The new 3D virtual world Free Realms by Sony, launches today! So I thought I’d post a review.

Free Realms is sort of a hybrid program. It is kind of like a virtual world, kind of like an MMORPG, and kind of like an online game portal.  “Kind of like” gets used a lot in explaining Free Realms. For example, “the graphics are kind of like World of Warcraft”.

It probably has the distinction of being the first MMORPG for all ages.  Really young kids (below 8 yrs) might find many activities too hard but others just right, Adults might find it a little too cutesy, but it manages to balance things enough so that parents and children could play together and both find it entertaining.

Free Realms has multiple activities. Some include “Brawling” (like a MMORPG style melee fighting), racing, demolition derby, “cooking” (simple 2D flash games for kids),  raising a dog or cat, playing board games (chess checkers, etc), and playing collectible card games. There are other types of activities available if you sign up for the full version of the game.

I tried this out in beta, but even then it already seemed like a full complete game. I did not really run into many bugs or horrible lag. Some players did however. It seems the better your computer hardware, the fewer problems you should have. A good video card seems to be especially important.

I found the game entertaining enough to play and the world is big enough for quite a few hours of fun, but it seems that as soon as you get far enough into an activity, your progress is hindered unless you sign up for the full version ($4.95 a month) . The “Free” part of “Free Realms” only goes so far it seems.

For example, I got into a battle with a “boss” and managed to defeat him by using some health drinks. After the battle, I looked to see if I could get some more health drinks, and it turns out the “gold” I have been collecting cannot be used for more health, only “Station Currency” which requires credit card purchase

Nevertheless, there is enough to do in the free parts to know whether or not you enjoy it enough to become a full member.  It is an entertaining enough program, and I suspect there may be quite a few players who do sign up.

As a “virtual world” it is very basic. You can customize your avatar, though there are not a huge number of choices. Each activity has a different outfit, which you can customize as you advance in level, or purchase optional items. The video demos I see indicate that home and yard decoration will be an option, but did not see anything like that in the free version. There are no player submissions. Chatting is limited for child safety reasons.

The MMORPG part is also somewhat basic. Even in the free game, you get better armor and weapons as you level. Being kid friendly, there is no “killing” or “dying”, it is all about knocking out the other guy before you get knocked out.  If you get knocked out 5 times in a mission, you lose the mission.  Most missions involve talking to NPC’s which launch individual “instanced” missions.  I have yet to see any team missions.

Racing felt a lot like one of those Nintendo kart racing games, where running over things gives you additional abilities like turbo boost, etc. Click to start a race, and others may join you, or more likely you will face a bunch of computer drivers.

It is definitely worth trying out if your computer can handle it.

Metaverse News 3D navigation, freerealms, reviews, virtual worlds

Time to do another exploring post. Today’s theme is “Visions of the Future”.  Lets start with the dark dystopian future. This is a very popular theme in Second Life including all the “Cyberpunk” role play sims. I may have to do a Cyberpunk theme post in the future, I have already posted about Insilico and SICK but I am confident I can find others.

For this post, I’m picking a cool dark dystopian environment sim occasionally featured as a load page on the SL viewer. The above picture is from Primitive City, a single region mall build that looks a lot bigger thanks to perspective tricks and a megaprim background.

Second on the list is less dystopian, more urban is Heaven4D Ultradome on the Velbert server. I read about this on a couple of other SL blogs and thought I’d check it out. It is also a small one server build with lots of stores, many of them mature themed by the way. Besides lots of obvious glow effects, there are some interesting build anomalies, like a light textured floor that is also transparent with water underneath. An interesting design choice for an “artificial” environment as ground like that does not exist in the real world.

Finally getting away from the dystopian future and looking towards a more utopian future is a 3 server build called Extropia Core. I have been sitting on this one for about 6 months or so, just never found a good excuse to blog about it.

Extropia Core is a community of players that even has their own web site.

The original theme of the community was to be a place to demonstrate future technology, like the old World Fairs. The designs in many of the areas though seem more retro-future (like what the year 2000 was supposed to be like as seen by futurists in the 1960s. They have tamed that down with some more natural gardens and such for a more environmental aesthetic.

Among some the future demonstrations is a working model of a “Space Elevator”. There are actually quite a few space environments high above the ground sim here, stacked one on top of the other, so take a look around way up above.

Virtual Society cyberpunk, exploring, future, sci-fi, secondlife

Generally speaking I do not do movie or TV reviews on this blog, but Caprica is a sci-fi story that hits many themes I tend to hit on this blog.

