Twinity: Unfinished business

Yesterday I decided I wanted to see the Singapore harbour in Twinity, so I walked from the city center towards the straits. Apparently not many people make it to the edge of the city yet, as my exploration even warranted some attention from Metaversum. Tonight I wondered: what if I went even further away from Singapore's city center? Would I eventually encounter a border or an edge, or would the world simply cease to exist at a certain point? And so I went on for a while - and there it was, the edge of the Twinity world!


This really is the place where the unfinished seams of Singapore become visible, and the visual effects are quite interesting.


But perhaps the most beautiful sight was this unfinished freeway, extending over the Singapore straits, in the dark blue glow of the night sky with the gentle waves of the straits below it.



The rest of tonight's snapshots can be found at koinup, as usual.

Twinity: Singapore

Finally, I am able to visit Twinity again. The latest ATI patches seem to have fixed issues I had; CPU usage is now workable, even though Twinity still uses a lot of resources. I took the opportunity to take a walk through Singapore to the port near Raffles Avenue, where I cooled my tired feet in the harbour water..


Even though Singapore is not finished yet, it's nice to be able to visit a new city in Twinity.

More Twinity visuals can be found at Koinup!

Are you prepared?

Many of Eve Online's pilots enjoy doing stuff together. Mining, missions or operations: it's often done with corp mates, alliance members or friends, which makes it a lot more enjoyable. Yesterday, an ad hoc team of four Alien Ship Builders did a couple of level 4 missions: Angel Extravaganza and Mordus Headhunters. Given the huge amounts of damage (dps) we could inflict and absorb (tank), neither of these missions proved to be much of a problem.

Yet, at one point during Mordus Headhunters I ran into trouble. I drew much of the aggro of the second pockets, meaning I had dozens of enemy ships firing at me at point blank range. My setup wasn't really prepared for those amounts of dps as I had only one armor repair unit fitted, and after a while I had to warp out to repair my ship. On the snapshot below, which you can click for a larger view, my shields are half gone, but my armor is still intact:


The reason I had left so ill prepared: I was running a relatively easy level3 mission solo, when we decided to run the level4's together. Without changing my fittings I jumped in, when in hindsight I should have adapted to the new, more demanding circumstances!

In the end, nothing was lost; the three others were more than capable to handle the incoming fire thrown at them. We completed the missions and cashed the rewards; in total, with the level3 and a few sales combined, I earned almost 30 million ISK yesterday.

Questions on CCP's new 'Dust 514' console game

Today brought us the news that CCP, the creators of Eve Online, will bring a new console only MMO to the market, called 'Dust 514'. The funny thing is: Dust 514 is situated on the planets of the very same EVE Online universe, New Eden, we already know! Both EVE Online's space bound pilots and Dust 514's planet dwelling fighters will play a role in the story that unfolds in New Eden. According to CCP, this is "one universe, one war", and they hope the Eve Online and Dust 514 communities will merge together over time. After reading a few news reports I have a few quick questions and remarks about Dust 514.

First off, Dust 514 is an FPS, meaning the players will be walking avatars - something still missing from Eve Online. Called 'ambulation' or 'walking in stations' we have been waiting for this for quite some time, but so far this hasn't materialised. Could Dust 514 be the precursor to ambulation? If Eve and Dust 514 players are ever to meet in game, both need a real avatar. Besides, the Dust 514 snapshot below - provided by CCP - shows a command pit, floating in space above the planet, not built on it. This is clearly ambulation, but of course it could be only for Dust 514 players.



Will an EVE pilot be able to participate in fights on the planets? Could EVE spaceships affect battles by bombing enemy Dust 514 players or by providing logistical services to his own Dust 514 mercs? Could an EVE pilot 'beam down' to pick up a gun and join the fight on the planet? And if he survives, could he then take his Dust 514 buddies back up to the station for a drink at the bar? Again, without ambulation this is impossible, but there's certainly a very interesting perspective for future expansions. Although, given that Dust 514 is a console game, I don't know whether it's technically feasible for CCP to provide such a mixed environment within the current implementation of New Eden.

Second: the changes to sovereignty in 0.0 (nullsec) space. Currently, an alliance can claim sovereignty over regions of 0.0 space by placing and maintaining player owned space stations (POS'es) there. In the future, Dust 514 players get to play a role in this mechanism too, as owning stations isn't going to be enough to maintain sovereignty. You'll need Dust 514 mercenaries on the ground, on the planets, to conquer those for you as well. This may have significant impact on the balances of power and the politics of New Eden. I wonder how the big space holding 0.0 alliances think about this sudden change to the playing field.

