Competition for SL?

There is said to be a virtual world called uWorld, a Chinese operation. Website is at http://www.uwo3d.com/

Google translation of that page is:







There is also said to be or expected to be a virtual world called Shandra. I'm having trouble re-finding what little information I had found on that one.

If hyperbole was an energy medium, this passage alone could keep the lights on all over the Earth for a century.

What's with referring to it as "She"?

Have you tried it out?

The world is divided in many sad ways, but some things I suspect we all share, one of them being over exposure to advertising puffery. Run such a puff piece through the Google translator and the result is pretty impressive in a way, eh?

LL used to make some claims on it's home page that were a bit unrealistic, such as something to the effect of "the world is there when you turn to it." They took that passage off at some point; gee, I wonder why?

If there are any Chinese speakers who can help me find out how to sign up for uWorld, please send me an IM or forum PM.

The dynamics of SL is what attracted me, complete control of my surronudings, entropia seems to be more of a MMO and does not offer the freedom that SL does, in my opinion...no comparison, the same goes for There.com although they are more like SL it does not offer the flexibility of SL.

I think they should take down all the nifty catch phrases and replace them with "We'll let you know when we figure it out".

It isn't clear to me what this China venture is actually going to build, just that Entropia have won the contract to deliver it. I suspect it may be more like SL than the current Entropia offering given the other bits of the description.

If LL really did bid and fail, I think they need to take notice. In terms of concept I suspect SL was closer to what the Chinese wanted, but I don't think LL has the credibility of being able to offer a robust, scalable, resilient platform with responsive 24/7 support which is essential for any such venture.

Until then, whilst big business may throw some crumbs from their advertising budgets in order to appear with the time, they will not take it seriously as a business platform, and LL will not be seen as the company to commission to build virtual world platforms.

HiPiHi which is the chinese virtual world being talked about in this article is ridiculous if you watch any of the videos of it. And entropia universe is rubbish to get into at all unless you fork out some $$$$. But back on track with HiPiHi.

1. Release of this game in an english version is highly unlikely.

2. Building in HiPiHi is tant amount to using premade shapes (you can rotate stretch position and recolor it thats about it...)

3. Character customization seems rather limited from what i have seen there are very few sliders for the avatar and they seem to have base avatars to switch between....

4. Clothing is all drawn onto a single layer. This layer included skin clothing tattoos hair whatever depending on the body area so the amount of customization is a little limited even more by that scope.

5. There is no scripting at all to speak of and I have seen no hints of being able to use your own animations.

6. The terraforming options are actually slightly better then in SL but figuring that out it may create more lag (you can change the texture in certain areas of the land easier In HiPIHi but other then that its the same as SL's land tools).

7. The itnerface is almost a direct ripoff of SL's right down to the bars in the upper right corner... and the black/gray/blue type of buttons (though theirs are square and not as nice looking in that regard...)

8. As previously mentioned you can change color but there is no real color picker to speak of simply sliders....

All in all HiPiHi doesnt compare in the least to SL and will only fill a Niche market in china as they dont have access to SL. There is alot of data out there on the net about HiPiHi including videos of goings on in the world. Just a judgement from someone who has been playing online games for a little over a deacde and has worked on a few mmorpgs and currrently works in the Game Design field and a SL resident of 2 years.

The cn gov only restricts public access to some special websites like as sex pic and mov, political websites, etc. PPL from mainland china can surf in sl website and inworld, only except official blog that hosted by wordpress.com

Hipihi is a good game in china, but still have too many of things to do and implement..

There's some ppl from mainland china in sl.. OMG, u will get a very slow connection to the hipihi in Outside Asia Pacific Region.

OK - I knew it was somewhat censored but didn't know whether that incudes SL

Walker's overview of Entropia is interesting enough that I might look into it as another venue for my webcast live music performances at some of the clubs / venues in EU. I'm not too keen on using a human avatar tho :\ I tried EU once a couple of years ago but was shot dead at the rezzing area for n00bs after stumbling around hopelessly for half an hour so I gave up on it and logged back into SL.

But, yes, in the light of LL's failed bid alot of the recent 'crackdowns' in SL might make sense when seen as LL's attempt to 'clean up it's act' in an attempt to win that bid. As the bid requirements point to something closer to SL than EU, it's even more surprising that MindArk walked away with the contract.

Not entirely keep in mind im going from the feature videos they were using to show it off and the like. Its going to fill a niche market in China but the odds of it being localized in english is very slim unless a 3rd party company contracts with the chinese game developer to localize it (much like Acclaim and 9Dragons Gpotato and Corum and other stuff...) However HiPiHi isnt SL. Cutting out any aspect of SL will be detrimental to anything that comes up and if people in china can access Second Life then why would they play a game that really just doesnt stack up against it? China banned the Sims 2 what makes you think as soon as HiPiHi isnt released that SL wont follow in Suite? They have also banned new internet cafes for a year so that will limit that aspect as many people in China actually end up using internet cafes to access online games.

