Note: The opinions of the author are
entirely her own and do not necessarily reflect those of Maxping
Magazine - we bring you this article because it is a great example
of the journey an individual can take when exploring open source
virtual worlds...
Six months ago, I blogged about the Openspace
fiasco and how it made business customers and creative residents
equally angry. You can read the original post
here.
In case you've not read the post, let me make a quick
summary: I work for a company which we will call "C"; C
owned a standard sim C1 and three openspaces C2, C3 and C4; at the
same time, I was the owner of the Condensation Land archipielago
(the Condensation Land, Condensation North, Condensation Beach.,
Condensation South and Condensation Southwest sims); all the
islands were Openspaces, except Condensation Land. When the
unjustifiable increase of 66% in the price of Openspaces was
announced, C's executives asked me to start researching for an
alternative to Second Life, because they had
lost their confidence in Linden Lab. I was also forced to look
elsewhere for my own islands, because
most of my tenants were not able to afrord the price increase, got
fed up, and left Second Life.
In this post I'll describe the alternatives
that were considered, the decisions that were taken, and what we
learned in the process. Although the experience has been bitter in
many aspects (having to abandon land which you have carefully
created and helped to make beautiful is awful; Second Life customer
service is a disaster; etc), the final results are quite
interesting. I've though to share them, in case somebody can find
them of interest and profit from our experience.
Personal side
My first reaction was to take a look at
competitive virtual worlds. I opened an account in the Open Life Grid,
and ordered a
private cluster.
The initial plan was to migrate the
Condensation Land archipielago to Open Life and learn as much as
possible in the process, so that I could later advice C properly. I
saved all the terrain files from Second Life, I bought myself a
copy of Second Inventory, I took
copies of all my creations into my inventory, and I started to
download everything to my hard drive.
What I learned in the process: Building unique
objects for the Second Life grid is completely different from
building while having several worlds in mind. If you have to
transfer stuff to other virtual worlds, you have to be much more
organized, link your prims, keep consistent names, etc. (Yes, I was
a lazy builder :-)). Indeed, the best way of building is by using
your own grid, or a standalone sim, but we'll get to that
later.
After a lot of hard work, I had an quite
complete version of Condensation in Open Life in 16 days; all the
work was done in my spare time, and I had to learn the techniques,
link the prims, etc.:
The building experience was fine, but other things in
Open Life were not. Scripts behaved erratically, as did
inventory and asset services. A single bad script was able to take
down the script engine for four full regions; this was specially
ugly when you owned a mainland region, since if a neighbour was
using a "bad" script your own scripts would not work and there
would be nothing you'd be able to do about it. And wearing
inventory worked one time and did not work the next, inventory
renames randomly failed to persist, etc. Customer support was very
friendly (a very welcome change after the robotic support from the
Lindens), but overall Open Life gave me the impression to be a
one-person project, with no serious company behind, and I did not
feel convinced enough to put all the eggs in that basket,
especially after the Openspace fiasco. This proved insightful,
because two months later
Open Life restricted the use of Second Inventory, effectively
locking your own creations to be used only inside Open Life.
What I learned in the process:
Never, ever build or create contents in a world
that doesn't provide easy, clear, manageable tools to
backup and restore your stuff to the same or to
another world. Being able to have a copy of your creations in a
pendrive in your pocket is a must for virtual world developers.
Opensim has very nice tools for backup and restore; more about that
later.
On december the 18th, 2008, I went to the
second Rezzable crash party, and thanks to the nice people at
Rezzable, who
allowed us to create an account in their private grid to play and
experiment, I was able to get a feel of how a small Opensim-based
private grid performed.
In the meanwhile, Second
Life mass land was shrinking fast, and Linden Labs
pretended nothing was really happening.
Opensim was looking better and better, while
Second Life was losing the little credibility they had left, if
any, and other worlds didn't look serious and/or stable enough for
enterprise use. The only alternative seemed to be Opensim, so that
I downloaded Opensim and MySql, created my first region,
and blogged
about my experience.