And the existing EVE pilots? If you're a highsec PVE player or miner, it doesn't look like your daily game experience will change much, as the sov changes only affect nullsec. Also, with Dust 514, CCP is aiming for a different audience: the existing pilots can stay in space, CCP wants new FPS players for Dust 514 combat! IF CCP succeeds, the number of gamers active within New Eden will continue to grow (or grow even harder), which is a good thing for CCP and hence for all of us who like to spend time in New Eden.

Opensim: two islands

Today I created a second island at my OpenSim location:



It's not that spectacular; it's just one of the default islands available for download in the Second Life knowledge base. But it's good enough for my purposes, here. I think I'll ask the kids to turn this into a park or tropical island, instead of an ordinary residential area. I wonder if they are up to it!

OpenSim amazement

The new OpenSim server I created last week, has seen a lot of action in the past few days. My kids and a few nieces living nearby, are busy building annd furnishing houses. They have discovered how to work with textures, too! At first they noticed that screenshots could be saved to inventory, and they started using them as textures. After that I showed my daughter how to upload pictures found on the internet or local hard drive, and now they are creating tv's, laptops and stuff like that. They are learning fast, and I am, frankly, quite amazed at some of their work.

This nice bar is built by my eight year old niece:

My almost-ten-years-old daughter framed a tv in her new house - but also some popcorn to go with a movie:

And this is perhaps the most promising build, a beach house, still under development. This one is made by my fourteen year old niece, who's very much into interior design, and I'm quite eager to see what she's going to do with this nice place!

More pictures are available at my Koinup stream.

OpenSim up and running

After trying again and again to get OpenSim running on CentOS 5 64bits, and persistently failing at it, I finally surrendered and installed in on Windows XP. I had an old Dell PC standing idly in a corner; downloading OpenSim and installing it was a breeze. Configuring MySQL wasn't much of an issue either; only a network issue and some tricky configurations in OpenSim.ini gave me some headaches. In the end, I got it up and running in a few hours - not bad. The kids are going to be happy tomorrow!

Skill training completed

One of the advantages of Eve Online's skill training system, is that training continues even if you're offline, for instance when you're on holiday. Of course you'll have to start training a skill that takes long enough, but there's plenty of those. I had several skills I could train to level 5 (the highest skill level) and that would take 22 days; longer than my holiday was! After careful deliberation, I choose to train Drone Interfacing level 5, giving me 20% extra drone damage. A translation for you non EVE playing readers: in space, I can use up to five drones that will inflict damage on the targets I direct them to. This means a lot of firepower, and many enemies rightfully fear the damage a swarm of drones can do, especially if their owners are well trained - as I am now. So, today, upon returning to Eve Online, I was quite happy to see the notification: "Skill training completed. Sered Woollahra has finished learning Drone Interfacing V." Twentytwo days of training, but it's worth every day of it!

Engineering efforts

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of virtual worlds is the technology side. I'm a systems administrator myself, responsible for maintaining and optimizing an important internet application, and as such, I can appreciate the engineering efforts of my colleagues at Linden Labs, CCP et cetera. It's not an easy task to keep all those residents and pilots lag free and happy..

Linden Labs has long struggled with Second Life's performance. Over the years, there have been many improvements: as I am writing this, there are over 77.000 SL residents online, which is roughly about three times the number of concurrent residents usually seen in late 2006. And in those days, SL would crash if the number of active residents got near 30.000!

But today, it's CCP that I want to talk about. Eve Online (as Second Life, btw) is a single shard world, meaning all pilots inhabit the same instance of the virtual universe that is Eve Online. And some of solar systems put quite a strain on the servers! Take, for instance, Jita, the major trade hub of Eve Online, which is sometimes populated by 1000 pilots or more. Until recently, having that many pilots in local (in any one system) would mean intolerable lag, horrible performance and all the fun associated with it. Recently, however, CCP released a patch that drastically improved on that situation: bugs were fixed, code was refactored and a database index was added. It is now estimated that Jita can serve up to 1400 or perhaps even 1500 pilots. A considerable improvement!

CCP has published quite a detailed account of this effort on it's dev blog here. As an engineer, I really appreciate the level of detail they're willing to provide. If you're really into engineering efforts, you should read this one: debugging jita live is for real men, where CCP Atlas details how a critical bug was fixed on the Jita server - while the system was online. Quite an effort, and a good read for anyone involved in high availability internet application!

Immersiveness in the browser?

