Second Life avatar, a chinese woman who has become quite popular, being even interviewed on BusinessWeek, for becoming extremely rich with estate trading within Second Life, buying and reselling or renting land.

I bought this land from a previous owner. She had had a SL architect, named after the famous dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, build a custom house, which is the one you can see in my screenshots galleries.

Few days ago I received a note from Dreamland staff informing me that I had to look for some other parcel to stay, because Feted sim is going to be “converted and relocated” within their redesign project that’s gonna start shortly after Nov, 30. This is not much clear, but I presume they intend to use some contiguous sims to form some new hood or island or continent.

The event would not be tragic in a normal situation, it’s quite usual in SL to move from a parcel to another, and it’s a chance for users to build a brand new house. Most of SL users lives in prefab houses, which are easy to box and moved somewhere else, and which costs are so low that no one bothers if they should be deleted.

My situation is different because it’s a unique project, formed by many custom made items not on sale within SL and not available to anyone else. Furthermore, the whole parcel has been modeled (in SL we say “terraformed”) to fit the house, creating gorgeous views outside from the windows and amusing effects at sunset and sunrise. All this is almost impossible to move somewhere else, because you need to be estate owner to be enabled to export terrain setup to a file that can be imported in another parcel, and I’m just a tenant. I’ve asked Dreamland staff about this but haven’t replied and I think they won’t give any help.

This made me start an ambitious project: cloning the whole house, its content and the surrounding landscape to a private sim of my own, run on my home server. This is possible thanks to the open souce projects aiming to emulate SL enviroment. Specifically the OpenSim project supports a sim on a Linux machine with MySQL database and Mono, the .Net Framework porting to Linux.

For the cloning I’m using a software called Copybot, which has created rumors and outrage in SL’s business oriented world, because it allows to copy any object made by others without buing it and without being authorized. Anyway in my situation this was the only way to clone some of the house items that the architect forgot to transfer when he completed the building operations.

At the moment the project is going fast and I presume it will be done before Nov, 30. The most difficult part will be recreating the terrain setup. Unfortunately I will have to do it by hand relying on various screenshots of the original area. When all will be done, I will have a full identical copy of the house and its content located in a sim of my own, managed on my server and totally independent from SL and its central databases, but still reachable from outside by authorized people using the standard SL client or one of various Open Source modified versions