Reading Radar

This post is Part 3 of a series of posts investigating the Openlife Grid, with the intent of determining the likelihood of the Alec Baldwins and Susan Sarandons of SL actually leaving SL for Openlife.

Part one can be found here.

Part two can be found here.

I knew what to expect when I logged into Openlife Grid. I knew I’d be a ruth. Big time. And I was not disappointed. Well, I *was* disappointed, no one likes to be a ruth. It’s just so demeaning. How the Lindens came up with that as a default appearance, I’ll never know. Why the fine folks building the OpenSim platform felt it was worth copying, I’ll really never know. But here I am in all my Ruthly glory, having just logged into Openlife with an avatar named Radar Masukami.

That reminds me of another thing I prefer about OpenSim based VW’s over SL, or at least this particular OpenSim based world: you get to choose your own avatar name. The WHOLE avatar name. Whether this is just how OpenSim works and no one felt like changing it, or if it was a conscious decision by the creators of Openlife knowing that people from SL would come look and want to lock up their SL avatar names in Openlife I don’t know, but it is nice. Of course the other thing that I prefer about the Openlife approach to avatar accounts is something that initially bugged me when I was signing up, which is the fact you create an account and then create an avatar account under that initial, “human” account. If you only create one avatar, this is annoying, but if you also want to lock up the names of any alts you might have in other worlds, it’s great. I wish LL had this approach to avatar accounts. Of course then they’d have no excuse to actually believe they have almost 16 million total residents.

I was really itching to get un-ruthed, but unlike SL where you can edit the shape you’re born with, in Openlife, you can’t. You can copy shapes from the Library folder, wear one, and edit that one. Also, on the orientation island I wound up on, you can find your way around to where Openlife creator Sakai Openlife has put a couple basic shapes and skins. Anyway, out of the box, this is what happens when you try to edit your shape:

Copy a shape from the Library into your inventory, wear it, and edit away.

One odd thing was the hair… I appeared to have some kind of system hair, but appearance mode wouldn’t let me edit it, claiming I wasn’t wearing any. I admit, it’s been awhile since I’ve thought about system hair in SL, but I’m pretty sure you can edit it if you can see it on your head.

By the way, you can see the signs I’m standing in front of, they’re the first thing I saw on orientation island when I flew around a little bit. Again, this is not SL. People who’ve been in SL for awhile and have high expectations need to lower them if they’re really going to defect. I keep repeating this, but it’s only because I don’t think the people threatening to leave have really thought about what they’re saying. It’s nice to have alternate worlds to threaten to leave for, but when they have no economy, are run by a handful of people, and the grid seems wonkier than that drunk uncle who keeps sneaking off to the bathroom for a swig of something in a flask, certain lifestyle levels are going to be sacrificed in the move.

There’s a few scattered buildings and signs, and it’s up to you to fly around and find out what’s going on. If you can. One thing that’s been consistent about my short time in Openlife is that I keep running into situations where my avatar can’t move, and I can see others typing (if they’re around) but nothing ever appears in chat. It’s like the old days in SL when this used to happen, and I’d realize I was no longer connected to the grid even though my client thought I was. Relogging was the only solution. This has happened to me several times in Openlife, and I’m sure I haven’t even spent a total of an hour in-world.

I did manage to find a train which had a sign pointing to Openlife, but not only was it not really meant to be a train, it also had some interesting sit targets in the seats:

Umm. Ok. I’ll walk.

Not far away, I found a little place with some jeans available. One thing you notice right away is that there’s a building for shapes, a building for shirts, a building for jeans… spread across the sim. It’s not the most organized “get your goods here” experience, but at least it’s there. I also discovered - the skinny pants syndrome!! Woohoo!! It’s been awhile since I’ve seen that in SL. Good times.

There was a nice lady at the freebie jeans shop helping people, she was the only non-ruth/noob I saw the whole time, everyone else was like me. She mentioned something about a sim called Blue Water, or Blue Wave, or “I’m singing the skinny pants Blues,” or something, but I couldn’t get it to come up on the map, so I may never know. Supposedly it’s got a lot of freebie items for people who hate themselves because they look like the kinds of things that mothers lock the front door on to keep from visiting.

That was pretty much it… I had the “I can’t move and I’m not really here” syndrome one last time and gave up for the night. I logged in once real quick today to check something and had the same thing happen again almost immediately. This story might take some time to write at this rate.

One thing I really want to emphasize to people who think they are going to leave SL and go to Openlife but haven’t even logged in yet - create an account and an avatar and log in. Then look and think very carefully. You might be doing yourself a favor if you don’t mention the potential switch to anyone until you’ve actually grokked the state of affairs on the biggest of the Opensim platforms. While it’s being worked on hard, there’s no doubt good people involved, etc, etc, both the OpenSim platform and the world Openlife have got a long way to go before they can ever sustain the number of people SL handles, deal with an economy, and all the things that go along with it. Seriously, if you think the Lindens are incompetent, and you don’t really get how hard the challenge of building a huge, scaleable VW is, then create an account in Openlife and sit back and watch the show. It’s gonna be a hairy ride. But if you’re not the type who likes roughing it and laughing off the hiccups and burps as part of the fun, don’t even bother. They aren’t ready to meet your expectations yet.

To be continued…