Last week, I watched the Gaikai demo featured on Massively and Slashdot. I came away quite impressed: it looked realistic, didn't make over the top claims and the speed of loading and playing MMO games like Eve Online and WoW looked decent as well. I immediately requested a beta signup, as did many others I suspect!

There is however one issue with Gaikai, that that is immersiveness. Some MMO games or virtual world environments are intended to be immersive: the intention is to immerse all your senses in the game or world you're visiting, creating an intense experience. That's why Twinity, Second Life and Eve Online for instance are best played in full screen mode: nothing of the host computer or operating system is visible on screen, to distract from the environment. From the demo, it isn't clear whether Gaikai can deliver that; I'm actually pretty sure they don't. This is not an issue for most games I suspect, but it should have a negative impact on the immersiveness of virtual worlds, as you can see in the snapshot below.


Still, if the price is right, I would sign up for the service. The ability to access my favorite virtual worlds and games from every PC that has Flash installed, is certainly appealing. Perhaps not as a primary means for real gameplay, but to do a bit of trade, to finalise a deal, to check in on in game communications, to add a skill to my Eve Online skillqueue, Gaikai may still be very useful.

Twinity: a first look at Singapore

Today I got an invite to have a look at the first beta build of virtual Singapore, as being built in Twinity. As I wasn't required or even asked to sign an NDA, I'm going to post this snapshot:


Granted, it's not that special, but it was dark there! Singapore is six hours ahead of us and so it's the middle of the night there now, even in Twinity. Hopefully I'll be able to take a daylight look too, soon!

Twinity: two sides of the mirror

Twinity has been in public beta for quite some time now; I've been a member for over a year. It started with standalone rooms, tied to a geographical location but without a real sense of world. That changed when virtual Berlin came: we were finally able to walk outside! With the arrival of virtual Berlin, Twinity's mirror world philosophy became a reality, be it at a limited scale. Obviously there's more to come: Singapore is in the works, hopefully to be launched later this year. Earlier there was talk about London, too, but I think we're not going to hear much about that until after the Singapore launch. It seems logical to finish that one first before taking on the next big project!

I don't have access to the Twinity subscriber database, but I have a feeling that Twinity's audience is still mainly based in Germany. 'Man spricht English', of course, but many Twinizens talk German between them. Adding Singapore to the mix might change this: the expected influx of visitors from Asia might tip the scales from a mainly German speaking to a more internationally oriented population. This too, obviously, presents opportunities for growth; it might also make Twinity an even more diverse and interesting mirror than it is today.

Two sides of the mirror
The mirror world vision which is slowly materialising in Twinity offers possibilities for real world businesses, tourism and such to present themselves to a virtual audience. And they do; the list of Twinity partners is growing. I can't judge whether the growth is fast enough or not, but it's is certainly there.

But the mirror vision also implies limits. Twinity has to resemble the real world as closely as possible, leaving little room for creativity in shaping or changing the world. Twinity's designers (the German company Metaversum) nor citizens ('Twinizens') can't just go ahead and randomly build houses or toy with the landscape, as is possible in Second Life. Clothing and interior designing allow for some creativity, and to be honest, some Twinizens have created beautiful spaces. But all in all, Twinity is, in this regard, more limited than SL citizens are used to. For me that's not much of an issue as I wasn't an active artist or designer anyway, but for some it is.

Who's providing the entertainment?
It also, and perhaps more significantly, means that Twinizens need to be entertained, much more so than in Second Life, where residents can easily organise their own concerts and events. This puts and additional burden on Metaversum; more than in Second Life or other game environments, amusement and entertainment has to be provided (or facilitated) by them, the world's owners. Exploring Berlin is nice for a start, but after a few sessions you probably have seen the best parts, and Twinizens might stop logging in, if that's really all there is! Looking at the list of events that have been organized recently, I think Metaversum understands this all too well. There have been movie premieres, literaty events, live music, parties, contests, games.. Metaversum is putting a lot of effort in this area. But if they didn't, I'm not sure Twinity would survive another year.

IBM goes 3D - once again

Much has been said on this blog about IBM and it's involvement in virtual worlds, most notably (but not exclusively) Second Life. Yet I somehow completely missed this announcement about Sametime 3D. Sametime is IBM Lotus' instant messaging and unified communications software, and Sametime 3D is a virtual world addition to the existing package.

Via this IBM Lotus Sametime blog announcement I found this youtube clip, which shows Sametime 3D. I haven't found confirmation yet, but it looks like Sametime 3D is an implementation of OpenSim! In itself that's not such a big surprise, given that IBM has been involved in OpenSim - unofficially for the most part - for a long time.


Sametime 3D doesn't look too fancy, it's just OpenSim. But, I don't think this has to be an issue, as business use has other requirements than recreational use.

