Ten Years Online

I just discovered that not only have I been on Second Life for 7 years.  Ariane Barnes has been around as a virtual character for 10 years.  The above picture is rendered from the oldest complete “Ariane” poser file I could find, dated April 30, 2001.

Ariane has been an online character for over a decade now. The original concept came to me in August of 2000 after playing the first Alternate Reality Game “The Beast” which was an experimental promo for the movie Artificial Intelligence. I wanted to create an artificial personality on the web, a person that lives in “The Metaverse”. So I dusted off my copy of Poser 2 (I have been doing Poser since version 1), and set off to create a character.

The looks of the character was the late great Audrey Hepburn, which I attempted (badly) to recreate in 3D. The first name “Ariane” came from a character Ms Hepburn played in the movie Love in the Afternoon. The last name Barnes came from the “real” last name of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys. And thus Ariane Barnes was born.

Early renderings first appeared online in 2001.  Ariane Barnes was officially born on into cyberspace with The Sims Online in late 2002, and had a geocities website up in 2003. After dropping out of TSO due to boredom, she moved to There, then City of Heroes, then Second Life.  The Dating Simulator Game first went up in 2004 on a free ISP host and fit nicely on the 20MB file hosting limit, but did not get any attention until the site gained a domain name in 2006.  It was discovered and went viral big time (with millions of unique hits) in spring of 2007 when a link to it got posted on a popular football fan forum.

Ariane Barnes exists as a creative outlet.  Popularity has never mattered, only for personal entertainment value, as long as it lasts, which is why I don’t advertise, or put advertisements on the site.  So here is to another 10 years.

Seven Years in Second Life

A thread at Second Life Universe put up a challenge to show the evolution of your avatar.  I decided to participate.   Even though I first did this three years ago on my 4th anniversary, I thought it was worth updating.

2004: Creepy system avatar.  Some would call this a “classic” SL avatar.   For me it looked ugly, which is why I spent most of 2004 playing There and City of Heroes instead.

By 2005, we could really customize out avatars with attachments and custom skin.  Unfortunately, this made us look like we had too much makeup on.  On the bright side, we could also use custom animations, like he sitting pose I have here.

2006: Vast improvements in skin and hair. there was now full prim hair available.  The world started to look normal by now.

2007: Yet another upgrade to skin and hair, and also eyes. Hair was flexible now so it moved in response to your movements.

2008: Windlight environments, reflecting and distorting water effects added much needed realism to the world.

2009: Sculptie prims made for better looking hair, and hats!

2010: Wide screen monitor, even better sculptie hair.  And cleavage with bouncing boobs.

2011:  While shadows have been around for a couple of years, the code is now stable enough to leave on all the time without crashing, making the world even more beautiful.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to post a picture of a mesh built SL and an improved mesh avatar for 2012.

CoH: You can't always go back home again

This past week NCSoft celebrated the 5th anniversary of City of Heroes/Villains, Lineage II, and the 4th anniversary of Guild Wars by holding some events and allowing old players to come back for a free week of play.  I have played all three at one time or another, I decided to focus the free time on City of Heroes.

From May 2004-May 2005 I spent something like 900 hours moving my Assault rifle/Tactics hero (ArianeB) from level 1 to 50.  It was my first MMORPG and I really had a lot a fun and made a lot of friends.

After level 50, there was not much to do, I had a few other characters, but never got any past level 25.  Eventually, I got distracted by Guild Wars, and did not play CoH enough to justify the $15 a month fee and dropped it, reactivating from time to time when urges came back, but mostly I have not played much at all in over two years.

I thought I’d try it again during this free week. Paragon City brought back a lot of memories. Despite the lack of play in two years, I still know my way around the freeway system in Skyway  – like going back to a city you used to live in years ago.

But is it still as good as I remember it? Unfortunately no.

It is still a game about mashing keys in a certain order over and over again.  Team play is still a lot of fun, but individual play is no where near as fun as Guid Wars. Both CoH and GW have constantly added content, but the game play in CoH has not changed significantly in 5 years. The new content plays more or less like the old content.

The new content on Guild Wars has changed the game making it a lot more fun. Nightfall added Heroes, Eye of the North added global powers. There is a lot of variety in the missions and many of the best missions are replayable. There is also a lot of strategy built into succeeding in the game, not just repetitive key mashing.

Bottom line: Guild Wars has aged better than City of Heroes.

