Imvu

Anyone know how IMVU compares to SL? (http://www.imvu.com/)

Any good?

Its nothing like SL. Its a basic chat room with pretty avatars.At least, it was when it first opened and I tried it. I wouldn't have thought much had changed.

Agreed. It's just a peer to peer chat service with fixed positions in a single room for your avatar, which invariably looks like some Bratz knock-off. Even The Palace was more open to customization and exploration.

Nice that you posted, I haven't been in IMVU in so long that if they let accounts lapse for lack of use, I would be a prime candidate.

One could reasonably start an investigation of IMVU by going to www.imvu.com and signing up and checking it out themselves - it's free to sign up.

It appears that free accounts have the word guest stuck at the beginning of their name. I'd forgotten that.

IMVU describes itself as 3D instant messaging. You do get a customizable home page, a normal 2D web page.

I heard it was mostly full of little girls chatting about what they saw on Nickelodeon the other night.

As others have stated, IMVU does not compare with SL at all. It's a totally different thing. The only things they have in common are that both are on the Internet, and both allow you talk to people through a 3D avatar. But that's where it stops.

SL is a world, as you know. Its got land and cities and oceans and sky and everything a world should have in it. IMVU has chat rooms. Some of them are kind of cool looking chat rooms, but they're still just chat rooms.

If you want to talk about the differences from a content creation standpoint, here's the easiest way to sum it up. SL allows you to create all kinds of things directly in-world, as you know. The sky is the limit on what you can do, and anyone and everyone can do it. IMVU, on the other hand, allows you to create items only if you've registered to do so, and you don't do any of it inside the system itself. You do it in a third party modeling program, following specific criteria, and then you import your stuff (in a semi-convoluted way) into the system. From what I was able to determine when I was researching it, most items are made by modifying pre-existing ones. Very little is made from scratch.

Unless I'm missing something, the age you enter when signing up is displayed. I hate that.

Active Worlds, Hipihi, Novoking, and Kaneva are more along the line of SL. Even the old Worlds Chat place is more like SL.

Trying to hide it, eh?

Thanks for bringing this up. Not getting out much, I'd never heard of IMVU and it's interesting to hear about other 3d environments as I think this must be the way the future of the internet is shaping up.
Can anyone tell me about the business possibilities over there. ie could I make any money selling any kind of custom content?

hehe I tried them to see what was inside the box.

Meh firstly I could nto get outside the room. Then they I forgot about the thing and weeks later logged in to find like 66797078 messages with pick up lines in them. Then they did a patch somewhere along the line and I logged in and found my avatar had lost its hair. clothes etc and they were knowhere to be found..

I never figured out what the service was for but I guess its like 3d MSN. I have always hated instant messaging services so I guess that is why i couldn't figure out what to do with it. I could not go anywhere or do anything i just stood...

I guess that is also why i got the 5657469733737373 messages with people wanting to chat whom I had no idea who they were or what they wanted.

Oh well such is life.

Anyone knows if HiPiHi has an English language client yet? I think that's their main handicap. Although there are over 1.5B Chinese speakers in the world, only a tiny fraction has a computer, not to mention internet access.

There's a partially English Hipihi interface available. I was just writing about it this morning, in fact, if I remember correctly.

There is one installation file for Hipihi. Installing it involves installing an Asian language pack and making some changes in your Region and Locale settings. Then you install Hipihi. Then you make a change to the Hipihi shortcut.

Doing the above steps gets you the Chinese client. The above steps are described at the Hipihi site, hipihi.com, the hipihi forums, forums.hipihi.com, the ideashape forums, www.ideashape.cn, and on my blog's Hipihi page.


Once you have Hipihi installed properly, then you edit a value in the Hipihi program folders to make the partial English interface be used.


On a standard installation of Hipihi the file that determines the language is in C:\Program Files\HiPiHi\HiPiHi World 50012 sp1\UIData\LocalSetting\localSetting.xml .

There's one line in this file which reads:
<LocalSetting>0</LocalSetting>
or it might read
<LocalSetting>-1</LocalSetting>

The zero or negative one needs to be changed to 1, like
<LocalSetting>1</LocalSetting>

I've been using this partial English interface in Hipihi for months now, I think it is.

The translation is not complete, and the implementation of the translation is rough - i.e., part of it is still in Chinese, and in lots of places the English doesn't fit properly, and the word choice is sub-optimal in places. That's why I try to use the word partial in front of English interface as much as possible.

What really needs to be translated into English at this stage to increase Hipihi's usefulness to non-Chinese-speakers is to translate the PDF help file, with the translated text in place with the pictures.

Remember, Hipihi is still in development. It's not feature complete, has no scripting of objects and no "real" economy at present, though you can give other people items from your inventory. This is just my opinion but I'll bet that the Hipihi company itself isn't quite sure exactly how they want Hipihi to be yet. I'm sure that working on features and fixing bugs is a much more important to the Hipihi company that trying to make multiple language versions of a still frequently changing product that hasn't even opened for business yet.

Hipihi does have a nice building system, free land to play with during testing, an inventory system, interactive Flash on prims, customizable avatars, customizable clothing, customizable gestures, a nice set of attachment points to decorate your avatar with or to create prim based avatars with, clothes than can in at least some cases move fairly fluidly, a nice moving hair mesh, and lens flare from the sun if you like that sort of thing, and it has nice moving speed trees.

I don't know what all it means but the inventory system in Hipihi has folders for Java and Flash and various other things the implications of which I'm not certain.

I just saw a thread in the SL Volunteers & Education forum about someone coming from IMVU to SL, titled "Migrating from IMVU.. "at /203/61/246432/1.html by Maggiedoll Alter.

Perhaps they would know.