I've been wanting to explore some other Virtual Worldy environments outside of Second Life and OpenSIM a bit, and recently went through a quick look at Spacial OS, using their tutorial which can be found here . Spacial OS kind of feels more like a basic game engine/server than a real virtual world environment. You don't really develop in world or anything, but it is something that can be used to develop and deploy a multiplayer online environment. I didn't get too detailed into developing anything, though it uses Unity, which is a pretty common platform these days. I did run through and deploy a world that I could connect to, and somewhat more fun, I used a remote computer for the server and my laptop for the client. I had to adapt the tutorial a bit, during the authorization phase by copying and pasting the URLs around and entering the IP of the server instead of "local host" but it worked out easily enough. I deployed the server end on a Windows 7 VPS...
Second Life, Open World Games, The Internet in General