I think it is time to make a clean break and hang up the tights. CoH and CoV were fun adventures, but its time to retire and move on. Cryptic Studios, those responsible for the content of CoH, is working on Star Trek Online, while Arenanet is working on Guild Wars 2.  Both are a year or two away from release. I’m looking forward to both!

5th Anniversary, How times have changed

This month I celebrate my 5th year in Second Life. My friend Torment Thorn is also celebrating her 5th this yearand was throwing a party so I decided to attend and have it count as mine too. Didn’t feel like organizing my own party.

The party started just as Lost was coming on, and some shows just take precedence. So earlier that day I positioned my avatar at the party’s location, and while watching TV, I launched Sparkle IM from my ipod. Its an iphone app that logs into Second Life (or many other virtual worlds) and allows you to IM and participate in local chats. It was a fun way to participate in the party for a little while.

Torment and I joined on a “free promo” Second Life was offering (it used to cost about $10 to join Second Life in the early days). They were offering 500 free accounts, first come first served, and we picked up two of them. We may not be the first in SL, but we were two of the first to not have to pay to try it out. Not sure about the other 498, but we have been busy. Torment, was one of the early adapters of the role play potential of Second Life, and has run a few RP sims in the past 5 years, and currently runs Wicked.

Five years ago it was rare for more than 300 people to be on at once. There were no prim attachments, no animations. To get from place to place you teleported to the nearest hub and flew the rest of the way, sometimes two or three servers. There was really cheap “first land” for people that upgraded to premium. Today Second Life has 750,000 active unique sign ins a month.

Today, improvements keep on happening. There was this press release about IBM and Conversive creating a smart “NPC” for IBM’s Virtual Green Project. Basically a computer automated avatar, at least that is what it sounded like. I decided to check it out and see what it was all about. Didn’t actually meet an NPC, apparently its only at certain times. Oh well. Looked worth exploring anyways. Five years ago no one would have even dared to do anything like this in Second Life.

In the next year, SL is changing even more. The “Adult” experiment will start this summer, when we should also see shadow rendering available in the client. By the end of the year Open Sim will likely be able to do everything SL can do. Then the tables will be turned and SL may startborrowing from OS.  (but that is next weeks topic).

Second Life's 5th Anniversary Event

So last week Second Life celebrated its 5th Anniversary with a huge 20 server event. I avoided it the first week, and due to multiple reports of lag it was a smart move. Above is a pic of the main birthday pavilion.

 

The Birthday celebration has not been without controversy. LL has made sure all exhibits conform to the PG sim standards resulting in some defacement. The roses above are seperate prims from the original painting. Another artistic statue of a nude woman had its breast prims removed. This is the result when you equate virtual nudity with real nudity.

600 exhibits on 20 servers is generally speaking a laggy mess of signage and spam for the most part. No way to see them all, so I just wandered aimlessly looking for cool stuff.

This sculpture/building on SL5B Linked was built by Scope Cleaver, and I’d consider it a masterpiece of prim artwork and architecture. It was also quite functional:

The northeast corner of the building served as a lecture hall. I stayed and listened to a presentation on how some companies are using Second Life in their business. There were about 35 attendees.

Four Years in Second Life: Lets Party!!

Here are a bunch of random “party” screenshots from my first two years of SL (if you want the last two years just look in the blog archive):

A wild and crazy pool party my friends threw, I’m the one in the round floaty.

The story of the circumstances of this event are interesting. Three years ago, Linden Labs needed to do a “stress test” on the servers to find out how well the system would scale up. They wanted to get 8,000 people in the game at the same time, and put out e-mails offering prizes for those that participated.

So we threw a big stress test party for the occasion. Incidentally, they only managed to get a little over 5,000 to participate. Seems ironic now when there are 40,000 to 60,000 on normally these days.

Attending my first ever in world screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

A group of friends showing off our “power moves” Actually we are playing with group pose balls.

Big live music event at the “Night Club at the End of the Universe”

Four Years in Second Life: Self Portrait Screenshots

This month is my fourth anniversary of my avatar in Second Life. I thought I’d do a couple of looks back using screenshots. One of myself, one of the world as a whole. Here is me in game from 2004 to 2008.

2004 – Damn I am such a NOOB!! I was on a basic account and limited myself to what I could get for free or cheap. They actually gave out 50L per week with a basic account. This was when there were less than 100,000 basic accounts to begin with.

2005 – Still on a basic account, but started to accrue enough L$ to start uploading my own graphic files, like my own custom skin file, and buying early prim hair. I still hadn’t mastered the art of makeup yet. Living conditions consisted of whatever house I could break into when the owner was offline.

