Exploring Second Life and OpenSim worlds
Quisque ornare placerat risus. Ut molestie magna at mi. Integer aliquet mauris et nibh. Ut mattis ligula posuere velit. Nunc sagittis. Curabitur varius fringilla nisl. Duis pretium mi euismod erat. Maecenas id augue. Nam vulputate. Duis a quam non neque lobortis malesuada.
My last post was about a landbot was able to buy for only eight cents the Second Life™ land that I had planned to sell for $150. Today I wrote a column on examiner.com that tells more about it. You can read it at www.examiner.com/second-life-in-national/don-t-let-a-landbot-take-your-second-life-land.
Landbots have been a problem in Second Life for at least four years. Linden Lab won’t do anything about it. Opinions about it range from outrage that a landbot can take your land instantly if you make a careless mistake to smug belief that if you made the mistake, you deserve to lose your land.
I believe there should be a waiting period after it’s marked for sale before it can be purchased. Not a long period, just a few minutes, to give the seller the opportunity to find their mistake and correct it. At the very least, the seller should be warned before completing the transactions that there are landbots who will buy the land instantly if there are any errors made in marking the land for sale.
For me, going for two days believing I had lost my land and not even able to enter the land because the buyer had banned entry was like electroshock treatment. I had been planning on buying a Second Life private region, but cancelled those plans and instead have begun creating my own OpenSim virtual world that will soon be on the hypergrid. I’ll be writing a lot more about the process.
This doesn’t mean I’m leaving Second Life. I love Second Life and have no intention of leaving. I had been looking forward for months to buying a sim and developing it, but I’m finding that creating an entire new world is even more of a thrill, not to mention a lot cheaper. I’m fortunate in having the technical skills and computers to host it myself, so my currently four sim world has so far cost me exactly nothing.
Pathfinder Lester (formerly known to Second Life residents as Pathfinder Linden) gave a talk about hypergrid adventuring at yesterday’s VWBPE conference. As reported in my last post, it’s exciting but still the stuff for pioneers, reminding me more of my early days in virtual worlds in 2003 than of current day Second Life.
Hypergrid adventuring is jumping between virtual worlds (known as grids). The picture shows what can happen when the jump goes bad. In this case, six or seven of us ended up merged into one avatar somewhere at sea. I did manage a few hypergrid teleports yesterday, but as you can see from this picture, they didn’t always go smoothly!
The analogy I used in my last post was touring in a car a hundred years ago in 1911. There were no paved roads outside of big cities, no maps, no gas stations, no AAA to rescue you when things went wrong. If your car got stuck in a muddy bog or ran out of gas or broke down, it was up to you to somehow get it home. Most people in 1911 preferred the relative comfort and security of a train or horse-drawn carriage for venturing beyond urban limits. Only pioneers used cars. Everyone “knew” that cars weren’t practical. And they weren’t. But it was those intrepid pioneers whose adventuring led to interstate highways, AAA, and reliable, comfortable cars.
Just like with cars a hundred years ago, hypergrid adventuring isn’t for everyone. For most people, the best choice is to belong to a few virtual worlds and just log into them separately. But it’s the intrepid adventurers breaking the ground of the new hypergrid who will lead to the day when you can host your own little virtual world on your own computer but have it linked into the hypergrid of hundreds of other virtual worlds, some big and some small like yours, with avatars able to teleport at will between them.
That’s an exciting prospect. It’s today’s hypergrid adventurers who will make it happen. If you enjoy breaking new ground like this, hypergrid adventuring may be for you.
You can learn more at Pathfinder Lester’s Hypergrid Adventurers Club website becunningandfulloftricks.com/hypergrid-adventurers-club. Also, CNN Second Life iReporter any1 Gynoid has written a tutorial about hypergrid adventuring: ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-555219.
After reading Pathfinder’s reply to my last post, I couldn’t resist learning more about the Hypergrid Adventurers Club and about hypergrid exploring. After being in Second Life’s closed grid for seven years, the realization that I can teleport between worlds is both exhilarating and liberating.
Hoping to learn more, I attended a meeting of the Hypergrid Adventurers Club (http://becunningandfulloftricks.com/hypergrid-adventurers-club). My attempt to teleport there from Osgrid failed and when I logged into the club’s home region in the jokaydiaGRID grid, where I found two other lost souls who were looking for the meeting.
I finally was able to attend by logging directly into Neogrid, so I didn’t actually do a grid hyperjump, and the lag was so bad that I finally ran out of time to explore and logged out, but it was enough to make me want to learn more.
From what I’ve seen so far, hypergrid jumping probably isn’t for people who want the equivalent of jumping into a 2011 model car, switching it on, and driving to your destination. It might be more like going back in time to 1911, jumping into a 1911 car (after you’ve cranked it started) and exploring along muddy lanes (there are no paved roads yet) with no maps to guide you and no AAA to rescue you… but for pioneering souls, that can be a lot more fun.
This picture is of the Hypergrid Adventurers Club meeting this morning.
