games like this

I tried There under Trial and having also joined SL in same week, I absolutely hated There... which is rare for me as i PLAY HALF A DOZEN REGULAR MMorpgs and many other games and I am beta testing several games including Planeshift mentioned earlier.

I found There entirely childish, clever yes, but like a cartoon. The level of avatar looks was appalingly boring and kiddie like and with almost no variation. Compared to SL or Project Entropia with the avatar realisations, There is like kids TV cartoon. I hated the intrusive, creepy, snobby ' Hello I'm your helper person' who accosted me within seconds of arrival with no proof they were a game official function, and whose teaching ability was zero. I am sure many people love it, and it must have good points, and is larger than SL The world was nice enough looking itself, But I just hated its total childish cartoon characters and its sugary PG Disney ' niceness' made me cringe !!

Sl has a long way to go also, and also looks a little bit Disney at times, but give me the mature possibilities of SL anyday, and leave There to the kids. That's my view.

The person that accosted you was most likely a, I forget what they call them, I think Mentor but I could be wrong, but anyway, theres this mentor program in There where people who don't really work for There try and help out new people. As for their snobby attitude, well, yeah, that happens everywhere but is especialy frequent in There. Just so you know not trying to cop yah out or anything, just lettin yah know most likely what was going on, not trying to defend There or anything. Hehe.

Coincidently enough Disney does have its own MMOG called Disney ToonTown, which looks amazingly entertaining even to me. The main objective seems to be to do practicle jokes on people like hitting people with pies.

We need a good pie game in SL... er... that doesn't sound right... moving on...

I played the ToonTown beta one night. I kept playing for like a few hours waiting for it to become interesting and then got that really horrible what-a-waste-of-tons-of-hours feeling.

ToonTown looks attractive but it's extremely shallow. Like, really shallow. Like, I'd pay not to play it. It might have changed since beta of course.

Azelda

P.S. I think the thing that annoyed me about ToonTown was two things:
- the concept that people are either Evil or Good. No moral relativity at all
- the fact that the game is all about killing people, but it is disguised by wrapping it up in this garb about laughter points and the fact that the people you are killing are Evil and Black. Yeah.

A quick word on Active Worlds.

Having been a member of the AW comunity since 1997 I think I know the program and technology quite well and back in 1997 it was, quite frankly, amazing. The ability to go online into a 3D rendered landscape and move around and speak to other people you met and build whatever you liked (within the limitations of the provided building blocks) was a big technical breakthrough for its time.

However, even back in '97 AW was already 2 years old, which in some respects made it even more impressive, but in those two years had changed very little. This was mainly due to the "slow" progress in technology restricting updates to bug fixes and minor performance improvements.

The advent of hardware 3D rendering cards should have brought a vast improvement to AW, but the limitations of Renderware used for the graphics engine meant we had to wait until version 2.2 (1999?) to see much improvement other than "pretties".

The current version looks nice but lacks a lot of the functionality of Secondlife. Emphasis being placed on server abilities (user owned) and more pretty graphics. A server in AW is much the same as a sim in SL except that each is its own island, unconnected to the others. Anyone can buy and run the server software though most owners choose to have hosting companies run it for them. One BIG drawback of this that I do not want to see happen in SecondLife is there are now over 1000 worlds available, but with maybe 150 people online at any one time, and 50 - 60 of those in the "main" Alpha world, that leaves hundreds of worlds sitting totally empty and devoid of life.... great if you're a hermit.

Building, for those that have not been there, is done using pre-uploaded models in either .RWX or .COB (TrueSpace) format. You can use TrueSpace or similar programs to create a simple wall piece or your entire mansion, then you upload the model to a web server (assuming you have access and/or permission from the world owner). These models can then be placed at will within the world you're building in, however they canot be further modified other than very basic texture changing. (You could upload a picture frame with a blank picture then define the picture when you 'create' it in-world..)

The use of off-line model building tools has meant there are some VERY stunning builds in some worlds, but also means that most worlds are filled with the "standard" model sets that look very out dated and uninspiring.

It does have one or two minor plus points when compaired to SL, but on the whole it is out of date technology. When AW announced its price increases 2 years ago I started looking around for alternatives. I wrote down everything that AW could do that I liked, everything I wished it would do and eventually found the SL beta did everything on the list plus more...

