New title, new grid, new experiences.
With the recent announcement of a 64% tier hike in there light use Sim product from Linden Lab the company that owns and runs Second Life, many residents have started looking to "Frontier Grids". Mostly looked at as developing Second Life clone, where granted these grids are currently based from open source code released by Linden Lab, some of these frontiers are looking to build on the technology pioneered by Linden Lab with eyes toward creating something better.
My partner and I along with a friend from SL also started looking at these frontier alternatives, we finally settled on OpenLife Grid, I am sure as it grows into its own it will get a new name, started a year ago by 3DX. This is a small development company started in Australia and now based out of Taiwan but with the recent boom, nearly 12,000 estimated new user in the few weeks since the Linden Lab announcement, it is growing. We had many reason for settling with OLG over others, it is still very much a beta, bugs are common though this is true for OpenLifes parrent grid Second Life.
Going in we were very impressed with the developement crew, the founder is often in world or on the website chat channel and rarely seems to sleep. Neither he or the viewer developer are shy about answering questions about the grid and even giving technical answers to the questions. We were also impressed with how quickly they responded to the population explosion and the strains it put on their fledgling grid as it saw 1000 to 3000 new registers a day, though at one point logins were near imposible in week 1 of the population explosion and have become progressively better since then. The land is cheap to and allows 4 times the prims (A prim being the basic building blocks of these grids that can be manipulated and linked to create objects.), $22o USD to set up a private cluster with 1 region to Second Lifes cost of $1000 USD for there equivilent, and $75 USD to maintain with Second Life charging 4 times that amount, making it more attractive to invest in virtual property. And a vision of a future that is not just becoming a clone of its parrent grid, but implimenting new and different technologies to make it work, this work is already started and ingrained in the developement teams thinking. On top of that the other users are very open and personable.
There are draw backs though, during the flood delivery of land orders were taking 5 to 6 times longers to complete and deliver, still on par with Second Life, however initial promises of quicker deliveries left some of us a little fustrated. The implimentation of the LSL scripting engine is only 75% complete, permissions (The method by whice inworld objects distributation and modification can be controlled.) are still being worked on. And till the developers are certain that users Intelectual Property is safe as it can be, they are holding back the implementation of inworld currency and economy. Permissions and an economy are what drive a large bulk of smaller scale content creation. It does not however seem to hurt building of environments and structures as much, the bulk of these creators build these themselves.
In the end the move from Second Life to OpenLife feels much like moving from a large developed expensive metropolis where everything is close at hand to a small boom town where everyone knows everyone and are very welcoming, cost of living is cheap, but one would have to be prepared to work a little harder get those comforts that were at your fingertips. Personally like RL I really enjoy the small town feel more than the urban metropolis feeling of everyone for themselves. Sadly to many seem to judge OpenLife by what it is, not by what it aims to be. Time will tell if 3DX can pull it off, but they seem very promising.
