Can someone make a comparison chart...

Of There vs Second life for features, you know, the kind of chart you see for products all the time that lists features each shares, and features unique to each, with little check blocks.

im tired of all the bashing of SL and There by various proponents of each and im unfamiliar with there and am frankly curious about the simularities. I mean, i know some about AW, but only because its been around for ages.

So is someone able to make a comparison of the two without bashing either? I think it takes more maturity to do that, rather than the frequent "sucks" comments.

Comparison charts suck!

Um. Sorry. It sounds like a fine idea.

Arch,
I'm afraid I can't make the comparison you seek but will make a small statement.
I had never heard of There until being exposed to SL by a co-worker. I only tried There after over 2 months already spent in SL. My trial lasted about 2 hours I think and I have never returned There.

The problem with categorizing the differences between There and SL is that a lot of them are totally subjective and not easy to slap on a chart. The way the two games look, the appearances of the avatars, the overall feel of both games are so very different.

However, the biggest difference for most people can be summed up in two main points:

1) You are free to make just about anything you want in SL, immediately (upload a texture, build something, write a script). In There, you have to submit everything for approval (clothing, objects, vehicles, building kits that players can purchase), and then once approved, you can buy and/or use them in-world. AND you have to pay to submit stuff.

2) The vehicles in There work better. They run more smoothly, have better controls and don't have problems like having your avatar tossed out when crossing a sim boundary (like in SL). Sorry, but it's true, SL vehicles are a bit lacking in the performance department in a head-to-head comparison with There's vehicles.

News flash: There has recently cut prices on a whole bunch of in-world items that There.com sells, like clothing, vehicles, hair and skins, and other stuff. (Yes, that's right: You can't make your own hair and skin changes in There, you have to PAY There.com for new ones. Which is another big difference between There and SL, the fact that the latter offers a mind-boggling choice of avatar customizations for FREE.)

I heard there are tons of nakked chicks in There and once guys find out, we won't be able to resist playing. Brilliant shit.

SL:

Rules [ x ]


There:

Rules [ ]

Psst, Jack! There's tons of nakked chicks in SL too! Oh wait. You already play that.

I'll just list advantages:

There:
- Better vehicle handling
- You can lend something to someone and revoke it at any time later
- The default avatar animations and movements are more "natural"
- No border crossing or teleport problems

SL:
- You can create content without an approval process
- Your creations are always instantly available to you to sell or give away free
- It does not cost money to make copies of something you create
- Avatars can be customized extensively, can look fairly realistic in appearance, and you can have as many as you like without extra cost.
- Ability to upload animations, sounds, textures
- Scripting
- Basic membership = lifetime login access for a one-time fee of US$10
- The economy is much more open and stable
- Extensive debug information
- Mature community
- hippos!

- The currency exchange (GOM) is player-to-player, rather than player-to-company, and Linden Lab keeps a sharp eye on the money supply, so there is less inflation. Also, the currency exchange is two-way: so entrepreneurship within SL can, with LL's tacit blessing, translate into not insignificant amounts of real world money.

- Scripting would seem to be worth more than a single bullet-point. The creation tools available, scripting chief among them, enable innovation by the users. Vehicles, weapons, particle-effect fountains, home security systems, nightclub light shows... how many of these could be pre-designed into the system by a small development team at LL? SL is what it is because of innovation by its users, not just its official creators.

- Membership is (supposed to be) 18+ only; so mature (or immature-but-naughty) content and behavior is allowed, with only some restriction on where it's allowed.

- Finally, SL is by all accounts growing in leaps and bounds, and is making money for its creators (including many creators who are not LL employees). LL continues to update the software and add features (though the next few releases are expected to focus on bug fixes and performance). Last I heard, There was in a sort of maintenance mode limbo, although my information may be out of date.

Does There stream as well?

It would seem to me that you'd have a much more static world in there but a much smoother and faster one.

If I'm not mistaken, most of the world is static, so you can play on a dialup connection.

LF

Requirements:

Windows 98 SE/2000 SP1 (or later)
thus: does not support Macs

Internet Explorer v. 5.0.1 or later
thus: does not support FireFox (standards based browsers)

There has built-in voice chat. In SL you have to use TeamSpeak or some other service if you like that. Personally I hate voice chat, it always seems to degrade to people playing MP3s and making farting noises and laughing like retarded hyenas.

Neither place has real "water." In SL you can go in the water, and it has waves (if you have something other than an nVidia 59xx series card, for which the water .cg has been broken for a year) - but the water has the same viscosity as the air, so it just kind of gets darker. In There, the water is solid, you can't go into it.