From what I've seen in the youtube clip, it's quite easy to initiate a new 3D meeting from the Lotus Sametime client, but it doesn't show how the meeting itself is started. It's obvious that the regular Second Life client is used to facilitate the meeting, so I assume you need to have that installed separately, but I can't confirm that at the moment. It could be that IBM has simply integrated a lightweight SL client in the Sametime software, but that seems unlikely; I would have expected to see some sort of IBM branding in the virtual world client, but the window just says 'Second Life'. So, is a separate Second Life client started as soon as you enter the Sametime 3D meeting? Do you have to login or does it use your Sametime credentials? What if you have SL installed, already? These things I am curious about, but details are scarce. More information is welcome!

Sametime 3D comes with a few prepared rooms: a boardroom, a collaboration space and a theatre/auditorium, and also features some business ready tools like a flipchart that can be used for note taking; the contents can be exported in "a word processor compatible format" as the video says. All in all I'd say it looks useful, and I would definitely like to give it a try once.

Linden Labs offers a standalone Second Life simulator behind the firewall, an effort that (as far as I know) is still in beta but also included IBM participation. This "SL behind the firewall" is, as far as I know, really just that: a standalone SL environment. Sametime 3D is different: the 3D part is a business oriented addition to a larger set of collaboration tools. I wonder what approach will work best in the real world! Frankly, I assume IBM Lotus Sametime 3D will find easier inroads in the corporate world, as it doesn't have the negative connotations that Second Life has for some, and because it's 'just' an addition to an existing package. It could be implemented without much fanfare or discussion, as a part of a regular upgrade cycle. Too bad we don't run Sametime at my employer!

Looking for reinforcements

My corp, Alien Ship Builders, is growing quite nicely these days. When I first joined ASB (temporarily), there were usually a few pilots online; say about ten or a dozen. Nowadays however, it's often double that and then some. Most pilots are based in Europe, but we also have players from the US and other parts of the planet. Some members are barely out of trial; others have been in space since 2003, when EVE went in beta. We have miners but also mission runners, and we have aspirations in PVP too.

And yet, it's not enough. As a corporation, we're having plans to grow and diversify, not only in numbers but also in experience, sources of income and skills! To make this possible, we are looking for new members. Check this post by our corp director, Jastuu, out for more info.

See you in our corp channel, perhaps..

0.0

Last week, one of my favorite agents set me up with a courier mission to a lowsec system. Usually I don't do those, but I had an implantless clone and a cheap frigate at that station, so I thought.. why not! I accepted the mission and flew through several lowsec systems in Essence to my destination. After completing my business there I decided to, finally, pay a visit to 0.0 (nullsec); it was only a few jumps away, and I figured I was way overdue to check that area out anyway.

Jumping from Orvolle to PF-346 (Syndicate) and then to FP-MLJ was quite uneventful, to be honest; few people in local, all quiet at the jumpgates - apart from a few wrecks here and there. At X-BV98 there where a few NPC rats posting at the jumpgate, but as my frigate didn't have any significant firepower I ignored those; I pressed on to Poitot, where I warped to the next stargate. When the warp engine cut, I found myself in a shiny blue bubble.. uh oh. So this is how a warp bubble looks! With me unable to get away, someone opened fire, and within a few seconds my tiny Amarr frigate buckled under the blows of a 200mm cannon. Total destruction came fast! As my pod emerged from the wreckage I tried to slip away, but no no avail. Suddenly, after another couple of seconds, I was back at the University of Caille station in Bourynes, the station I was born, over a year ago..

I talked a bit with the guy who shot me, and he offered me some cordial advice, which I'm passing along to all you pilots like me, inexperienced in the ways of nullsec: never warp straight to a jumpgate, when in 0.0 or even lowsec. Because if you do fly directly towards it, your angle and direction of approach is predictable and you are more likely to end up in a warp bubble - and quite possibly in a fresh clone, half a galaxy away!

How the mighty have fallen!

For those of you that don't play Eve Online, a short primer on territory and sovereignity in New Eden, Eve Online's virtual universe. New Eden is a single shard world, meaning all pilots live in the same, single instance of it. It's divided in three areas of space, indicated by their security level: from 1.0 to 0.5 is secure space, with 1.0 being the safest; this is where new players typically enter space. This secure area is also known as 'empire space'. The second area is 0.4 - 0.1; these are lower security or 'low sec' systems, where law enforcement is almost gone (0.4) to virtually nonexistant (0.1); it's a hornets' nest of pirates. The third area is 0.0 or 'null sec'. These are lawless regions, where alliances reign.

