Virtual Forbidden City: imperial dinner

forbidden-city-imperialdinner, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

I've spent some time in the Virtual Forbidden City, and I really like it so far. Anyone with a general interest in history or culture should pay a visit!
More information is here: Virtual Forbidden City".

For anyone who cares to post a screenshot to Flickr, I have created a Flickr group for the Virtual Forbidden City. It can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/virtualforbiddencity/.

Virtual Forbidden City

IBM's Almaden Island was one of the first places in Second Life I visited. Wandering around, I noticed a billboard apparently advertising a Second Life rebuild of the Forbidden City, China's imperial palaces in Beijing. Amazed, I tried to visit the place, but unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to. Even now, quite some time later, this sign is still up there, even though I've never heard of someone actually visiting it!

But it seems IBM is involved in more than one virtual rendering of the Forbidden City. In cooperation with The Palace Museum, the current inhabitants of the Forbidden City, they have published the Virtual Forbidden City. It is an IBM Corporate Citizenship project, intended to "provide the means for a worldwide audience to celebrate and explore Chinese culture and history."

It's a 200 MB download, and it runs in a window. You can just visit as a guest or register and become part of the community. I'm not sure what the added value of a community is for such an environment, but I registered anyway, to see what it can bring. As for visiting the city, I'm still at the gate as you can see below. Tonight I hope to explore more of the interior of the Virtual Forbidden City!

Metaplace beta

A long time ago, I applied to particpate in the Metaplace alpha. I never really heard much from it anymore, but to my suprise I received an invite to join in, a couple of days ago. Here we go again: after Twinity, Google Lively, Just Leap In and OpenSim, here's Metaplace, brought to you by Areae, a venture capital backed company, presided over by Raph Koster.

Not a world
Metaplace, by the way, isn't a virtual world, it's a platform. Their goal is to do away with separate client installs for individual, separate, disconnected virtual worlds. Instead, they envisage an infrastructure of tailor made virtual worlds, interconnected if so desired, built on Metaplace technology and accessible through the browser.

Browser based worlds
This begins to sound familiar, doesn't it? Just Leap In more or less offers the same, and Google Lively also shares some of these properties. The difference is that both Google Lively and JLI require a separate plugin installation, while Metaplace uses Flash, something most endusers already have in their browser. Another difference between Lively,JLI and Metaplace is that Metaplace does not just provide a 'room' but an infrastructure. It has developers' tools, code, APIs and the like. In this regard it is much richer than JLI and Google Lively. More like Second Life, actually.

Competing with Linden Labs, OpenSim
If Metaplace wants to become the platform of choice for virtual (social or game) worlds on the internet, they'll have to compete with Linden Labs and OpenSim. On their own, Linden Labs can't really win this battle; Second Life is just one big virtual world amongst others. But with OpenSim and, more specifically, the Open Grid beta that's going on, the Linden Labs client technology suddenly becomes a much more viable platform choice. Anyone can install or create OpenSim worlds, and use the Second Life viewer - or open source flavors of it - to access them. The technology being built and tested in the Open Grid beta ties it all together: Second Life, other Linden Labs owned sims, OpenSim based worlds, all accessible from the same rich and tested client.

Graphics, UI
I am, currently, very busy with real life stuff, so I am not done exploring Metaplace yet - not by a longshot. But I must say, the graphics and UI are, currently, still underwhelming. I haven't found a way to change the camera point of view, for instance. And running on full screen, it definitely looks like some of the PC games my kids play, like Rollercoaster Tycoon. But hey, it's beta..

Twinity: in world jobs

I'm trying to spend a bit more time in Twinity, to get more feel for the whole environment. To get an idea of what's possible, I'm redecorating my place, an appartment in Amsterdam. Right now it's just a bare set of rooms, with ugly wallpaper to boot; it really needs a makeover! Because I participated in a couple of beta activities, I got some Globals (Twinity's currency), which I can spend on it. New wallpaper costs 9 Globals.

If I would need more Globals, I could do two things: buy them directly from Twinity, or apply for a job. Twinity has a collection of jobs on offer: DJ, waiter, usher, photographer, stuff like that. Spend 10 hours online doing one of these, and you earn 500 Globals! To be honest, I have no idea how much that is, but it amounts to 50 Globals per hour, so that thing better be worth something :-)



Ten hours is also quite a lot of time to spend in world. But still, I like the fact that Twinity arranges jobs like these. A world like Second Life already has an established economy; Twinity obviously doesn't, and this might help to get people involved, get some currency flowing into enduser pockets.

Twinity: real and virtual mix getting better

Twinity recently went into public beta, after being in closed beta for the best part of 2008. It's nice to see it develop over time! Some parts of the Twinity vision are much better articulated these days; the mixing of real and virtual for instance is becoming much more obvious as a center piece of Twinity's offering.

A good example of this mix is the Drykorn shop in Berlin - both the real and Twinity Berlin, that is! The similarities between the two are obvious.





Nicely done, I must say! Too bad one can't control the lighting in Twinity - for the European market, it means shopping in a dark store as you can see. Twinity's day/night cycle has always matched the real world cycle, and while I appreciate why that's done (remember, mixing virtual and real), the result is that I'm always stumbling around in the dark when visiting Berlin. I'd really like to have the option to influence this daylight cycle - in Twinity, I mean!

In the past, I've had a lot of crashes with Twinity. Today I adjusted the Twinity resolution to match my screen resolution (1440x900), and this seems to have a positive effect. I now can use control-alt to switch between Twinity and other applications without Twinity crashing, and the graphics look better too. So here's an advice to Twinity users: in the menu System - Display, set resolution to the same value as your display uses!

From the 'must fix' department: I'm still experiencing performance issues. Lots of harddisk and network activity, and lots of lag, even when I'm alone in a place. I use this same setup to play Eve Online, Second Life and other stuff, and Twinity doesn't look too good, compared with those. The Twinity client still feels clunky, too. From the splash screen and the startup messages, you can gather that the Twinity client is comprised of several pieces of third party software, glued together by Twinity code. That's a bit how it feels: not yet like a tight piece of software. I know it's still beta, and I acknowledge it's getting better, but this could still be a major roadblock for enduser acceptance.

Open Grid developments

My Open Grid server is still humming nicely, so I've waited a while with upgrading to a next build. But it may be necessary to upgrade in a while, because the Open Grid development team is working towards implementing the third draft of the Open Grid Protocol, for which a number of Jira issues remain open.



In the mean time, this is a snapshot of the Open Grid region Lexania. This beta tester, Lexa Sands, actually has two adjacent regions up and running. I teleported to the first, which somehow didn't rez. The second one however did, and seen from the first region it looked like an island drifting in the void! Of course I tried to fly from the first to the second region, and region handoff between the two regions worked like a charm!

