Flipping Scenes, Back to Openlife

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."

Openlife: MojoBox Lives!

Location: Fredi's Gunsmoke Store

I'd had such a rotten experience last year with the alternative grid Openlife, less an Open Sim world than a smaller and direct Second Life competitor, that I vowed never to return.
Last year I created two avatars, but soon I figured that Mojobox Kane and Tao Jones were goners. In January their inventory was useless because they never rezzed and remained clouds, teleports were dodgy, textures remained gray and lag was terrible with no one else around. In June I went back and had some better results but things were laggy and I kept crashing.

As far as I can tell, third-party viewers apparently do not work there, a complaint I've read that discourages many from trying this world. It got a bit of hype during the Openspaces debate in Second Life, and it received a few thousand immigrants.

Did they stay? I had to go back, if only to find some proper shoes to wear.

Logging on was fast and easy. Viewer 1.7 for Openlife seems to have corrected most of these problems, and it even offers a tidy interface that leaves lots of real estate for the visitor to see the world around him: a complain leveled against the new Second Life viewer. The little toolbar icons at the top of the client window replace many of SL's 1.2x viewer buttons at the bottom:



Mojo not only rezzed but explored (with a good deal of inventory missing--not that he had much). The Search feature does work, though teleports from it do not. My technique was to find the simulator name, put it into the map window, then teleport and wander.

Mostly, it's a big, empty place--I don't think I saw even a dozen dots on the entire world map, but that's not to say that Openlife is on its way out. I met another avatar, also interested in exploring after a year away, and I guided her to a freebie shop to get rid of her Ruth looks.

I want to plug a store I found with excellent Freebies: Fredi's. Here's the spot on the map, in case the link does not work for you: http://url3dx.com/openlife/Cowboys%20Country/30/158/22

I'm not ready to put any money into Mojo's virtual pockets, until I'm certain of the stability of this world. As for educational uses, I need to do a lot more exploration.

The only problem I found--and not as tricky as in Reaction Grid--was my "Hat Test." Mojobox put on a free prim cowboy hat and did quite a dance whenever I resized it. It also put me in the George W. Bush situation of being "all hat, no cattle" until I got it right:


Meanwhile Mojobox was catapulted into the air, blown through walls, and more. But he got the damned hat to fit, finally.

Despite these glitches, after dismissing Openlife last year, I'm ready to give it another go. My MacBook's graphics card was complaining mightily, and the system did lock up once...coincidence? I'll try Openlife next with a more robust external monitor and report what I find.

One thing Openlife has out of the box: a decent default walk for avatars. That, and boots and a hat, are promising signs.