Ogle Earth: Skyline patent infringement suit agains Google Earth dismissed s , direct AP story link
Stefan scooped me on catching this. I thought I had a news alert set up…
Anyway, this is very good news, not just for Google, but for any game developers out there who want to stream 3D content over a network. The patent is just too broad, IMO. I’d prefer if it was invalidated completely, but this is good enough for now.
Alternatives To Second Life « Second Life Games
I’m not sure I’d call all of these competitors to SL, but they each have their strong points. Raph Koster has his own list here.
There are quite a few more in the pipeline that I’m aware of but can’t name. Most don’t allow real object editing — some customization or selection from a catalog. Some try to let you pick objects from the web itself. I haven’t seen any that truly solve the problems I addressed in my recent "Anti-Social Worlds" post.
And now, I have to get back to work. I just wasted 2 hours posting to the OpenGL boards about how the new object-oriented API should actually support C++ directly instead of being so C-like, as the current versions are…