Reading Radar

Edit: re-reading this post, I have to think that they aren’t saying they had 30,000 signups and 1,000 land orders this week, they mean that’s what they have in total. But 20,774,912 sq m is only 317 sims, right? Not nearly 1000. I’m confused about what’s being claimed here. But I’ll assume they meant they hit over 30,000 sign ups, not that they had 30,000 last week. End of Edit.

Bettina Tizzy is reporting that Openlife claims 30,000 new signups in a week, and over 1,000 new land orders.

Here’s last week’s numbers published on their web site.

Here’s this week’s.

You be the judge. That’s a delta of less than 3,000, and the size of their metaverse hasn’t changed at all, meaning they haven’t filled any of those orders for land yet. Unless I’m misinterpreting what they mean by land orders, and they just mean people buying plots. But from their web site, the only land sales I see mentioned are sims.

I can’t wait until they really do start going through their growing pains and all the people who are supposedly leaving SL starting noticing “hey, this isn’t as smooth as we thought!”

Openlife is taking on a precarious role if they’re truly accepting the mantle of second Second Life by trying to attract the most dissatisfied SL’ers, because when they have a few “what the fuck just happened” moments, and they will if they really grow anywhere near as fast as they think they will, they’ll find out that how fickle people can be and how little most people want to go through the birthing process all over again.

Someday OpenSim solutions might be really appealing when they’re run like web servers and thousands of companies can offer stable sims with big bandwidth, but right now Openlife has to go through all the same stuff that LL went through to get scaled up. The difference is that their code is behind, and they have fewer people and less money.

Look, I’m not bashing them out of any kind of ill will, in fact I wish them all the best luck because choice is GOOD, but to think they’ll be able to sail sublimely through the troubled waters that LL’s already crossed is naive at best, amazingly stupid at most. They have huge challenges ahead. There are going to be problems, a lot of them which SL’s already been through. If people really understand that, that’s one thing.

I just keep remembering the whining about the system skirt. If people are upset about that kind of hardship, imagine what’ll happen when they routinely can’t keep prim attachments on or scripts go wonky, they can’t stay logged in for more than 10 minutes, and their inventory has to reload every time they cross a sim border (which kept happening to me, btw). I hope the crew at Openlife actually understands for real the high expectations of SL’ers if they’re actually trying to pull the disgruntled ones over. You know… the ones with higher expectations and less tolerance than anyone else?

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.