Over a year ago, I went around the world in Second Life builds and noted the lack of builds based in Africa. I did find one decent one at the time, but felt annoyed that there were not more. It is the second biggest continent after all.

Since then some new ones have been built. I tracked them down and thought I’d share.

The first is a really impressive 4 server build called Visiwa (more pictures).  According to its website it was originally opened in October of 2008, but has expanded quite a bit since then. I saw some tacky construction signs (are these really necessary?) indicating it is still expanding.

The port in the top picture is dubbed Port Kijiji (an ancient African work for “Village”), and it is surrounded with stores, including some available for rent.

In the back are some residential spaces, also with some vacancies, if you are looking for housing in a beautiful exotic locale. Even if not this is a cool place to explore, just don’t feed the lions.

Speaking of lions, the next African location I visited was simply called Virtual Africa (more pictures). Built by a non-profit based in South Africa, its a small tourist attraction complete with 3d models of about a dozen different African animals, and a fair number of plants. The whole thing has a safari feel to it.

You can walk around, balloon around, or hang glide. There are also tents for rent, auditorium, and some informational displays.

With these real world tours, I like to try and find historical locales as well.  No problem, I found an Ancient Egypt City of Thebes (more pictures). This is a role play server, so you have to be in costume to look around.  I just decided to scope around with my camera.  If you want to visit someplace a little less role play, I found a build called Egypta occupying a quarter of a server.

Well that’s my brief tour of Africa in SL. Hope you enjoyed it.

Virtual Society Africa, exploring, Historical, mirror worlds, secondlife

This week, two of the more successful creators in Second Life filed  a class action suit against Linden Labs due to lost business resulting from other players copying their items and selling them as their own.  This is a very touchy issue for a lot of people, the thread at sluniverse.com was 15 pages long in the first 24 hours of the post.

I thought I’d share some thoughts on this. I am not a lawyer, and I have no clue how this will play out. My best guess is an out of court settlement that will not change the situation at all. Personally, I believe that there is plenty of blame and misunderstanding to go around.

Lets start with the basics:

1.) Second Life was not designed with security, copyright, or IP protection in mind.  Otherwise, 60% of all textures and 90% of all sound files would have never made it into the game.

2.) It is technically impossible to stop the copying of textures and objects on to people’s hard drives, and damn near impossible to stop these copied textures and objects from being imported back into the game under a different “creator” name.

Linden Labs has failed in two ways:

1.) They failed to publicize facts 1 and 2 above, thus giving most players the false impression that they can make what they want and no one could copy it. Even worse, they instituted a policy early on that the rights to all textures, animations, scripts, etc imported into the game would remain with the player that imported them, thus implying that they can be safely used in game.

2.) They have failed to enforce copyright claims, even at the bare minimum level an internet “service” is expected to do. Claiming to be a “service” and claiming only the users of the service are responsible if they violate copyright or trademarks has not stopped other internet services from getting take down notices, and should not stop Linden Labs either.

The filers of the class action are stating some things in the class action that are clearly not true as well. Take a look at point 6 on page 3:

6. Linden Labs has the means to simply and easily halt the alleged conduct, but refuses to do so because it makes too much money from all the infringement.  Plaintiffs bring this lawsuit in order to prevent Linden Labs from continuing to commit trademark and copyright infringement and to recover damages for Linden Labs unlawful behavior.

This paragraph is for the most part false, and its inclusion undermines paragraph 4 and other parts of the complaint. Especially false are the words “simply and easily” as if a simple command into some SQL database would solve a complex copyright issue.

There are a lot of ideas floating around to prevent copyright issues from coming up in the first place, and I have yet to see one that would not seriously harm legitimate businesses or the SL economy as a whole.  The most popular is to not allow people who do not have financial data on file to cash out lindens for dollars, in hopes that the lack of anonymity will scare away copy scammers.  The flaw is that it is not necessary to use Lindex to buy and sell lindens. If LL starts restricting the Lindex, it will open up third party exchanges.

