Reading Radar

Before I start talking about my experiences logging back into Openlife for the first time in many, many months, there’s something I need to impress upon you. Openlife is small. VERY small. If I’m not mistaken, SL hit over 70k concurrent users at one point, and the total user base of Openlife is 32,411 as of this writing.

It’s small in other ways too, as evident by the web site’s look and content. Staff. LL takes a lot of bashing from SL residents, but in truth, they have a lot of really smart, talented people doing a lot of things that make SL a VW that’s created the high expectations the residents have. They have some issues with policy and communications at times, but the stability of the grid has improved hugely. Client viewer stability and user experience tends to be all over the map, as can be expected from an app that jams the hardware up against the wall and demands its lunch money, and running on a lot of different hardware and software configurations. Some people have very few issues, and for others, running SL is a daily exercise in frustration.

The reason I’m saying all this is that it needs to start sinking into your consciousness that at least LL has been through a shitload of obstacles that these other guys haven’t even faced yet. And while they still have problems (witness the openspace sim fubar that is at the core of all the user threats to leave and take their toys with them), they have created a company with over 250 employees and a lot of financing, created a grid that’s now stable enough to handle 70k concurrency, created an in-world economy that, while not without problems, can be relied upon for commerce in a way that no other VW can even begin to claim. In short, they’ve been through the huge birthing pains that anyone else is going to have to go through. Anyone here old enough to remember a lot of those pains of development? Yeah? Well, unless you’re really willing to go through all that again, you might want to think twice about how dedicated you are to another VW. I’m not saying you should stay with SL or only use SL instead of another or multiple VW’s, I’m saying you need to stop and think about what you are getting into before you think you’re going to take your blinged out hair store and make a shitload of money in Openlife. That is all.

When you first arrive at the Openlife website, you realize immediately that you’re dealing with a small operation. There’s programmers/computer people, and there’s designers. This web site was made by programmers/computer people. Don’t worry, I’m not a designer either. But I know them when I see them. This ain’t them.

In truth, the look of the web site would not be so material were it not that the information’s not really well laid out. For example, they have a graphic that exhorts you to “Take the Tour!” but links to nothing, and the arrow on it points to the links for information about information on land you can own.

Click the register free account graphic, which initially didn’t work for me, and you’ll be taken to a page to register your new account.

Look, there’s those numbers again… 32,411. Which, as I said, is tiny, but still huge compared to the other metaversions based on opensim.

Openlife has a different concept of accounts. First there is an account for you, the human, and within that account, you create avatar accounts. This is actually kind of a handy way of keeping all your alts managed under one main account, and the more I think about it, the more I kind of like it.

Ok, great, you have an account and at least one avatar, now what?

Now you get to figure out what viewer to use. If you’re a windows user, that’s simple. Their downloads page talks all about windows downloads. And only windows downloads. Nothing BUT windows downloads.

It’s only by looking at the bottom of the avatar toolbox screen after creating your avatar, or by looking at the openlife wiki that you find that you can use an SL client to log in. That’s cool, and I probably should have noticed it the first time, but I’d have made mention of it on the downloads page as well, for those who.. well, searched the downloads page like I did.

One thing that you DO have to stumble into the wiki for is to find out how to connect an SL viewer to Openlife. There is no information about this on the web site, but the wiki tells you. In the case of the Mac, you edit the argument.txt file inside the app package in the Contents/Resources folder. I’d make a copy of your SL client first, since you really don’t want to have to edit this all the time to use SL and then openlife and vice versa.

Copy your SL app and rename the copy.

Now open the app package for content viewing.

Go into the contents folder.

Then the resources folder.

Open the arguments.txt file in text editor, and enter the following line, and save:

-loginuri http://logingrid.net:8002/

By the way, I realize this is a small thing, but it annoys me no end when the wiki refers to the MAC over and over. It’s a Mac, or even lowercase mac will do just fine. Not a MAC. A MAC is a Media Access Control address, or MAC address. I know this seems pedantic, but it’s little things like this that say if they’re paying attention to their user base. No mac owner calls their system a MAC, that’s like me talking about WINDOWS VISTA or LINUX. If I said “Ah, you’re a WINDOWS VISTA user,” you’d wonder what the fuck my problem was, and rightfully so. The point is, combined with the lack of an OS X version of their own client, I got the feeling that asking these guys for support would be pretty much useless for any mac owner. Either figure it out yourself or find someone else who’s been there, done that to help you.

Armed with a version of the SL client that was configured to connect to the Openlife Grid, I clicked the Login button, and….

To be continued.