Location: Openlife Grid
I have covered Openlife, briefly, in this blog. I had found performance and stability to be increasing there, but last month I spent several hours in-world there, writing a review for Prim Perfect, and discovered a passionate and small community of builders at work.
My Prim Perfect columns do include advocacy of a grid's best features, and Openlife has something I'd not encountered in a another virtual world: scene flip. This permits a region manager to set up five different "scenes" for a region and, with the push of a button, reload everything. Thus a roleplaying community in a space-opera setting might have ready, with just a flip, a massive starship interior, an alien world, and an empty-space starfield for space combat.
Openlife's founder, Sakai Openlife, has persevered through a difficult update and the issues with performance that stymied my trips there in 2008 and 2009. This grid is worth another look, and several residents responded to my requests for advice with great enthusiasm.
Pantaiputih Korobase came to the grid in November 2008, after he "escaped" Second Life for a new base of operations. Like the other Openlife residents I met, he notes that the new grid "made me personally turn into a much more active user, OL made me create, decorate regions with my own buildings and made me learn all the time. More over and most importantly, I made some really good friends in OL."
His thoughts were echoed by Shai Khalifa and Cheops Forlife, who talked to me in-world and, in Shai's case, met me at the Over the Rainbow region to discuss the work of builder Surreal Numbers. The build quality of several sims was as good as anything I have seen in SL.
My Prim Perfect column will cover more details soon. But for builders and social users who want a small and closed grid with good prices, Openlife remains an attractive alternative. Educators needing hypergrid access might not find the grid to their liking, but scene-flip alone makes handling OAR files of regions very simple work for changes to simulations "on the fly."
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