The only way around these loopholes is to not allow any unverified free accounts to have any lindens at all. This will further deteriorate new player experience, and ultimately hurt the economy as a whole as it limits the customer base.

The least harmful way to enforce copyright is the “You Tube” way. Take it down if a copyright holder wants it taken down. The burden of proof of a copyright claim would be on the copyright claimer, requiring evidence that you uploaded said texture or created said item before the copy, to prevent false reporting for griefing purposes.

Complaints regarding copyright or trademark should be investigated. If the investigation determines the claim is valid, the offending object gets removed and replaced in people’s inventories with a notecard explaining what happened, and who made the complaint. It should also possibly result in the suspension of the copiers account, rescinding of land holdings and lindens.

I know this would result in a lot of innocent victims losing stuff they paid for, resulting in lots of complaints, but it could lead to other reforms for the better, like a rep system or insurance system. Who says these have to be run by SL?

Even this is not a fool proof system, but it is a way of doing something, which is more than they are doing now.

Some other 3DVWs that allow user created content that can be bought and sold by players, namely There and IMVU, have restrictive approval requirements, that also cost money to submit new items, and it takes days to get it approved.  This makes sure people aren’t copying other peoples work, but it also slows way down the growth of content in the virtual world.  Second Life has definitely benefitted from the exponential growth afforded from an open submission policy.  Restricting the policy would completely change every aspect of Second Life.

In conclusion, I believe this lawsuit will never get to court and will end in some settlement.  I’m not worried that SL will close, I am worried that LL will have to make some draconian change in policy that will ruin SL. Getting rid of the offending material, and maybe the offending avatars is fine.

Making changes to the submission process, or making economic changes, would no doubt do more harm than good.

Metaverse News copyrights, legal, linden labs, secondlife

Its September and that means the new fall season of TV is coming. As usual the networks rearrange their schedules and schedule most of my favorite shows opposite one another.

I do not have cable or satellite, just an antenna to pick up local HD channels. My “DVR” consists of a tuner card on my computer running Windows Media Center — far and away the best DVR software despite the fact that the files it saves are proprietary. Between WMC, and websites like Hulu and streaming video on network sites (cbs.com, abc.com, etc.), and pay for TV like iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, I do not miss anything I want to see, despite the lack of cable or Satellite.

The problem is, none of this can be seen on my TV, just my computer. All I can watch on my TV are live channels, DVDs, and my previously metioned Apple TV.

I decided that I would find a way to solve this once and for all. I researched many possible fixes: Wireless enabled television (too expensive), building a media PC (also too expensive), TiVo (another monthly fee to pay, high startup cost), a media server (none support the WMC proprietary files),  a converted xbox or linux box with XBMC loaded (same WMC proprietary issue), a Windows Media Extender (difficult to find, most no longer being supported) and a PC toTV device (poor screen resolution no HD support).  I mention these options because others may find them more suitable. 

For me, the easiest and most cost effective solution is to get an XBox360.

I don’t own any consoles, never had the need, as my computer is powerful enough to play anything. But if I want to watch all this internet based television on my actual television, the XBox360 is the best way to go. I got the “arcade” model, the extras you get in the “elite” are needed for console gaming enthusiasts, but not needed for my uses.

Setting all this up turned out to be a major chore as I ran into some undocumented issues that Microsoft apparently does not even know how to fix. My computer connects wirelessly to a router in the same room as my TV, so all I had to do on the xbox is plug in a cat 6 ethernet cable (the 54mb limit of the way over priced wireless G adapter Microsoft sells is too low to stream HD).  Once connected, my computer had no problem seeing my XBox, but the XBox could not see the computer. 

The official answer from Microsoft is to make sure your network is “private” and that and that both file and media sharing is enabled. It turns out you must also turn off Internet Connection Sharing as well (its a service under administrative tools, disable it from ever starting so it does not come on when you reboot your computer).  Microsoft either does not know about the issue, or they dont think it is common enough to publicize as a possible fix.  Took me a good 4 hours of troubleshooting to find this out though.

