Welcome to the sixth installment of "Under The Grid", an irregular look at the mechanics underneath Second Life. This time, we're looking the announced release of simulator code.

The announcement that the simulator/server code would be released open source came at the same time as the announcement that the viewer source-code would be - both took place almost exactly two years ago, in September 2005.

Philip Rosedale, in his talks at SLCC this year, estimated that server-side simulator software would be open sourced within approximately twelve more months. Development staffers whom we have spoken to inworld and who have spoken on the matter on the development mailing list around the same time are estimating 1-2 more years.

There are a number of interesting blocking issues involved in opening up the server software.

Welcome to the fifth installment of "Under The Grid", an irregular look at the mechanics underneath Second Life. This time, we're looking at the statistical data reporting from Linden Lab.

As you've probably noticed, neither Eloise nor I have been able to produce trustworthy numbers in the daily wrap reports. There's a reason for this. The numbers being published by Linden Lab on their web-servers are so much garbage.

Welcome to the fourth installment of "Under The Grid", an irregular look at the mechanics underneath Second Life. This time we'll look at the basics of a bot. An automaton in avatar form. Building a bot is hard, right? The sole purview of C++ or C# programmers, you think? Not so. If you're familiar with python, and are willing to take some time to learn the structure of libsecondlife, you can put together simple task oriented bots fairly quickly.

As with any programming task, the more complex the task the more research, writing and testing you will need to do. If you're going to start, start small. In many cases a simple task-oriented bot can automate an annoying task for you, while placing significantly lower demands on Second Life than logging in and doing it yourself. An important aspect of any Second Life automaton is to remember that Second Life is a shared space and set of resources and never to impose more load on the system than an ordinary avatar might. Less, if possible - and it is frequently possible.

Welcome to the fourth installment of "Under The Grid", looking at the mechanics underneath Second Life. The first open source release earlier today of the Second Life viewer under a Free Software License is raising a lot of questions and concerns. Aside from those already strongly familiar with the community, very few people know what the distinctions are between Open Source, Free Software and Proprietary Software are, or how the source code being open can or is likely to change things.

And change there certainly will be. This is the biggest thing to happen to Second Life since version 1.2, and will probably turn out to be a bigger deal than that. In the next week, you'll read a lot of stuff that says that the sky is falling as a result, noting that we hear that every time there's a change, so hearing it -- however loudly -- does not reflect on the truth or falsity of the statement.

Let's dig around in the can and see what we can pull out.

Welcome to the third installment of "Under The Grid", looking at the mechanics underneath Second Life. In the last two weeks, we looked into lag, and the causes of it at the server side, and in other places. This week, we're looking at prims.

Prims are one of the very fundamental and distinctive systems of Second Life, and are done differently to pretty much every 3D system you can think of. And with good reason! Let's take a look at the technical underpinnings of prims.

Welcome to the second installment of "Under The Grid", looking at the mechanics underneath Second Life. Last week, we spoke about simulator load, when simulators started lagging and what information there was available to help the average resident diagnose the causes of simulator-based lag.

This week, we're going to look at where other kinds of lag come from, what causes them and what practical things you can do to try to minimize it.

Why do Second Life simulators lag? How can you tell when the lag is at your end and the lag is at the server end?

Under The Grid is a new series looking at the mechanics underneath Second Life, and how it functions. This week, we're going to take a look at simulators and what we know about lag.

There are several pieces to the lag equation. Your hardware (we'll just call it your computer), your viewer (we'll call it the client), your network (this includes whole chunks of network that belong neither to you nor to Linden Lab), sims (short for simulators - those square areas on the map that are sometimes also called regions) and the servers that they run on. There are a lot of pieces there. There are even more that are involved in the running of the grid, but we'll talk about those another time, along with non-simulator causes of lag.