An extra bonus for Kiva?

Kiva is enrolled in a competition that may yield a prize of 1.5 million US Dollars. AMEX card user? Then, please, vote!

Just Leap In - update

One weird thing when logging in to JLI, is the fact that you don't have or are an avatar. You move your camera around and you can even put animated avatars there, but you yourself are not yet rezzed as an avatar. But, this will be available in an upcoming release, according to an announcement on the site.

Speaking of moving the camera: this is done by rightclick - drag, just like in Eve Online. I like this very much, and miss it dearly in Second Life.

Another nice thing is the physics: stuff bounces nicely in JLI. We'll have to see how avatar movement turns out when avatars become available.

For those of you who want to share snapshots: I have created a Just Leap In Flickr group.

..and another one: Just Leap In

Earlier this evening I caught an item at Vint's blog, about a new browser based 3D environment: Just Leap In. New stuff is always exciting, so of course I signed up for the public beta right away. It took an hour or so to get access; not too bad, better than promised! I've been online in JLI for half an hour or so, and so far it's been interesting. There's a lot of rough edges, which is not strange given that it's early beta.

The installation procedure and the initial user experience remind me a lot of Google Lively; both require an install of a plugin in the browser, and both offer a range of prebuilt room templates to choose from. Both offer a host of accessories to place at your room, too. But, it seems the JLI rooms are easier to customize with your own content; apparenlty. Just Leap In features a more open approach in this regard, more open than Lively anyway. That could make JLI interesting to companies looking for branding opportunities.

Just Leap In also offers the option to embed a room in a web page. The result is this:



Stay tuned for updates!

Underwater Archeology in Second Life?

On our OpenSim server, my kids are building underwater villas and a submerged cinema. Quite a weird thought one would say.. Yet, after seeing the results, I thought of something else: Second Life would be a great environment to recreate an underwater archeology site! Most of us never get to dive to the real thing, whether they be famous shipwrecks or lost cities in, for instance, the Mediterranean. From a promotional or educational perspective, this could be interesting!

I own some real estate in the Fortimus area; I centered a few rental houses around a water parcel; this way, every rental has open water access. Maybe I should try to create something like that, there. Too bad I'm a lousy builder :-)

Ugliness

I am, I must admit, a happy man. After a job switch earlier this year, I haven’t had one single traffic jam while commuting! The reason is simple: I no longer have a lease car, I am traveling by train. One of the unintended side effects of train travel is this: I used to see a lot of cars, but these days I see people. To be honest, I quite like the change, people are much more interesting!

One of the things I’ve noticed is, that I only very rarely see ugly or repulsive people. Even though most commuters definitely do not look like they could win the next Supermodel tv show, the majority of those travelling with me have something that touches me, makes them human, special or even beautiful, even when they look completely ordinary on first sight.

They are, often, imperfect but still beautiful people. Dignified, vulnerable, barely concealing emotions, relaxed or stressed out, playing a role or being their utter self - most of them have something redeeming, something that's disarming, that touches me. Perhaps it’s just a look in their eyes, or in the way they behave themselves; the way she reads a book or brushes her hair aside, the way he visibly enjoys being in the presence of his girlfriend, the nervousness in the young girls' voice, going to her first University week.

In a virtual world, we all can look perfect, if we want to. It's not that hard, if you can spare the cash for those extra nice clothes and bodily enhancements. And that's precisely why that beauty doesn't mean much to me; it lacks that human element which I notice daily in the crowds of commuters surrounding me. My consolation is that, beneath the pretty pixels on screen, you'll probably find those same humans again!

Perhaps a native english speaker would have found better words to convey what I'm trying to say here. I hope you get it just the same!

server upgrade

When I first started out with OpenSim, I installed it on my server at home. Unfortunately, my adsl router doesn't do UDP over NAT, so I rented a low end Linux server at strato to get this stuff up and running. That was almost a year ago, and the choices for Linux distros at Strato were, at that time, not really up to par: they were all old. I finally went with RedHat Fedora core 6, because that seemed to be the best choice at the time.

Recently I noticed I could upgrade the server to newer stuff. Amongst the now available distros were OpenSuse and Ubuntu server, both contemporary versions. As I have some experience with Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop, I decided to go with that version on the server too. Yesterday, I downloaded all my own data to my local machine and, subsequently, had the machine reinstalled with the new Linux version. That didn't take too long - only 25 minutes, instead of the couple of hours Strato indicated.

Installing the necessary software went relatively smooth, googling the necessary commands for installing Nant and Mono. The latter wasn't that easy by the way, the command 'apt-get install mono' didn't work for me, even though I had enabled all the necessary sources, because my server couldn't find the package. Luckily, after installing Nant with 'apt-get install nant', Mono was installed too, so that was solved quite easily.

Running OpenSim with MySQL would not work until I installed the appropriate code page with the command "sudo apt-get install libmono-i18n2.0-cil".

Now everything is up and running, it works, it performs better and I'm feeling a bit safe again, being on an all new and up to date OS!

Now if only I could get scripts to work I'd be a happy man. Unfortunately they don't: Mono can't find the libraries because my ../opensim/bin directory isn't in it's path. I've set it in the user session and the environment, but still no dice. I'm going to use MONO_PATH I think, even though that's supposed to be a developers' tool, a kludge, and not a proper runtime tool. But hey, if it works..

Gridnaut Bear

Those who succeed in building their own Open Grid beta enabled OpenSim and teleporting from there to Linden's Vaak region (on their Aditi betagrid), get to call themselves "gridnaut". Gridnauts can claim a trophy bear, allowing you to show off your OpenGrid prowess in the Second Life main grid :) I got mine from Whump Linden a couple of days ago. This is how it looks:



I like it. Too bad I can't get one in real life!

Two OpenSims

Yesterday I finally finished my OpenSim environment again. There's two installs now on my server: a plain OpenSim install for the kids, and a Open Grid enabled one for myself. I didn't know for sure if two installs would work, but it seems to be fine so far.

It even seems you can run two installs on one database. I accidentally forgot to change one database value in the OpenSim install for my kids, which caused their content to end up in the same database as my OpenGrid install. Result: I suddenly saw my sons' newly built house pop up on my Open Grid island!

I'm planning on leaving the kids' standalone OpenSim alone for a bit. It's good enough the way it is; no need to upgrade every couple of days. That's what I can use my OpenGrid install for!

My son at his new underwater villa:

Gridnaut

It's been a while, but today I installed the latest OpenSim build on Linux, did the necessary configuration stuff, and tried to teleport from Linden's Vaak region to my own OpenSim region. And it worked!



