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…

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.

You can’t throw a rock without hitting some idiot avatar who swears that they are leaving SL for the Openlife Grid, and that the Openspace sim debacle is the end of SL. Just like the gambling ban was. And not allowing age play residents to have exhibits at SL5B. And Windlight. And voice. And changing search. And taking away popular places. And the removal of the self-appointed “truuuuuuuust me!” banks. Need I go on?

Still, it’s never a bad idea to keep on eye on other emerging virtual worlds and try them out. Not only is competition good, but in the overall scheme of things, who really believes that in 20 years it’s going to be LL’s Grid technology powering the metaverse anyway? Not me. Note that I said 20 years because frankly, they’ve got such a head start on anyone else that no one outside of Google is going to present a real challenge anytime soon, and only then if Google can ditch the overly exaggerated cartoonish feel of their crap and try to get serious for a moment. I’m pretty much bluntly stating here that although the other SL-technology based grids are interesting, I expect them too to go the way of the dodo and get bypassed by some totally new platform just as I expect SL will at some point.

Putting aside my predictions for the future, I decided to go back into Openlife Grid, an OpenSim based VW, after having created an account a long time ago and never having done anything with it. OpenSim is basically a VW platform that reverse-engineered the SL server technology as best they could, so in theory they are compatible, and in fact LL and IBM managed to teleport an avatar between SL and an OpenSim server in a hugely momentous event that maybe ten people actually understood the significance of.

I chose Openlife Grid because it’s probably the most well known and oft-mentioned of the opensim grids, and this is probably because it’s the most well developed so far. There’s a list of OpenSim grids on opensimulator.org, and frankly, some of these things are there just because they can be. Talk about Joe’s Bait Shop and 3d cartoon world. Openlife Grid may be a tiny group of people and their grid may be creaky in contrast to SL’s, but they make the rest of OpenSim grids look like a screenshot of something that might possibly be rendered in 3d. Maybe. If you squint real hard. Of the OpenSim worlds, seriously, you may as well ignore all of them besides Openlife Grid. The others are the 90’s web homepage of the metaverse.

So, on to Openlife. I’d created an Openlife account back in February of this year, and never really did much with it except get the name Radar Masukami to keep Crap Mariner from doing it so he could run all over the grid calling people perverts. I think I’d logged in once or twice and stood there for 5 minutes. I figured enough time had passed that it would be like a whole new experience. Starting next blog post, Round 1 of the Openlife experience.

Arminasx keeps coming up with really interesting particle effects. Now he’s got one called “Paint Drips” that emits paint drops. Included are paint splat textures for the ground.

The drip rate, color and size varies as they fall.

Check it out at his store, Electric Pixels.

One of the things that sets builds apart is good textures. Instead of relying on the freebie ones and any of the textures you can buy in SL, generally you’ll want to make your own. The hard part about that is making them seamless, or tileable (isn’t that a word?) so that you can have them look good on any size prim.

If you’re a Mac user, consider ImageSynth2, a non-free, non-cheap ($99) app that can either be run as a standalone program or as a photoshop plugin. It’s versatile in that you can pick “chunks” of your input images to use, define the percentage of contribution to the image you want a particular chunk of image to have, etc, etc.

I made this tatami texture with basically no messing with the settings or doing anything other than dropping chunks of original down and then letting imagesynth2 come up with the edges for me. Then I added the fabric on two sides of the tatami, uploaded, and used it to see the results.

Like any tiling texture, it has some repeating patterns in it, but it is seamless and it looks pretty good for not really working too hard at it. Compared to a seamless tatami texture I made from the same original snapshot of tatami, it came out cleaner and the repeat lines aren’t quite as strong. And it took a LOT less time to produce than me doing it by hand, and tatami is a pretty easy texture compared to some others you might need a tileable copy of.

Anyway, not a cheap option but I think a good one if you’re going to be making seamless textures for your builds in-world.

Hopefully he won’t get mad at me for plugging this web site already, but TheFriedGeek Althouse has put up a web site called Studio TFG for promoting some of the SL gear he makes. He does some great work, and he’s able to work with scripts, sculpties, prims of all kinds, particles, animations, skins… what else is there?

From steampunk to Lovecraft to chairs and car seats, he’s probably got something that will make you say “wow… that’s cool!”

I mostly wanted to put his name out there as a thanks for the numerous times he’s helped me out by explaining something in detail to get me on my way to understanding how to do one of these tasks better myself.