For Battlestar Galactica fans, it is the story about the creation of the first Cylons. For Virtual World fans there is a deep plot involving virtual reality, its nature and practical uses. The opening scene is what a lot of SL players probably wish SL was really like. (this scene will likely be heavily toned down when the movie finally airs)

I like science fiction, especially the speculative fiction with real world ties, like Philip K. Dick, or the “cyberpunk” writers like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and early Neil Stephenson. This kind of stuff does not translate well to TV or Movies, and even when it is done successfully there is not a big enough audience to sustain it.

Battlestar Galactica often managed to get beyond its space adventure genre and start telling stories with real world parallels, like the “New Caprica” episodes and their table turning parallels to the war in Iraq.

Caprica loses the whole space adventure genre completely. It is more of the dystopia genre. Caprica is a parallel Earth slightly more technological advanced than ours. The fact that it is also slightly more advanced than BSG as well says that Ronald D. Moore and crew understand how tech can slide backwards in the time of war (which hasn’t happened yet in Caprica’s timeline).

Bottom line is that Caprica is a good sci-fi story set in the BSG universe. If you are a fan of either, you should really check this out. I will definitely be looking forward to the series this fall.

Media Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, reviews, tv

This is a detailed follow up to my earlier “comic” post about Open Sim.

The Paradigm:  The Open Grid

For those who do not know, Open Sim is an open source clone of Second Life. The Second Life download client, itself an open source program, can connect to an Open Sim almost as easy as it can to Second Life.

Open Sim networks run the same way as Second Life runs. You set up an account with a first and last name, log into the grid, decorate your avatar, possibly buy some land to build on, attend events, make stuff, sell stuff, etc.  So far there is little difference between OS grids and the SL grids.

Except there are differences. SL runs SL server software, OS grids run OS server software. OS has some advantages over SL, generally less lag, megaprim support, etc. But, as of right now, SL is the superior and more fully supported system. For example LSL scripting is not fully supported in OS yet.

The first thing you notice when you go to an open sim is that you are starting from scratch again. There are legitimate ways to get some of the SL stuff over to Open Sim, but it is time consuming.

Within a year, the OS project hopes to be at parity with Second Life, meaning if you can do it in SL, you can do it in OS. Soon after that, it is hoped the pattern will be reversed and it will be Second Life playing catch up. Among the things being worked on:

• “Mesh” imports made from 3rd party 3D models (Maya, 3DMax, Blender, GMAX, Lightwave, Cararra, etc.). Complicated models would generate serious lag, but simple models could do more than the current “prim” system with even fewer resources. This is what There uses.
• New avatar meshes, allowing more detailed form fitting clothing, or  even non humanoid avatars.

The Paradigm: Region Archives

I mentioned before that Second Life’s fatal flaw is the lack of virtualization of real estate. Open Sim has an archive system (so does Second Life, but the Open Sim one is better). With some improvements, it could be used to store unused regions in storage, instead of taking up server power.

A system could be designed to work as follows:

1. Player picks a region they want to travel to. System looks to see if the region is active, if so, player is sent to a server running the region, unless region exceeds maximum occupancy, in which case proceed to step 2.
2. An inactive server is activated, as soon as possible, player is moved to the server. Items are loaded from archive file while simultaneously “data” is streamed to player’s client. If this is an “instance” copy, player may be prompted to move to original once room is available.
3. When the last person leaves a region, temp items are deleted, foreign items are returned to owners, the region data is backed up (if changed by an authorized person), and sever is freed for later use.

Such a system would eliminate the need for so many servers, and would make expansion easier and less expensive, and also allow events to run across multiple servers with potentially thousands of players.

There is also the potential of people to run their own private servers on their own hard drives. People could build their region privately without needing to use web resources. People could share region archive files with one another allowing another method of group cooperation. Maybe people could even participate in certain events (concerts, lectures) on private sims by downloading copies of event venues and NPC data.

The Paradigm: The Multi Grid Marketplace

Under the Open Sim paradigm, there are multiple networks acting independently. Second Life could be like AOL of the early 90’s, and all the other networks like other web sites.

Under such a scheme there needs to be trade channels set up between networks, so stuff I make can be sold for use in any other network. In the 3D market place today there are web sites that sell 3D models for use in various 3D programs. Daz3d and Renderosity are ones I have used for my Poser work, but there are other big ones used by 3D artists using more professional programs (3DMax, Maya,  etc.). Artists can sell their original works for commercial and/or non-commercial use, via “brokering” arrangements. It wouldn’t be difficult to change XStreetSL into a multiple network market site.

