Virtual Underworld

Posting one last entry on the seredipity based blog, to say that I converted to wordpress, and if you are using an RSS feed to keep track of this blog it will be changing.

New blog link: http://virtualunderworld.net/wordpress/

New RSS feed: feed://http//virtualunderworld.net/wordpress/?feed=rss2

New feed page link: http://arianeb.com/rss2html.php?XMLFILE=http://virtualunderworld.net/wordpress/?feed=rss2&TEMPLATE=blog.html

Word press is easier to update, easier to manage, much faster to load, and I can tag my entries now. Any of you regular readers will no doubt like the changes.

The serendipity blog will be around for a while to make sure links work (at least until  I find a smooth redirect method), but new comments will be disabled

Went to a great Election Night party in Second Life sponsored by the So there Forums. Lots of fun, and most of us were rooting for Obama. A great celebration followed him getting over the top.

Time to plan an Inaguration Ball for January I believe.

I'm not sure where to start, lots to cover. Maybe at the beginning.

On October 20th, Linden Labs announced the roll out their second "premier" zone called Nautilus. The first one, which had a big city feel, was called Bay City. The new one was decked out in an old world Greco-Roman decore as kind of a large fantasy land. Among the cool features of these premiere zones is that the property is more spread out, with every 1024m lot having at least one border side on public paths, and most have at least 2. The large amount of free land on these servers means lots can take twice as many prims on them. The only negatives are you can't subdivide your land, or terraform it, but all land is flat to begin with.

I checked it out and put some bids on a couple of lots at auction, but the auctions are closing between 60,000L$ and 250,000L$ for each (depending on their strategic location), which is way out of my price range. Winners of these auctions are turning around and selling the lots for around 100,000L$, or trying to any ways. I have not seen a lot of new owners of lots for sale. These lots are a little cheaper than the huge prices on Bay City but not by much.

Mad Private Real Estate Barrons

So this new LL continent has made some of the private real estate barrons a bit mad. Linden Labs has been busy building lots of new continents in an attempt to drive real estate prices down. These "premiere" regions undercut what makes land on private servers special. The result is that it is no longer profitable to be a land barron. Here is a snippet from one angry land barron.

There is a fundamental pricing difference all the island owners have to pay, just to maintain a presence on the grid. In my own example, the bill I am paying breaks down like this:

Full sim island 1: $1250 setup, $195 tier
Full Sim Island 2: $1675 setup, $295 tier
Open space islands: 6 x $250, 6 x $75 tier = $1500 setup, $450 tier
Paid by other Open space islands: 2 x $250, 2 x $75 = $500 setup, $150 tier
Total bill each month: $1090 tier each month.

The setup fees for all but 2 open space properties total $4425, of which i've made back $0. The monthly Tier fee collections are 99.95% funded thru rental properties and subdivided zones on these sims.

With the release of more of the mainland Continents, the overall value of land has dropped to a level where the comparable price of ML vs Island properties is so out of reach that most new members to the SL grid won't be able to afford the cost of ownership of any Island properties. And with the real world economy falling rapidly, brought on by a similar situation in which there is too much supply, and too little demand, the actions of LL of opening a new continent of ML properties seem to me and other Island owners to be marking a point in which LL seems to be trying to kill off private island ownerships, and the talented builds many of them have created.

They have a point. If you have to lower your prices on the private sim to mainland prices, it may simply not be profitable anymore except to the largest real estate barrons, and even they may be seeing dropping profits.

But it gets worse...

The end of the above protest letter was a plea to lower fees. Linden Labs did the exact opposite late last night and raised setup and monthly fees on open space sims. Setup went from $250 to $375 and monthly fees went from $75 to $125. There will be no "grandfathering" of the old price on current users. This means that the above land barrons monthly fees will jump from $1090 a month to $1490.

A little info on the Open Space sims: They are only sold to people that own a private sim at full price. For each private sim, you can add four open space sims at a reduced rate for each. Open space sims share server space with other open space sims, while private sims have their own server. The primary negative of open space sims is the prim limit and avatar limit is considerably lower.

The primary reason for the change is that many open space owners have been treating them like they do with private sims: selling and renting lots to other players, making them very laggy at times, and when one gets laggy the other open space plots that share that same server also get laggy, which is unfair to the owners of those sims. Linden Labs is just trying to solve this problem.

But the fee increases are very unpopular. Open space servers are used in a myriad of ways to add land to play on: environmental terrain, open water, sailing areas, surfing areas, battlegrounds, etc. I found this excellent blog post that explains it all. Bottom line is this increase is going to seriously cut back on the number of open space sims, and will do harm to the whole SL community.