I’ve met a lot of these kind of really talented people in SL who go out of their way to pass on their knowledge to me, and it’s a huge part of what makes SL what it is for me. People like that who know what they’re doing and don’t mind helping others. I could write a list of people who’ve helped me learn by sharing their extensive technical knowledge while collaborating on things with me… Airsafety, Itazura, and TFG at the top… and many, many others are on the list too.

In a world of knowledge hoarders, I feel pretty lucky to have the friends I do.

I like to point out great customer service when I get it, and again tonight, a content creator went above and beyond to help me complete a project.

The SLPN Headquarters on Podcast Island is using two copies of the Akeyo prefab Trii edited and mashed together, with modified textures as the building it’s housed in (see below).

So when I wanted to get some couches for my SL Under the Radar podcast set that I could rez on demand, I went back real quick to see what they had as far as copy/mod furniture. In order to rez any object from the inventory of another object, it has to be copiable, and in order to put the scripts in it for setting the position to be restored upon rez, it has to be modifiable.

Unfortunately, the couches were no copy, no mod, transfer. I looked at the creator profile and found that artoo Magneto was online. So I contacted him and told him that I was hoping to use his product for a rezzable podcast set. Well, he came through for me. He tp’d me over to his workshop where he was busily working on products, and set me up with a mod/copy/no transfer version of the floating couch. Cool.

It just shows you that a lot of the more creative content makers do it not just for the lindens, but because they love what they do. They just want to get their stuff out there. Obviously they want to get paid for their work, and good work is always worth paying for, but when you get customer service like this, you know they started not for the dough but for the love of making things they can be proud of.

So a huge thanks to artoo Magneto! And do go check out his work at Akeyo… it’s good stuff.

Here’s a glimpse of the floating couches as I mock up a set real quick, and then take a much needed break. Having people do a lot of work for me is tiring!

Check out a fuzzy flash video of the rezzer in action, sans commentary.

A few posts ago, I complained about some chairs I bought at the Loft and posted video of me having problems with them. Tonight Colleen Desmoulins from The Loft sent me a couple working chairs and those were much better.

The BEST part of it is that she also made up some new versions that have a much simpler menu system… just sit on it, and choose one of eleven poses from the menu. VERY nice. I like that a LOT better. And they’ll be selling those in the store now too.

The green ones are the new simplified menu versions, and the white ones are the (correctly working) ones with more menu options.

I think what I’ll do is buy two more green ones! I like that version a lot, and for people who just drop by casually to hang out, which is what I want these to be able to be used for, they’ll work better.

Thanks to Colleen and everyone at the Loft. I mentioned they had nice products before, now I can attest to their customer service as well. She really went above and beyond to make sure I was happy. That goes a long way with me. And their stuff all looks very nice too. My one complaint was taken care of thanks to Colleen.

Life can let you down in a lot of ways, and Second Life is no different. It just lets you down in totally new ways. Have you ever, in RL, had to learn new complicated procedures to sit on your ass? NO? Didn’t think so.

Awhile ago Nika Dreamscape of Diamonds and Rust featured The Loft on her excellent and informative blog, Second Homes. Being the supportive type that I am, I went and looked at their store, and I found some stuff I liked. I liked their small skybox as a small office for working on scripts, etc, and I rezzed one over Podcaster Island. Take a look if you want - check my profile picks for location. My homemade computer desk, Macbook Pro computer, and chair are in the back of the skybox. I should put them for sale for some tiny amount.

Anyway, I bought some deck chairs… one of the things we put in below on the Tiny Beach is a kind of a tiki house thingy that looks cool in the water. Wanting people to be able to hang out and talk about the weather and how they fell and broke their hip last month, I put out these deck chairs. Well… they look great. Then I realized, these things are primarily made as couples chairs. That’s not what I wanted. But I thought, ok, they have options for single sit poses, and I can set them so that only I have access to the menus, so I can make sure they get used as single sit chairs for hanging out on the deck. Sounds great, right? The only problem is that THE MENUS ARE SO CONFUSING AND NOTHING SEEMED TO WORK THE WAY I THOUGHT IT WOULD BASED ON THE MENU CHOICES and so they wound up being deleted. Gone. FOREVER!! Mother… flippers.

I want to reiterate again that I’m not bitching about the loft per se, but I would ask vendors: If you’re thinking about using the MLP system in your products, do yourself a favor and just go run in front of a bus. Mmmkay? Really, that’s all I’m asking. Off yourself, or off your furniture, but just off something. For the good of Avatarity.