What I learned in the process: Installing
Opensim is fairly straightforward, if you have some technical
skills. Having one or several sims in your own PC allows you to
create content, experiment, etc, without depending on an external
company (and you don't have to pay for uploads :-) )
Business side
In the meanwhile, I had to find a solution to
my employer's problems. After a lot of discussions, we decided that
I would buy C2, C3 and C4 from them, then they would sell C1, then
I would rent C2 to C, and I'd consolidate C3, C4, Condensation
South and Condensation SouthWest into a full sim and attempt to
sell it. This was a complete and total mess. The
discussions at C took too much time, and after the island transfer
C1 had to be abandoned because the billing period was over. Then I
got a six-months bill for one of my islands, which I was supposed
to pay too, even if the fusion of the four islands would have had a
paying date of two months in the future, and I had ordered the
conversion into a full sim one week before. Since I refused to pay
the bill, I lost the four Openspaces (I had already taken all the
objects and terraformed the remaining islands, I was furious at the
stupidity and rigidness of customer care, and I was not willing to
take the time to terraform again Condensation South and
Condensation SouthWest, only to have them taken down some few
months later).
What I learned in the process: If you are
absolutely forced to do business with the Lindens (which I
obviously won't recommend, given my experience), don't even think
there will be somebody there who knows about you and about your
business. 3,540 US$ + VAT per year doesn't entitle you to be
treated like a customer. They don't even have a list of how many
islands you own, or how much money you spend per month, so that
they can care about you and advice you properly. Or if they do have
such a list, it doesn't show. Plan ahead of them,
taking into account the inneficiencies of their support system -
you'd better do, because you'll be paying for them (i.e., when you
transfer an island, neither you nor the buyer can use the island in
the meanwhile - but you have to pay for it anyway, and there is no
guarantee about how much time it will take them to implement the
transfer; if their queues are collapsed, you pay for their
collapse).
Hypergrid
So that C kept C2, which they now were renting from me, and I
was left with only three islands: Condensation Land, Condensation
North, and Condensation Beach. I used Christmas holidays to learn
more about Opensim;
Justin Clark-Casey had
published a
very interesting article about the future of the metaverse,
where a vision of an
hypergrid of small, interconnected
grids was presented, and Diva Canto was modifiying Opensim to
implement that
Hypergrid,
providing a mechanism to allow teleports between worlds, amongst
other things. I tried the mechanism, and
blogged about it.
Business side
I set up a nine-sim Opensim test grid for C, using an old Athlon
X64 core duo 3300+ at 2 GHz with 2 GB of RAM. Configuring
everything was a little messy, because the server resides inside
the company intranet, and I had to do quite a lot of tweaking in
the regions xml files and at the firewall; but once everything was
set up, the results were fantastic! Using a
symmetrical 2 Mb SDSL line, which costed C around 240
€/mo (yup that's expensive, but there's no real
alternative in C's zone of the city), we had nine sims
working! That's less than 27 €/mo per sim (< US$
36/mo per sim), but of course these calculations are nonsense,
because you can put as many sims as you want into an opensim
installation without increasing the price :-), and without
increasing CPU consumption. Indeed, when there's nobody logged in,
CPU usage is near to 0, so that if your use of opensim is on-demand
(i.e., if you only need it some parts of the day, for example if
you use it for lectures, as is the case with C), you can even use a
non-dedicated machine.
What I learned in the process: Second Life is
grossly overpriced, and their product is
monolithic and quite inflexible for educational and corporate uses.
The idea of a permanent world is very nice, but it's unneeded
and overkill, and also bad for the ecology; above all, and
compared to Opensim, it's unbelievably expensive. Opensim
allows you to switch on your virtual world when you need
it, and switch it off afterwards. Since you don't need a
dedicated machine (or even a powerful one), your hardware costs are
near to zero, because you can recycle an old desktop from the
accounting department, for example. The only thing you
really need (and you have to pay for) is
bandwith. And this will get cheaper, much cheaper, as time
passes.
I made some capacity tests: the 2 Mb SDSL line was more
than able to handle 15 simultaneous avies! C uses
Opensim mainly for education, and they never had more than 10 avies
in Second Life at the same time, so that the only remaining problem
to solve was voice. At the moment, Opensim had no working voice
system, and voice is essential for education, so that I gave a try
at Skype
conferences. The result was astonishing! Skype voice
quality is by far much superior to Second Life voice
quality! In particular, 3D spacial voice is a nuisance for
education (because it forces you to constantly zoom around the
virtual classroom when the speaker's voice is not audible enough),
and Skype's dynamic feedback and noise cancellation algorithms are
so good that most virtual students can attend the class without
even having to mute/unmute their microphone.
Having tested that, C decided to completely migrate to
Opensim, and leave Second Life altogether. They are happily living
in their own private Opensim grid now.