Anyways, once fixed, I can play all my media files through my TV, including my DVR recordings via the Windows Media Extender feature. The xbox also has netflix built in.

What I still could not do was access hulu and other streaming video.  Turns out there is an easy fix for that too called PlayOn ($40 one time after two week trial). It installs on your PC and plays online streaming video through your TV by pretending to be stored video. Works on PS3 and Wii as well.

And with that addition, I can watch anything  I want on my TV, sans cable or satellite.

Media appletv, internet tv, Media, Media Center, tv, xbox360, xboxlive

I want to take a second look at Blue Mars from the perspective of what Blue Mars is trying to be. It is still very unfinished of course, but based on what I read and what I have seen so far, I get a picture of Blue Mars’s real purpose, and it is not what most people think.

The majority of the people jumping on the Blue Mars bandwagon are Second Life players, hoping for something similar, or more accurately, something not in control of Linden Labs.  I feel for them, but they are likely to be disappointed.

Let me tell you what I believe Blue Mars really is and why its goals are not compatible with the Second Life model of the 3D web. Or, to use an obvious metaphor, Second Life is on Venus, Blue Mars is on Mars.

Take a look at what Blue Mars is doing.  First, as I pointed out in my previous review of Blue Mars, a primary activity in virtual worlds is building stuff, and Blue Mars is keeping the building parts out.  Second, they are keeping avatars fairly standard, with only the face being adjustable. Third, they are built on a gaming engine designed to be flexible enough to make many kinds of video games, not just social worlds. Fourth, the tools they are making available to “developers” are professional level, requiring some prior game design knowledge, sending the message “amateurs need not apply”.

The missing piece of the puzzle is to look at the latest trends in 3D Virtual World games, and I consider myself an expert. Take a look at my What is the Metaverse? page. I give a list of attributes for a metaverse, one of which has sadly not come into fruition. To quote:

Game Launching – Think XBox Live, where you meet up with your friends, pick a multiplayer game to play, you all load up the game and suddenly you are all teamed together. Obviously XBox Live has this ability, but XBox Live is all text until you get into the game. Playstation 3 Home is a 3D social world that lets you do this too. If we really want to have a “Metaverse” this is the way to do it: Tie all the individual online games together, let players carry their identity from game to game, and provide a way to move in groups between games.

My idea is to create a toolbox that game developers could use so that player could move from game to game with the same identity and similar avatars.  Playstation 3 Home is supposed to have this ability, I do not know how well it works. I know others were attempting this ability, but never successfully.

What we have been seeing as a trend is an intermediate step: Create a bunch of small games yourself and  integrate them into a larger virtual world. This is what Free Realms is doing, as well as Empire of Sports, Football Superstars, and Moondo.

The design of Blue Mars is that of a portal to various games. Each game space is capable of having its own rules and designs, but uses the same avatars in each room. What Blue Mars is mostly looking for is “game developers” to create these game spaces, not SL object builders or fashion designers.  Some game spaces could be created to work similar to  Second Life, or they could be adventure games, sports simulations, RPG games, even first person shooters, as long as it is 3D and runs on the CryEngine2 and designable using the game engine provided.

This is what Blue Mars really is: A gaming portal with common avatars.  It is not a good place to start a designer business like Second Life is, it is not a good place to become a merchant or build your dream house or hold meetings.  Blue Mars is designed to be a place to build 3D games and get other players to come check out your games.

If successful, Blue Mars will be a compliment to SL, not a substitute.  Second Life is designed to be a social network but has limited game design potential (made problematic by script lag).  Blue Mars is designed to be a gaming network with limited social potential.

I do not have any thoughts about Blue Mars potential for success in this venture, except to point out it is likely to be difficult. The real measure of success will be if they actually attract professional game designers and gaming companies to create content for their platform.

In the mean time, they are going to have to develop some “developers” themselves. These early developers are likely to not be very good early on, but will get better.  Meanwhile, Blue Mars needs to develop their own in house “killer apps” to attract players.

There is potential here but it is a path that has never been tried before.