SL avatars are vastly superior in many ways. They are much more realistic, free to customize (although you can buy clothes from others, mostly for very reasonable prices), can have prims attached (to the point of being entirely obscured by them, as with robot avs), can be stuffed into a volume the size of a couple shoeboxes for use in tiny prim-based avatars, can have animations overridden, etc. The only thing I see as being better in There is that there is direct support for interactions between two avatars. In SL this would have to be done with scripts and I don't know if it would work quite as smoothly.

I agree about the vehicles being somewhat better. They have support for multiple joints, so their ground vehicles have actual suspensions, with each wheel being able to travel up and down on something like a shock absorber. SL vehicles can have variable geometry (wheels that turn, car doors that open and close, swing-wing aircraft, etc.), but we can't currently emulate springy suspensions and things like that with too much realism. We also have that annoying sim border issue, which is the bane of my existence in SL.

There has a much larger draw distance. SL is catching up with the far plane changes in 1.5, but we still have a long way to go before we're caught up. (The far plane option only lets you see stuff where you've already been, and it still doesn't seem to be as far out as in There.) There generally has better framerate, but their world is not as densely packed as ours.

Unfortunately, a lot of those naked chicks are male escorts pretending to be girls for money =/ . I think there should just give up and merge with SL (i want better vehicles).

I don't think There streams like SL. I recall downloading a 110mb client when I took a look at the There beta last year. At the time, the SL client was just over 10mb.

I played There a little while Comcast was playing catch up with Isabel last year. There was actually playable through a really crappy AOL dial up connection. However, all I did was drive my buggy, and buy a shirt.

There does not stream in the usual sense of the word. I.e. Objects are mostly pre-downloaded, the exceptions being textures on clothing items (main models already downloaded on your computer, then textures are applied), and placement of objects such as those in Portable-Zones (PAZ). Most of There is pre-downloaded.

Also, "boarder crossing" can be sucky in There also. There still has server switch overs of course when going across from one server to another, you can sometimes notice it when your avatar or your avatar and vehicle will "Stutter" back and forth in position, the avatar sometimes going out of the vehicle. It all depends on where, and what server you're going on.

Its hard to make a comparison chart because you'd have to have a strictly third-party view with no preference between the two and look strictly at technical standards.

Things like avatar appearence and/or graphical appearence are "personal prefference" some people like the look of the others more. I've heard people actualy call There's avatars more life-like graphical wise (not movement) than SL's.

So what I personaly would do, is list the technical issues of each that could not be disputed from either side of the fence.

This involves looking at features and bugs from both applications.

If you want to get into inclueding ActiveWorlds in this, it may be nice also as it is more primitive yet does offer some basic functions that SL has and doesn't have, and also functions that There does not have. (such as scripting being one that SL has, but its more primitive, but There does not have it. Also streaming of video is something neither SL or There have.)

Again, if you do a comparison chart, be sure to describe things, more than "this is ugly". Such as what each programs avatars look like rather than "ass-ugly".

Active Worlds:
- Text on surface (!)
- Arbitrary Teleporting
- Textures can be specified by URL, and loaded directly from the web
- No "sim borders"

The text on surface thing just confuses me. AW is so much more technically primitive, yet they do this one very useful thing that SL cannot.

Here's some info from an old school AW'er to the mix here:

Activeworlds technically does NOT support "Text on surface" per-se, they have specific sign objects that you can place text on by using the "create sign" command in the object's "Action" property box.

Yes, textures (and now certain types of video) are supported by CERTAIN objects (picture type objects), but unfortunately not for any or every object available in world.

AW also has some pretty interesting lighting commands (directional spotlights, point lights, special fx (like fire, flicker, pulse, etc.), corona fx) that no other VR world has yet to tackle effectively. Lighting has come a long way in AW, but lighting still "bleeds" through walls and other objects just like in SL.

AW can pull in mp3, WAV and MIDI files of any size and quality.

You can also fly in AW (on worlds that allow it), but it's not as fun as it is in SL. You can also turn clipping off (again, on worlds that allow it) and walk through objects and the ground by holding down the SHIFT key.

There are no vehicles in AW. You can create "rides" that "bump warp" your avatar along and push it in different directions, but this is pretty much limited to rollercoasters and other basic amusement park type rides, and it is rather poorly implemented.

AW has a basic "Action line" command structure that can apply limited control over objects in world. Objects can be "scripted" to work in conjunction with sounds, movements, lighting, etc. but in a very limited way. It's also sort of cryptic and confusing language, even to someone who has previous programming experience. I couldn't begin to tell you how "astart" and "adone" works! Don't get me wrong, people have done some AMAZING things with just that feature alone.

