other virtual worlds - share your experiences

Hey gang,


lets see how long until LL locks the thread...


what other virtual worlds have you tried, and how was it?


I've tried hipihi, there.com, imvu, kaneva, various opensim-based "worlds", entropia universe and multiverse.net...

hipihi: feels like SL in 2005 with the added drawback of an UI that is in a language that I don't understand
there.com: feels like SL in 1998 with no people.
imvu: not even a "world" in my opinion.
kaneva: ...you can't even turn left or right, or move your camera view around. or at least I didnt find out how to do it.
the opensims: interesting, with a really small population, and a stability that is on par with SL on a bad day. Sim borders are worse than anything I've ever had in SL. Advantage: grab the code, run your own.
entropia universe: it's a game, not a "world". Too expensive, pre-defined rules and goals. 'nuff said.
multiverse.net: seems to be today what blue mars wants to be at some point: a platform for others to run worlds on, rather than a world. That being said, the graphics are horrible, looks like its more like IMVU on steroids.

There's no place like home"

Yeh, I got tired of it really quickly.

I haven't played them on line, but I bloody LOVE the Half Life and also Silent Hill games


My brother is or was very big into America's Army online.

half-life, silent hill, america's army don't even pretend to be "virtual worlds".
You don't compare quake3 and SL, either.

Yeh, I know they aren't... but they are satisfying enough to take me from SL too.

i know what you mean, for me its neverwinter nights and stuff on the playstation,
but that wasn't what i was asking about...

I occasionally visit OpenSim and OpenLife, which based on SL so they look and behave more or less the same but more buggy.

I did join 'There' just for a look some time ago. It was very basic and cartoony but it seemed less laggy than SL.

I tried Metaplace, the only other virtual world I have been to, tried it over 2 days, never been back since.

I have been a member of a large variety of virtual worlds from vrml based worlds to the everyday common ones we hear about now. They all have something different to offer, and appeal in various ways. I stay with SL cause it kind of brings all those appealing aspects into one game. With some benefit and sometimes loosing some things. Quality on graphics and performance have been sacrificed to be able to create content and see a larger range of worlds inside SL for me. I have found something common that is the same in almost every virtual community online. People and their personalities. Regardless of the characteristics of those personalities either negative or positive it seems people are people where ever you go. They can ruin your experience or you can take them with a grain of salt. I always remember where ever I am in a virtual world that I'm playing a game. Regardless if I can make money in SL or if anyone can, to me its still a game to relax in and enjoy. I guess my "overall" experience in other words after saying that, would be about the same.

Before discovering SL, I tried There.

I left after 1 hour of being bugged to buy a membership.

Their "helpful" in-world guides were horrible & annoying sales people. It was like a 3D Virtual Telemarketer attack.

I assume you mean 3d graphical ones, not text ones like SPR or Puzzlebox, or 2d ones like Furcadia.

There, Twinity, Activeworlds, IMVU, Lively, bunches more I don't even remember any more. I couldn't negotiate the linguistic maze to get into Hipihi, though I did sign up.

If I couldn't build I quickly got bored.

Second Life is my home, and no place is a substitute, but I also like seeing what other places have to offer. Sometimes I'm in a mood that suits being elsewhere - these may not fit the definition of "world" but are places I enjoy.

I like Just Leap In, which is a series of embeddable little 3d places connected by portals, and which, although in beta, is very interesting and has many witty touches. At the moment you can retexture things, upload short video and music, link to things, and some other abilities, but it's mainly fooling about with the things given until more abilities are added. I have an exploding bowling game in a Mayan temple, among other things.

The Endless Forest is a non-verbal place where interactions are limited - which is surprisingly liberating. (I'm a big Tale of Tales fan.)

It's hard to think of other places for some reason. Multiverse and Croquet and RealXtend are platforms and I don't know what's going on with them lately.

There's lots of very cool abilities in Metaplace, which like (the defunct) Lively and (the burgeoning) Just Leap in is small connected places. The avatar bill of rights, scripting, and so forth, are neat. It looks funny to me, though, so I can't really get into it.

I went to There for about 2 minutes and I have been to Legend City a few times. But all I could ever want is here in SL.

I played around with some of the others and found myself bored and confused by them. I like that SL is not a "game" unlike most of the others I tried out.