Metaverse News bluemars, game platforms, metaverse, secondlife

I decided I have done enough tweaking and released Dating Sim 6.0 as a download.  I was going to release it as 5.9 and then have 6.0 be the “bug free” version of 5.9, but being bug free is likely an impossibility anyways.

Since version 5.0 I have looked over all the “places”, especially the older ones, and I have enhanced them all in some way. I took a look at version 5.8 and decided the weakest parts were the non-romantic lake beach, the boat, and the home improvement store. There were also some bugs in the nightclub that could not be fixed without a complete code rewrite.

The other enhancement I had made since 5.8 is to organize my rendering files better. The Ariane model has changed here and there over the years, and some of the older pictures did not look as good as the later ones. So I went and re-rendered a bunch of the older pics using the newer Ariane models. These pictures are “cleaner” looking and actually compress into smaller jpg files. Even though there is more content, version 6.0 is actually a smaller download than version 5.8.

The new download is here.

If you find any new bugs, post them in the comments.

Metaverse News Dating Simulator, updates

Blue Mars has officially gone into open beta so I can now talk about it in full. So where to start?

First I need to say that I am reviewing a beta product. There are many bugs, which I wont discuss, and there are many missing elements I will discuss that I assume will get fixed eventually. My initial impression was not very good but I met with one of the admins in world and he  says many of my concerns will be addressed in future releases as noted below.

What I can see now is the overall game plan of the admins.  Could Blue Mars be the Second Life killer everyone is looking for?  Short answer: no. Long answer I’ll address in a future post.

I decided to break down my review by looking at the various components I expect to see in a 3D Virtual World.

3D Graphics - So once you get past the avatar creation step (which I will talk about later) and pick a destination to visit, the first thing you notice is that Blue Mars looks fantastic. It is by far the most realistic 3D virtual world out there. I took a walk on the virtual beach and the waves and surf as it hits the sand is damn close to the real thing. You know how when you walk on a real beach the water gets repelled from your feet? They simulated that on the virtual beach. Lighting, weather, everything, just looks fantastic.

Avatars – Now here is where things start to get a little messy. The first thing you are greeted with is the avatar creator, and it is one of the least intuitive avatar systems I have ever seen. Trying to get your skin tone and eye color right is down right frustrating. Whats wrong with just letting us choose these options right up front? Then they have three different ways of adjusting your head and facial features, none of them are very good.  If you play other 3DVWs I highly recommend going to “advanced” and using the good old slider bars. Even here, the slider bars seem to have a mind of their own.

The avatars were done by e-Frontiers a Japanese company that owned Poser for a while.  Unfortunately, the adjustments you can make here are no where as flexible as Poser. They seem to have designed it to keep “fugly” avatars from being created, but at the same time make it difficult to make really attractive avatars as well.

Previously, I wrote an essay on what makes a good avatar: the looks of PS3 Home avatars, the interactivity of There avatars, and the flexibility of Second Life avatars. The avatars got the PS3 home looks down, but still lack the interactivity of There  and flexibility of SL.

Another virtual world fan has a way to measure avatars from game to game by simply asking 3 questions. Can you get naked? Can you make your avatar look like yourself? Can you be something other than human? The answer to all 3 is NO! You can only look like yourself if you happen to be a petite 15 year old. Body shapes types and even heights cannot be adjusted at all. Apparently the reason for this is to make sure all animations work the same for everybody.

User Created Content - You can sign up for the development program to design original content for Blue Mars. They will give you some off the shelf tools compatible with the CryEngine2 platform, but it is up to you to figure out how to use them.  All content has to be submitted for approval, and I have no idea how long that takes. Most of the tools that are available are very high end for 3D artists who know what they are doing. If you don’t know what a LOD is, you will probably get frustrated quickly.  Considering how building stuff is a major component of all successful virtual worlds, I’m not sure how well this will go over.

This is a weakness of any platform built from “off the shelf” software.  Second Life, There, and IMVU were designed from the get go with user created content in mind.  CryEngine2 was designed for professional game developers, and most of us amateur designers, are likely going to find the process a bit overwhelming.

