f13.net

I signed up to take a look around and...my god is it slow and laggy.

But, the avatar customization is pretty interesting, if a bit primitive but looking at what some people have done, fairly amazing.

So - any suggestions on things that are must see or that one should do while in Second Life?

Gibson and Chaos are two good sims.  You should be able to get to 'em by going to the map and just entering the sim name in the search function or whatever. They're both cyberpunk themed and kinda cool.  There's some new build that is part of the Wasteland sims -- I guess some guys wanted to do post-apocalypse stuff.

Other than those spots, I haven't been in SL in ages, so I don't know what else to suggest that is still there.

Right now, I'd go to the fourth anniversary celebration. Everyone has little builds about their particular little worlds.

Other than that Caledon and Midian City come to mind.

Search for a nude beach.

I saw a giant 2D penis flapping like a flag, it was awesome.

Fuck a guy dressed as a girl dressed as a guy dressed as a squirrel with the rear bumper from a '47 Chevy. I wouldn't know from personal experience, but I've been told it's amaaaaaaaaaaaaazing.

It would have been funnier with a reference to the Telefunken U47 (http://www.telefunkenusa.com/products/show_product.php?item=7&cat=mics).

Go to a virtual whorehouse!

Isn't that somewhat redundant? He already said he was going to login to Second Life.

Man, that link you provided had me totally messed up as I could have sworn the U47 was a Neumann mic. And it is, telefunken just rebranded/relabeled them. You can still buy them from Neumann as well. I had to look it up I was so confused.

But that has nothing to do with SL, just an anecdote.

I just like the opportunity to make Joe's Garage references.

You'll love it!


That would be the Amsterdam sim.

For the time that I've put into SL, I've found the environment is mostly about what you can do in it rather than what other people have done. Unless you know where to go (which is the point of this thread of course) you've got a much better chance of missing people than seeing them. That's neither here nor there for me, as I'm only there for the CADD aspect. The whole "hey it's 3D and online with other people" thing is years old now. And companies have finally (God, finally) wizened up to just who's making any sort of ROI in the world (as in, not). Within a year I think it'll be back to the old days, a good proto world for people to jerk around in until something with better graphics and and much better UI comes along.

Now that I've spent a day or two tooling around, I'm not sure anyplace is ever going to give that much freedom ever again.

I might not be going into the right places, but it seems mostly like mostly empty malls and places the offer to give you lindens for sitting on a couch.

I have yet to meet someone who has asked me for sexxors.

You must have a very non-appealing avatar to the NAMBLA crowd then.

Kinda on-topic: My friend used to play Second Life religiously. Spending hours every day trying to find new things to create and what not. I remember he designed a motorcycle and a circular tube for the bike to fly around in all its glory. Except he didn't set a variable for the bikes speed so it would just keep going faster and faster until it eventually crashed the server/area. I made him do it a couple times cause I thought that was the coolest fucking thing.

Go to the Amsterdam sim during prime time....if it's still the way it used to be, you'll get offers from escorts pretty darn fast.

I agree. But not for the reasons some would think. Basically, that much freedom is hard to monetize. There's a reason SL is one of the only games where the players own their IP. I don't know how much money they've made over the years, but it's taken them that "years" to actually become top of mind for business folks who quickly learned the true revenue potential.

In this quick-buck world, what's the business rationale for doing a sandboxy CADD game? Even the things that are close, like Kaneva, are much more compartmentalized and looking to monetize a computer in more traditional ways.

There won't likely be another SL until it's as easy to bang one out as it is to make a blogsite.

It's also got the problem of user created content. Which means most of it is utterly horrid. The number of really crappy textures is downright amazing.

So no one has suggested a must see area, and really if I want porn, I'll go get some real porn.

I did, but hey, maybe the cool building designs, etc. aren't your thing. To recap: Chaos and Gibson sims are great. Midnight City is cool. The Wasteland sims are great.

Its been a while for me, but I would recommend checking out the demo tower created as a tutorial on building in the game. You likely won't find any people there, but its a pretty cool sample of what you can make using just the basic tools, without even getting in to scripting.

Also, find a sandbox and start throwing giant beachballs at other people.

Then just look at the guides and find a place that has a shit load of people in it, that will probably be interesting.

Sorry - missed that.. Will do.

For roleplaying Midian City (dark cyberpunk with catgirls), the elven sims (search on elven), and Caledon, which is a victorian sim. I think all three have builds at the fourth anniversary celebration.

And this, in a nutshell, is why monetizing this is sort hard. It's the same thing from when NWN was going to launch and make completely relevant the big MMOs of the day (which was EQ1 and DAoC).

"Why pay for a game when you can make your own!!?!"
"Because, johnny, most people suck at game design."

SL has a couple of cool experiences. If you can find them. And if they're still there. But it's everything you would expect from an unaccountable anonymous free-for-all.

In Alpha World (the only true predecessor to SL) nothing ever went away unless the original builder removed it.  Including all the crap.  One bad neighbor would ruin a whole neighborhood FOREVER.

In Second Life, nothing lasts forever.  EVERYTHING goes away the minute the builder stops paying the rent, even the really cool stuff that would benefit the community as a whole to keep around. 