I tried getting into Hipihi but I couldnt log in. I got into Kaneva and walked around. I guess accounts get money when i joined so I bought some clothes to try to look different. I also played around with the apartment you get. Everything was very limited.

Well,only other virtual world,that i use before is There,but actually that was replacement for a SL,because then i have old comp.But There is just not good enough.

I've enjoyed my visits to Hipihi. I had no great trouble installing it other than a failure to read and understand the instructions early on in the process, and of course it was a bit challenging figuring out the interface when it was only available in all Chinese. I worked with one of the staff members on adding English annotations to some of the Chinese language documentation. The first thing I recall building in Hipihi was a peace symbol, which was still there on my last visit. I built a simple building, and put some notes out saying hello and giving some links to my blog and such. I've enjoyed chatting with the people, and I did some mentoring for some of the other English speakers there. The Hipihi interface can be displayed with a partial English translation now, for a year at least, by changing one character in a configuration file, the details of which I have described on my blog page at http://suezannecbaskerville.wordpress.com/hipihi . The building system in Hipihi is very similar to the building system in Second Life. I think the Great Firewall of China is an impediment to the success of virtual worlds located in China. Hipihi allows people to give each other inventory items, and I received some gifts from some of the other Hipihi users. Hipihi allows objects to run Flash, but the objects can't move, at present. You can do scripting in Hipihi, but the scripts are a property of the land. I have not explored the Hipihi scripting system at all. It's really hard to experiment much without having a fully English interface. I am looking forward to the next big version of Hipihi, which should have drivable cars and may have scriptable objects. I did import a few textures into Hipihi as tests of the clothing system, though I didn't go to the trouble of making anything worthwhile.

I have also enjoyed my visits to the Novoking virtual world. Novoking is a nice looking world. It also has a building system, somewhat like SL's, though not as similar to SL's as Hipihi is. You can also import mesh objects into Novoking made in programs like 3d Max and similar modeling software. Novoking stopped working for me for months, and I spent many hours trying to figure out the problem but finally just gave up. It's really hard getting troubleshooting help from people who don't speak your language, and the fact that you can't use a full-page translation system on the forum while you are logged in to it makes communication a lot harder than it needs to be. For reasons as unknown to me as why it stopped working, I tried it again lately and I could once again connect.

I haven't really enjoyed my visits to There very much, although if I was a paid member I imagine I'd enjoy the skateboarding and cars a bit.

I enjoyed Cybertown and the other vrtual worlds that ran using that sort of VRML plugin, back before I found SL. I manged to stick a few boxes together and import them into Cybertown.

I've visited the Chinese virtual world / game called uWorld a number of times. It's been quite interesting seeing how ragged it was on the first visit right after it opened the beta test and how much it's improved today. It looks pretty nice, and is fairly responsive. It also has an inworld building system , with which I've stuck together a box or two. uWorld is most definitely a game, it that it has some rules to follow and tasks to complete in order to get points for reason or another. I can't make heads nor tails of the game. The game tasks are displayed in Chinese in a way such that the text can't be copied and pasted into a translation system, and I can't find a Chinese language OCR program for free. I believe that it was uWorld whose registration system was complex enough and explained only in a language I can't read, thus requiring me to have help getting an account. uWorld is at uwo3d.com in case anyone wants to give it a try.

I've stopped in at Active Worlds several times over the years, and enjoyed looking there.

I've been in ProtoTerra, at whose web site I just noticed an update date of 6 July 2008 .

I've used JustLeapIn, Vivaty, Lively, Multiverse, and I even managed to find a place to log in to a Sun MPK20 - Project Wonderland setup.

I've been registered with Kaneva for a long time before the virtual world opened for testing. Kaneva's made great progress since it first started. There always seems to be people in Kaneva, doing the breakdance spinning around on their heads and other repetive things avatars do when the animation supply is provided by overloaded developers. A lot of the content in Kaneva is devoted to TV, televison shows, which does nothing for me since I spend my time on the internet. The TV is in a different room, and I watch it so infrequently that I have a hard time remembering how to operate the controls. People are building places, playing media and running clubs that have visitors in Kaneva, so somebody must like it.