What I learned in the process: Opensim
is ready for prime time for educators, at least when the
classroom is composed of a small number of students (and this will
for sure improve very quickly in the near future). Students
and teachers don't need fancy avies and wonderful dresses;
a ruthed student can learn exactly the same as a fancy student
avie. And, besides, most people don't want to spend time tweaking
their avie, if the only reason they have one is to attend some
classes, as it often happens. Of course, if somebody wants to look
nice, there's plenty of freebies everywhere.
Ludmilla's side
The Condensation archipielago was now reduced to three islands,
since we had lost Condensation South and Condensation Southwest.
When the six-month billing period for Condensation North expired,
we relocated the (few) tenants to Condensation Land and abandoned
the island. Now we were left with Condensation Land and
Condensation Beach, Ludmilla
Writer's island. Ludmilla, an RL friend of mine,
cannot afford the price increase, and Condensation Beach will be
abandoned too.
Ludmilla is a typical example of what the
highly inept management of the Openspace crisis has done to a RL
resident: when the 75 US$/mo Openspaces were announced, she decided
to rent a whole Openspace for herself, making a big effort,
because she's not a rich person in RL. She bought
a wonderful castle, for which she paid more than L$ 10,000, and
tons of other things, just to make the island beautiful. The island
was never used for big events,
as I explained in my earlier post: even
the opening party for her island was made in Condensation Land,
which was a full sim. Then, after a lot of work with terraforming,
after paying a lot of money for her land, and after buying tons of
objects to make her land beautiful, she was suddenly declared an
"abuser" and forced by the price increase to leave her land.
Condensation Beach will be shut down on may the 5th; if you want to
visit Ludmilla's island, you'll have to hurry :-(
Personal side
On my part, I started to migrate the Condensation
archipielago to Opensim. The experience gained in Open
Life was very helpful, and this time the migration was much faster.
I installed the Web
Interface package and tweaked it a little to make it work for
my grid, which is a standalone (the web interface is supposed to
work only in gridded configurations), and then recreated the whole
archipielago in some few weeks. Here's a screenshot of the login
screen to our grid, as of March the 6th:
Opensim continued to develop and improve. Diva
Canto improved hypergrid to allow specifying the destination
universe by using the map (so that jumping to another grid gets
very similar to jumping to another page using the navigation bar of
your HTML browser):
Justin
Clark-Casey wrote the
Parallel Selves Message Bridge, an Opensim module that allows
you to IM your Second Life (or OSGrid, etc.) friends while in your
own grid:
Favio
Piek and Ludmilla
Writer, co-owners (with me) of Arrabal Tango
Club, worked hard to create a replica of the club in our
grid.
Shoshisn
Shilova was so kind as to lend us several of her
wonderful sculptures to decorate the islands.
Flourishing Condensation Land
I created a virtual worlds art exhib in the southeast part of
Condensation Land, and have got several offers from our wonderful
Flickr friends to show their work there. I routinely make a copy of
my universe, zip it, and copy it to my pendrive. Sometimes I unzip
it in my own PC, and play with it. The feeling of having a
copy of all your stuff, including your objects and your inventory,
is simply awesome! :-) Now I know that I can work in my
land and be sure that what I create will remain mine. If there's
some inventory malfunction, I can go back and use a backup of our
universe. If somebody loses a building or another object, I can get
a copy back in minutes. If I need a new island, I can create it at
will, also in minutes. I can back up
complete islands and recreate them in other grids in the simplest
of ways. Justin Clark-Casey is developing a function to save
inventories and restore them to another grid, so that I can safely
build an inventory in my own grid and know not only that I won't
lose it, but that I can recreate it elsewhere. And it's me who
decides when there will be an maintenance outage :-)
To say the truth, there are some few things I am
lacking, compared to Second Life. Most specially, good
quality dance animations. But as Diva
Canto says, we only have to wait to see who will be the
equivalent of iTunes for virtual hair, skin and
clothes… and anims! :-)
Oh, and, above all: Condensation Land in Opensim is getting
more beautiful than the Second Life version ever
was! :-)
I think this is due to the fact that with Opensim, we feel that
our work is really ours, that our land is really ours, that our
avies are really ours. We are in full control. The exodus from
Second Life has been bitter, expensive and quite painful, but the
final results are more than worth it :-)
More articles form the SL emigrant´s perspective to come
soon on Maxping Magazine...
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