There are exceptions in both cases, of course, involving developer/admin intervention, but that seems to be the general rule. 

Not sure what my point is, but I found it to be an interesting contrast, and was amused by an ironic twist.  I've often considered the pasttime of making elaborate landscapes and buildings in virtual worlds as akin to building sandcastles in cyberspace - done for the pleasure of doing it, and for the pleasure others may take from seeing it, but gone with the next tide. It's ironic that stuff I built in the early 90's in AW with no guarantee that the virtual world would even exist the next day is still there.  But some really cool stuff I built two months ago vanished without a trace a few days later when my (wife's) land sold to a land speculator who promptly razed it flat and put it back on the market at a higher rate.

I have heard theres a very cool Star Trek Neg Gen sim but  Ihave no idea what its called I'm afraid.

This has nothing to do with second life, but every time I see a "Count" anything these days I think of that fuckin Count from Sesame Street and his homo fake accent! It sucks reproducing...sometimes.

Whatevs. The Count rocks. You just don't appreciate numbers enough. I get the number of the day song stuck in my head all the time.

Actually, you are right. Out of all the Sesame street character, the Count is kind of a badass. I just get pissy about having the Wonderpets song get stuck in my head, or friggin Elmo, or a multitude of other shit happen that I take it out on innocent ole Count.

The wonderpets are infinitely worse.

That's why we limit our daughter to Sesame Street and Jack's Big Music Show.

Wonder Pets are the modern Barney. Backyardigans any day!

So true. You know what freaks me out worse than all of em? Fuckin' lazytown.

Oh gawd, preach on man! I have no idea what the allure of that show is. Yea, sure, DDR = game = get off couch = stop being fat. But the show is just freaky in all the wrong ways. Why does the main good guy have a schister mustache? Why is the bad guy a Jim Carrey in Mask wannabe? Why are half the characters lifesize puppets? Why's the world made of paper mache?

The only thing that bothers me more is when they show The Wiggles as animated Flash sequences. My 4 year old could bang out better animations than whoever they brought off the street to do those things.

My favorite show was The Koala Brothers, but that's fallen out of favor on the network it seems. The new CGI-based Tigger and Pooh (seems to be only on Sundays) is actually pretty good too, mostly because I like that CGI for this age bracket has finally moved beyond "it's obviously CGI to save money" stage to something that's being treated as traditional animation would.

Bleh. Wierd derail for an SL thread :)

Hey, at least its not a trammel derail.























Baby steps, my friend. Baby steps :)

You need to step back and take a look in the mirror.

Tonight my plan is to finish making my hair. It's going to have curls and be pretty.

I was talking about myself, since I was the original derailer.

Thanks for helping me clarify that.

Everything DQ said about Lazy Town is how I feel about that one too.  It's just too creepy.  It's almost like proof that, sometimes, drugs are very very very bad for you.

I found it better to just camp places for money and then buy my own hair and body style than try to make anything out of SL's standard looks generator. Everything I made just looked like a downs syndrome mutant drag queen.

There's a Rome sim (I think called Roma) that's a goddamn incredible piece of work. It'll be better once they get the combat arena working, until then it's just more malls. The Liverpool sim is an interesting recreation of a few historic streets in Liverpool, with a heavy Beatles-fan slant. Finding pr0n is way too easy.

This is what kids shows should be like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n4iqocDXr4 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n4iqocDXr4)

edit: sorry for the continuing de-rail. Thought we were still on kids tv shows for a bit. I know nothing about SL so ignore the post.

Telefunken did more than just rebrand them - they supplied the tubes and were the only company exporting them reliably during the reign of the original U47, so their name was better known outside Germany. Neumann's name is better known these days though.

Again we see music causing BIG trouble!

I was looking at it more from a "if it happened today" kind of perspective. I was more trying to figure out why the mic I knew as a Neumann was being shown as a Telefunken. It is like seeing a car you know as a Cadillac being sold with the same body/styling/name as a Lincoln. Totally confusing.

Looking at the info on the mic, all the Neumann models actually had the Telefunken tubes in them. It is too bad I did not ever get into playing music, I may very well have turned into one of those weird recording technology hoarding audio geeks. I just hung out with them in college. Heh.

Hello - Trammel...Mirror... UO humor... /sigh

Clearly the count is a pimp, and he counts his cash his hoes give him. Duh?

He also counts bitchslaps.

The standard look generator is horrid. I think it's there to encourage people to go buy better clothes and hair and skin. I want to give making a skin a go because so much of what I see is horrid. I've made a couple outfits from scratch and am still enjoying that part. I've also learned a lot about baking texture maps in Modo and using Gimp.

I am pretty sure you can actually make a living selling skanky dresses. Well - let me rephrase that, I think you can make a lot of linden dollars. I'm still pretty sure it's a pyramid scheme.

No, I've talked to some of the more successful shopkeepers and they are using SL as their real life job. It is a pyramid scheme in that eventually everyone will have a skanky dress that wants one.

The key is to move on to the next fad in Prostitute Fashion before the next guy.

I wonder how much an artist from Russia or SE Asia or Brazil costs per hour....