Moving the SL model into the wider Open Sim model requires a lot of work, and involves a lot of hammering out of issues, chief among them being copyrights.

In future posts, I’ll discuss some of these issues, as well as an even broader 3D web paradigms (who says there has to be only one standard?).

Metaverse News 3D Web, opensim, secondlife, virtual economy, virtual real estate

This month I celebrate my 5th year in Second Life. My friend Torment Thorn is also celebrating her 5th this yearand was throwing a party so I decided to attend and have it count as mine too. Didn’t feel like organizing my own party.

The party started just as Lost was coming on, and some shows just take precedence. So earlier that day I positioned my avatar at the party’s location, and while watching TV, I launched Sparkle IM from my ipod. Its an iphone app that logs into Second Life (or many other virtual worlds) and allows you to IM and participate in local chats. It was a fun way to participate in the party for a little while.

Torment and I joined on a “free promo” Second Life was offering (it used to cost about $10 to join Second Life in the early days). They were offering 500 free accounts, first come first served, and we picked up two of them. We may not be the first in SL, but we were two of the first to not have to pay to try it out. Not sure about the other 498, but we have been busy. Torment, was one of the early adapters of the role play potential of Second Life, and has run a few RP sims in the past 5 years, and currently runs Wicked.

Five years ago it was rare for more than 300 people to be on at once. There were no prim attachments, no animations. To get from place to place you teleported to the nearest hub and flew the rest of the way, sometimes two or three servers. There was really cheap “first land” for people that upgraded to premium. Today Second Life has 750,000 active unique sign ins a month.

Today, improvements keep on happening. There was this press release about IBM and Conversive creating a smart “NPC” for IBM’s Virtual Green Project. Basically a computer automated avatar, at least that is what it sounded like. I decided to check it out and see what it was all about. Didn’t actually meet an NPC, apparently its only at certain times. Oh well. Looked worth exploring anyways. Five years ago no one would have even dared to do anything like this in Second Life.

In the next year, SL is changing even more. The “Adult” experiment will start this summer, when we should also see shadow rendering available in the client. By the end of the year Open Sim will likely be able to do everything SL can do. Then the tables will be turned and SL may startborrowing from OS.  (but that is next weeks topic).

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There is a lot to say about the Open Sim paradigm, and I’ll be covering it in future posts. For now, I’ll just say it is very early and there is a lot of work still to be done. Right now all it is is a poor substitute for Second Life, but I think it has huge future potential as long as they diverge from the SL model at the right point and go their own way.

I just felt the need to introduce the topic in a clever way, because it will be an important topic for the future.

Links to stuff mentioned in the comic:
Second Inventory
OpenSimulator
NuAthens archive by Lordfly Digeridoo

Previous Related Posts:
Dark Times for 3DVWs Part 3: Second Life’s Fatal Design Flaw
SL Open Source Update!

Metaverse News, Virtual Society future, opensim, secondlife, virtual real estate, virtual worlds

This is part 2 of an ongoing series about what works and does not work in 3D Virtual Worlds (3DVWs) in hopes of educating anyone thinking of building their own. In part 1, I discussed the importance of avatars. For part 2, I want to discuss the silly but strangely popular idea that if we could access a 3DVW from a web browser it would be a huge hit, and finally bring 3DVW programs to the masses.

The primary attraction for even attempting to create a 3DVW that runs in a web browser is from looking at all the success the 2D virtual worlds have been getting.  Conventional wisdom says that the primary obstacle standing in the way of 3D virtual worlds having the same level of success is that people do not like downloading and installing a separate program just to play.

There is some truth to that, studies have shown that only one out of 10 new visitors to a 3DVW website will bother to download the program. So requiring a download apparently drops your audience 90% right off the bat.

I believe this is only an obstacle initially. People will download a good program that promises to benefit them, especially if it is free and comes from a reputable source.

From what I have seen so far, and from what I have heard is in the pipeline, there is no real point in trying to run a 3D virtual world in a browser, its bad conventional wisdom based on faulty logic.

There may be some good reasons to have 3D displays embedded in a web page, if nothing else its an attention grabbing novelty.  But 3D multiplayer worlds with chatting and building capabilities do not fit into the web page model the same way they do with 2D virtual worlds.

