One of the thing I do in Second Life is shop. I have been to a lot of stores in SL, but never bothered to blog about them, because most are so unoriginal. You got your box stores, your boutique stores, your fancy upscale stores that look like they belong on Rodeo Drive in LA, 5th Avenue in New York, or any of the other famous upscale shopping locales.

But this is Second Life! Why do you have to be normal?

I recently stumbled on to a few stores that were far more interesting as places to explore than as places to shop, and being the 3D adventurer, it makes me want to shop at these places more.

Being a “shopping” themed exploring guide, I decided to get a new outfit. Something wild but fashionable, but not formal dressy fashion, and ended up with the above outfit. Half the outfit comes from the first store pictured above The Abyss (more pictures) The store consists of two buildings and a walkway surrounded by a post-apocalyptic nightmare world. Lots of gothic and art deco looking buildings leaning at angles like they are about to fall over. Its a very cool.

The second completely original shopping experience belongs to The Boudoir (more pictures). The Boudoir City region looks like a french village on most of the server, but the skyline is dominated by a completely bizarre and completely original building. The bottom half has stone arches similar to a gothic cathedral, the top half looks like a post modern disaster you imagine seeing in East Asia.

As original as the exterior is, the interior is an equally impressive decorated store, looking like something you might see in a French opera house, or a Las Vegas casino. It makes you want to spend some money.

Finally on the stores that impress list is an odd fantasy combat store called Alruneia Sentry (more pictures). Being somewhat traditional in my tastes, there wasn’t much I was interested in buying, but the place looks gorgeous and unlike anything I have seen before.

The rez  point for the region will drop you at the store, but fly on down to the surface and explore there too.

Lots of glowing plant life and flying neon whales to keep your eyes busy. There are lots of hidden corners to explore. One was a “grotto” cave filled with water and  things to see both above and below water. I had to check it out but did not want to ruin my new clothes. So I just took them off.

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Two of the games I spend a lot of time on both recently announced major upgrades.

Second Life 2.0

The recent Second Life Community Convention (SLCC) had some presentations from Linden Labs with demonstrations of upcoming upgrades. Among them a much better organized viewer, much requested mesh imports (not till 2010), reflective surfaces (also not till 2010), and a bunch of other features.

More info on the new viewer can be found here. Here is a video.  We could see the new viewer later this fall.

Guild Wars 2

There are new MMORPG’s coming out that have tempted me to get back into online role play games. Aion, Champions Online, and Fallen Earth are three new ones for fantasy, comic book, and post apocalypse fans.

But now word comes that Guild Wars 2 is coming out maybe as early as the end of this year. Which is surprising, since I was hearing possibly 2011 before. This is the one I am most looking forward to. In Guild Wars 1 you always played as a human. In Guild Wars 2, there are five races to choose from, and I plan to have characters in all five.

More info on Guild Wars 2 can be found in an interview with the devs here.

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Due to the nature of this blog and site, I just had to post this video, even though it is all over the place.

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Most people that play Second Life, run into this problem eventually: You want to build stuff, and cant afford a lot of land, so you go to a sand box region, and when you go, its laggy and overcrowded.

Why is it even necessary to build stuff in world anyways? We can make our own textures and animations offline using other programs then import them into SL. Why cant be build objects in a third party program and import them?

There is a solution with OpenSim. You can create a free, lag free personal sandbox island on your own computer and build what you want.

I heard horror stories about setting up an Open Sim server of my own. Unfortunately, instructions to set it up are often overly technical and have the format “if you want to do this, then A, but if you want to do that then B.” A lot of tutorials want you to compile the latest source and set up another database, none of which are really necessary.

All I want to do is set up an Open Sim sandbox on my own hard drive. I’m not looking to connect it to a grid, or invite my friends to connect to it. I just want a free place to play and experiment. How difficult is that?

Its not difficult at all. Here is the process in five easy steps:

Step 1: Download and install the latest Open Sim build. Don’t bother with the source code binaries, (which you need for the very latest version) the latest ”installer” download is likely to be a stable build, and will keep you from having to install three other programs needed to compile the source code. Forget all that, just download and install.

The download page is here. You may have to scroll down a bit to find the “installer” section.

Step 2 : Open the directory you installed the program to, and find “opensim.exe”. Right Click and “create a shortcut” and move it to your desktop. (Vista users only: Right click on the shortcut you just created and go to Properties, then the “Advanced…” button, and check “Run as Administrator”). This is needed to get all the permissions right. Every time you launch the shortcut you will also be asked to “allow” the program to run. Its a very minor inconvenience.

Step 3: Run Opensim for the first time. The scary part is that it will look like a DOS command prompt which you may not be used to. Don’t worry its easy. It will ask you to fill out a bunch of initial settings. You need to make up a first name, a last name, a password, and a server name. The rest of the settings you can just press enter to use defaults.

Step 4:  Close Opensim by typing “quit”, then find “opensim.ini” in the same directory. Open the file in notepad. This file is one of many important ini files where you can make changes to your opensim server. The list of settings here can be overwhelming. It is formatted in an old DOS way where all the possible settings are listed and the ones not in use are commented out with a “;” character in front of the line.

All we need to do is go to the “Physics” section and add two semi-colons, and take two others away. Put a semicolon in front of “meshing = ZeroMesher” and take one away from “meshing = Meshmerizer”, then just a few lines down put a semicolon in front of “physics = basicphysics” and take one away from “physics = OpenDynamicsEngine”.

Don’t forget to save the file when you are done.

Without these changes, collisions with objects that you build will not work. The default basic settings are for testing purposes only. The settings we enabled will make interaction with objects identical to the way Second Life handles objects.

Step 5: Right click on your Second Life shortcut, and create another shortcut. Right click on this new shortcut, rename it to whatever you want, maybe something clever like “Local Life”. then in the “Target” section add the following info the the end of whatever is there already:

-loginuri 127.0.0.1:9000 -login firstname lastname password

The last three things should of course be whatever you made up in step 3.

That’s it, you are done! All there is to do is launch. Double click on the shortcut you made in step 2, when it is done loading stuff and it says it is ready for logins, double click on the shortcut you made in step 5.

The first time on you will probably see a puff of smoke on top of a small round dome shaped island. Going into inventory under Body Parts you can create then wear a new shape and new skin. If you still see a puff of smoke press ctrl+shift+R to rebake your texture.

There you are on your new island. There are no shops to buy stuff and you will have to load all your own textures, build your own stuff, and basically start from scratch. But at least there will be no lag. For help you may want to consult the opensim wiki page.

Have Fun!

I may eventually write about getting an Open Sim specific client, loading and saving builds, importing stuff to and from Second Life, upgrading the database on your home grid, bring others on to your sandbox, and connecting your build to the OS Grid, but these are more complicated, and I have not even figured them all out myself yet.

For now I have a sandbox to play in and build stuff… FREE!

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