Today big protests were held on the Nautilus Continent and at Linden Estate Services server. Both getting big enough to shut down servers. You can join the protest in world here or sign the petition here.

What this is going to do is pretty much kill the real estate market outside of Linden Labs own land holdings. The future virtual real estate market will most likely be on open sim servers, which is cheaper, but very difficult for the average SLer to get to, hence no one wants to live there.

Viva la Revolucion!

Not too long ago while writing about Steampunk Worlds, I mentioned a cool underwater build called Vernian Sea. I decided to look around for other underwater builds. I found a few that I will present in order from educational to fantasy.

Lets start with educational. A great place to learn about life underwater is the Abyss Museum of Ocean Science. This small but well thought out build gives a self guided tour into life way below the depths. The above pic was me riding in my mini submarine (available free at my store) through the life filled "shallows". The depth tour includes links to web videos about ocean exploring.

Hey, its October, its Autumn, and the traditional Halloween festivities are under way. So I thought I'd post about some of my favorite scary themed places I have run into in SL. There are of course some classics like Transylvania to check out, but also some new masterpieces like the above New Relic which I mentioned before.

You might start your Halloween by looking for costumes. One of the more adventurous places is Grendel's Children which has all sorts of interesting avatars.

I missed the beginning of the Burning Life event this year, and just got in for the tail end. This was often a cool showcase of building and scripting in years past, but they changed the format this year. They doubled the size of the event, and displayers were picked by first come or lottery basis.

The result was, well mostly garbage. To make matters worse, scripting was turned off on most of the burning life area, I HATE that! There were no doubt a few cool builds among the 32 burning life servers, but I did not see them. Truth is I got bored wandering around a couple of servers waiting for things to rez. The new format got more people to participate, but much weaker results.

Meanwhile, in other SL news. Security holes were found in the upload asset system, allowing exploiters to overwrite server asset files with their own. This resulted in some emergency rolling server updates over the weekend, and a mandatory client update this morning (10/7/2008). Details are non existent on the official blog, but the folks at Massively have the full scoop.

So much for allowing people to use old viewers. Third party viewers are still allowed for now, but using third party viewers to upload files may not be.

The upshot is this is a final goodbye to "Popular Places" meaning camping chairs will now be 100% useless.

Does a good job of summarizing the state of the technology, as well as give you an idea what all these worlds look like.

I know what you are thinking, "Oh no not another review of Spore". I won't insult your intelligence by trying to explain the game, or do an in depth review like the hundreds of others that are out there. This blog is more or less dedicated to the social 3D web, and I want to focus on that.

I know someone who downloaded a broken pirated version of the game off the web. The problem with doing so is that you can't get any of the online content. He hated the fact that once you reach the Civilization stage you have to make all your own buildings and vehicles, etc.

My experience is different. I bought the game, and created an online account (arianeb of course) and on the So There Forum that I frequent, many of the people have also bought the game and posted their online account name. I made them all buddies.

The upshot is this: Things my buddies make for the game are easily accessible via the "Sporepedia" (third button in the bottom left corner). I got through the Civilization stage without bothering to make anything of my own, I just sponged off my friends.

Every level of the game is enhanced with stuff your buddies make and do for the game. The other creatures you encounter, the planets you visit, etc are derived from buddy content first. There is also tons of Maxis content online if you don't like your buddies stuff.

One of my buddies made a "star trek" like vehicle, and I saw it flying around while I was still at the tribal level. When I finally made it to space, I used it myself.

Maybe my second venture through the game I'll make my own stuff, but for now I'm just learning, and content from the sporepedia is fine.

I have mentioned before that a lot of the early beta members of There came from the now defunct The Sims Online. We found in There many of the things we wished we could do in The Sims Online but could not due to the 2.5D nature of TSO. There were a few things we missed from TSO though, the most common requested was a two person hug emote.

That was five years ago, today we finally have it!

So, how do you hug in There? Well first you and the person you want to hug have to install the updated client. Don't try updating your old client to the new one, that is generally just asking for trouble in There.

Next you have to be in the same chat group, so talk to one another until you join the group. Then you have to look at each other. Then you both have to say 'hug within five seconds of each other. I'm not sure why it is so short. If you plan on giving lots of hugs, you better make a macro.

The video below shows hugs are useable in all gender combinations, and they are even different depending on the gender.

Sometimes its fun to pick a word, type it into the SL search, and see what comes up. So I decided to try typing in "Museum". The usual assortment of art galleries came up, but the cool thing about SL is that you don't have to build a museum according to typical real world rules. Lots of walls with lots of pretty pictures, is not that interesting in a virtual world.