Summary, good for a visit but I wouldn't want to live there...

When i first heard of SL i really be really happy, im have looking för this type of "game" for a long time.

I think its great, but i think also there is a problem that only we the resident build things, there is no plan, no structure, sometimes im sorry to say its look reaaly bad.

And what i also miss is a real city, im also miss the violence, im not the type that like quake and so on, but i think this game sometimes need some action.

Surina,

Thank you for the very thorough summary of ActiveWorlds. You have actually made me curious about it. I am a huge fan of 3d modelling programs, especially Truespace, and the thought of being able to import custom made models is very appealing. That has been my one disappointment with SL. While the build tools are amazing, I have longed for the ability to create a model in a 3d program and import it. I understand the technical reasons why this cannot currently be done, but as someone who owns Maya, 3d Studio Max, and Truespace, I would love to be able to create content for SL using those incredible tools. If nothing else, I will give AW a visit. Thanks again

Cristiano

i must say when i see there.com i think its much more nicer then SL and the Planeshift is really beautiful.


im really will love SL if there are a city with streets and so on.

** deleted **

I must admit, the randomness of the landscape in SL has always bothered me too. In Federal, I have done my small part to push back against that by working with my neighbors to at least make the area fit together. Granted, the rest of Federal is still random in some ways, but I am seeing more and more of this in other sims as well, and it is encouraging. We all have different goals, and I don't think every area needs to be structured, randomness appeals to some people equally as order does. I would just like to see more balance I suppose.

Harvest Moon on the Gameboy Advance has been fun. Chillin on the couch while growing crops and fishing has been great

well the graphics i saw on there were an order of magnitude simpler than sl's... and i can see how that would appeal to people, there is a certain beauty in simplicity... though whether it can make up for the fact that there jus isn the depth there do do much more than look pretty is anyone's guess... its like when yer visiting sample homes for sale... its 'pretty' but in a wholly empty and shallow kind of way... no nasty books cluttering shelves, no 'stuff' to show anyone's actually *LIVED* there


its *ALOT* easier to make 'nice' looking avatars in there than it is in SL... tho of course that means almost everyone in there looks the same... unfortunately it also means there are WAAAAAAAY too many giant eyed 6 inch long eyelash 'beauty queens' in sl that could scare the bejesus outta kids... i think thats why we're still 18+ required (j/k)


the internet explorer thing tho... yah.. yaknow what? i'd rather stop playing a game than be told what web-browser i should be using... i've been ie free for 2 years and LOVING it.

Eltee,

There uses the component version of Internet Explorer as its browser engine for the game. As much of the UI in There is browser based (along with Flash), I imagine they wanted to standardize on a platform that could be built on top of. It in no way forces you to use IE for your web browsing outside of There.

Cristiano

Build it.

actually it requires IE to be the default browser, making alot of other programs i use open up IE without much of a choice in the matter, (assuming i really wanted to play there

I think SL should revert back to text gaming online. Get back to the roots of MUUUUUUUUUU. LoL

Instead of objects you'd have to describe them. No more prim limiting now it would be word limits on things.

I did not realize it forced the default, that is bad programming on There's part, which is not a shocker. I use IE as my default browser anyway, so I had never noticed one way or another. It may also be that Internet Explorer is set to check if it is the default browser in the IE settings, thus the component version is also using that preference. I don't know, I would lean more towards There just having screwed something up.

I have Mozilla as my default web browser and There never forced me to switch to using IE as default, so I dunno whats up with that.

Surina what was your name in AW? I was addicted to AW at first (I love my virtual enviornments), and spent a long time building there, baught my own world server (for only 10 bucks a month, pretty nice), and played bingo on there religiously and won a t-shirt which I still wear. However all the problems you describe are exactly why most people left AW. They're the slowest updating thing only above There. Its very sad to have seen it go from a pretty popular place to a pretty much abondoned waste land of over 1000 servers all empty.

AW is definitly worth a try, however it is like a very primitive SL, many of the things SL has the AW community has wanted for many a years. (custom avatars, in game economy, better interface, ect)