Trying out There.com again

A lot has changed since I used to hang out at there.com, but not much has changed with the service it self. I was in the beta back in 2004 and even met the entire development, executive, and support team at there.com, but that was a long time ago. The service it self has changed hands, changed names, and has spun off the original company many times.  Even long before then all the exeutives (CEO, CTO, etc..) all left there.com to do other things (like imvu.com). So it’s not the same company.

Anyway after about 3 years not much has changed.  They finally added a hugging emote about a year ago.. took then 5 years to get this. Something SL had since day one.  There.com still has a nightmarish inventory system that makes absoultly no sense, and has yet to to be changed at all.  It still heavily relies on Flash and IE to function, which is why you’ll never see there.com client ported to Linux or OS X.

They did finnally consolidate most of the assets of thousands of tiny files (meshes, textures, etc) into a single large file so that it’s not wasting so much disk space, and also dosen’t take forever to install and uninstall the client from your PC. they finally added more functions to your nametag menu, which was something I suggested like 4 years ago.

The biggest problem I’m having now with there.com is connection lag. Every 20-30 minutes everything stops.  Other avatars stop moving, chatting, and voice chatting.  I can still get up and walk around, but everyone is frozen.  People have told me they can still hear me when I’m using voice chat or typing, but I see nothing back from them.  Then after being in a sort of semi-limbo for about 2-5 minutes, everything dissapears, and reappears again slowly like I just re-logged in.  Not a big deal if this happens once.. but this happens like clockwork every 20-30 minutes.  This also occurs if I use a diffrent PC. Really hard to have any meaningful conversaions with anyone when everyone shuts up for 5 mins every 30 mins like clockwork.

Fallout 3 DLC

Operation Anchorage is merely okay.

The claim that it raises the level cap to 30 is bogus. I was already at level 20, and after downloading the DLC it’s still says I’m “max” at level 20. The experiance guage still shows “21″ at the right side, but it’s been showing that long before I got the DLC. Apparently you have to be at 19 or below for the cap fix to work. Once you hit level 20, it seems to trigger a “max” flag and it’s locked down; which is complete bullshit.  Hopefully they can fix this soon, or at least with the next DLC.  Also the game play seems far too short, I did it in about 5 hours (or less) on hard difficulty, and you don’t need to know anything special to earn all 100 achievements points.  Just play the missions and you’ll get all the points.  There are 10 collectibles you can find, but since I already got all 100 points for the DLC, the collectibles are seemingly pointless to collect.  But there are new items you can get once you’re done with the DLC. There’s a ninja style stealth suit that makes you go invis like a Stealthboy, but you can use it all the time. A new power suit which seems just as useless as all the other power suits, except it can protect you from rads better.  The best is the Gause rifle, which has a zoom function and delts out a shit load of damage, especially headshots can kill with one shot (though that depends on your skills, level, and perks).

I also noticed that the “mysterious stranger” actually MISSED my target on numerous occasions, because he was in too close proximity to it; often standing right next to him but his gun would be over the targets head.. so he misses! Often when you see him show up, your target is guaranteed to be killed, but not in Operation Anchorage.

Further more the DLC plays completely diffrent from the regular game, and completely isolated from it.  I don’t think you can exit the DLC missions once you start, unless you reload an old save game.  You enter a VR chamber so you lose all your inventory. When you kill a down enemy you can NOT rummage though the corpse gathering items like you normally can; the bodies just vaporise.  All the normal things you see laying around you can interact with or pick up, it won’t let you. Instead you find these dispensers that refill your heath, and ammo (but not all weapons will refill).  I felt like I was playing any other shooter game in the past few years.  I was expecting a lot more for my $10, especially unlocking the level 20 cap that didn’t work!

I still haven’t finnished the main storyline in Fallout 3.  I plan on replaying the game again, since there are at least a half dozen achevements I can’t get anymore now that I hit the level 20 cap.  But there are a lot of sinarios that I’d like to redo diffrently to see how it works out.

For example, having the Ghouls take over Tenpenny Tower can happen a couple different ways.  Problem was I still couldn’t get down past the basement to let the feral ghouls run into the building and terrorize the tenpenny tenants.  So instead I took the diplomatic approach to get them accepted into the tower.  However once they move in, your character talks about a room full of dead bodies the ghouls killed and piled them into that room, which I never been able to see yet since I’ve not been able to open that fucking door!  I’m also wondering if I let the ghouls move into tenpenny tower, if that allows me to own that pent house, with out nuking Megaton?  Hmmm, it’s things like this that make you wanna replay it.

Despite the games problems, the game is still extremely compelling. Even if it weren’t for the achevements you still have a lot of replay value to see how plot lines would play out. There’s apparently 3 diffrent ending sinarios depending on your karma level at the time when it ends. Which may also play out diffrently if you’re playing male or female, so a possible 6 diffrent endings?

Do your web shopping in world!