The only problem I have is that my avatar doesn't rezz, and the terrain remains invisible. So all is not yet 100% good, but I'm definitely on my way.

I just teleported from a Linden Labs owned sim to my own and back! How cool is that!

Confusion

For those who don't play Eve: many of the action in Eve takes place in asteroid belts. These belts provide ore to miners, but they are often protected by game generated enemies, which are nicknamed 'belt rats'. These belt rats show up as little red crosses in the distance. If you notice them, you'll usually fight them or get out of the belt, if you haven't got the firepower. One thing is clear: red crosses in the sky means an enemy, and, quite probably, battle.

Yesterday I was at a garden party - one of the very few this year, the summer hasn't been that great unfortunately. Standing in the dark I looked up to the star dotted sky, where even the milky way was faintly visible. Suddenly, my eyes caught a plane passing overhead, a little red light blinking away in the night. And for a second, that red light triggered a response in my subconscious: a belt rat! Lock on target, dispatch the fighting scout drones and open fire with the 125mm rail guns! And then, a fraction of a second later, I realised that it was just a plane. I wasn't playing Eve Online, I was standing in a very real garden watching a normal plane passing overhead..

My guess is this must happen more often to those engaged in immersive virtual worlds or games!

Still relevant after all these years: Arthur C. Clarke

It was a summer somewhere in the 1980's, I was twelve or so, and I needed books. This summer holiday we would be traveling a lot with the camper, meaning I had days and days to read while my father drove - so I needed quite a bit of reading. One of the volumes I ended up taking with me the local library was a book called "2010: Odyssey 2" by one Arthur C. Clarke. Its' cover intrigued me, and being an amateur astronomer, all things space travel fascinated me anyway. And it turned out to be very fascinating indeed! Even without having read part 1, which was not available, the story gripped me.

I'm still trying to find out what it was that appealed to me. The bits of dry wit, a fascinating future of space travel, the characters, new perspectives on time and space..all that and more, I think. Over the years I kept reading his books, bought several of them, watched him on TV and read articles about him, and I was impressed and amazed on more than one occasion.

Again it was summer, and I needed something to read for the holiday, and Arthur had just passed away. It seemed fitting to buy something from him again: The Collected Stories. It's almost a thousand pages and contains Clarke's short stories, written between 1937(!) and 1999.

Unfortunately it came too late for the holiday, but I have read a sampling of the stories, and again I was surprised by how relevant much of it still is. Many of the concepts found in Star Trek for instance, can be found in these short stories - but these stories often date from the 1940's or 1950's. Many of the stuff taken for granted in current scifi, can be found here - in writings fifty or sixty years old. And much of it is still science fiction even today!

Of course, some of the material is dated. Clarke couldn't, for instance, foretell the shape of the current internet in the 1940's, even though he wrote about reading the paper on an electronic device and over a network, in the late 1960's.

And, a disclaimer: it's possible that Clarke got some of his ideas from other, older writers. His bio on Wikipedia for instance mentions that Clarke, as a kid, read cheap US scifi pulp magazines - who knows what ideas found their humble beginnings in these mags?

But still. The man who has given us the communication satellite left us a great body of literature; food for thought for many years to come. I wouldn't be surprised if some of his stories are still relevant as SciFi stories in another fifty years.

Choose your life - real and virtual

I've been doing EVE online for some time now; about eight weeks I'd say. During that time I have chosen several EVE careers.

Solo or ..
At first I was content with flying solo, doing a bit of mining and shooting the incidental Serpentis belt rat. No real need to worry about skills and skill training, so I more or less neglected it, randomly choosing skills to train, without a real plan or goal. In hindsight, this was very shortsighted. After two shooting incidents I noticed I was too vulnerable, all alone in EVE's large universe, with only minimal protection and almost zero offensive capabilities; I needed to train skills to be able to fly a bigger, stronger ship, and I needed a corporation where I could learn and grow. I have been lucky to join TRACE, the Trade Association Corporation, which is a great corp - and not only for n00bs like me. I really learned a lot there, and the corp members are really nice.

Skills and changes
While working on skills for bigger ships, drones and guns, I needed to do missions too. They bring in money, train your combat skills and help you grow. These days, I don't even have a miner fitted on my ship anymore - what's the use? I'd rather fit an extra gun there! So without really noticing it, I switched from being a 'solo miner' to a 'mission runner within a corp'. Consequently, my skill training plan has changed too; I've been working on drone, cruiser and some weaponry related skills first, followed by skills needed to operate salvagers and tractor beams.

Mid Year Review
Today I had a mid year review at my current job. My manager and I discussed, amongst other things, my longer term prospects within the company: where do you want to be, two or five years from now? The answer to this question does have immediate consequences for the choices you make in everyday life - now! What training to choose, which people to link up with, what to read.. And then it struck me that reality doesn't differ that much from gaming in this perspective. The career path you choose has an impact on the skills you train, and this is true both in real life as well as in the gaming universe.

Time wasted
The lesson for me is, that I wasted valuable time when I first started out in EVE Online. I had no real goals, other than to enjoy myself a bit. Yes I trained some skills, but it was aimless, there was no structure, no comprehensive plan to it. I've wasted a lot of valuable skill training time this way! After todays Mid Year Review, I have decided I won't let this happen in real life too, as the time lost in real life is, obviously, infinitely more valuable than those skill training hours in EVE.

Do you know where you want to be five years from now? What's your five year plan?

The male office dwellers' guide to finding the right toilet

Something off topic I need to get off my chest: the male office dwellers' guide to finding the right toilet.

Usually, a man doesn't have to go through a lot of trouble to get rid of the waste his body produces. Liquid waste especially is easily disposed of - sometimes a tree is all a man needs.

But things change when you're locked up in this huge office building you get to spend your working days in. Especially for those of us who work in technical professions, finding a nice, clean toilet can be quite difficult, as offices occupied by the IT department tend to have a larger than average male population - young, geeky males I might add. This does have a distinct, noticable, negative impact on sanitary hygiene in bathroom areas in the immediate surroundings of said offices.

So what's a civilized man to do? Again, disposing of liquid waste is still not difficult, as long as you can hold your breath for, oh, 30 to 60 seconds and can find a dry spot on the toilet floor to stand on. But the real problem arises when you, a hygiene conscious man, need to get rid of the solid waste your body produced. You are definitely not going to sit on those toilets used by the IT dept - that would be beneath your human dignity, and you would need to take a shower afterwards, which is, even if possible, highly unpractical.

So here's how to go about this business: the male office dwellers' guide to finding the right toilet!

