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OMg they listened to my rantings
WizGamer
Member UncommonPosts: 403
in Second Life
I ranted and ranted about this needing a forum and YAY
Comments
It is nice to see what a couple of emails to the admin can do. Glad to see that you second lifers finally have a board of your own. Spread the word.
"Whoever controls the media controls the mind..-'Jim Morrison"
"When decorum is repression, the only dignity free men have is to speak out." ~Abbie Hoffman
Well, the board seems to be pretty empty.
Ya' don't say! I gave up on asking for a Therian forum months ago. Well theres still hope!
Oh, its Lifers and Therians.
There
The only limitation in There is your own imagination!
Second Life is wayyy more popular than there joel . Neither are for me but graphics and game play wise second life owns there.
mhttp://www.mmorpg.com/discussion.cfm/setstart/51/loadthread/29442/loadforum/446/loadclass/145
I'm sorry but There has the better graphics. There's lighting and textures are so far past Second Life. Plus There's avatar dynamics and vechile physics blow Second Life into the next galaxy. Now when it comes to building thats opinion based, but the rest is simply facts.
Second Life is full of sex, porn, and dirty content. The members are very creative but Second Life went down hill only a few months after it opened. Did you know I came from Second Life into There? I was sick of the sex and the community, plus Linden Labs is full of BS.
There
The only limitation in There is your own imagination!
All you said was opinion as well second life has better graphics to me. I dont know about all the sex and what not ill take your word for that but the fact is that you are in a dieing game that will go nowhere. That doesnt mean something better wont spawn off of there and second life but if you think the graphics are good in there you havent played many games bro end of story.
There is not dying, it is growing and thriving. There has finally recovered from Black Friday and in fact is working on scripting and improving building. They're working on land options, building, and bugs. Finally There is listening to us, There is now owned by a company that cares.
They are hirering and the company is growing. Linden Labs is obviously in trouble, Teen Second Life is a ploy to just collect some extra cash. Look at Linden Labs list of open positions, that is proof right there Second Life might not be around in a couple of months.
They are low on staff, running out of money, and the players are finally seeing that. There will evolve and change. There was meant to be a consumer metaverse and thats what its gonna become. What goes around comes around, I hope There is prepared to pick of the falling empire of Second Life.
Revenge is sweet!
There
The only limitation in There is your own imagination!
Yeah you're right, Second Life is better than There.
Oh.. my...god.. I thought I felt my Joel sense tingling, don't you have something better than to troll?
Something I got tired of in SL was just the player majority.
I still play SL from time-to-time, definetly fun logging in and saying hi to some friends of mine, but I just got tired of there being nothing for me. All the games I got attached to in SL disappeared (RollerBall, Discs of Tron). I can't seem to find a club to hang out at, mainly because they're all either hip-hop clubs, or goth clubs, and I am an avid metal-head, so I hate both of them.
When I first came to SL, first club I ever went to was, you guessed it, The Edge. Had some good music back then, better people. I was even manager there for a while. But I watched things change, I had less time to play, and now it seems the game has almost completely changed on me
(Oh, and by the way, ever seen the picture of the Edge with the dude in the Spawn costume standing in front of the club's Spawn symbol? Yeah, that was me.)
Anyway, I've just about left the game except for the occasional log-in, just lost the magic it once had :S
"Change" is all what Second Life is about - as the old saying says, "evolve or die"
This is often hard to understand, for people to expect things to continue to be the same, over and over again. It's very hard. The longest-lived projects are rarely over one year old (I'm part of only two...). Finding ways to continue being successful is one of the challenges of most users of Second Life.
Anyway... for metal and good old hard rock... try Rocker's Requiem or Transylvania (this one is vampire-themed
). Rocker's Requiem is not really "themed", people just gang together to listen to good rock. The DJ, Sech Molinari, does both places (and he owns Rocker's Requiem), and he has been around for, oh, 7 or 8 months, so I guess he'll stay.
As to... hmm... Second Life being all about sex? Wellll that's an overstatement! I personally teach children several skills in 3D worlds - Second Life is a wonderful platform for teaching - and you may be sure that there is much more than sex in Second Life
Of course, I agree that some people are in there just for the cybersex - that's fine. Others are for the in-world games, or for making money (real money, mind you), for doing artistic creations, for educational purposes, for conferences, for listening to good music, for socio-economic experiments... there is sooo much to do, and it really depends on where you hang around.
"I'm not building a game. I'm building a new country."
-- Philip "Linden" Rosedale, interview to Wired, 2004-05-08
Gwyneth, please forgive me if my post gets out of hand. I'm an Ex- Lifer. I was in Second Life beta and had a very bad encounter with a Linden, I see them now as money hungry people. They may be building something great but they're just out for the money.
I've moved onto There. Sure I visit Second Life now and then but I have everything in There now. Second Life will surely end up like Worlds.com or Active Worlds, dry and old. The vision is amazing but they've done it the wrong way. I have a very bitter taste in my mouth from Second Life, I see There as the world which will live longest.
There has survived through so much and much more is coming our way. Second Life may have Jeffery Ventrella now, but we have a community of hard working people who strive to help There grow and evolve. Will and Philip saw the future, Will stepped into the future.
There
The only limitation in There is your own imagination!
I don't think your posts are out of hand
We all have bad experiences now and then 
And in my case is the reverse - I mostly have had good experiences. Also, it helps a lot that Second Life supports the Macintosh and that it runs under Linux as well (although it's far too much trouble to do so for a regular user) since I don't have a Windows computer.
So far, I think that There surpasses Second Life in the following aspects:
- Tight integration with the IE browser
- Faster-running graphics (ie. much better frame rates even on slow computers, no hiccups, etc.)