Also reading the article is laughable. 7 Million residents at any given time. Ill call BS on that for this other virtual world if they hope to compare to second life at all. If you have a static enviroment with locally stored content and no user controlled content with some server splits yes quite possibly it could support that number but its laughable when they say 7 million at any given time. Yeah WoW can support 8 million at any given time but the servers are split up that doesnt mean the server can handle 8 million concurrently on them......

Keep in Mind how SL works and then consider if someone wishes to do anything like it they are going to face the same issues. Also considering this that Entropia Universe SUCKS with alot of people around and is very clunky to use its suprising as hell that they won the bid at all..... In all likelyhood this wont be any type of competition for SL and again it may or may not even get out of china for the rest of us to use. Outback Online is also boasting a ton of stuff and so many people do and all i've seen quite frankly have saddened me. You need to make SL as it stands now and improve upon it to drag most of the user base away from it.

Sadly that will hold true and stuff that pops up is going to face alot of the same issues SL does. So many people forget that SL allows us to build in real time and do all sorts of other customization to ourselves. Boasting support for a high number means jack if its rubbish.

The thing that makes all those other places the same, and which leaves SL as a unique offering, is that they all limit or disallow creation. The reason SL is chugging slowly along in the resiliency and scaleability departments is US - our unpredictability and wild usage of resources that no other company would try to accomodate.

At the end of the day those other companies don't want anything like the SL platform because they want to keep tight control. LL is moving in the right direction and after a bit, when everything comes together, it will be apparent that they have created something far, far greater than anyone else.

Right now things are moving in stair-steps, and a completed part might be included which doesn't get fully understood until it's joined by its fellow components later (such as the sun and WindLight).

Be patient. This is a great undertaking and is in some ways similar to the exploration of the Antarctic (I'm reading The Worst Journey In the World right now so that springs to mind).

I wonder if at some point SL should make all the textures a downloaded library that updates everytime you log on, so only shapes had to be downloaded. If you took every texture in second life now, you'd probably cover most usage other than pictures & signs, and if peopl couldn't find what they wanted they could still add
Of course sorting & accessing it would be a job and a half.

I doubt it would ba any worse than us Australians accessing the US servers.

Entropia Universe Version Update 8.12
4 June 2007

The Entropia Universe servers will be temporarily unavailable while we implement VU 8.12 between:

2007.06.04 04:30 and 2007.06.04 14:00 UTC

We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

-------

Looks like they do updates during the day too!

Darn. I was so eagerly looking to try out harvesting some sweat or collecting dung.

(as mentioned on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropia_Universe )

I appreciate that and don't mean to belittle LL's achievements - they have come a long way and suceeded where many others failed. However you can still achieve this and

a) used a transactional database architecture to avoid data loss during failures
b) implement an architecture which allows backups and recovery of data without violating the no-copy and no-transfer permissions even in the case of sim rollbacks (in Jira would will find a number of approaches to this which would easily work if you were rewriting the asset systems from scratch, whether these can be applied to the way the asset systems currently work is unknown)
c) use regression testing on new code to prevent old bugs creeping back
d) provide user focus and timely support (not ignore tickets for weeks, which is still the case with the new system)

The ability to create and trade scripted content in game is basically SL's selling point. It is only a matter of time before a competitor builds a system which also allows that but with an architecture designed to allow data recovery when things go wrong, with a better QA process for new code, and with better support.

LL is no longer playing with demos and prototypes - it has aspirations to be a service provider, and it needs to start balancing innovation against service if it hopes to be celebrating its eighth birthday.

Hehe my visit to EU reminded me of a jaded American going to another country to find happiness only to find out that country is an oppressive, totalitarian-run country where the rich stay rich and the poor stay in orange suits trying to live off the land.

I came back to SL with a MUCH greater appreciation!

Honestly, there is plenty of opportunity for someone to come in and steal LL's thunder but I think most companies are trying to cast their lots with consoles and other existing platforms.

The products out there as "competition" for SL are mostly run by dorks that get it even LESS than LL's management does!

That's a frightening assesment.

Entropia Universe is pretty cool if you like shooting people and creatures . I've played it for almost 2 years .. but i wonder what this Unreal Tournament is all about.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSl4mFw4GDo

You're clearly referring to InActive Worlds..

Do you have any concept of how much data that would be?

To download all of and ONLY the textures I have in my personal inventory would likely take hours.

For all the textures in secondlife... people would have to have hard drives at home capable of storing *many* terrabytes of data. Most people still only have a few dozen, maybe a small number of hundreds of gigabyte available to them.