Metaplace has what looks like a nice scripting system. I'll agree with Osprey that I don't like the way Metaplace looks too much. That orthagonal projection, if that's the term, where the back side of cubes look bigger than the front because they are displayed as being the same length just bothers me to look at. If Metaplace was displayed with two point perspective instead I'd like it a lot better. If you could at least rotate your point of view in 90 degree increments in addition to at least having two point perspective then I'd find it immensely more pleasant to visit. Another drag about Metaplace is that it is using Flash, which is kind of slow on my system, and which means that when you accidentally right click you get that stupid Flash menu instead of an inworld relevant context menu. I wss never into the games that used the orthagonal displays. I guess I need a fully 3D client and flying to fully appreciate a virtual world.

I do wonder why all the interest in Blue Mars as compared to the relative lack of interest in Multiverse. Does Mulitverse require too much programming knowledge to interest very many people? Does Blue Mars require less? Is the Blue Mars interest due to the somewhat deceptive imagery of a globe that gives the impression you'll be able to tell that you are on a sphere - to fly around the world, to launch a rocket into space and come back down on the other side of the planet, after seeing a nice display of the stars and planets, neither of which you can do in Blue Mars.

Twinity has surprised me. It was pretty raggedy when it started, and the idea of apartments said to be in a city, but you can't actually go out and look at the city, didn't seem too interesting. It's improved and seems to have found something to offer that people are willing to pay for, modeling real city areas. The female avatar shoulders are way too broad, though; I feel like I am wearing shoulder pads in Twinity.

One virtual world I'd really like to try is Quaq. Unfortunately you either have to pay, or apparently at least be part of an organization in order to get a free trial where you'd have other people to interact with.

After I posted the link to the article about Red Light Center, I tried to run it again, and had a miserable several hours trying to get it updated properly and failing. The next day though I did a thorough uninstall and started over fresh and it worked properly. I suppose it might be fun for people who want to pay to do the virtual sex activities.

I've tried a number of the OpenSim variants. There's not much purpose to visting them, to my taste, because they look just like Second Life. If you were going to stay there and develop something, that might be a different matter, particularly looking at the prices compared to Second Life prices, but for just dropping in to see the technology, there's not much point to me.

I did visit two Chinese OpenSim worlds, ChinaQ and Dreamworld (there are two different Dreamworlds, one Chinese, one not, both OpenSim systems, no relation to each other, I believe).

I've tried RoBlox, Club Penguin, the old Disney world no longer in business from back in 2003, 4 or 5, and a bunch of others I don't remember.

There's a thing called Atmosphir which is not a virtual world but which is a multi-user game system that allows you build your own 3D games. That seems like a fun thing.

Oh yeah, another virtual world with an unusual look to it is Papermint. It's definitely worth taking a look at for virtual world enthusiasts.

The ones i did try actually showed me how nice it was to be here..

I tried The Palace, it was 'okay' it was mostly like the infohubs are here, most people were in one place doing IM and random things, but it was kinda fun sometimes to chit-chat with other avs. I didn't use it so often, but was fun from time to time to go there.

I tried Everquest free trial but people kept trying to kill me, and it sounded like too much work just to get the smallest trinket. So I didn't join.

I was one of the many beta testers for TS Online, but did not join when it went pay, because of what I felt were basic flaws which were not changed in game play. Not enough room for creating, basically.

SL has been the best fit so far for me.

Zero, Zip, Nada.

If anyone has tried the Japanese virtual world "Meet-Me" I'd like to hear about it.

There's a wiki with some clues on signing up and such at http://meetme-english.wetpaint.com/.

Not speaking Japanese, I haven't figured out exactly how register, which would require typing or copying and pasting some Japanese and I think some Chinese too.

Anything based on the CryEngine2.

Just take a look at Niveus.



Rock

As messed up as it is, SL provides me sufficient entertainment, I'm here for the duration.

I looked at that insipid There video and that was enough for me. I haven't been to any others.

I came here from Moove. It was OK if you liked it being down for weeks and everthing ppl complain about in SL well go there and try it then you will think SL is heaven

I also tried "There" and it was awful!
I started SL back in 04 on another account, and as there were not many ppl in the world back then, on a good day it was 7000 logged in But how much fun it was, even though we had to pay to TP. Actually you only had to fly where you wanted to go. I remember Miss Chung was starting out, but had already "owned" most of the land back then, too..lol..sighs..the good ol days.
I was addicted to The Sims, and thought, my god, wouldnt it be awsome to have a world like this with other ppl in it...lo and behold..here I am.