Along the same lines, AW has a Software Development Kit available to the public so that people may (and many, many have) developed 3rd party applications, mostly "bots", that can interact with the AW browser code. There are several examples of this, such as the AD&DRPG world, various paintball worlds, AWBingo, card games, etc. I personally loved having my PrestonBot [Val] follow me around and interact with others while chatting, it was quite fun! Second Life would do well if they released such an SDK for their software I think. You could even use a "bot" to SAVE a "propdump", or offline copy of your builds, which could then be later reconstituted if data were ever lost (provided the objects were still in their correct object paths).

One of the great negatives about AW IMHO is that you are limited to the objects that are already loaded into the world (in the case of Alphaworld and other public building worlds), so unless you want to pay AW Inc. for your own private world, you can't add any new models to the mix. This forces you to come up with some creative ways to make stuff with the existing models! The same applies (except for "picture" type objects) to textures. You are limited to only the textures loaded into the object path, which kinda sucks if you don't have your own private world to play in!

One of the great positives about AW is that building over land (and under it also) is virtually limitless. You are only limited by the cell data limit of each cell on the world, and you can basically cover as much land area as you like. You are not allowed to build over top of other people's builds (again, this only applies to public building worlds, with the exception of WildAW and perhaps a few others). For example, I am the Administrator of a medium-sized city on Alphaworld called Nexxus City (AW 285s 5000w), which covers approximately 4 square km of VR real estate and has around 50 builders sharing the city. While as Administrator I am responsible for building the overall infrastructure of the city (roads, monorail lines, adminstrative buildings, etc), I had lots of varying sizes set aside for people to build their own stuff on.

Their pricing structure used to be the lowest in the business ($19.99/year!), but alas, they lost a lot of their citizen base when they decided to up their prices a dramatic 3-400% all at once, instead of gradually raising the price. O'm not sure what the monthly is now, I think last time I checked it was $6.95/month, which in that case, SL premium annual is cheaper and for me, infinitely more worth it!

That's it from me for now,

Artillo

Some of these have already been covered, but I'll reiterate.

AW Features:

- Free building, no need to buy land, just plop an object down and the "land is yours"

- Ability to build in ALL directions, up, down, left, right. By this I mean, you can build above, or even *underground* something we can not do in SL currently. (however this is due to AW's lack of real physics)

- "Running" in AW is much faster. Probably somewhere around 3-5x's the speed of SL's running. This allows you to cover large distances in a smaller amount of time. (be sure to hold down Shift though while you do this so you don't keep running into stuff). Note: Not sure if running is disable-able in worlds, I forget and I'm too lazy to check my own.

- Worlds can be much larger in size than Sims. AlphaWorld, the main building world in ActiveWorlds is quoted to be almost the size of California. Worlds can be actualy *any* size, large or small.

- Worlds can be compeletely customized, everything from sky boxes, "physics", water, land, objects, avatars, etc. can be customized.

- Like SL Sims, worlds can have ratings and be restricted to users. However AW takes it a step further and allows you to specify what exactly users can do, either by "anyone", or by specifing who can do what specificly, i.e. "this user can build, and kick out users, but can't change world settings" or "all users can build, but only this user can kick out users".

- You can select what worlds you see based on ratings, i.e. I could select not to see any worlds with a rating of PG-13 or above (AW uses the standard movie rating system, G - X). I could even set a password to be entered in order to change the rating setting.

- Differntly powered users text appears differently. I.e. If I have the power to kick users out of a world, or have "speaker" rights, my text appears in bold, a normal users text appears in regular, and "tourists" (trial users, users who are not paying members) appear in greyish text. This makes it alot easier for Town Halls as the main speaker can "go bold" to make their text stand out.

- Worlds can have "welcome messages", and world announcements.

- Custom uploading of objects possible, allowing you to pre-model objects/avatars and upload them to your own world.

- Chat Logs can easily be saved by checking/unchecking an option in your prefences. URL's in chat are clickable and can launch your default browser or a built in browser (uses IE of course).

- Individual settings for people on your Contacts list. I.e. I could set myself to never be visibly online to a certain user, or dissallow a user to see what world I curently am in, or allow only one user to see what world I am in.

- Can set an offline mode.

- Using a system of "Citizen Numbers" (simular to ICQ numbers), you can freely change your name to annything and everything will update to reflect this, i.e. all the objects built in world by you will change the name to your new name (however your cit# is still displayed on the object), and also if you're on someones contact list, it will reflect the change. This can be confusing, but is still nice. It cannot be used for abuse as you can easily obtain anyones cit# (simular to Avatar-UUID Keys in SL) using bots etc.

- Different video modes. You can run AW in Direct3D, OpenGL, or Software mode.

