Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Openlife: Is it ready for most Second Lifers? No. But that day doesn't seem so far off

Is one-year old Openlife ready for the mostly social user of virtual worlds? The fashionistas? The Universities? The VIP dOOds and the bling-ettes? Absolutely not. Yet.

You cannot teleport a friend. Instead, you have to give them a landmark, and they may not even receive it. A teleport may very likely end with a crash. Poseballs are mostly hilarious. Click to sit and you may find yourself upside down or doing an odd dance in mid-air. You can't spend a dime, there is nothing for sale (except land) and... well, you get the picture. Openlife is still in Beta.

Can you create cool content?



Most of the builds I saw during my short visit to Openlife were crap. I need further explorations to understand the limitations there, but a visit to Exodus (teleport directly from here) - created by Gino and Linda McCallister with help by Grimly Graves - was a clear demonstration of its potential.







At this point, you can't terraform beyond 15m-/+, but tier for mainland regions costs $59 a month, and each region supports 45,000 prims, and regular prims are scalable to 100m. And per my conversation with Openlife's founder and president, Steve Sima, features coming before the end of the year include:

- Support for OGRE.MESH 3D Objects (Import 3D Modelled objects)
- Avatar 2.0 (advanced next generation Avatar System, including 'real' face texture mapping)
- Python Scripting
- Avatar-to-Avatar Private Skype Calling
- In-world Spatial Audio Voice support

Importantly, Openlife also expects to have a working economy by the end of this year.



A real Community

Openlife enjoys a strong sense of community and neighborliness. Everyone I met there has a Second Life account, but most spend the bulk of their time in Openlife building this new world. They've rolled up their sleeves and are working steadily and together to make their dreams a reality here, together with their leader, Steve Sima (aka Sakai Openlife), with whom they meet once a week!

I'm thinking that NPIRL and Impossible IRL should begin to establish a presence there and welcome any thoughts on this topic from our members.

8 comments:

Alpha Auer said...

Agreed! On the NPIRL presence I mean.

Although at first glance the interface is quite similar to SL, there are nonetheless differences as well. So, what I am especially planning on doing over the next few days is checking out the building potential by realizing a full build there. In fact, there is a project that I have had in mind for Syncretia for the longest time which I suspect would be quite perfect for implementation in OpenLife also. So, I think I will get cracking with that and then maybe do a post on my building experiences when I am done.

Alpha Auer said...

And I would invite other content creators to consider doing this also. Be it hair, aircraft or skyscrapers!

I think much benefit can be attained from the sharing of experiences and results...

Anonymous said...

Nice review.

Can I suggest a review of http://www.secondinventory.com/ next to see how effective it is at transferring inventory from SL to Openlife? :-)

Todd said...

@Bettina: am I to understand you think the other builds you visited are crap?

Bettina Tizzy said...

sean, you are welcome to come help me out and prepare a review! Would you?

Connected-worlds:
Yes, most definitely yes, OLG has a long way to go before it can begin to compare with the content I regularly review in SL. However, I DID see some good content and I'm not done reviewing it either. Hang in there. I'm NOT DONE.

Anonymous said...

Bettina: I haven't used it. That's why I was hoping someone would do a review. :-)

I also thought it might encourage people to support OpenSim-based grids if they new they could transfer their SL content across.

Have you thought of checking out some of the other grids to see how they are advancing?

DaveFromIreland said...

Check out Flickr - and the Openlife group. And the YouTube videos, tagged with Openlife. Let your readers judge for themselves the quality of content already there. 'Crap' is subjective and in the eye of the beholder. But you are entitled to that view. Perhaps having seen so much of it on mainland SL has dulled your senses. But there's wheat among the chaffe if you take the time to look for it in OL. Not having a search facility makes it more difficult to find. But time will cure it.

It's my personal choice to be there, in at the beginning of a new era, a pioneer in a frontier world where I am forced to think of solutions and workarounds to problems that cannot be solved by spending linden $. If you are someone used to a pampered life style where Linden $ can buy you whatever you need, and you wouldn't be seen dead without sophisticated AO then perhaps OL is not for you .. yet. I can sit on my beach, sunbathe, float in the sea, watch the sunset and let my dolphin frolic, listen to my music streamed inworld while i sip my rum and coke, and work on that which could not be accomplished in my former second life. My "Openspace" is a sim with 45,000 prims at 59 USD per month .. what's yours ?

Unknown said...

Well for someone that got so offended when I called her by her last name in secondlife Miss Tizzy certainly doesn't mind dishing out the insults. Calling other people's work crap seems like a pretty nasty thing to say. Especially considering that, from what I saw on the videos, I couldn't tell much difference from what I see in sl.