My There Experience

Ok so after a recent post i decided to try out There. (with my second life rocks the world and is above all condensending viewpoint of course.)


I couldnt even login.

Heres what happened:
1. i downloaded and installed there
2. the post-installation took me to a registration page
3. i registered and it said There isnt installed.

Nice.

I spoke w/ tech support THREE times, all three times i had to delete the same temporary objects and re-install There.

First of all, that process is just restoring my machine to a pre-installation state, and then reinstalling. If the damn installer is bugged, im gonna get the same result. (maybe too logical for these nimrods, but i digress.)

So anyway *I tracked it down to the dll 'therevoicetrainer.dll' not registering. (via setup logs, etc..) It wont even manually register.

So now I have 3 avs registered, (they registered, but would not let me login) michaelsmall, michaelsmaller, and michaelsmallest.


However out of all this I did get the following enlightening excerpt from There's TOS:

to that i say pfffft!!!
geez what a hassle for nuthin.

Michael did you ever even get in? Sounds like not, but just want to clarify for myself.

And I know how agonizing that must have been, especialy with the installation of There being surprizingly long.

If you didn't get in, don't worry, your not missing much, yet atleast. They do have some things in beta testing apparently that may be interisting... but probly not, hehe.

It still is neat to try out if you ever do get it working, I don't want to totaly diss it, it does have some cool things about it, but personaly its nothing compared to SL.

Thats a great excerpt from the TOS, lol, I've never read the whole thing myself.

i know i've already grumbled in my own thread about this, but i figured i'd spout just a bit more here...

..besides the glorified chat-room singles scene that i quickly ran away from...

..the camera/walking controls were loose and annoying
..the avatar customization controls left a LOT to be desired,
...not to mention they were buggy

while i thought the cartoonish look was cool because it was smooth and flows nicely, it also just further strengthened the feel that it was nothing that i could really dig into.

as was referrenced once before, There is like a visual version of AIM..

blah.. i'm even bored talking about it.. lol

No i never got in Oz.

If this wouldnt have failed the installation was actually very easy.

it was 3 minutes to download (71mb), 6 minutes to install,
install requires 400mb of hd space but control panel only lists it as taking up like 280mb or so.

the UI of the install and steps to d/l and install were idiot proof. 'click here, download there'

*It took 4 minutes to uninstall.*

Well I just tried There about 10 min ago. I was surprised how laggy it was but I was in a zone where there were a lot of people, vehicles, and paintballers.
Overall, it just seemed like a poor man's SL. I completely hated the chat bubbles and lack of camera controls. I also really hated that it had IE embedded in the app.
I did get into a conversation which seemed odd to me too. Sorta like entering combat mode in FFXI instead of having the freedom to move around.
I didn't have the chance to check out the other aspects of the game. We'll see.

To it's credit, the world is Earth-size and you can see for miles.

To it's discredit... well, I wouldn't know where to start.

I'm on There right now and decided to cruise the world. I'd have to admit, the buggies are really well done. As I type, Im hydroplaning across the ocean going north. My cell phone is stuck on the forward button and I've been going now for about 15 min. All I see is ocean but that fact that the world is so big is cool. Hopefully I'll hit the north pole sometime soon.

Ironchef, Darwin was being literal when he said that the world is Earth-size. The world of There is approximately 1:1, with a 12 million "unit" diameter (where a male avatar is ~2 units tall).

Happy driving.

Yes it may take you quite awhile to get there. Although there are people who have been there, they said it gets a little buggy for some reason.

Everytime I log in latley I put my avatar on cruise control on a hoverboard heading perpetualy East, I usualy am in for about an hour or two, this has been going on for quite some time and have yet to find any land east. Or come around full circle yet, blue in every direction.

Ya I basically gave up on that. But I did run into someone in the middle of the ocean.

I ported back, checked out a spa and gave myself a huge beer belly.
I ran into some people who have been there for a while and they were very helpful. This one chick Shamrawk showed me around the place. I rode in a buggy with her and started running over paintballers. That was sorta fun besides the lag--and the display freezing up a couple of times. Then got out, was lent a paintball gun, turned the force field off and shot a couple of people.

The people were nice I can see the benefits of joining these chat circles. I saw a dog and was very impressed with its animations.

I don't think There is such a bad place after checking it out first hand. If you don't care for building and want a prebuilt world, it's not a bad place to be. The AV's look like characters from Zelda, but if you think of AV's as just dolls anyway, it doesn't matter.

My There experience:
Installed, created an account, hopped in, tried to change my hair color, found out it was going to cost 4995 out of the 5000T that you start with, uninstalled.

Yeah but There.com is open source software what do you expect.

/duck.

Actualy... most of it is kinda open source... they use alot of Flash files, which quite a few people have hacked open and edited to their liking, its kinda funny when the players against the will of the company make things better than the company itself.

There hasn't started cracking down on them yet, but they most likely will eventualy.