First off, locate those areas in the building where, on average, more women than man seem to work. Target your search; look for the HR or marketing department to begin with.

Once you've found such a location, locate the male toilets in the area, and execute a quick visual inspection of those premises. Also, use your nose. No need to sniff explicitly, just take notice of what signals your nose sends up to your brain.

If the visual and nasal inspection leaves room for doubt as to the level of hygiene at the site, repeat the steps above until you find a place that passes this first, initial test. Once you've succeeded, proceed with the steps below.

If no one is at the scene, proceed to inspect the available stalls, executing a more thorough visual inspection. If someone enters during this procedure, you're supposed to do like you were just entering the stall; enter, lock door, wait until other person leaves again and proceed as necessary. This should not be difficult, as males tend to ignore one another in bathroom areas anyway.

The nose plays an important role in this second, more thorough examination of the site. As you're not the only one looking for a suitable place to sit and relax a while, some of these stalls may have been used recently. No matter how clean they look, these should not be used unless you can hold your breath for many minutes.

By now, there are probably one or two choices left. Choose the one that has the least visual contamination on the installed hardware. After all, you need to sit on it. Ideally, there's no contamination at all, but you can still wipe the thing down a little with some toilet paper, just to be sure. Be careful to keep a couple of layers of paper between said hardware and your hand; no moisture should be able to penetrate the layer between the moment you wipe and you throw it away.

The best choice is the stall that has little dust particles floating in the water in the toilet bowl. This means it hasn't been used for some time, probably not since it was cleaned last night, and it's the best result an office dwelling man can hope to achieve in his quest for sanitation and hygiene. Sit down, let out a deep sigh and relax. You're safe.

Time to do OpenSim again

Last year, I spent many an evening on installing and running versions of OpenSim on Linux. The blog items I wrote about that, still get a lot of hits - apparently many people still have the problems I encountered then. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot, but some of the early issues with OpenSim prevented me to really do something with it. Not that I blame anyone for it, it was alpha or very early beta software! But after a while I stopped updating the install regularly, and recently I wondered if I, perhaps, should just deinstall it and stop paying rent for an unused Linux box..


Intergrid
But just before I went on holiday, something very interesting happened: a couple of IBM and Linden Labs engineers succeeded in teleporting an avatar from OpenSim to a Linden Lab Second Life simulator, essentially breaking down the barrier between the two simulators. I'm quite sure you read about that!

It looks like this was more than a proof of concept, as Linden Labs has opened a beta program for repeating and expanding on this first experiment: Open Grid is the name of it. I will apply, as did many others; but Linden Labs is giving precedence to those who will be able to bring up an OpenSim region. And I already have one, I just need to update the install and make the connection!

Soo.. time to dust off the cheap rental Linux box, update my OpenSim install, and hope Linden Labs will allow me to participate in this beta. Of course, I will keep you posted.

More information on this whole intergrid teleporting can be found on the Metanomics site. A good list of recommended reading is at the bottom of this page.

All about the..
As for Linden Labs' revenue model, my quick guess is that the Lindens see OpenSim as a good way to expand the reach of Linden Labs compatible technology. After all, anyone using an OpenSim simulator will have a viewer that's compatible with Second Life. This way, SL-compatible technology may be a bit closer to becoming a standard of sorts. Plus, Linden Labs gets to claim the moral high road in the interoperability debate by openly collaborating with an open source competitor to their main product.
Linden Lab could also position itself as the trusted, known grid provider with the most interesting, enduser generated content (products, entertainment) available. But they could also claim to be the most legally compliant or regulated grid and hence (perhaps) safe environment - not sure about that, but it's a thought. These are just quick guesses; I'm sure there are more thorough analyses out there. I'll see what I can find when I have the time.

Just a quick note..

Saturday, I have returned from a nice holiday in Austria! More specifically, we visited the Stubai Alps. A beautiful part of Tirol, with lovely flower filled fields punctuated by fierce mountain ranges and grim gletschers. Tomorrow it's back to work, and virtual world stuff will resume shortly, too!

Twinity update

It's been a while since I last blogged about Twinity; time for an update!

Real? Really?
Let's start with the good news. Metaversum is putting a lot of effort in digitally recreating parts of Berlin, especially the Hackescher markt district. But that's not all: Metaversum announced plans to add other metropolises as well . From the start it has been Metaversums' intention to create a mix of the real and virtual world (hence for instance the realistic daylight cycle in Twinity); bringing these cities online really adds to that vision. I have never been in the real Berlin, but I already know my way around the Neue Schönhauser strasse and the Hackerscher Markt; I easily recognized the streets on Google Maps as well. It would be interesting to check out Berlin in Twinity, and then see the same area in Google Streetview; would you still recognize it? As Berlin is not yet added to Google Streetview, we can't tell - yet!

More outdoor
Plus, one of the complaints I had during the early beta is really being solved this way: more and more outdoor areas have appeared in Twinity. Not only that, they have been given a more prominent place too! You are no longer confined to a list of available rooms, much as Google Lively is today. Glad to see that improve.

User created content
Another aspect which deserves attention, is that more enduser created content is appearing in Twinity. Blogger Tinsel Silvera for instance has a room at the Bitropolis area where he exhibits art like items he created. To be honest, I haven't paid much attention myself, I'm not much of a content creator. But for a real virtual world to be viable, the ability to create content and to subsequently sell it is, in my opinion, an important one. It is one of the things that sets a real virtual world apart from a 3D chatbox.

Resources
So what's not to like? Well, there are a few things that might need improvement before Twinity is ready for mainstream usage. I still have issues with stability and resource usage, for instance. Memory usage can run in to the hundreds of MB's of RAM - over 450 yesterday. After doing an ALT-TAB to switch to another app (say to Gimp to save a screenshot) it isn't always possible to return to Twinity; you sometimes need to stop the process and restart. Generally speaking, the application sometimes just feels clunky.. But, it's still beta, that obviously accounts for something. Nevertheless, I'd really like to see some improvements here. I will download a new fresh copy of the software, perhaps that helps.

Finally, performance remains an issue of concern. The overall world operates at satisfying speeds without much lag, but startup, search and teleporting to certain places take a long time. I understand that loading the virtual city of Berlin takes time, but a lot of users won't tolerate a delay of five to ten minutes to access a certain place. Perhaps it's a good idea to ship some of that content with the download package? Or provide it as a separate download? Eve Online does something like that too, both with regular and premium content, perhaps Twinity should too.

Oh and another feature of Eve Online which I really like: once you press the print screen button, a screenshot is automatically saved to a default directory - in high quality .bmp if desired. Very handy! I'd like that in Twinity too!