I was on the lookout for something different. The above picture is a good example. You may recognize it as Nighthawks, what you may not recognize is that its a 3D representation of the famous Edward Hopper painting without the people, and I'm sitting in one of the occupied chairs from the painting. The 3D model is located in a lot called Primtings, which hopes to make more 3D models of famous paintings but only has the one for now.

I previously did a There version of Nighthawks you can see on my There Magic page.

There are a few new Virtual World conferences this time of year, and many companies are making announcements. Twinity is now open beta, so anyone can try it. Mycosm is now demoing at one conference in LA as it moves from alpha to beta. Red Light Center has a new section called Rude Virtual.

Anyways the announcement that I was interested in was the open beta of Myrl social network.

This is a social network designed primarily around virtual worlds, especially 3D virtual worlds. You can set up your account as your avatar. Here is my page.

Currently Myrl supports 19 different virtual worlds. You create one account in your favorite world, then in the "Switch To" box, you can add additional avatars for all the other virtual worlds you participate in. I added 7 others, all linked together. The profile details center around your virtual world characters not the real you.

You can get an attachment for SL or a download add-on for There if you want people to track your movements in those programs. You can also add You Tube Favorites, Flickr Feeds, or blog via RSS feed, so its low maintenance. If I blog on my web page, it shows up as a Myrl blog as well easily.

Koinup.com is another social network site working with virtual world IDs, Here's my page. This site has more of a digg feel to it as you can add screenshots, videos, etc. and if they get popular they get featured. Koinup has been around for a little while now.

Finally, since I am on the topic, there is a fascinating article in the New York Times about the phenomenon of social networking in general, and how the mundane updates on Facebook and Twitter are changing the way we view relationships.

Check it out!

So last week Rebecca taught me how to surf at Epic Conditions Surf. This week she is showing me around a few other popular surf places. First stop is the PrimWorks server, where the inventer of SL Surfing  Heather Goodliffe has her home base.

"Last week we saw the epic waves," says Rebecca, "there are two other kinds of surfable waves, the foam waves and the pipeline, both of which are for sale here.  While there are resellers out there, here you know you will also get the latest versions."

"Well, since I dont own a ton of land, I'm not in the market for my own waves." I said, "But, I could use a surfboard."

"Good thing we are standing in front of a mall filled with various board designers, then." said Rebecca.

"Ooh, shopping!", I exclaimed.

I have been keeping track and trying many of the 3D Virtual Worlds and even related 3D websites out there, and I have been noticing a trend: Most of the newest 3D web programs have focused primarily on creating what amounts to 3D web pages.

The list keeps growing: scenecaster.com, 3dxplorer.com, vivaty.com, lively.com, exitreality.com, and the latest is justleapin.com. They all take differing approaches, but their goal is the same, they want to be the "standard" 3D web page program.

What each is about is letting people build a customized 3D web page like a "room" that can be explored via a browser (and ultimately a browser plug-in since nothing is standard yet), and allowing others to visit as well. If two people are in the same 3D room at the same time, they will see each other and can chat with each other. Like 2D web pages there should be conventions for connecting and linking rooms together, embedding media, allowing comment posting, etc.

3D web pages have been a goal for a while now. VRML has been around for years, and was supposed to be the 3D equivalent to HTML. You could even create VRML using a simple text editor, if you knew what you were doing. Most tools to create VRML were hard to use, and VRML took forever to load, especially in the age of dialup that everyone had in the 90's. The technology was never there to display properly either. VRML is still around: As mentioned in my review, Exit Reality is based on it.

After VRML failed to catch on widely, the trend moved towards "persistent" worlds, like Active Worlds, Second Life and There. These are separate programs designed to access a "grid" where players rent space to build what they want. You can travel between spaces if you want or teleport from place to place.

Maintaning the "persistence" turns out to be very complicated, and as players of these programs know, buggy as hell.

So the later 3D virtual worlds simplified things as much as possible. IMVU came out only to do 3D chatting, the most popular activity in these earlier worlds. But building and decorating was number two, and most of the latest 3D virtual world programs, like Kaneva and Twinity, provide a "house" you can decorate as you please. They just drop the complication of house to house travel, every player has their own space to use as they see fit.

The websites in the second paragraph attempt to offer something even less complicated. They allow you to build 3D "rooms", often as many as you want, that can be viewed in a browser, embedded in a web page. They replace the separate executable download with a browser plug-in that is generally easier to get the viewing audience to accept.

For all intents and purposes, we have come full circle; these sites deliver the 3D web page experience that VRML promised only with better graphics, with rooms that are easy to build, easy to load, as customizable as possible, and accessible by all.