- Vehicles that work!!
- Things like animals or robots that are wonderful to watch in their detail (as detailed as avatars...)
- Good interaction on large-scale, first-person-shooter types of games (like Paintball)
- Even if the avatars seem a bit too cartoonish for my own taste, they have excellent animations, and also tons of them, compared to the "default" ones that you get in Second Life (only a few dozens :P - the rest you have to do by yourself...)
- Better "finished" product - ie. the There designers have given There a much better look overall, on the interface as well as on the in-world content (things like many more animations or good-looking bubble boxes really make the difference - attention to details is important)
Also, since the way Second Life works - streaming content that is created by users on-the-fly, collaboratively - this means that all tricks that MMORPGs can use for lighting and texturing, which need to be pre-generated from static content, are impossible to do in Second Life. Only next year will we be able to watch their work on Second Life's 2nd generation renderer, and see if there really are improvements that way.Of course, I really don't like the model on how There "limits" the way you can bring content into their platform, but I know it's a question of a different technical approach.
The reasons I use Second Life is really because, for my own projects - and I'm talking real-world projects here, not simply "entertainment" - I need much more than what There currently offers. Things like using the Second Life 3D browser as a front-end for applications, for instance. In my view, There is targeted towards the entertainment business, and is very successfull at bringing in the correct features that allow you to have a better entertainment experience. Second Life simply doesn't know (yet?) what direction to take. Some use it for entertainment, some use it as a replacement of other tools (WWW, chat, videoconference) to do real work. When you have such different communities using your platform, it's hard to know what features you should bring in next. A simple example: having working vehicles or being able to do better first-person-shooting games in Second Life is important to a large part of the Second Life population, but another part wishes better XML-RPC support to talk to their real life application servers. Which of those features need to be attended first? It's a tough choice for Linden Lab, and they don't get their priorities that well defined. They attempt to please all users of Second Life at the same time, while giving out tiny bits here and there of partially-completed features - but more than often, this only means that nobody is much impressed, despite their efforts, except for one group.
The latest example: we have now for the upcoming major release (1.7, under preview right now) the ability to create HUD attachments. This was a feature that was requested by a tiny group of people that need that feature for their FPS games. But it wasn't part of their roadmap. What a majority has asked for (there is a "feature voting" tool with hundreds of proposals...) was a way to change the user interface, by integrating HTML into floating, docking windows - which would allow not only HUD attachments, but integration with billions of other applications, as well as more freedom in redesigning how the user interface should look like. So, this "new feature" is neither of what has been asked. But it will have its uses - perhaps 50 people (0.1% of all users) will be very happy to have this new feature and eventually use it. But wouldn't it me much better to have a "feature" that appealed to 500, 5000, or even 50000 users instead? Since summer '04, Linden Lab has concentrated all their efforts in eliminating bugs instead of releasing major features - the net result is a better game experience, but sadly, less features. We can only hope that Linden Lab is happy about all the bugs which have been eliminated and starts concentrating on the features their community needs.
Not surprisingly, they're now having several colleges studying and working in Second Life for whole semesters to give them input on what they should do - as well as some major US banks renting private islands to use it as a training ground for people wanting to learn more about finantial services. These, I hope, will give Linden Lab the serious feedback they need to improve their product in what we usually think is the "right" way - as opposed to "the way Linden Lab thinks is right".
"I'm not building a game. I'm building a new country."
-- Philip "Linden" Rosedale, interview to Wired, 2004-05-08
Your point on There being for entertainment is very right. However, many others including I have said There could be used for so much more. I had a disucssion with a There member last night and there are clues here and there that they are working on tools similar to Second Life's. I've always wanted less limits and more freedom over There.
Things like scripting are indeed coming our way. Also I see terraforming tools that might be coming. I've always wanted to be able to edit objects just a slight bit in-world without going to Gmax. You have to remember There has been in survival mode for a long time, they are just coming out of that state.
They are finally able to work on things the community wants. They are currently doing some land owning things and a few updates back they gave us DICE. There has a scripting language already and its called ThereScript. All vechiles, activity systems, and things like that are programmed using ThereScript. When I say activity system I mean like the paintballing system and racing system. That includes DICE I would say.
After they fix all major bugs and finish rolling out their realestate features I think we'll be seeing some major updates to building and content creation. Right now its about limits, but There is owned by a new company that see's things in a different way. So i'm guessing we'll be seeing alot of nice stuff in the coming months.
Now about your Second Life comments, i've not been too fond of their streaming based ways. There is dial up friendly, Second Life could at least make it a bit possible for lower connections to be on their platform. Second Life is very easy to use for people who want to have big projects. I am amazed at how Second Life has this huge gaming world inside it. I hope that kind of stuff can be brought into There as well.
I'm sure in the end Linden Labs will go into the casual chatter direction. They'll make updates for new features after bug fixes are made. They have all the basic building and scripting, they need to improve avatars and communication. Kind of the opposite There is going right now, improving building and other things like that.
Both Second Life and There will suprise us in the coming months.
There
The only limitation in There is your own imagination!
Joel - thanks for your very informative post on the future developments of There! It's amazing that There.com has looked so well a their "competitors" and are more than willing to learn from them (who knows, they may even respect users' copyrights as well, and start giving people tools to interface There to other external applications). Yes, it sounds like we will see heavy competition between the two platform models. Like you, I think that ultimately competition will benefit both and I'm eager to see how this will develop in the future...
"I'm not building a game. I'm building a new country."
-- Philip "Linden" Rosedale, interview to Wired, 2004-05-08