In article <4874ee34$1@news.povray.org>, dne### [at] sanrrcom says...
> Invisible wrote:
> >>> Not sure why you'd be running something else at the same time as a ga
me
> >>
> >> You never played Second Life, have you? ;-)
> > 
> > Played? I've never *heard* of it. Why?
> 
> Because it's a terribly boring way to play a game, so on the rare 
> occasions when I played it, I usually had other windows open doing other
 
> things too. :-)
> 
I have a post I made yesterday on the exchange forum stating why I think 
that is the case. There is no "cohesive" concept for the world, unless 
some people get together to buy up sims and link them, and no way to 
"find" places to visit unless its listed on a note card, your are 
looking to buy something, or its on a mainland, where its "possible" to 
wander past it. (Well, unless you do what I did one day when teleporting 
was bugged and just started making short hops between disconnected sims 
(for some reason long jumps wouldn't work, but short ones would).

In any case, there are exceptions. One exception is people that build 
beautiful areas, but provide no factions/groups, RP concepts, or things 
to really "do" there, then wonder why, after the first few days of 
people showing up to look at the pretty glowing whatevers, its dead 
empty. some of those places look like they belong in an MMO or even Myst 
Uru (well, almost, in the later case). The second case is ones like CoLA 
(City of Lost Angels). Its got:

When I started RPing there: West Gate, CoLA, Aracadia

Has added: North Gate, Cape CoLA (Cape has nothing in it at them moment, 
but it doesn't take long to build North Gate, though that is still not 
100% finished.)

Will be adding: at least 2 areas dedicated to the local vampires, and 
maybe 1-2 others that are around.

Has teleports for - New Gammorah, Opal City, and... probably others.

Its successful because... ***Its gone one single theme!***

Same goes for the furry areas, though those tend to be more of a social 
club type thing. There are SG-1/Atlantis areas, including one *huge* 
group of 8-9 sims that are at the main center of that group of people, 
not including the thousands of gates scattered around the world, with at 
least four different networks, which can all interconnect (means you can 
have an OpenGate, Pegasus, Alteran and Milkyway gate all on the same 
property, if you don't want to have to keep telling the one you have 
which network to link to when dialing).

Basically, the people that are **geniuses** at making pretty content, 
but couldn't give a reason for people to "stay" there, are dying out. 
The shopping malls are succeeding for the same reason all such places 
do, and in no small part because, despite the disparity in product 
quality, its easier to "find" bad designs at a mall than find the gems 
in some out of the way place, which *only* has one or two items. But, 
even those are hurting, and partly due to their own stupidity of trying 
to make themselves look good using bots to boost "visitor numbers".

But, the key point that Orchid XP and Invisible need to recognize is 
that, unlike regular game worlds, this one allows you to "create" things 
for it. Which means you need tools made by the other players, who sell 
licenses via SL to run them, paint/photo software to do certain kinds of 
textures, Blender or Wings3D, etc. to generate certain kinds of things, 
including UV maps and displacement maps (which they call sculpties), 
maybe a BVH editor to do animation of the character for special poses, 
walks, etc., and.. hmm, a sound editor for making those, and who knows 
what else in the future. If you had a fast enough connection, a fast 
enough machine, and no other hardware to do it, you might even run a 
server to track data sent via the script from your items to your DB, to 
support RP combat, or who knows what else. Heck, one of the most popular 
things in SL right not is 7Sea Fishing, where you buy a pro fishing 
pole, some bate, then try to catch every new thing they add to "that" 
database. They managed to hook me, and I hate spending money I don't 
have to. lol I just wish I had thought of the idea first.

I mean, seriously, unless you have a basic free account, everything you 
own is "on" your character, you have no items you make yourself, and all 
your time is spent just "playing" the game, at some point you are 
probably going to install "something" else on the machine that helps you 
design/code script/animate, and so on.

-- 
void main () {

    if version = "Vista" {
      call slow_by_half();
      call DRM_everything();
    }
    call functional_code();
  }
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

<A HREF='http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=16130551'>Get 3D Models,
 
3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

Post a reply to this message