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.

I posted about my tests with SLim a couple posts ago. Testing again today, I’m seeing that if I IM my alt from SLim, the alt’s name disappears and I get a message that he’s temporarily unavailable. Then his name reappears on the list.

If I IM from in-world to the account logged into SLim, however, it works fine.

Anyone else seeing this with SLim right now?

Last post I complained about how testing the SLim client would be hard with no one using it yet, then I woke up and created a SLim account for an alt that I use for building/scripting and getting stuff done (hence the blurred name in the picture below) and IM’d my Radar account while logged into SL as Radar, and into SLim client as the alt.

It worked really well for text IM, obviously I wasn’t going to be trying out the voice capabilities though. But for IM it was instant back and forth.

Then I noticed that Dedric Mauriac, while not logged into SL, was logged into SLim. I knew because of the icon next to his name in my friends list.

I IM’d him but got no response, so either he’s sleeping, wishing I was under the wheels of a bus, or SLim really only works to communicate with your alts. Hmmmm…..

Right now the downsides are still the requirement of a special client to use it, which 99.999% of the people won’t download, having to create an account with Vivox, which 99.999% of the people will find annoying, and all the normal considerations of the SL client, namely, I don’t think this will be an option for people who can’t have SL on a particular computer or need to get around firewalls that SL can’t. I think it’s useful if you aren’t logged into SL and don’t want to, but need to communicate with someone real quick, or if they aren’t, but are using SLim. I think it’s a nice to have, and I think for a few people, I may use it quite a bit. It would be nice to only have to deal with an IM window in-world, for example, than to deal with skype and in-world SL IM’s at once.

We shall see…. oh, yeah, the locals are still angry at the Lindens anyway, so they’re all claiming lack of interest in SLim based on that perspective too.

UPDATE:

I tried out the voice with Stuart Warf this morning while we were both out of world, logged into SLim. Once I pointed it to the correct audio devices, all was well and it worked fine. Sound quality was about what you’d expect from the Vivox/SL voice experience - not great. Vivox seems to be synonymous with “noise generator” in my experience, although in recent months it’s always worked well for conversations in SL. It’s nasty to record for podcasts though.

Also, SLim keeps wanting to default to the first account I logged into the IM client with rather than the last one. That’s annoying. Couple other annoyances with it not keeping my preferences saved, which I assume will get fixed over time.

I agree with Jane’s comment on this post, LL needs to make sure that the barrier of entry is low for people to use this. Obviously right now it’s only first look, but LL tend to gravitate towards complexity. Then again, the SL experience in general is pretty smooth compared to the Openlife Grid’s website and information for new users.

Ok, the SLim IM client thingy is out in first look form, as announced in the SL blog, but I can’t really comment on how well it works for a simple reason. In order for you to voice or text IM others using it, they also have to be using either SLim or else the new SLim compatible SL client for you to reach them. And in order for them to use the SLim client they have to already be using the SLim compatible SL client… confused yet?

It’s actually pretty simple, just not so great for getting initial impressions. To use the SLim client, you need a new version of the SL viewer. That allows interaction between the two. You need an account through Vivox to make the SLim client work. And then you need the SLim client itself.

Even though it’s really not a difficult process, it’s just difficult and annoying enough that all the people already fed up with LL (rightly or wrongly) aren’t going to be bothered to try it out. And that means no one to test it with, and that means no first impressions. At least until Saturday, which will be the first day I’ll be home and online at the same time as some people who maybe ARE trying it out.

It’s too bad the process isn’t a little more streamlined. Once it’s built into a mainstream viewer, if LL and Vivox can get the account thing ironed out so you do not have to create a separate one on Vivox, then maybe more people will use it. Right now I’m not sure how many people will.

I like the concept. I wish I knew if I liked the actual function.

BTW, can LL write even ONE blog post without people whining about “ok, that’s nice, now get back to stability” or “does vivox know that everyone is leaving SL anyway?” etc, etc? I get that you’re disgruntled. Posting OT on the blog isn’t going to fix it. Stick to the fucking topic. There’s plenty of ON topic places to post your anger that openspaces weren’t actually meant for your blinged out hair stores. I mean, I agree the price hike was bad, but I’m starting to feel a lot less sorry for the openspace abusers the more they open their mouths.

Second Life, the client application, has high hardware requirements, it’s probably safe to say. I first came into SL on a mac mini, and would routinely get chopped down in katana fights. I couldn’t see what my opponents were doing. It was like being at a disco and only seeing what was going on every few seconds when the strobes were on. That’s what SL with GMA950 integrated graphics was like back then, I can only imagine how badly it chokes on Windlight now. I wouldn’t know because I haven’t tried it on bad hardware lately. BTW, did you notice how I totally avoided the thought that maybe I just really suck at sword fighting, regardless of hardware?

