More 3D Virtual Worlds

Since one of the focuses of my website is 3D Virtual Worlds, I thought it would be appropriate to create a web page that lists the ones I know about. I left off There and Second Life, since I already have pages dedicated to those. This is a list of the rest. Each includes a screenshot or a you tube video of the games in action.

Here’s the page: http://arianeb.com/more3Dworlds.htm

There are some old ones, some pre SL games: Active Worlds, Cybertown, Moove, and worlds.com. These are the survivors. There were at least a dozen others in the late 90′s that have since been shut down. Visiting these is somewhat of a historical education. They influenced the newer games in many ways, and made a lot of interesting things happen on slower computers and slower bandwidth.

The newer games pretty much slide into two categories: Specialty worlds and build it yourself worlds. The specialty worlds are designed to cater to specific audiences. Generally they do not allow user created content, though some do anyways. Worlds in this category: AWOMO (multiplayer gaming focus), Amazing Worlds (Virtual Tourism), IMVU (3D chatting), Playstation 3 Home, (Playstation 3 players only), Red Light Center (Adult entertainment and virtual sex), VLES (independent music), vSide (teen focused vitual clubbing), Virtual Vancouver (Adult focused virtual clubbing). You might also include the corporate sponsored worlds in this category: Kaneva (Turner networks), Meet-Me (Toyota), and Virtual MTV.

The build it yourself worlds are the ones I am most interested in, as I get a lot of enjoyment out of virtual tinkering. In that category is HiPiHi (primarily a Chinese world), Twinity, and Vastpark (the latter two still in early development).

At the bottom I list some “platforms” that can be used to build your own 3D virtual worlds, and some web sites that are exploring some interesting angles to the whole 3D web idea.

I hope to update this page from time to time as new worlds emerge and the 3D web takes shape.

A Quick Peek At Twinity

If you are a regular reader of my blog, from time to time I look at other 3D Virtual Worlds to see where we are in building a 3D Internet. The most recent entry in this club is Twinity, made by Metaversum a company out of Germany.

The game is in closed beta, and as is the case in closed beta games it is not ready for prime time. Lets just say they have some scalability issues to work out, but that has been the case with every beta I have tried.

Here’s the good news: This program shows the most promise of any beta in this genre that I have played since There.com. You can do stuff in this game that you cant do in any other. It already beats Kaneva.com in every comparable category.

Among the stuff you can do that you cant in any other is HTML on a prim. Second Life has it on a limited basis, but in Twinity it seems fully supported. Instantly create a wall picture object and add an HTML and that page comes up on the wall. I was even able to click and play a You Tube video from a wall picture, something Second Life still cant do.

Remember Ariane’s first law of 3D Virtual World success: If you want to succeed you must have two things: User created content and user customizable housing. Twinity currently only has the latter, but it is obviously designed to support the former. User created content is definitely in the plans even though it is currently not available.

Let me prove that user created content is coming. Here is another function of Twinity not found in any other 3d Virtual world: Customizable faces from photographs!!

I decided to test out this feature by using my Poser model face, results from actual photos will likely not be as nice, and may require a few tries to get right. It actually took me a couple of tries from ideal rendered images.

When you load your front and side images from your hard drive, the images are stored in your game inventory and can be used for other uses. Because this inventory space exists tells me it will be available for more than just the custom face tool. Eventually you will be able to upload custom textures for objects. The menu system for objects in world hints at eventual custom scripting.

By the way, the process took a lot longer than 15 minutes, but it did result in an accurate custom face:

It also seems to have color matched the skin tone as well. I am very impressed.

The main Twinity page is not very informative. Here are some more Twinity screenshots.

Here is another review of Twinity from another SL player I found helpful.

The Sims Go Offline!

The Sims Online was not the first 3D social virtual world game. Worlds.com, activeworlds.com, and a dozen imitators came out in the 90′s.

The Sims Online (aka TSO) is however the first mainstream popular game of the genre, thanks mostly to “The Sims” name. It brought in thousands of new people into the genre, many of which promptly left never to return, but a few of us enjoyed the genre enough to stick with it for many games of the genre that followed.

Most of these players joined TSO in the beta days in fall of 2002. The game launched to paying players in January 2003, which was about the time I joined. It is the opinion of many, that the games heyday was in beta.

The Sims name got lots of people in, but the game had a major flaw: There was only a limited amount of things that you can do, and there was no user created content… ever!, despite promises that someday it would be available.

The result was people got bored fairly quickly. Most people that lasted more than 3 months were the ones that developed friendships to keep them in the game. There was constant turnover.

Worse was the fact that in early 2003, There.com and Second Life were both soliciting closed beta players. By August of 2003, when I quit TSO never to return, virtually all the people I knew in TSO had moved to There Beta, and/or Second Life beta, including myself.

The Sims Online carried on with much smaller numbers, for five years. They added a few new features after I left, including pets, and a second version where you could play a whole family of characters at once. A friend of mine tried to get back into the game two years ago and initially liked it, but only lasted about 3 weeks.

Earlier this year, the game was relaunched as “EA Land”, but only lasted 2 months before they announced its close on August first. Ironically, TSO closes five years after I left.

So yes it was a crappy online game, but it brought a lot of people, including myself, into the world of 3D Social Online Gaming, where we still hang out.