Among the Legends

A recent drama storm around the OpenSim-based Legend City Online (LCO) reminded me that I haven’t tried one of the public OpenSim virtual worlds for awhile, so when SL was being weird the other night I headed over (using the Second Life viewer, rather than their recommended Hippo, because I didn’t want to download a Whole Nother Thing).

Turns out I already had an account over there; here I am as Dale Mullins (in a pretty radically unattractive shot, now that I look at it), helping one of the Legends (roughly the equivalent of Lindens in SL, I gather) adjust a sit-ball on a park bench at the default landing space:

(That’s me on the right, the Legend on the left: a very nice woman, with an adorable shape and skin, and a million-watt facelight.)

There are some very nice builds in the parts of LCO that I wandered through, and there are enough bits of free clothing and shapes and stuff that I was able to make myself more or less my familiar self without much trouble (although those glasses are Not Realy Me; I will have to make some myself).

The underlying server software, though, is pretty clearly still pre-beta. Things I noticed:

• Inter-sim teleports and sim boundary crossings were quite risky, relatively often resulting in disconnection, infinite uncontrollable flight into nowhere, and/or appearing at one’s destination but being unable to move,
• Even just standing around is somewhat risky; I got logged out a few times when I was doing nothing notable at all,
• Once one has crashed or been logged out, it typically takes two or three or more tries to get in again; lots of message about already being logged in, or having been disconnected from the region, or whatever,
• Scripted attachments are odd: I made myself a little invisible attachment with a hovertext title and some decorative particles just for fun, and found that if I went to a different sim it would be sort of half-off (the title would be in black, and I couldn’t see any particles although sometimes others could) until I detached it and re-attached it.

It’s possible of course that some of these problems were due to using an Unsupported Viewer; I ought to try Hippo next time if I’m not too lazy.

There weren’t a whole lot of people in the world, but the dozen or so that I saw seemed to be your typical early-adopter type and therefore above average conversationally; so that was nice. LaLa Legend herself, who I gather runs the place, was also hanging around at the entrypoint; something you don’t see in SL. I don’t know how positively she would have responded to challenging questions about the current drama of course. :) And the Legend in the picture up there (I apologize for not recalling her name; for some reason the viewer wasn’t logging chat while I was in LCO; I probably forgot to check the box) gave me 250 of the local currency so I could (for instance) upload the texture for my famous Noob Tee Shirt, which I then handed out randomly.

It’s fun to play around in such a young world, and to see how things are being worked out in them compared to mama Second Life. On the other hand the infrastructure is still wonky enough that I doubt I’ll be there regularly. It’s worse than my first week in SL (and that was pretty bad!). But it’s coming along…