Empire and low sec space belong to the different empires emerging from New Eden's lore: Gallente Federation, Minmatar Republic and the Amarr and Caldari empires which are all non player (npc) empires. Nullsec however is different. A player alliance, if powerful enough, can actually own systems in nullsec; and if you hold enough (or strategically important) systems in a region, you can call it your own. Some regions however are more profitable than others; they contain more rare ores to be mined, more opportunities for moon mining or more npc enemies to kill. Hence, alliances are continuously struggling over systems and regions, fighting to gain or break sovereignity. The neighbour's grass is always greener!

And this is where the big alliances come to their own. Over the past few years, a large scale war has been fought between Band of Brothers, recently renamed to KenZoKu and it's allies on one side, and GoonSwarm and the Northern Alliance on the other side. It's been an epic struggle, a back and forth of spying and betrayal, large scale fleet battles involving hundreds of pilots, strategic manoeuvering; it's been a grind of destruction, fire and mayhem. And it looks like it might be over.

KenZoKu, once New Eden's most powerful alliance with thousands of active members, has yielded their last 0.0 holdout to the combined forces of GoonSwarm and it's Northern Coalition allies, after being thorougly decimated over the past few weeks. Compare for instance this map of 2007 which prominently shows Band of Brothers (KenZoKu's original name) with this recent one; at time of writing, there's no BoB or KenZoKu to be found, anywhere. The mightiest, perhaps most smug of all, fallen! Will it recover? Who knows.. Eve's politics and alliance warfare make for some pretty interesting history, and with this great conflict coming to an end, it's going to be even more so in the coming weeks. Will KenZoKu regroup and return to 0.0? Will GoonSwarm and it's Northern Alliance remain intact without a big adversary as KenZoKu to fight? We'll see in the coming months!

Twinity: Rocking the metaverse

shot0021, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

The audience gathers for Rocking the Metaverse in Twinity Berlin. Dizzy Banjo is already playing, and the people around seem to have a lot of fun.

Twinity: group moderation

Koinup, the snapshot orientated social network for virtual worlds, is a participant in the Rocking the Metaverse tour, which sees virtual worlds artists perform in several virtual worlds environments. Now on Koinup, the Twinity group is administered by me. Today I received a message from Pier, one of Koinup's cofounders, asking me to keep an eye on the Twinity group; given the publicity, he expected new signups for the group and probably quite a bit of spam. I didn't see that coming, but he was right and I have already had to remove a few works that clearly didn't belong there! They were sometimes pretty and really nice to look at - but they had nothing to do with Twinity, and hence they had to be removed. Now I hope these people don't take it personally, but Pier was right: this is a group about Twinity, and it should stay that way. No offence intended..

Newbie bashing

Eve Online has a notorious reputation as one hard game to master and a harsh environment to survive in. Tonight one of my corp members experienced that firsthand. He's a few weeks old, and worked hard to be able to buy his first real mining barge. At his first mining trip with it, he gets tricked by an older character, this guy:



For non EVE Online inhabitants, here's a short primer on killing in space. Normally, you can't just fire upon any and all ships in high security (empire) space; you'd be killed on the spot by Concord, the in game police. This does however not apply if someone steals something from you; in that case you have killrights! You are free to destroy a pilot's ship and pod, for a certain amount of time, after that pilot steals from you; Concord will not harm you.

So here's our newbie miner, happily mining the asteroids, when all over sudden this guy pictured above attacks him and destroys his ship and pod. Without Concord intervention! How's that possible? Well, that's the trick part.. I don't know what happened, but our unsuspecting n00b was somehow tricked into taking something from Dark Drifter (a character from 2007), thus giving him killrights. And Dark did not hesitate to use them, unfortunately.

From a gameplay point of view, our n00b is out of luck. He was played, tricked, made a honest mistake - any of these will do - but he has to suffer the loss. Yet, given Dark Drifter's negative security standings, I suspect this is an older character who likes to grief n00bs. Again, from a gameplay point of view there's not much you can do about that, but it's appaling behaviour nonetheless, akin to a teenager bashing the kiddies in kindergarten.

D-Day +65

Today marks the 65th anniversary of D-Day, the allied invasion of occupied Europe. The monumental sacrifice and achievements of that day should not be forgotten. I've been on the infamous Dog Green sector of Omaha beach, and while walking on the sand, I remembered the famous scenes of The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan. It had quite an impact on me: so this is the place where all those young Americans died.. In honor of those men, and all those other soldiers who gave their life for freedom here's a fitting Second Life snapshot.