shaneroach wrote:Is that place still around? When I played it the interface was quite clunky. Stores turned into places with flat pictures of the wares available, etc...
Still around, yes. And now there is a Mono-based open source simulator called OpenSim. You can use it to run sims/regions in your own home, so you can have an environment completely separate from the online "Main Grid" (and I guess you can connect to other peoples' OpenSim grids, but I haven't messed with that). It also allows you to have "land"/database space to keep stuff on without paying Linen Lab a cent.
Generally the platform allows you to build very detailed objects and effects. You can construct from modified primitive shapes (solid constructive geometry), and now you can even upload full 3D meshes. You use varying quality textures, lighting, add scripts to decide behavior, etc.
The main downside in my opinion is that you can't easily build a large world because it is designed to run a few 256mx256m regions on a server with reasonable computational power. So while the quality is very high and you can create very detailed and interesting things, it doesn't really run on older systems or scale into a full "game" the way Minetest does (unless you want to connect to the large Second Life grid run in Linden Lab's server farms).
EDIT: BTW, the stores you mentioned are just one common way people have created "vendors" for selling stuff, much line Minetest "formspec" based stores and storage objects. It is just as possible to create full 3D displays, etc. They just take up more computational power on the client and server because they are more than a cube with a few references to textures and database objects to give to people. On the Second Life grid more computational power equates to more money you have to pay Linden Lab to host the objects on your "land". When you run OpenSim it's just a matter of the amount of disk space and CPU cycles you want to consume.