The state of the art

A quick note on the state of the art (in case you do not follow my blog): There are a few 3DVWs that can run in a browser already. Among the ones currently available are Exit Reality, Just Leap In, and Vivaty. All three still require either a small download or a browser plug-in to work. I have tried all three and they all feel like novelties rather than full fledged 3DVWs. If the primary goal is to add a 3rd dimension to the 2D Virtual World, none of these come close.

There is a largely unrecognized truth in all this: 3D virtual worlds are not 2D virtual worlds with depth. The two attract different kinds of players. Play style and activities are of a very different nature. 2D is much more social, 3D is a more creative outlet. 2D is “point and click” just like the web. 3D is played like a video game.

Once you accept this truth, it logically follows that a 3D virtual world designed to play in a web browser will never work. Playing inside a web browser is too limiting, too simplistic.

A good example is Google Lively. It was probably the greatest 3D virtual world ever to reside in a web browser. It was a failure, because people found it too limiting. Outside of chatting, the two primary activities in 3DVWs is building stuff in 3D, customizing your environment.  Lively provided a simple but inflexible interface for building, and no real ways to customize. Exploring what other people have built was not that interesting due to limited content. Every room was variation of the same 5 or 6 rooms. Lively’s legacy is that it mostly killed the dream of browser based 3D worlds.

A downloadable full fledged client may limit your audience, but it makes your world much more flexible, usable, and customizable.

Alternate approach #1: Put the client in a browser

Since it seems that every browser based 3DVW requires a download anyways, maybe the approach is to embed a mini client in a browser.  This is the approach being used by Pelican Crossing and 3di. This allows you to create an embed on a web site that opens the Second Life client inside the browser, the user of the embed is taken to a location specified by the embed.

The primary question that comes to mind is “why?” Linking to Second Life locations is already possible via SLURL. There.com and other 3DVWs have ways of creating links to specific locations as well. A client embed looks cool, but it is limiting the size to a part of a web page (which you can click to full screen) but does not add functionality to the client. Multiple embeds on a page are unworkable unless you have a really good computer.

Now what would be cool is a way to convert Second Life places to VRML and embed them so you can show non SL users your creations. People would not have to have an SL account to see it, nor have a full SL client, just some generic VRML viewer. This is actually possible. There are tools available to convert SL objects to XML files for backup purposes, and these could easily be converted to VRML files.  The biggest obstacle to this idea is the lack of wide access for SL to XML converters. This is a very sticky issue (maybe you have heard of the copybot controversy?).  Still it is a cool idea.

Bottom line it is easier to add a browser to a client, than a client to a browser.

Alternate approach #2: Accessing 3DVRs via interactive streaming video (Cloud gaming)

Cloud gaming via embedded video is coming very soon. At least two companies OnLive and Gaikai are developing interactive web video technology allowing you to play (nearly) lag free video games remotely through streaming video.

Most online games works like this:
1. your computer or console “renders” your environment from game data stored on your computer.
2. you take action
3. action is sent to gaming server
4. gaming server decides outcome which is sent back to your computer
5. go to step 1.

“Cloud Gaming” works like this:
1. Your computer gets a streaming video feed from an online server.
2. you take action
3. action is sent to gaming server
4. gaming server decides outcome, renders the outcome from game data stored on the server, and converts it to streaming video
5. go to step 1.

That seems like an awful lot of work for the game server to handle, but if they can get it to work, there is no real need for powerful gaming computers to use the service. Theoretically, I could play Crysis in high definition detail on my ipod. There would be no need to get the latest hardware, or constantly updating your console.

Sounds pretty good, but unfortunately it could not work with Second Life as it is currently designed, because there is no way the service could handle all the custom textures. Handling the bandwidth of the streaming video is one thing, handling the bandwidth with the Second Life Servers as well would be a networking mess.

Just because SL will not work in a cloud computing environment does not mean another 3DVW could not.  If models and texture data were hosted on the same physical network as the rendering, it would eliminate the extra bandwidth. The 3DVW would have to work via submissions like There.com does, rather than instant feedback like SL. Building could be done with offline tools, then submitted. Since the whole technology of “Cloud Gaming” is in its infancy, I do not expect to see a 3DVW built with it for at least another 5 years.

Sounds difficult, but that may be the only way to get a usable 3DVW to play in a web browser.

Really, I don’t see the point.

Metaverse News 3D navigation, 3D Web, cloud gaming, exitreality, justleapin, onlive, secondlife, virtual worlds, vivaty