A lot of people are talking about Second Life and you can see it pop up in the news aswell, so my curiousity was sparked. And since they ditched the creditcard requirement I could have a (free) look to see what all the hype is about. Boy, was that a bad idea...
Purpose / Content
A huge virtual world where you can meet other people and also create your own content.
As you've probably heard by now most (if not all) content is user-created and it's suppose to thrive on that. But think about the internet and the user-created content, think about stuff like myspace, livejournal or geocities. User-created content suddenly lost quite some appeal didn't it?
Sure you can script/code, model, etc etc items and a patch of land you bought or rented, but it seems everyone does it poorly. I'm not fully sure if the users are to blame or the engine, perhaps a combo of both.
People
-Looks
Guys walk around with a cock they bought from a store and girls walk around looking like whores. And everything has to shine and sparkle. Sometimes some chicks have some weird shit going on like a fountain of hearts above her, it looks horrible and eats up FPS. If you use the default hair or skin you are considered a lower lifeform (even with tweaking). Just like reallife looks are important I guess, up to a point people simply ignore you for looks.
It's funny how people care about the looks of their virtual characters -willing to spend real money on it- while they and the entire world looks horrible.
Oh, and there are furries too which are freaks.
-Personalities
AOL is prolly as close as anything outside Second Life gets. Bad English is the norm and whoring appears to be the only reason people join.
Places
The Top 5 of "Popular places":
1: REEF ISLAND MEGA 2 CASINO & MALL!!,(space avalible to rent)
2: Neva Naughty, Free Sex Orgy Room,Movie Theater,Valentines Gifts
3: ! SEXY LAND ,free sex money,nude,XXX,FKK,france,Italia
4: ! NUDE BEACH,Martin Mounier,SKINNY-DIPPING,FKK,nacktbaden,cosy
5: ELEMENTS at Goddess of Love3, The Best Looking Club in SL
Nuff said.
Engine
-Graphics
Sometimes I got 10fps while looking at 2 walls and nothing else. Keep in mind I can run Oblivion on ultra high (1280x1024) without any problems, same with BF2142 and the eye-candy.
--Geometry
Even though it's 2007 you wouldn't think that looking at the geometry since 2d-walls seem to be the norm. Although if you get lucky you can actually find 3d walls. Even though it's possible to create 3d walls, buildings look simplistic at best. Pretty much like a kid with some blocks and not fully developed motor skills. There are no curved lines anywhere.
--Textures
About 95% is misaligned, everything already looks cheesy and crappy but with shitty textures it gets even worse. I've also noticed that IF you ever see a 3d wall that the same texture is on the small sides of the wall, of course it's all squashed and improperly resized. A lot of textures are recycled aswell, sadly they prolly are from 1995.
--Sprites
Some sprites (not chars but items) are 2d aswell, instantly I had flashbacks to Doom which is about 14 years old(!).
-Netcode
Atrocious at best.
Ping doesn't go below 200.
Packetloss is normal and so is the resulting rubberbanding.
Transferspeeds are pretty low aswell, can't even set it so it goes faster than 190kB/s. Then again it doesn't even get to 190kB/s, so an option to set a higher limit wouldn't matter.
Random disconnects are normal aswell, even though they never report issues and the status of "The Grid" has always been online for as far as I have tested it.
-Cache
Default cache size is 500megs which isn't that weird if you take in mind all the content. Sadly, it doesn't work at all.
Example: I go to a new place, everything slowly loads when it's done I leave and go back. Only to be stuck with soddin grey walls again as the software needs to download the same things again.
Also it doesn't notice when parts are reused.
Another example: Some fairly big place had huge tiles on the floor, they were prolly 10x10m in size. All the tiles looked exactly the same (size, texture, etc), yet the engine was (down)loading every piece 1 by 1.
-Optimizing
They must have skipped this part of the initial developer process, the engine loads all the geometry and textures at random around you. So if you transport to a new place it could easily start with things in the same section except far far away and normally not in your view since there are 3 walls in your way.
And I think because the engine prolly doesn't know which things you can or cannot see that it explains the low FPS. It just renders everything (even things far far away behind multiple objects) but starts rendering far away from the user and places closer things ontop/infront of the rest. Possibly if this is true, then it explains the low fps.
So a new place takes quite a while to load properly, mostly since it's doing some random approach instead of distance/view-based. They also forgot that the world isn't just the USA since all times are always PST without any option to change it (unless they really hid it well). It might not sound like a problem but when the damn thing disconnects you again and then tells you at what PST time your char will be available again its quite confusing. Or some areas have events also tied to hours, all in PST.
Stores
Mostly XXX stores to buy cocks, pussies, sexy outfits. All the stores are automated, click and buy so to speak. For some reason some stores have (US) opening times which pretty much locks out the rest of the world as a potention customer, gg.
If you ever see some (new) crappy game you can _always_ safely say "Atleast it looks better than Second Life".
