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Heh, I played with this when I was working in the Second Life/Virtual world bubble (around 2008). Back then it was called OpenSim and the code was a mess, not made any better by running in an itself very buggy (at least then) Mono runtime. Enthusiastic hackers working on it though!

Back then the client (viewer) was still closed source, which seems to have changed since.

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If you're remembering the date correctly then you're wrong about the client; the Second Life client was open sourced in Jan or Feb 2007.

It's still called "opensim" informally, but the formal name has (since 07 or so) always been "opensimulator".

Development around the client hasn't closed but a lot of enthusiasm around both the opensimulator server and the second life client has quieted down, in part due to restrictions put in place by Linden Lab on 3rd party viewers sometime around 2012 (for the sake of "shared experience").

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