Stuff to Do – Blue Mars is built on a gaming engine, and thus there are a few games available. The first one I tried was a fly a hover ship (a helicopter without blades – this is set in the future after all) through a series of rings. Controlling the ship was so unintuitive that I did not bother with the game and just decided to fly around the scenery. There is a golf game too, which looks good but not as fun as dedicated golf games. I assume that over time there will be a lot more stuff to do. The Admins to their credit are giving all the tools they can to developers, its only a matter of time before people start making some really cool stuff.

Interface Notes – Things that need some work to make the game more usable and playable for typical players:

Avatar Movement -  Your avatar can do two things, walk and run, and there do not seem to be any easily accessible vehicles to do anything else. Worse, moving around Blue Mars is frustratingly unintuitive.  Movement is all based on clicking the ground and having your avatar walk to that point. MMORPG fans are used to this. ASDW keys do not work because of the need to type text, which is fine, but the arrow keys behave very weirdly. Your avatar turns, but the camera does not. Pressing “up” is the equivalent of clicking on the ground a couple of feet ahead of the avatar, but without the camera following, it is very difficult to “steer” your avatar.

Each zone seems to play by its own rules too. You can fly in New Venice. Press escape and your camera will fly around using ASDW keys,  Press Q and your avatar will land where you flew to.  There is no flight in Beach City yet, it is all point and click to navigate there which is annoying because of the size of the city.

Camera Movement – Using scroll to zoom does not function normally (it did in hover ship mode, but not avatar mode).  The only way to zoom is in the “camera” menu and even then there are only 4 preset zoom settings. You can pivot the camera around by holding the right mouse button.  Basically the camera controls do not make up for the lack of an auto following camera when using arrow keys to control. The Admin that I talked to says cameras are being worked on.

Graphics Compatibility – The incredible graphics of Blue Mars comes at a price. You have to have a pretty robust computer to run it (nvidea 8800 or higher), limiting the number of players right from the start. According to the admin, the Beta test currently runs in the highest graphics settings for testing purposes. Later they will allow lower settings and lower graphic requirements.

Blue Mars currently runs in a window with a set resolution that looks a little small on my 2048X1170 monitor.  Currently, only  the Developers version has graphic adjustment settings, future player clients will eventually allow you to change the graphics settings.

The “Very Beta” State of the game – The following are things that are missing or sub-par at this time. Hopefully they will be coming soon:

Communication Systems - Currently local chat only. The chat tool consists of either bubble text or chat window by people in close proximity with you. They have a primitive “Friends” system to keep track of people you meet and find out if they are online or not. There does not seem to be any IM system or player search or teleport system at this time.  The Admin that I talked to in world says that there are plans to implement these things in future releases.

In Game Web Content – None at this time.  The admin I talked to says they plan to eventually enable in-game flash players for streaming audio, video, animation etc.

Out of game Web Content (i.e. Website, Social Networking, player profiles etc.)  - Currently a player forum and a developers blog are available. They have basic player profiles now too.

Bottom Line – The makers of Blue Mars seem to have taken an off the shelf graphics engine, an off the shelf gaming engine, and off the shelf avatars, put them all together in hopes of being the next Second Life.

What we get is incredible graphics, weak gaming elements, and nice but uninteresting avatars mashed together with little common purpose or interaction.  One of the most common VW activities, Building, is only available to developers, and done outside of the game. There are no web services yet, no streaming audio for clubbing, no built in browsing or linking. Even though this stuff may eventually get fixed and improved, it is destined to always have a patched together feel you don’t get with virtual worlds built from scratch.

This is more obvious from a developers tool standpoint as different components have to be developed using different tools. It is going to seriously limit what is possible in game, and eliminate any possible contention as a “3D web standard”.  The graphics are great, I admit, but as I previously mentioned in a past post, great graphics do not make a great game.

At this point, Second Life and There have nothing to worry about.

Metaverse News 3D Web, bluemars, reviews, virtual world