2006 – Finally splurged for premium account and bought some land. Did a little bit of land wheeling and dealing before ending up where I am today, for at least the last 2 and a half years. Got better at skin, makeup, and making my own clothing, and animations.

2007 – Yet another evolution of hair and skin. Took this picture for my website at Devils Moon. Notice the reflections in the wet looking ground. This is actually a prim trick of building a copy of the buildings under the ground.

2008 – The Windlight client makes for great screenshots. notice the water reflections and refractions, the improved atmosphere rendering. Skin hasn’t changed since 2007, but flexi prim hair has.

Wow what a radical change in four short years!!

Searching for my SL Spawn Point

So I’m approaching my avatar’s 4th birthday in Second Life, and will write about that soon. In the mean time I got nostalgic about my early days in Second Life.

It got me thinking, can I find my original spawn point in SL? Its been four years, and not only is my memory hazy, but the game has changed considerably since then, is it even possible to find out?

Well the first step in a process like this is good old Google, which led me to http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page a fan created wiki of all things second life. Except for learning that the first sim in Second Life was Da Boom, it wasn’t helpful.

It was then I realized there may be an in game answer to my quest. One of my oldest SL buddies is Oz Spade, an SL history buff. It is quite possible that the only people that know more about the history of Second Life than Oz are on the original development team. He built the SL Historical Museum in game where you can see picks and objects from the very early days of the game.

The display of interest for me was the historical maps section, which contained maps of the game from the early years. I went and checked out the locations of the original spawn ponts.

The Alpha spawn point was on the western edge of Natoma. Second Life at the time contained 14 servers. The spot now houses the “Library of Primitives” which is an excellent place to check out if you want to learn how to build stuff in Second Life

The first Beta spawn point was on the southern edge of the Ritch server, where a flea market now resides. The later Beta spawn point, and early game spawn point, which is where I apparently spawned is in Ahern, where there still is a welcome center. New players today start on one of the orientation islands where they go through a tutorial before joining the game, usually in Ahern. When I joined the tutorial was in Ahern. The place was redesigned to its present design about a year after I had already joined.

So there it is mystery solved.

One Year in Second Life

Well my Second Life account got charged $72 today. Luckily I sold enough L$ that I had that amount in my account.

I have been playing Second Life on and off since 2003, but did not get a premium account until 2005, and today is my 1 year anniversary as a paying customer. I go for the $72 a year because $6 a month is nothing.

It is especially nothing because my discount animation business easily pays for everything I need. I already have enough Lindens right now to pay for year 3.

My philosophy in playing SL is to go cheap. I make practically everything I own, except hair styles. I also stick with the low tier 512m land. I tried upgrading, only to lose money in land deals so I stick with what I got: beach front property on a low lag server.

I know I only have 117 prims, but that is enough. Come by my lot and see that I usually have around 60 prims available. How do I get by with so few? Partly because I don’t need a house, and partly because I am a scripter who can rez in and out objects quickly. I have a 4 prim dock, a 4 prim waterfall, a 6 prim store, and sometimes a school of 8 fish, all one prim each. Way above my lot I have a sky box lab that instantly turns into a house, a garden, a pool, and if I ever finish it — a nightclub.

The year in SL as a paying customer has mostly been good. There were some annoying times, like the recent incident involving no entry walls that had me completely surrounded as both of my practically never there neighbors made their land restricted.

Second Life is undergoing a growth spurt, partly due to letting everyone join without credit card verification, which has changed the landscape of the game a bit. On the upside, it has opened the door to a lot more people. On the down side it has opened the door to a lot more anonymous griefing.

The problem I see is that Second Life is probably right now at its height. Linden Labs has a lot of cool things sitting on a shelf for SL that have not been implemented because they wont work with stuff already released. They have boxed themselves in a corner on a lot of fronts.

We really need a do-over, an SL 2.0 that disregards backward compatibility.

We need the client layer, the 3D engine layer, and the server layer completely seperate and swappable without creating problems. This will allow SL or even 3rd parties to create much improved UI. The current UI sucks big time.

We need higher resolution avatars, with better joints and more flexibility (i.e. animatable joints in fingers), Poser 6 instead of Poser 2, which means current clothing will be useless. More realistic lighting and atmosphere and physics models. Without having to worry about backward compatibility, they can use lessons learned from SL 1.* and put limits on lag inducing scripts, griefing scripts, and put prim limits on attachments (a high rez bump map costs a lot less resources than 1000 prim rhinestones).

Second Life 2.0 could look like this: