World of Kaneva virtual world open for business

I've been waiting for this thing to come out of closed beta for a while now.

It's no SL clone, so no point in wasting time pointing out that it's not; instead best to evaluate it on its own terms.

I'll start with saying that the continuous repetition of the word "Rave!" or some variant thereof gets quite annoying after a few microseconds.

I came across this in the new forums for the Kaneva 3D chat program. The old Kaneva forums seemed like a custom made forum written by an amateur programmer. The new ones are vBulletin and kind of familiar looking - much like this but almost exactly like slhomepage.com forum.

Well the appearance of the Kaneva forums is beside the point of this post.

The point of this post is to ask if anyone has any comments on the Kaneva rules shown above.

I think they'll get a lot of people who think that having the kinds of rules that apply when you're in high school, is somehow a form of safety.

The rest of us are likely to barf.

I went over to their website and was especially put off by their rejection of fantasy avatars and content.

To make it worse, they WANT people to integrate their RL content with their 3D experience... this is hazardous if not carefully done. They're just asking for a problem, especially since they permit minors.

Blah. Give me SL's relative anarchy any day, I'm a grown up and can handle it.

However, thanks very much for the tip. I will check it out, just out of curiosity.

So.. No age verification, eh?

I went over to Kaneva tonight for an hour and checked it out.

Several things suc that even at their low tech level, did not need to, including the idle animation. I kept looking at the build and thinking "I could have built this in SL with a few box prims two years ago as a newbie." I would expect corporate content to be a little more polished than it was.

The constant rave thing did get old quick but might be the social glue of the place; two friends in one hour, no doubt you can easily gather enough to lose count. I saw a small bit of toplessness and implied nudity, so they're less prudish then I thought they would be. The avatars truly suc... they are even angular and ridged in certain kinds of light. It's not clear to me why the faces in particular are so poorly done.

On the other hand, Kaneva does have the potential to capture a MySpace-like social vibe. It was obvious most of the crowd was very young. There wasn't a lot of shopping, so once I figured out the basics I headed for the club, which consisted of dancing in front of a video. The animations vary from decent to suc. When the whole scene started giving me flashbacks to the MTV heyday I got the heebie jeebies and went home.

"Home" is a box with another box just outside of it pretending to be a panoramic view of a city. The wallpaper can be changed by uploading images, and there's a TV for media content. About this time, between that and the fact that my avatar would spaz against the wall and periodically scratch her leg, I was out of there. An experience like this makes you grateful for what we've got in Second Life.

On the plus side, they are new, and if they ever permit any content creation the private apartments could be fertile ground for experimentation. Accessing the world through a browser means it would be easy for people with old computers to get in. But overall, I tuned out Kaneva for exactly the same reason I tune out MySpace and its relatives. So by their standards perhaps they will succeed.

I just fired up Kaneva. The updating took longer - much longer - than a complete download of SL. There's only a one or two hundred people online , so there can't be too many people downloading the updates. I understand that people go through this process for regular online games but those games have more going for them, for the people that enjoy them, than Kaneva has going for it.

Upon arriving, I was once again struck with the question I always have when I enter Kaneva: What is that door in the apartment for?

Looked around at my picture of Andrew Linden and a Max Monde build, both of which are tiled unpleasantly because you can't adjust the texture scaling, listening to my boombox playing Torley music. The Torley music is nice, so Kaneva has one good thing in it, but it was made by a Second Life employee and put there by a Second Life user.

Then I went around the apartment, bouncing up and down to the Torley music, which gives a glimpse of the cityscape above the ceiling due to a little flaw in the camera system. Went over to the little room in the almost unfurnished apartment and asked myself the second question I ask after entering Kaneva:

What is the little room for?

I listened to my music play for a minute, noting that the bounce rate sort of matched the beat of the Torley music.

I next went to the Mall, the public place where the most people are, and I ran into this:

That's something that wouldn't go over too well in SL.

The Mall reminds me of early SL in a way, people trying the gestures and dances, looking rather primitive and silly, because they don't have much choice of gestures and dances, and they want to do something rather than nothing and that's all they've got. Like doing the old F12 dance used to be.

SL avatars look better than Kaneva to my eye.

Swithched my camera, you can be in third person from behind, like we are in SL, or in Kaneva's version of Mouselook, or - and here Kaneva has SL beat - third person looking at your avatar from the front, like I've been wanting SL to have since Decemeber 22 of 2003. Otherwise though, the camera controls leave much to be desired, like, umm, aiming, tilting, panning, etc.

One thing that I find very effective in conveying a sense of really being in SL is the way the camera bounces around as you move. The camera is anchored to your avatar's pelvis, and that makes the camera move in somewhat the same way that your visual field actually move in RL when you walk around.

Kaneva's camera does not follow that model, it's like a movie camera moving on a meticulously smoothed and oiled track, like the camera in Multiverse. This kind of camera is great for Machinima and I'm sure is fine when you are just playing a game but if the designers have a goal the imparting of a sense that your are your avatar actually in the virtual world or that your spirit at least is in the virtual world, the smooth movement of the camera to me largely ruins the effect. Real bipeds trundling about just don't have the fluid graceful organic eyeball camera movement that Kaneva and other virtual environments I've seen have.

Next thing I notice is people chatting and using the word Rave. Sheesh, what a rotten choice of words to mean "pos rate", the Kaneva folks should have gotten out the thesaurus and used ten or twenty different words in the interface at different places so you don't have to see the world Rave so many times it makes you want to pull your hair out or punch your fist through the monitor or something.

I get these emails from Kaneva with supposed news or links to Kaneva forum posts so I follow them to the company's web site, and it is a mess, not as bad as it used to be, but still, it's hard to tell what to do once you get there. SL's web site is a model of clarity by comparison.

Kaneva's supposed to have some games introduced; I'm not sure if they mean games to use your avatar to play in the 3D world, or if they are gonna be 2D games, which would be fun, but which would not be making real good use of the 3D world, especially in light of the big loading time necessitated by the 3D world format. You can find places with perfectly good free multi-user 2D games with no trouble.

Here I am in Kaneva at the Mall:


That's as much as I can stand to write about Kaneva at the moment. By far the best part of tonight's experience was Torley's music.

Cool review Suezanne, thanks.

I kept trying to push on the door or interact with it to get to the other side. It has a light coming from under the door... very tempting to try to get the camera over there somehow.

The little room might be for changing. Is there a way to rezz furniture?

Trying out Kaneva and wandering through the mall, I saw some boots. Bought 'em. Tried to put them on and got this:



This last statement is also a bug, since the boots in question are specifically marked "Cannot be traded or sold". I'd say this transaction was a bug, because I can't figure out why you'd let somebody spend money on something they can't use or return.

That's totally sucky if all their clothing is going to be gender specific and no cross-dressing or sharing will be allowed.