If the idea of a 3D web is to catch on, everything must be customizable, it must work like HTML, and must be as simple as HTML. You must be able to start with a blank slate, or a pre-built template, navigation must be intuitive, and interactive. Quality should vary from simplistic to photo realistic depending on the computer capabilities of the viewer. Special effects (weather, particle, lighting, animation, water, physics, reflection and refraction) should be optional to both the builder and the user.

Eventually, one of those websites listed above may become the new defacto standard for "3D web pages" which will eventually lead to a 3D internet. Lets face it, if any of them do, it will be decided by advertiser dollars more than users. That means it will be Google Lively.

Except that Google Lively fails in most of the criteria listed, especially in the customizable part.

The program that inspired me to write this post in the first place was justleapin.com, now in open beta. It is lacking somewhat in features at the moment, but shows great promise in doing exactly what a 3D website program should do. Currently instead of avatars, you can add, animated people. Room navigation is simple mouse view. I dont know if avatar support is forthcoming, but I like the idea of adding animated people the way you add an animated gif to a 2D web page. You can customize any texture in the room, or embed videos, music, sounds, etc. There is a small library of 3D objects you can add, which could grow in the future. It also displays the room in decent graphics quality without being a resource hog.

I think that the decoratable "room" or "house" may be a popular model right now, but I know from my SL explorations, that thinking in just room terms is too limiting. Ultimately creating a 3D "space" should not have form limitations.

I do not know when or even if 3D web pages/sites will catch on. I do believe that expressing ideas should not have to be limited to 2D text or pictures or video, and that sometimes 3D may be a more effective and desirable way to express them sometimes.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know I am really into exploring 3D worlds. My friend Rebecca though is more into doing stuff. She agreed to show me around some of the cooler activities in Second Life.

First stop, surfing.

A couple of years ago, the first prim waves started appearing in Second Life. An enterprising SLer named Heather Goodliffe had the idea of creating prim waves that are surfable. It starts with waves that push any physical object that makes contact. Then creating a controllable board that moves with that physical push. The result is a surfing effect.

Surfing has grown into its own sub culture in Second Life. There are dozens of places to surf commercial and private, and numerous clubs, events, contests, etc. dedicated to the activity. Rebecca invited me over to the Weather sim, this is a group of sims sponsored by the Weather Channel with various activities, including one of the best places to learn to surf.

"If you just want to try it, there are free boards available in the surf shack," she explains. "Go get one and meet me in the water."

I did what she asked and noticed a problem. "Um, either I weigh too much, or this board does not float right."

"Oh, sorry about that. That's a bug that hit the SL surfing world last April when they implemented the Havoc 4 server code. The board will still work right, but it looks a little funny sunk in the water like that," she says. "Let me loan you a non-bugged board."

"Thanks, so how does this work?" I asked.

"Its just like real surfing, you paddle out to where the waves break. If you use your mini map, you can usually see four squares out in the ocean. This is where the waves usually start," she explained, "There's one starting now, lets see if we can catch it."

It seems that Second Life, especially the mainland, is like an American shopping mall. Go to any shopping mall and you will find the same 50 chain stores as the mall closest to your home. Most mainland builds are all the same unoriginal clichés repeated. I'm sure there are some original builds, but mostly its generally the same stuff over and over again.

So I decided to make a game of it. Introducing Second Life Cliché Bingo! Its part Bingo, part scavenger hunt.

Start with the picture above, or make a 5x5 matrix and fill each square with something you see a lot of in Second Life. Then pick a random spot on the mainland, and see how long it takes you to find five in a row or black out the whole board. Notice that I did not include any avatar clichés, the truth is that if you really pick a random mainland spot, you run a 70-80% chance of going somewhere where there are no other people around.

Anyways, here are the clichés I included in the picture above. I found all 24 within a group of 6 servers, and screenshot the evidence.

Top Row:
A piece of furniture with sex "pose balls" attached.
An object with the default pinewood texture
One of those stupid home security scripts telling you to leave in 10 seconds or else!
A parked vehicle (car, boat, plane, etc)
A tree made of sculptie prims

Second Row:
An Asian build (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, etc.)
A flag or banner made with a flexi prim
A house, complete with yard, floating high in the sky
A nearly vacant plot of land with an off limits barrier in place
Something that spams Notecards or landmarks to passers by

Third Row:
Any object that emits particles
A vacant nightclub or bar
free space
church, cathederal, wedding chapel, or religion oriented build
A beach with fake prim waves

Fourth Row:
A clothing store
A wall picture containing nudity (or selling skin textures)
A "Castle" or a medieval inspired build
A pointlessly tall skyscraper build
Prim rotating spotlights

Fifth Row:
A temp object that didn't de-rez, or any object that got stuck and abandoned
An animated animal or robot wandering around
A rotating "land for sale" sign
A "No Fly" zone
A 16m plot of land with advertising

Good Luck!!