For all you EVE Online fans out there

..it's an asteroid themed Lively room. Now if I could get a decent ship and some belt rats in here, this could be fun :)

Google Lively - the aerial view

Google Lively, my first room, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

A standalone room like this makes perfect sense to my eight year old daughter, who's very much into Habbo hotel and the likes. It has less appeal to me, I'd rather take a walk in a virtual city, fly my Sopwith Camel over Caledon, or my Catalyst through Eve's virtual universe..

This does not mean I don't see any value in Google Lively, but I am perhaps not the kind of user that's attracted to this sort of thing. I think I'm going to spend more time on Twinity instead. See how their virtual Berlin is developing!

No comment

Further thoughts on Google Lively

It's obvious that I need to spend more time on Google Lively before being able to make an in depth assessment of it. In the mean time, here's more thoughts on Google Lively.

Virtual yes - world no
First, I wouldn't call it a 'virtual world'. It is not. A 'virtual world' should, in my opinion, have certain properties in common with the physical world. A geography, maps, places, buildings and inhabitants, a currency and/or an economy, to name a few. One should be able to freely wander/fly/drive/swim around in a physical environment that could be real - in this or an alternate universe. In this regard, Second Life is a virtual world; Eve Online is a virtual universe. Metaversum is expanding Twinity to become a virtual world, too; their virtual rendering of the city of Berlin is interesting in this regard. Google Lively doesn't have the properties I expect in a virtual world, it is a flat list of separate rooms one can choose to visit. Lively is a virtual environment, a 3D chatbox, but not a virtual world by any of my standards! The comparison with Second Life is, in my humble opinion, an unfortunate one; it is comparing apples to oranges.

Lively, a new default browser plugin?
For those of you who haven't tried Lively yet: it runs in the browser, but it requires a small install. Once installed it can display all Lively rooms, and rooms can be embedded in web pages, as you can see in the blog entry below. It looks like Google created a 3D platform for the 2D internet with Lively: adding a 3D element (the Lively room) to an existing website is really easy, and I expect a lot of them to pop up in the coming months. In the near future, having Lively as an addon or plugin to your browser may be as common as having Adobe's Flash player or Sun Java are common plugins today. If I were an MSN executive, I'd be very worried about these developments, because why muck around with a 2D text message service if you can have a 3D room just as easy?

Marketing
This opens up all sort of interesting marketing perspectives as well. Going 3D suddenly doesn't require much; basically it's just a Google account you need. My room was ready in five minutes! I don't know yet how easy it is to brand a room; I know you can put advertisements up, but that may not be enough for all prospective Lively customers. My current employer for instance, a large bank, has a distinct visual identity, which must be used in all internal and external communications, but also in the layout and furniture of offices. Being able to sufficiently brand a room would be critical to management acceptance of a Lively room as a suitable solution for corporate communications. Disclaimer: I am, at time of writing, not involved in any 3D efforts my current employer may or may not deploy.

Safe
A Lively room is a relatively safe 3D environment too. A room does, for instance, not share anything with other rooms: you can't see you neighbours' smut store or gothic SM cave through your windows of your room! Something like this happened to us in Second Life. Two female (former) colleagues of mine were once confronted with a couple of girls having 'lots of explicit fun' on the lawn of our companies' test site. The couple said they chose the site on purpose, in order to piss off corporate users of Second Life. Lesson learned: SL mainland is not suited for corporate presence..

Important step
Google Lively may not be full blown virtual world (and hence not be of much interest to me, personally), it probably is an important step in the emergence of a 3D internet, by dramatically lowering the bar to an entry 3D presence on pretty much any 2D website. Coming soon to a website near you: the 3D internet.

A couple of minutes after writing the above, I stumbled upon an interesting interview with Google's Mel Guymon. It contains useful extra information: "Feature: Lively - Google's Contribution to the 3D Social Web?"

Lively - first impressions

Yesterday I signed up for Google Lively. It reminds me a lot of the early (not the current!) Twinity beta, where the environment consisted of just a bunch of room, without a real world to access. Lively is the same; it's dressed up 3D chatrooms. It's not an immersive environment either, because you always run in windowed mode as far as I can see.

Avatar editing is quite limited, you can't tweak your avatar as I'm used to in SL. The result is an avatar that doesn't look like me at all. Avatar movement is done by mouse, which requires you to keep the mouse button pressed down if you want to move the avatar. I think this may be quite hard on your hand muscles if you stay in Lively too long.

All in all I spent fifteen minutes in Lively, which is obviously too short for a thorough analysis. More to come later!

I've created a new room, put in some furniture. Feel free to check it out or add to it!

Even more boom

My thirty days EVE account is about to expire. I've got a bunch of things to blog, about Second Life, Twinity, Google Lively and other stuff; I'll try to get that done early next week.

In the mean time, I need to make good use of those EVE hours left. Here's a sequence of screenshots of an explosion. It nicely illustrates how Eve depicts such an event: the initial explosion, the expanding shockwave, flying bits and pieces, and finally the fading fires afterwards. Larger pictures available here.

Bits of boom from the depths of space!

Dogfights in Eve Online

It's been a while, but I have participated in several dogfights in Second Life, with the Royal Caledon Air Force. Always lots of fun and lots of crashes (meaning: I got shot down a lot!) No problem, just teleport back to the airfield, rez a new plane and back into the fray you go!

Yesterday I found out that the same happens in Eve Online, too. A couple of corp members joined up for a pvp fight in the Mormoen system, and I joined in. We gathered at the Federal Administration station, where our corporation has a hangar. We were issues identical ships and ammunition; after that we headed out to a deserted part of the system where we fought each other. Unfortunately, just like in Second Life's RCAF dogfights, I lost, again due to lack of skills! With one difference: in Second Life I just didn't have the skills and the hardware to outmanouever the other players' aircraft, but in Eve I didn't have enough skillpoints to be allowed to use the armor repair set which was fitted on the ship! My opponent however was able to use that facilty; this meant that while my armor, once damaged, didn't repair itself, his did. Obviously, this made my ship more vulnerable, and so I lost my game. As in Second Life though, this didn't have negative effects on standings or points!

Five ships, almost ready for battle, orbit a cargo container containing a whole lot of ammunition:

"Journal of VIrtual Worlds research"

Yesterday, while looking for scientific data on Second Life's Linden Dollar, I stumbled upon something new: the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, facilitated by the Texas Digial Library. Their mission, in their own words:

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is an online, open access academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is a transdisciplinary journal that engages a wide spectrum of scholarship and welcomes contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that intersect virtual worlds research.