But I have to say, when I hear this fact equated with the comment that “fanboy geeks rule SL,” I really have to wonder, what are the actual technical challenges involved with making this stuff realistic and yet also technically accessible to people who don’t have modern hardware?

A mini tangent here… the term fanboy geek gets slung around at anyone who disagrees with people making the statements, but in terms of SL technology, there’s really very few geeks. People who know how to do 3d graphics and understand the challenges and compromises involved in making a VW with user generated content. I don’t understand how this stuff works at a source code level, and I submit that I have a better technical background than the people I’m thinking of appear to. So could we please stop calling anyone that disagrees with you a fanboy geek regardless of their actual level of technical acumen? Please?

This is the fundamental difference between SL and just about any other computer game, VW, or application your computer has to run… it is user generated content, the world changes, and therefore can’t be loaded off HD. It’s also full of less than optimal textures and other junk tossed into the metaverse by every bozo with an account.

What all this means is that right off the bat, you’re going to be asking more of someone’s system with SL than you are with something like World of Warcraft, where the whole universe comes on optical media and all the textures and content are professionally produced and optimized. Every time you spin your avatar around in SL or move across the grid, you have to go through this loading/sending/rendering process all over again.

I’ll be the first to agree that none of this proves that LL is doing things in the most efficient manner. And none of this answers the debate over Windlight, and whether or not the old graphics were good enough, and we should have just maintained status quo. Prokofy claims to speak for everyone when she says that no one wanted Windlight except for Pastrami, but I think that’s probably bullshit, and I’m sure she knows it. This kind of broad statement is rarely true and in fact is like saying that all common people want Palin. What’s a common person? Oh, YOUR definition of common. Got it. It may infuriate her to hear it, but the fact is that at some point, not moving forward with realism would cost SL as people move on to other upcoming technologies and VW platforms. We know this stuff IS going to move to more realism and more immersive graphics and environments, so that point isn’t even relevant. The question is how to make it happen without choking people’s systems or requiring that they get a new computer every year.

The real question is not whether making things more realistic is the right thing to do. The real imperative for LL is to look around and find out what other technologies are out there that are being used, could be used, probably will be used to make these things happen. Huge corporations are working on how 3d is going to be rendered in the future, and also on just about every other aspect of technologies that go into making up VW’s. The problems are huge. Discounting them by calling for the abolishment of Windlight is missing the whole point. Great, we can all go back to an even more cartoony world, but that’s not going to do anything for us moving forward. These are real problems that have to get solved, and no matter how much it pisses you off when I say this, it is not 2003 anymore. VW’s *WILL* move forward in graphical realism and therefore requirements on hardware. The problem is how to do that correctly, not how NOT to do it at all.

By the way, I’d like to point out that I personally go into SL probably 99% of the time these days on a system with a Radeon X1900. This card line came out in early 2006 or so, obviously not a long time ago in human years, but in computer terms, it’s far from new or top of the line. I usually get anywhere from mid 20’s to low 50’s in terms of FPS. The X1900 is a capable card but it’s far from being geeky fanboy stuff. I doubt any uber-geeks would list this as their 3d world/game card of choice anymore. If they do, they probably aren’t really an uber-geek. I fully realize and acknowledge there are a lot of factors involved with how SL performs on any given system, and I’m not one of those who thinks that because they personally don’t see a problem, it doesn’t exist. I know better than that, and fuck you very much anyone who paints me with a brush and says otherwise. But what I am saying is that anyone who thinks SL performs well for me at present because I have the latest graphics cards is wrong.

And listen, when I’ve had problems in the past, I’ve never hesitated to complain. The 1.20 RC series had its way with my systems, both with ATI and Nvidia graphics, at least up to RC6. Those were harsh. They would just lock me up solid on the Nvidia based system, and have a nice day. And other weirdness happened routinely on the ATI based computer. But to blame the Nvidia lockups solely on LL would be unfair, as both the Nvidia and Apple drivers at the time were buggy as well. The point? It’s a complex interaction of a lot of shit, and if the people calling everyone else fanboy geeks is at all honest, they’ll have to say they don’t understand it. Slinging names around in frustration is great, but without geeks, there wouldn’t be a computer for you to post your hatred of anyone who knows how to program to the internet to begin with.

I got a lot of comments telling me I was whining back when I was bitching about the 1.20 RC’s, and now I’m sure I’ll get a lot of hatred directed my way for saying the world’s not the evil place everyone thinks it is now. This is what happens when you have an opinion - somewhere there’s going to be a set of people who disagree with it vehemently. Some of them can’t handle that ambiguity and so have to call those who happen to disagree with them fanboys and geeks and whatever other labels they happen to have handy, instead of stopping and looking at the issue and admitting it’s more complex than they have time for.