- NPC's. Bots use Avatar's to represent themselves, which easily allows you to create NPC's. Bots names appear as: [OzSpade] where as my name would appear as: OzSpade to distinguish. Bot's names also display their owners Cit# next to their name, i.e.: [OzSpade] (331155).

- Ability to "skip" back and forth from your current teleport location to your previous. i.e. I can teleport to WorldA, then teleport to WorldB, then hit the "Back" button and teleport back to WorldA, and then I can hit the "Forward" button and teleport to WorldB again.

- Can set your home in any world, at any position, if the world allows it.

- Chat allows you to identify new messages from "scroll back", so if you scroll up, then scroll back down it tells you which messages are new from that time.

- Right clicking a name in the Chat window gives you the same options as right clicking their avatar, i.e. Telegram, view profile options, listing of Citnumber, etc.

- Swimming animations and different behavior when underwater.

- Total Time Online in your user preferences (only you can see it).

- Telegramming, AW's IM system works simular to SL's, It is sent instantly, however if the user is not online it is saved for them for when they do come on and they are then informed they have a Telegram waiting for them. Via GUI you then check your telegrams which shows the sender and the date of each telegram. You can then click to see the message. Or if you are online it is sent instantly. Now, whats different than SL's system is that Telegrams are saved untill you delete them, so you can keep telegrams in your list untill you wish (or untill you reach the limit, then you must delete some before more can be stored I think).

- Saving of direct coordinate teleports. If the world allows it you can save a direct teleport to any coordinate in a world.

- Worlds list, lists the current worlds (you can select which worlds you want to see, by rating or by public/private settings), AND you can see how many worlds AND how many users are currently online and in each world. (Something I'd love to see in SL)

- VRT, Virtual Reality Time, basicly a universal time to arrange meetings based on. (SL just uses PST currently). VRT is 2 hours ahead of EST and has the same 24 hour span as regular hours, presented in 12 hour form, not military 24.

--------------------------
AW Bugs/NonFeatures:

- No custom avatars. There is no way to create your own avatar to always have and use in every world. Avatars are world-dependant and you must use one from that worlds avatar list.

- No physics. There is slight emulation of physics, but no actual physics. I.e. avatars can "jump", and colide with objects/otheravatars, and you can emulate physics with scripting (poorly), but thats about it.

- No real grouping method. You can use shared "privliages" (you can allow another user to have your priviliages simular to the system SL has, but slightly more) which could allow for group building/access, but its not a true grouping and one person could go rogue and screw everyone.

- Dated graphics. The graphics are still rather "low". This however has the advantage of being able to run on older systems.

- Poor company handling. Even There Inc. (Forterra) looks good compared to ActiveWorlds Inc. or whatever the hell they call themselves now days (they've been through about 5-6 name changes). Company support and general updating activity or service has been lacking for many years and is in large part why alot of the community left.

- No economy. While this is actualy good in some cases, there is no built in economy, you could however make your own using a bot, however I imagine this would be hard/difficult/annoying.

- No fullscreen mode. AW is always ran in windowed mode.

- Very limited GUI customization. I.e. both SL and There have customly graphical GUI's, however AW uses mostly default GUI Look with only a few skinnable icons (newly added).

- Non-cross platform. To my knowledge AW is highly Microsoft dependant, the built in browser uses IE (simular to There, although AW isn't as heavily reliant on IE), and also streaming video requires you to have Windows Media Player 9. Making AW look to be it will never be cross-platform.

- Limited Terraforming. Most of the time users building in a world can-not terraform the ground, only world owners can terraform. However some users have pulled this off using bots.

- Graphics "stutter" or "slow" when using the interface.

- Tourists (trial users, unpaid users) have limited access to worlds/features.

- No wind, clouds, or other enviornmental things. These can be emulated using the minor-scripting system and objects however.

------

Long list, but thats all I got for now.

In large part, I like AW because of the creational freedom, scripting (what limited they have), building, etc. are more than you can do in places like There in some ways, however more limited than what SL offers.

Bots can be used to achieve alot in AW, the best worlds I've seen use a combination of bots and custom sculpted objects.

Thanks Ace, that was very informative.

One thing from There I'd like to see more of in SL would be the Try-O-Matic machines that let you actually try something out for a few hours, several times for each item in fact, until it automatically derezzes (using SL terminology ). It helps one to make a more informed buying decision when in the marketplace. I know I have heard complaints of when the item on the box looks much better (i.e. touched-up Photoshop job) than what is actually purchased. By doing this, one is able to have a more extensive, not to mention fun evaluation if something is right for him/her -- leading to greater customer confidence and satisfaction.

Here's more info:

http://info.there.com/idx/0/080/article/Using_TryOMatics.html

That'd be cool to see, you can do this kinda with some scripts, but nothing as nicely as There has with the full implementation.