Final judgement: If you value your retinas stay away at all costs.
Purpose / Content
A huge virtual world where you can meet other people and also create your own content.
As you've probably heard by now most (if not all) content is user-created and it's suppose to thrive on that. But think about the internet and the user-created content, think about stuff like myspace, livejournal or geocities. User-created content suddenly lost quite some appeal didn't it?
Sure you can script/code, model, etc etc items and a patch of land you bought or rented, but it seems everyone does it poorly. I'm not fully sure if the users are to blame or the engine, perhaps a combo of both.
People
-Looks
Guys walk around with a cock they bought from a store and girls walk around looking like whores. And everything has to shine and sparkle. Sometimes some chicks have some weird shit going on like a fountain of hearts above her, it looks horrible and eats up FPS. If you use the default hair or skin you are considered a lower lifeform (even with tweaking). Just like reallife looks are important I guess, up to a point people simply ignore you for looks.
It's funny how people care about the looks of their virtual characters -willing to spend real money on it- while they and the entire world looks horrible.
Oh, and there are furries too which are freaks.
-Personalities
AOL is prolly as close as anything outside Second Life gets. Bad English is the norm and whoring appears to be the only reason people join.
Places
The Top 5 of "Popular places":
1: REEF ISLAND MEGA 2 CASINO & MALL!!,(space avalible to rent)
2: Neva Naughty, Free Sex Orgy Room,Movie Theater,Valentines Gifts
3: ! SEXY LAND ,free sex money,nude,XXX,FKK,france,Italia
4: ! NUDE BEACH,Martin Mounier,SKINNY-DIPPING,FKK,nacktbaden,cosy
5: ELEMENTS at Goddess of Love3, The Best Looking Club in SL
Nuff said.
Engine
-Graphics
Sometimes I got 10fps while looking at 2 walls and nothing else. Keep in mind I can run Oblivion on ultra high (1280x1024) without any problems, same with BF2142 and the eye-candy.
--Geometry
Even though it's 2007 you wouldn't think that looking at the geometry since 2d-walls seem to be the norm. Although if you get lucky you can actually find 3d walls. Even though it's possible to create 3d walls, buildings look simplistic at best. Pretty much like a kid with some blocks and not fully developed motor skills. There are no curved lines anywhere.
--Textures
About 95% is misaligned, everything already looks cheesy and crappy but with shitty textures it gets even worse. I've also noticed that IF you ever see a 3d wall that the same texture is on the small sides of the wall, of course it's all squashed and improperly resized. A lot of textures are recycled aswell, sadly they prolly are from 1995.
--Sprites
Some sprites (not chars but items) are 2d aswell, instantly I had flashbacks to Doom which is about 14 years old(!).
-Netcode
Atrocious at best.
Ping doesn't go below 200.
Packetloss is normal and so is the resulting rubberbanding.
Transferspeeds are pretty low aswell, can't even set it so it goes faster than 190kB/s. Then again it doesn't even get to 190kB/s, so an option to set a higher limit wouldn't matter.
Random disconnects are normal aswell, even though they never report issues and the status of "The Grid" has always been online for as far as I have tested it.
-Cache
Default cache size is 500megs which isn't that weird if you take in mind all the content. Sadly, it doesn't work at all.
Example: I go to a new place, everything slowly loads when it's done I leave and go back. Only to be stuck with soddin grey walls again as the software needs to download the same things again.
Also it doesn't notice when parts are reused.
Another example: Some fairly big place had huge tiles on the floor, they were prolly 10x10m in size. All the tiles looked exactly the same (size, texture, etc), yet the engine was (down)loading every piece 1 by 1.
-Optimizing
They must have skipped this part of the initial developer process, the engine loads all the geometry and textures at random around you. So if you transport to a new place it could easily start with things in the same section except far far away and normally not in your view since there are 3 walls in your way.
And I think because the engine prolly doesn't know which things you can or cannot see that it explains the low FPS. It just renders everything (even things far far away behind multiple objects) but starts rendering far away from the user and places closer things ontop/infront of the rest. Possibly if this is true, then it explains the low fps.
So a new place takes quite a while to load properly, mostly since it's doing some random approach instead of distance/view-based. They also forgot that the world isn't just the USA since all times are always PST without any option to change it (unless they really hid it well). It might not sound like a problem but when the damn thing disconnects you again and then tells you at what PST time your char will be available again its quite confusing. Or some areas have events also tied to hours, all in PST.
Stores
Mostly XXX stores to buy cocks, pussies, sexy outfits. All the stores are automated, click and buy so to speak. For some reason some stores have (US) opening times which pretty much locks out the rest of the world as a potention customer, gg.
If you ever see some (new) crappy game you can _always_ safely say "Atleast it looks better than Second Life".
Final judgement: If you value your retinas stay away at all costs.
Last edited:
