Author: Vex

I always liked the concept of virtual worlds as connected space: e.g. The Street in Snow Crash, The River in Otherland, even required travel time in many games and novels about games. 

Second Life used to feel much more connected than it does today:  real estate near telehubs were valuable, and people needed to use the roads.  Sure there is plenty of mainland, but the roads, rails, and waterways are activities and window dressing, not really a meaningful part of the experience and rendering the world functionally just a huge pile of disconnected regions.

Au reports in New World Notes on the general lack of vehicle communities in SL… of course, there are certainly large groups centered around vehicles (SL Sailing is huge, and motorcycles are the center of smaller but perhaps more numerous groups), but again – they are generally all about the skills of driving, and they seem to mirror the social aspects of their RL analogues.

So, a thought experiment: what would it take to make vehicles in SL (for instance) not only valuable but crucial? … and what would the side effects be?  To get things started:

1. lets imagine that Linden were to announce tomorrow (!) that user controlled teleports were no longer allowed in any situation.
2. Oops – what about all those private regions? Well, how about navigable voids?
3. Flying disallowed by default and never on mainland.
4. The only way to go fast is to use a vehicle – faster engines cost more to run.
5. It is possible to set up teleport portals, but they (a) cost money to set up, (b) the owner may charge a fee to use, (c) you need to manually place the endpoints, sailing to your island or building steps (minecraft-like) into your skybox.
6. the world owner would probably want to set up some public transportation: maybe inter-telehub portals, or stargates, or Snowcrash-like high-speed rails.
7. How long would SL take to recover? Ever? Quickly?
8. There are plenty of MMOs that work like this – what would an SL or OpenSim with these rules look like?
9. Would such a system kill SL commerce entirely?  Would people only shop on Marketplace?  Maybe Marketplace delivery charges go up to encourage people to go to stores.

No no, I’m not really suggesting that SL change, though I’d love to see an opensim try.  Maybe SL2 should work like this?  HiFi?

I went through creating a new avatar the other day…

… and here’s what I found.

• The account creation dialogs on the website are okay, but:
  • they still don’t make it clear that you cannot change your account name and don’t offer you the option to customize your display name at registration time… Action: ask for your preferred DISPLAY name, then munge it to create an acceptable account name as a second step.
  • There’s no email validation step – this seems like a bad idea. Action: add one.
  • You don’t have to retype your password, combined with no email validation, this is realllly bad.  Action: require retype.
  • BTW, I chose a nice one-word avatar name “Alemayehu” which, according to behindthename.com means “I have seen the world” in Amharic.
• Avatar selection
  • The carousel is a nice idea, but it doesn’t work terribly well (the animations glitch or fail on various browsers).
  • Why only three categories?  and why would “Vampires” make it as a category, especially when half the avatars in the section are clearly not vampires? Action: more categories.  Maybe a set of dialogs or a hierarchy.
  • What happened to the black avatars? I chose an African name and the only remotely African looking male avatars are.. monsters which are more or less racist caricatures of black men?! I know there used to be a pretty decent black male in the library, but he’s not in the “Classic” section. Action: expose more library avatars at the signup phase.
  • Best practice would be to either offer a very small number of generic avatars and do an appearance modification exercise in-world or run through a more involved dialog during setup… or maybe let you select a “starter avatar” from a new marketplace section and have it pre-applied?
• Learning Island
  • Build is acceptable, but needs more environmental effects and music.  It DOES have some very very repetitive wave sounds at the landing point, but otherwise is dead dead dead: no animal sounds, no wind, the fountains are silent. Action: this is the very first environment a new user sees.  Make it GREAT.
  • Few indicators of what you are supposed to do.  Arrows point the direction (fine), but some instruction is really required.  There are hints that instruction is supposed to happen as popups:  once an empty window popped up on the right side of my HUD, but… well… it was empty and soon went away. Action: fix the popups, make things work.
  • A few minutes in, I was told that there was a new version of the viewer and offered to install it for me – it did, which was nice and fast, but I couldn’t log back in immediately, which was unexpectedly annoying.
• Social Island
  • wait… we’re done learning already?!?  Action: basic training should include touch and sit, use a dialog, chat something, maybe some basic inventory manipulation before sending them to a social space open to anyone.
  • landing point crowded with avatars, mostly not new, some dancing and waving stuff around.  At least they were chatty and seemed willing to answer questions.
  • … which is good because there are no indications where to go and what to do.
• The Mesh Avatar
  • First thing I noticed is that it doesn’t move anything like it moved in the avatar selection carousel on the web page.  Not only no AO, but still the same old horrible default animations. Action: all starter avatars should be animated like the carousel.
  • This guy seems to be almost unmodifiable and there aren’t any clues as to what you need to do to customize, including what clothing you need to look for. Action: starter avatars need to be customizable or they undercut one of the major selling points of SL (shopping, personalization, expressiveness).

Another year, another University of Washington Virtual Worlds program semester!  We’ll be trying out some new ways of doing things this semester:  can’t wait to see the awesomeness of this year’s students!

Another cheat sheet here. Some issues and, hopefully, workarounds for running SL under Linux. I use Ubuntu 12.10, so have your grains of salt ready.

• Control-Meta-T brings up a new terminal window. That’s nice except when you are in SL and want to highlight transparent. Solution: Keyboard settings, Shortcuts, set Launch terminal shortcut to something less nocuous – I changed it to Super-T
• Accidentally clicking on the bottom border of a window maximized it vertically. Solution – this is, IMHO, a bug resulting from the combination of the edge resize function (click and hold on bottom border, for instance) and the “Maximize Vertically if screen edge hit” feature. Not a bad idea, but when the window is already snapped to the bottom of the screen, any click on the bottom border will maximize the window. Bad compiz! Use CCSM, Resize Window, General tab, disable “Maximize Vertically if screen edge hit” option.