Question To Former Therians or TSO Players

When it comes to games, I don't really like to say *better* or *worse*... I rather say *different* and Sl is definitely different

I really hated the letter-by-letter chat thing in There. You sit there watching and waiting for the poor soul to finally get it typed out, and you watch them back up and correct typos a couple of times . . . TORTURE.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of The Sims, so of course, TSO sounded like a great idea. It was a lot of fun during beta, but right after it went live it pretty much croaked. Lack of content and excess of greening and skilling killed it, IMHO. I know play The Sims 2, when I'm not playing WoW or in SL.

There always sucked for me. I never found the fun in it, except for the people, my friends who had come from TSO. A huge turnoff was having to pay for absolutely everything you did in There... even creating.

When it comes to games, I don't really like to say *better* or *worse*... I rather say *different* and Sl is definitely different

There still has its strengths such as vehicle smoothness and realtime letter-by-letter chat bubbles and Try-O-Matics, which I hope could be rolled into SL so SL becomes better.

So I'm wondering, what was good about these games and is SL better?

Feb 03, 2004 18:53
First Impressions of There -
It's not all there in There

How does that song from Disney's Robin Hood movie go? "Every town has ups. Every town has downs. Some towns' ups outnumber the downs, but not in Nottingham."

Friar Tuck may have been singing about gloomy days in mideival england, but his lyrics are just as applicable to 3D online worlds. If each world is a town, then There is definitely a Nottingham.

I went into There for the first time today, and I must say I was very surprised at how different of an experience it is from Second Life. The look of the world, the interface, and most notably the people of There appear to be very unlike those of SL.

The first thing I noticed upon getting started was how little freedom There allows for self expression, forcing the user to choose a permanent gender, and then only allowing 3 choices each for hair style and skin color. This is in stark contrast to SL, which allows the user almost infinite liberty to create and re-create his or her appearance. I’m sure it’s possible to customize a There avatar further as one progresses in the world, as I saw individuals with some different outfits and hair styles, but I glimpsed no one who looked particularly unusual or inhuman. I’m sure that most of the people I’ve met in SL would feel quite stifled by this apparent lack of creative freedom, as did I.

The second major difference I noticed between There and SL is that There’s user interface is much more restrictive than that of SL. The camera controls consist of just a few angle choices available from a pull-down menu, a far cry from the almost complete 360 degree freedom that SL’s camera allows at the touch of the alt button. Furthermore, it seemed (at least to me) not to be anywhere near as intuitively understandable as SL’s interface. For example, right clicking on an object does not pull up options for the object, as any Windows user would expect, but instead causes your avatar to jump backwards.

I also found There’s balloon style chat to be somewhat annoying. It’s all too easy for people to fail to notice portions of conversations, particularly when in groups of 3 or more. The only potential benefit I can think of for this format is that it makes reading the name of the speaker unnecessary in order to know who is talking, perhaps allowing the speaker to be identified a split second faster than in SL, where all text is displayed in a more traditional linear scrolling progression. However, this is obviously trivial at best, and hardly makes up for the potential of not being able to see all that is typed in a fast-paced conversation. In addition, this format causes the situation that you can’t “hear” anyone you can’t see, which I consider to be quite silly. If someone is standing in back of you, it is impossible to see anything they type.

Additionally on the subject of chat, it's worth noting that There's interface publishes everything the user types, letter for letter, before the user even hits the ENTER key. This not only makes every typo visible before it gets back-spaced and fixed, but it forces you to choose you words very carefully every time you speak. You have no way to rephrase a sentence before everyone sees it if it turns out you don't like the way it sounds.

I find SL's approach of putting the avatar into a special animation to incidcate when the user is typing be far superior. Everyone knows the user has something to say while he or she is typing, but they can't actualy see any of the text until he or she is ready for them to. This allows the user to prepare his or her thoughts much more naturally, without the need to be constantly on guard against letting the odd poor choice of words slip out.

Despite the fact that some of the There users I met were under the impression that its graphics looked great, I couldn’t help but find it to look very 2-dimensional, almost cartoonish, a bit Flash-like. Perhaps there are options for display settings that I haven’t found yet, but as far as I could see There exhibits almost no 3D shading, no bump mapping, and very little in the way of interesting or complex textures.

The population of There is probably the most striking difference it has with SL. There users, from what I can tell so far, are much more reminiscent of a typical online gaming community than are SL users. Many of them gave every indication they were the exact type of rude, insulting, petty, and immature people whom I had been so happily surprised to find did not inhabit Second Life. What’s more, they seem to be incredibly territorial, some calling me a spy and ordering me to leave when I mentioned I use Second Life, and one calling SL a "Japanese paper doll looking game" and then accusing the Lindens of having some grand conspired scheme to somehow send people spam by collecting credit card numbers.

This last person was absolutely convinced that the reason SL registration asks for your credit card number is so that Linden Labs can then use it to somehow track your real world purchases with that card, and then use that information to decide what type of spam to send you. I tried to explain that had Linden or any other company really wanted credit card demographic information that badly, it would obviously be far easier and cheaper to obtain a categorized list directly from the credit card companies (as would any targeted mass marketer) than it would be to devise such an elaborate scheme involving the countless thousands of man-hours necessary for the programming and maintenance of the SL world. However, this person was far more interested in watching himself type than in any real discussion. He responded only by calling me a "griefer SL spy" and then he ordered me to stop calling him a "liar", which of course I hadn't done in the first place. He then made it a point to declare what a great mentor he was for newbies, and how much he loves to help people, just before he and his buddy told me if I did not leave There by the count of 20, they were both going to “make life very uncomfortable” for me.

He actually counted …all the way from 20 to zero, on screen.

I could hardly believe what a childish display these two were putting on, and I was more than a bit curious to see what they were going to cook up at the end of the count. Apparently however, they were not quite as creative or daring as they were boasting. The best they could do was to hurl a couple more insults my way and then disappear.

The one and only nice person I did meet was a guy named Teely, who volunteered to be my mentor. He took me flying around on his hover craft, and explained a few things about the workings of There. Along the way, we had an interesting conversation about 3D modeling, during which my new friend explained to me that a talented modeler can make real money in There.

He said he had a friend who makes his living (about $500 a week) doing nothing but selling his creations to other There users. This person is able to do this depite the fact that There keeps approximately 80% of all sales revenue.

According to Teely, people actually buy and sell There dollars and items via Pay Pal, and There's users take its economy very seriously. I got the impression that while there may be people who are clearly benefiting, the degree to which some people feel attached to this particular online world borders on dangerous, possibly self-destructive.

One more notable difference between There and SL is that There, unlike SL, apparently can import models from outside programs. According to my newfound mentor, objects in There are first created in Gmax and then uploaded. I see certain advantages and disadvantages if this is indeed the case.

I’ve only ever used Gmax very briefly, about a year ago, but from what I can recall its modeling tools, limited as they are, are a lot more robust than those in SL, meaning there is a potential for much more complex and interesting models to be made for There than for SL. The downside of using Gmax though is that it's likely no where near as easy for the novice modeler to grasp than is the SL interface, possibly explaining why good models are so highly prized and expensive in There.

I’ll have to play around with Gmax again to remember how good or bad it actually is, and I’ll have to learn more about how it interfaces with There before I can decide if it’s worth trying to do any kind of extensive modeling for There. The idea of making some real money off my models is an intriguing one, but if the people I met today (Teely excepted) are any indication of the potential clientele, I don’t know if it’s worth the hassle.

I guess I’ll have to see if I can prove the good friar wrong.