Well, that sounds impressive, doesn't it? To be honest I was a bit sceptical at first, but the first issue does indeed have a couple of very interesting articles. And, I also note that Edward Castronova is an advisory editor. For those with more than a recreational interest in virtual worlds, this may become a good resource of information.

Old and new

In Second Life, several of my parcels at Timandra and Fortimus have been rented to tennants. We're still developing the land further, hopefully we'll be able to show some of that later.

Meanwhile, I've bought a new ship in Eve Online: a Gallente Catalyst, a destroyer class vessel. More firepower, better shields and armor. One thing I've noticed in Eve, is that ships are rarely 'just perfect'. There's always a tradeoff to be made! In case of the Catalyst, it's speed and medium power slots.

But still, with the added firepower and shields I was able to complete a certain mission without suffering any real damage. When I did the same mission with the Incursus frigate, I had to go back to a station for repairs - twice!

My trusted Gallente frigate, an Incursus:




The new Gallente destroyer, a Catalyst:

Even more bang for your buck

A sequence of three snapshots,showing another deadspace explosion in Eve Online. I should have been closer for more detail, but it's quite difficult to catch the moment of these explosions. Once you hide the interface to get the best snapshot, you can't tell when the explosion will occur!

The smugglers' habitat module begins to explode..



..the pieces fly through deadspace..



..and the aftermath.

Bang for you buck

Bang for you buck, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

A huge explosion marks the end of a smugglers' complex somewhere in Lirsautton space. Actually, it's deadspace - special areas for missions, only accessible to those involved in the mission.

Blowing up stuff in deadspace can yield some nice visuals, even with the relatively limited ATI card in my laptop.

Second Life and Eve: raw materials

One of the similarities between Second Life and Eve Online is, that both have an internal economy. CCP, Eve Online's creator, even employs a full time economist to monitor this aspect of the virtual universe, while Linden Labs maintains web pages with all sorts of interesting looking statistics concerning economical activities. Both worlds have their own currency, which can be bought or sold in world, but also on independent web sites - although in case of Eve Online's ISK, this is deemed illegal by CCP. In both economies, large quantities of currency change hands (between players) over the sale of goods: land and luxuries in SL, ships and hardware in Eve, mostly.

There is one big difference however between the economies of SL and Eve: raw materials.

In SL, objects are built from prims. They are the basic building blocks of SL! Prims can, literally be created from thin air. Any user can create prims, just like that, by rightclicking and choosing 'create'. Existing prims may easily be copied as well (under normal circumstances, depending on the rights you have on the prim of course). This means, there is no way Linden Labs can control the amount of prims (and, hence, objects) that can be created. The only limit I can come up with, is the physical limit to a given SL parcel: the maximum amount of prims the land is allowed to carry.

Creating objects is possible in the Eve universe, too. You just need a blueprint (which you must buy on the market) and raw materials in the required quantities. This is an important difference between SL and Eve: Second Life does not require raw materials for content creation in world, but Eve Online does.

And CCP does have some control the amount of raw materials available in the Eve universe at any given moment. Raw materials are usually acquired by players mining asteroids for ores, as depicted in the snapshot above. These asteroids are obviously programmed by CCP, who can control what ores and what amounts of them will be available for mining. This gives CCP control over an important part (the source) of the raw materials market.

Another aspect of Eve's economy, is loot. When I destroy an NPC ship (a game generated 'enemy'), the resulting wreckage has a cargo hold, that often holds one or more objects: ammunition, devices, goods, drones or weaponry for instance. These objects are (part of) one's reward. You can tranfer them to your own cargo hold, keep what you need, and sell the rest on the market. Mind you, some players loot dozens of objects like this on a given mission! You can also choose to reprocess objects, instead of selling them. This breaks the objects down into their individual compounds which can then be sold off as raw materials again. Again, CCP controls the contents of NPC ships (they are game generated, remember), hence CCP has control over the amount and types of objects that will flow to players on a given day.

Of course there are limits to the bandwith of control that CCP has. If one day asteroids would turn up empty and NPC wreckage would no longer contain loot, a player revolt would probably ensue. Players are used to certain amounts and types of ore or loot. But CCP could, by gradually turning the dials - a little more here, a little less of that there - definitely finetune or shift the economy.

To determine whether CCP actually does that I would have to read the Eve quarterly economical reports, and frankly, they don't interest me that much. But it's an interesting difference between the two in game economies.

Defeated

Defeated, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

In Eve Online, battle occurs every now and then. Player versus player if so desired, but player versus game generated enemies is very common too. Here, such a non player corporation (NPC) enemy ship (a typical 'belt rat') explodes after I have pummeled it with several guns and a scout drone.

Vyttenyn, near Mirilene stargate

Vyttenyn, near Mirilene stargate, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

Fortimus harbour by night

Even in the dark it looks nice. Good job, Zena! ..now, to be honest, I thought I'd already sent this one. But when I leave mouselook, the 'send postcard' menu appears again. This is with 1.20 RC11..bug?
posted by Sered Woollahra on Fortimus using a blogHUD : [permalink]

Fortimus harbour by night

Even in the dark it looks nice. Good job, Zena!
posted by Sered Woollahra on Fortimus using a blogHUD : [permalink]

..proudly presents: Fortimus Harbour!

..proudly presents: Fortimus Harbour!, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

I managed to buy a couple of parcels next to one another in Fortimus. My business partner Zena Silverstar and her team from Tropical Beach Rentals, transformed the lots into this beautiful water themed rental park, with little beaches for each parcel. We decided to leave the middle parcel open, so that each other parcel has access to open water. Hence the name: Fortimus Harbour.

I'm really quite happy with how it turned out!

Eve online: after battle

Eve online: after battle, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

Much debris is left in this deadspace area after battle.. my ship survived, be it with the help of a repair job half way through! A couple of tactical adjustments helped me to survive when I got back into the fray after repairing the ship.

Landlord - part II

So I've been a landlord in Second Life for a couple of weeks now. I was quite happy with theFortimus parcel, as it had nice views and a lot of water surrounding it. I hadn't been there for a week (don't want to disturb the tenants!) but today I decided to take a look. I was quite surprised to find my neighbours' parcel for sale, for a nice price too! Of course I bought it, but now I've gone into the next tier - so I might as well buy some more to make good use of it! I've been thinking about creating a little park there. There's a couple of other parcels for sale as well; they would make nice parcels for a rental. The waterland lot I just bought could serve as a harbour, so my tenants would always have water in front of their house.

Eve online: lessons learned

So, after playing Eve for two weeks, what have I learned?

First, it's more demanding than a social world like SL. Objectives need to be met, progress needs to be made. You will never get anywhere without a bit of commitment. Of course one can choose not to go anywhere, but then the game could become boring quite quickly.

