Are you fed up with Second Life? Then this may be just for you. Opensim-derived walled garden grid has been evolving and growing for a long time.
Openlifegrid is something that forked from
Opensim a good while ago. It has got its own server and viewer
now. The viewer is based on the Linden Lab viewer, but it has been
heavily modified. Some code from the realxtend
viewer is also used to have some of the features.
The user account creation is easy, but it may confuse some as
the user is required to create an avatar after the user
account is ready. This is actually one of the good things
at openlifegrid, users can create as many avatars as they want
under their own account. This also makes it easier for OLG to
calculate how many users they have as all the alts are connected to
the same user account.
The recently released viewer for OLG, Openlife R17 is only 29
megabytes in size. It has been developed by the legendary
Kirstenlee Cinquetti, known from her many ultra-stable and fast
builds of the Second life viewer. The viewer is available for
all the major operating systems; Windows, Mac and Linux. Also
available is a SX special version of the viewer with much higher
system requirements. I decided first to try out the ordinary
version just to know how and if it works.
First login attempt failed because the viewer tried to connect
to "my last location". I never have logged to openlifegrid
before, so I changed it to "my home location" instead and this time
it was a success.
The welcome island where I ended up contained nice signs to
guide me through the setup of my avatar and its controls. When
I tried to edit my appearance and create a new outfit, that crashed
the viewer twice. Then I created outfit directly to my
inventory - something a true newbie may have not figured out -
and wear everything from there. That changed me first to a glowing
cloud, but when I bravely started to edit my avatar further, I
could see me again as a human being. Now meet Snowcrashme Hawksby
at Openlife (note the nice-looking tree at the background!):
The sign said I could use "WASD" keys to control my avatar, but
I could not as pressing those keys appeared in local chat
input field. I used the arrow keys instead. After some moments I
found out that I can turn off the chat bar from the "chat"
button at top of the screen, which made "WASD" usable.
After a while I was flying around, and somehow this was a nicer
user experience when compared to Second Life, but things were
not working as smoothly as expected. If I was a newbie
using virtual worlds, I would have quit quite early. There are
severe usability problems and bugs, as you can expect from a
beta level software. However, for an experienced user, it looks
that this grid offers plenty of fun.
"Please keep openlife tidy and do not feed the
bears"
snowcrashme
This article belongs to article series where I evaluate
different virtual worlds from a newbie point of view. The articles
are tagged as FirstExperience. The previous (and the first)
was Second Life
Newbies.
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