Personally, I agree… Damn the Geeks!!! Damn them who forget not everyone has top of the line hardware. But I also say, Damn the Techtards. Damn them for not taking a look around, realizing something that every gamer in the universe knows which is that improving graphics in games, virtual worlds, ANYTHING 3d and immersive, takes hardware. If you can change that fact, then you are a genius and need to quit wasting your time whining on the internet about the geeks of the world and make it happen.

I took an opportunity to use Dusan Writer’s post on ray traced metaversions to take a shot at Rezzable’s sim entrance fees, but really the part of the post that was of interest was, in fact, the notion that the future trick universe will be ray traced. I call it a trick universe because in order to be immersive in the believable sense, it has to hit on key mental constructs that make us believe it’s real, or at least pretend we do for awhile. Metaverse, trick universe, whatever. It’s the place we go when we delve into the world inside the system rather than outside of it.

So what about ray tracing? It can do amazing things. It can make the current state of Second Life’s rendering look like something your two year old doodled in crayon on the wall. Unfortunately, it’s monster math, and it’s slower than hell. I do know that right now at least some companies are working on ways to get ray traced graphics into the mainstream. I’ve read, for example, that Intel is working on a visual computing project that throws massive parallelism into tackling graphics, and my understanding is that they are hoping to take this down ray trace road. Throw enough Core(tm and all that happy horse poop) processor cores at something, and it should be able to speed up to the point of acceptability, or apparently that’s the theory. In reality there seems to be some point at which massively parallel systems combined with current computing platforms don’t seem to yield much in terms of gains. If I’m wrong on that, someone hit me over the head with a 64-bit bus.

What it does mean for the Second Lifer is that it’s possible that SL might have coded itself into a corner, but that it’s just not obvious yet. If platforms starting from scratch can cough up something with acceptable performance for a ray traced environment, AND allow really solid user content generation tools (currently no one can top SL on this aspect, IMHO), AND provide a place where the same diversity of communities and activities SL has can thrive, they might just make SL look like the Apple II emulator I’ve run a few times under OS X - interesting, a great nostalgia play, but nothing you’d use on a daily or even monthly basis. In short, irrelevant.

I’m not saying that’s how things are going to play out, indeed getting all geeked out about ray traced VW’s should probably be rescheduled until there actually IS ONE that you and I can log into, but LL might start thinking real hard now about how their slower than molasses development of the metaverse and their current technical approach might one day be seen as a bit of a downer for the sustainability of their particular platform.

Remember the muppet who would come up on Sesame Street and try to sell people letters he had hidden in his coat? I’m going to play “OpenSim” muppet and sell you something for free. “You wanna buy a sim?” “A SIM?!” “SHHHHHH!” “a sim?” “Riiiiiiiiiiight…”

Interspersed with other blog posts most likely, I’ll be blogging about my experiences with getting OpenSim running on a Mac Pro (Quad Core, blah blah blah) under OS X 10.5.4.

At this point I should probably mention WHY I’m doing all this. As you probably know, IBM and LL jumped an avatar from SL into an IBM OpenSim, or vice versa, or both. You may also know that OpenSim is really looking like it could take the underlying LL simulator technology and make it gain widespread use and acceptance, hopefully in an interoperable manner with SL. In theory, people with fat pipes or good dedicated hosting setups could run their own sim, and people could hop between other sims on the grid in SL, and this OpenSim based sim.

Right now it’s all in its early days, but it’s fun to play with anyway. If nothing else, I can be a generic looking avatar on a sim of my own and guarantee that I can work on scripts and not be interrupted. Well.. I think I can. At this point, I’m not sure if OpenSim is backwards compatible with current LSL technology, or it’ll be mono only (that’s my guess) which is not deployed in SL yet, or what.

Anyway. Enough theorizing and pontificating.

There’s actually a few steps to getting it up and going. OpenSim requires Mono, the open source .net framework and c# language. On the OpenSim instructions for how to install on OS X, it links to an older version of Mono (1.2.5_5).

Unfortunately, this link refused to work, so I headed over to the mono site at mono-project.com to see what they had. Turns out they have a lot of download options.

They show 1.9.1_3 as the current version, but it also called it Mono 2.0 beta, so I decided to try an archive version. Unfortunately, none of their URLs worked either, but they all referenced ftp.novell.com, so I fired up Transmit and headed over there myself. I navigated to /pub/mono/archive/1.2.6/macos-10-universal/6 and downloaded the dmg for 1.2.6_6.

Tomorrow if I have time, I might try installing this and seeing what happens. Then once I install the OpenSim server on the Mac, I’ll even find out if that version of Mono is what I needed. Isn’t technology fun? Of course it is.