A player can make progress alone, but it's not easy. It's best to join a corp as soon as possible! I'm quite happy with the corporation I joined: there's always a couple of fellow Traders online, and all my n00b questions were answered - correctly I might add - within a couple of minutes. I'm sure I would have spent hours researching the answers to some of my questions, if it hadn't been for my fellow corp members. The corporation is (in my case) a useful support group and a very welcome social element in this high tech universe.

Skills are more important than ships or armor. For a game that's set in space and often involves shooting (either defensive or offensive), that may sound a bit over the top, perhaps. But still, if you don't train your skills, you'll never get into the ships necessary for the better missions, the higher rewards, the bigger battles or mining operations. Without the skills, you're pretty much stuck in high security regions doing smalltime mining ops. You're simply not going anywhere without properly trained skills. The good part is: in Eve, skill training is easy. But still you have to do it; and you better get to it because it takes time.

You can buy skills and train them subsequently. But it's better to acquire some real skills too, by running missions. At first I was a bit hesitant about doing missions. I was having fun chasing rats in higher security sectors (0.7 or 0.8), why should I do formal missions? It turns out that mission running does pay well; the rewards are often quite good. And, sometimes there's better loot to be had, during missions. It is more dangerous however, I had to retreat and repair my ship before finishing one of my missions; my ship was too damaged by sustained and heavy enemy fire to carry on with the battle. But before I can pilot a bigger, better ship with more firepower, I need more skills. See the previous point! Finally, mission running has a positive effect on your security standing and, probably, on your informal standing within the corporation as well.

Fly safe!

Second Life and Eve Online: single shards

Recently, Eve Online brought it's expansion "Empyrean Age" online. It seems to have drawn new players. I'm seeing more people online anyway, in the (Western European) evening, there's usually well over 30.000 pilots active with concurrency peaks over 35.000. In the trial period I did, just before Empyrean came online, it was often two to four thousand less.

Second Life on the other hand hasn't really been growing that much, recently. After a couple of concurrency peaks with over 60.000 players online in early 2008, it never pushed through; concurrency is still usually under that figure. Yet, Second Life has been really unstable now for quite some time, with outages and asset server issues abound.

Single Shard
Both Second Life and Eve-Online are 'single shard' environments, meaning that every player is online on the same instance of a virtual world. For other virtual worlds, sharding is used as a way to spread players over multiple instances (shards) of a virtual world. This allows for spreading workload, and helps tremendously with issues of scaling and performance. The downside however is is that players in one shard one cannot communicate, play with or against, players in another shard. For a social world like Second Life this is not acceptable, as much needed social interaction between groups of residents would become impossible!

CCP, the designers of Eve Online, also decided long ago they wanted a one shard world. That leaves you pretty much with one solution: grid computing, where the physical environment of the virtual world is divided over multiple, connected and communicating computers.

The Second Life grid
Second Life's grid is notoriously unstable. Periods of relative quiet are followed by weeks or even months of system outages, simulator crashes, lag and general unreliability, often blamed on the asset cluster that handles the residents' inventories (read: the database) or the SL simulator software itself. Eve online to me seems to run much more smooth and stable, even with over 35.000 concurrent users online. But I think there may be good reasons for that.

Uniqueness..
Each Second Life avatar is a unique composition of customized body shape and facial features, clothing, accessories like glasses, jewelry, watches, shoes et cetera , tied to an identity . The shape and position of all these objects has to be calculated in three dimensions, both absolute (all the objects that make up one avatar in relation to one another), as well as relative to the landscape, buildings and other nearby avatars. The same holds true for individual objects: each object is comprised of one or more prims whose (unique!) shape, texture and and positions have to be computed both absolute and relative. Finally, the landscape is different for all locations, with unique combinations of texture and shape in many places. In effect, there are many uniques in Second Life. That makes for a CPU and database intensive environment, I'd say. This is most notable at simulator crossings: if you cross a simulator boundary, the whole avatar package, again including calculations on absolute and relative positions of objects, has to be handed over from the originating sim (computer or CPU) to the other, often causing a slight bump or delay in movement.


..versus uniform objects
Eve-Online on the other hand is much more straightforward. There is no unique avatar, there is only a limited number of ships one can fly ; your ship is tied to your identity but it has no unique features otherwise. Each type of ship obviously has a distinct look and shape, but all ships of a certain type look identical throughout the whole of Eve. There are differences of course, these can be found in the configuration of a ship. What tools, drones or weaponry are on board, what cargo does it carry? But, all of these are represented by styled icons, which makes them easy to display, cpu wise. There may very well be no really unique objects within Eve! As for the physical environment: each region of space is made up of different solar systems, which in turn consist of stars, planets, moons, asteroid belts, stargates and stations and, of course, game elements like computer generated 'enemies', real players and their ships or objects. Some of the planets or moons in the systems are unique indeed and graphically beautiful to see, but their number is relatively limited; as are the other objects within a system. I think that on any given moment, your average Second Life simulator is dealing with much more unique objects than an Eve solar system contains.

To be honest, I have no idea whether each Eve solar system runs on it's own CPU or not. There is some slightly dated information that multiple systems can be combined on one server but that one system cannot be divided between multiple servers. Typically when jumping from one system to another, you experience the same bump one notices when crossing a simulator border in Second Life - and my Wine based Linux Eve installation often doesn't survive that bump. That would suggest something of a CPU handoff indeed.

Eve-online: joined a corporation

Yesterday, after my space craft got shot to pieces, I decided it was time to join a corporation. In the Eve universe, players are expected work together in these corporations. There are many different corps: mining, mission running, trading and manufacturing, warfare, rat killing or, in most cases, a mixture of all these; often these activities are carried out together as well. Some corps require a tax payment of all your income, others don't. But, the tax charging corps don't only charge, they usually share as well: profits among (active?) members, or other useful stuff: ships, equipments, manufacturing blueprints, weaponry.

Another aspect of corporations is, that n00bs such as myself can learn the tricks of the trade from the old hands who often form the backbone of a successful corp. Transfer of knowledge is usually an integral part of these corps, even though there are corporations who only recruit experienced players.

Finally, last but not least, as part of a corporation you're better protected against random violence: if someone harms you, your entire corp gets to shoot at the bad guy who did it. As long as you're alone, you're basically fair game for anyone with a bigger ship than you; as part of a corp, a bad guy must not only deal with you, but with your corp as well. And your corp members may be much more dangerous than you!

Corporations are not alone either, they often form alliances for political and military purposes. A small corp within a powerful alliance may actually provide better protection than a larger corp without one.

You have to be careful when choosing a corporation. If you join a corp that requires your presence at practice drills or joint missions, you have to make sure you can comply with those demands. My busy schedule hardly allows for that, I'm glad if I get to play at all for several weeks! So after carefully weighing my options and limitations, I applied for membership or the Trade Academy Corporation. It's reasonable in it's demands, yet has an active member base, which is good for learning and protection. So I jumped to their head quarters and applied. After half an hour I got a call from Jenny Twotone, one of their members, and after a brief chat I was accepted as corp member!

Some advantages are visible immediately. In the in game chat window, the corp chat is automatically switched to your new corp. In my case I was introduced to my new corp colleagues by the officer who interviewed me before accepting my application, and others online welcomed me in their midst. Then one of the corp members requested assistance, he was in a big fight with a lot of Mordus rats somewhere in the Halle system. I was eight jumps out, so by the time I finally got there the fight was over - but the sky was literally littered with Mordus wreckage. One of the more experienced members called it "an epic space battle"! We looted like mad, as each wreck had more cargo on board than three of your average Serpentis wrecks combined. I've never had so much different objects in my cargo hold! I had to go to a nearby station to drop off cargo twice; by the time I returned for third round, most of the wreckage was cleared. To my surprise, the corp members allowed me to keep the loot I collected, even though I didn't participate in the firefight itself. A nice welcome present, that!

All in all it felt good to be part of something instead of going it alone. I'm sure I can learn a lot, and possibly contribute too - as soon as I can buy a larger, more powerful ship that is..

Twinity: Alpha City Berlin, Alexanderplatz

Twinity: Alpha City Berlin, Alexanderplatz, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

These are daylight shots of Alpha City Berlin, Twinity's first real outdoor environment. It's alpha, meaning it's still in development, but I like it so far.

Eve Online: a cocky n00b

Bereye, Roden Shipyards, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

I was having a lot of fun tonight in Eve Online. Gathering and selling stuff, killing off (game generated) bad guys in Lirsautton, until one n00b asshole, called Gen Doctor, got in the way. For some reason, he seemed hellbent on interfering with me! First he stole my loot, which gave me kill rights on him. I talked to him, he didn't want to compensate me, instead he wanted a fight. I didn't, so I warped the heck out of there. After all, the galaxy is large enough, isn't it? But he started following me, long enough to get me angry: he tried to steal from me again! I enabled my shields and fired a warning shot at him when he was close enough, and now he's firing away at me with some heavy missile stuff.. and I just logged off. That's not the EVE Online I like to play!

Of course, for some, EVE Online is just that, player versus player combat. It's just that this is not (usually?) done in high sec regions, and I was in one of those! If I wanted to pick a fight with someone, I'd have jumped to a low sec region, don't you think?

Someone in an Eve online forum once said: these guys aren't assholes, this is just the game they play. My problem is that this guy forced me to play *his* game in a region that was not intended for it.

A cocky n00b with much too much armor and guns. Yuck.

Twinity: Alpha city Berlin

Twinity: Alpha city Berlin, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

One of my complaints with the first Twinity beta, was the lack of a real outdoor experience. Confined to houses or small gardens, it almost felt claustrophobic. In later releases, one could fly off a balcony and have a bit of freedom. But, it looks like it's going to get a whole lot better than that. This is Alpha city Berlin, an alpha version of a 'real' outdoor city! I need to check this out when it's day again, but in the dark it looks nice enough.

Oh, those starry skies.. those would never be possible in a real city, due to light pollution. But as an amateur astronomer, I like it!

ready for tenant

The two Timandra parcels are ready as well, meaning all three of my parcels are ready for a tenant All other Tropical Beach Rentals houses in Timandra and Thetidia have been rented already; it's possible my parcels will find a tenant sooner rather than later..
posted by Sered Woollahra on Thetidia using a blogHUD : [permalink]

a snapshot bug in 1.20 RC10

as of 1.20 RC10, the snapshot interface is included in a snapshot. But not in the preview, only when you click 'send' it becomes visible. Weird!
posted by Sered Woollahra on Fortimus using a blogHUD : [permalink]

available for rent!

Nice, TBR has already put up an advertisement for my parcel in Fortimus. I wonder how long it will take before it's rented!
posted by Sered Woollahra on Thetidia using a blogHUD : [permalink]

A real landlord, me ;-)

It looks like I've found a good construction for my land in Timandra. The rent for my neighbouring parcel was handled by Zena Silverstar of Tropical Beach Rentals, and after a few IM's and a few emails we decided to do business. She and her team will be handling my parcels as well!

Notice the multiple? I had only one 1100 meter parcel in Timandandra, meaning I had a couple of hundred meters left on my land tier. After consulting with Zena, I bought another nice 512 square meter waterland parcel in Fortimus, which will either feature a hotel or another rental house.

Zena handles most of the work for an (in my opinion) modest fee, and I get some return on investment without losing the parcel in Timandra. I consider myself lucky!

Oh, if you want to rent.. contact Zena :-)

My son loves this..

..the jumping orca, that is. I'd rather have the boat :-)
posted by Sered Woollahra on Putnami using a blogHUD : [permalink]

An invitation to Twinity

Just like Tinsel, I've got a batch of special invitations to Twinity: the first fifty people to sign up through this link get direct access to the Twinity beta - without waiting time. Why don't you give it a shot!

Personally, I'm still trying to get Twinity to run on Wine. I'd like to stay in Ubuntu as much as possible, and so far Twinity is the only thing I need to go to Vista for. Obviously, Twinity on Wine isn't supported by Metaversum, but if anyone gets it to work, I'd love to hear how.

How to offer land for rent?

I am the lucky owner of a nice parcel at Timandra. It's really a neat place: surrounded by small, Linden owned waterways on three sides, not too big (1100 square meters), and so far the sim itself is quiet as well. A nice place to retreat to.

But, recently I haven't been using it, really. It's just the place I login to, or go to if I need some rest, but it has no real function. Yet I am paying the Lindens a premium account and a fee each month, just for this one parcel.

Yet I'd rather not sell it. I'm not sure I can get a place like this again, if I really want it or need it. So, I think the solution is to rent the place. It may or may not cover the cost, but at least it will bring back some of the dollars I'm spending on SL.

But how do I go about this? Ideally, I'd rent it to someone I know, or have an agency handle the rent stuff for me. Anyone else in this business? Useful advice?

Thanks!

quite a crowd

..at the Metanomics session at the Tech Museum. We're getting a stream of a live discussion, featuring Philip Rosedale and Peter Friess, on 'digital democracy'. Should start at any minute now..
posted by Sered Woollahra on The Tech using a blogHUD : [permalink]