I recently found this story (and linden blog post and Press Announcement) that Linden Labs has acquired two off-site SL-commerce sites where you can purchase in-game items (technically) offline. You can simply browse items online and click to buy and then they will appear in your inventory.  The two companies in question are Xstreet (Formerly SLxchange) and OnRez. The plan is to integrate these services directly into Second Life it self, no longer using a 3rd party service.  My initial guess is better security so you don’t have separate logins at these 3rd party sites that may have some indirect access to your second life avatar account.  But all of this sounds fine and dandy, but this is something they should have done 6 years ago, and There.com has been doing it since day one.

There.com world is intricately linked with the production web server. It’s the only way to really do much of anything inside the world of There.com besides doing micro transaction buying a tshirt.  It was also how you set up events, created documents (not just plain text notecards), teleported around the open world, view profiles, etc, etc. It was the use of a stripped down web browser (IE actually) which is something the SL View has recently has added in the past year (striped down mozila). There really was no real need to buy land and set up a massive mall and rent out plots to vendors like we do in Second Life. And only to realize you barely make any money doing so. There.com simply did it with eBay like auction service.

All items bought and sold in there.com can be traded, given away, or put it up in auctions sold to the highest bidder, or sold as a buy-now. Developers had special access to the auctions to sell limited new copies of their products as buy-now auctions listings.  They didn’t have to build vendos and rent a space in some mall (of a bazillion other malls in SL) and drop the vendo there.  There.com didn’t have any stupid DRM-style (no transfer) restrictions with some possible exceptions with employee made special gifts.

Furthermore you are able to TRY OUT any item in auctions and use it in-game to see if you really want to buy it or not, and the item last about 2 minutes.  Rather than going on gut feelings when you buy something in SL, or spend 1L on a DEMO that you can’t even edit/adjust (cluttering up your inventory) to see if it suits you or not. Plus there.com has a “Secure trade” window, so when you want to trade or sell with someone directly you open a window that shows exactly what you’re getting from the other person with two levels of acknowledgment before the trade occurs. This avoids someone just ripping you off after you hand over someone money in hopes that person will give you something back.

This explains why in the past year SL viewer has integrated a web browser into the viewer, and has overhauled it’s search engine, which I found not to be much useful.  I still use the old ‘People’ or ‘Places’ tabs when searching for specific things.  Using the global search would give you links to crap you don’t need like people’s profiles or group pages that happen to mention the word you used to search that.  Plus many places will fill the description with random word that aren’t directly related to the place so they appear in search (meta tag whores).

I’m glad that after 6 years they finally got something in place to do something that There.com has already been doing for 6 years.  But then again it took there.com about FIVE years (and two different management changes) to get a hugging emote in game.  But there.com’s auction system is still a horrible mess to sort though.  It’s inventory setup is a fucking nightmare.

Another thing to point out is that sites like Xstreet allow basic members (with no payment info on file) to buy and sell L$ and bypass LindeX. I see nothing wrong with this in and of it self, but if Xstreet gets absorbed into Second Life, then this L$ market will disappear.  According to the market rates at Xstreet, you’ll get a better deal buying L$ than you would from LindeX.  Transversely you’re better off selling L$ at LindeX, than at Xstreet.  But this doesn’t take into account what percentage cut is taken (if any) for transactions, nor any other fees relating to transferring money to and from paypal, from credit cards, and bank accounts.

So is this a move by Linden Labs to create a more convenient and secure way to purchase in-world items, or are they killing off another L$ exchange market to establish a monopoly?  About four years ago there was website (sorry I can’t remember the name of it) that dealt with all forms of online currency allowing you to basically swap out your Linden$ for ThereBucks, or WoW gold, or about a dozen other kinds of MMO currency. Problem was a lot a fraud occurred using Paypal, and only Linden Labs would backup and support issues that arose. Other MMOs just didn’t care, or didn’t have the resources to deal with more fraud than they already had in-house.  So for a good while they only traded with L$.  Soon there was a lot of talk about Linden Labs and this exchange site merging up and establishing an in-world trading market for L$. But Linden Labs pulled the rug out from under them, the site soon closed down, and soon after that LindeX was established.  Bit of a stab in the back wasn’t it?

Obama Overload

I’m getting really tired of the hype surrounding Obama’s Inauguration. I feel they are putting way to much pressure upon Obama even before he actually enters office, which I know people will end up really upset if he chooses to do something that is not popular. If anyone else was going to be the 44th president, Hollywood and the media wouldn’t put so much effort into the hype into the next president. Is it really because he’s the first Black to be elected? Are we Americans really that backwards racists to put so much focus on the color of his skin and not who the man is?

Let me make this clear, I voted for Obama, and I’m also a registered Republican voter.  I voted for Bush in the 2000 campaign but I voted for Kerry in 2004, and of course Obama last year. I’m extremely happy that Obama won, but for fucks sakes, they are placing Obama on a pedestal so damn high you’ll need the fucking Hubble telescope to see him. The media at large (all typical Hollywood liberal democrats) are regarding Obama as the next messiah who will magically fix this mess that the last administration left us in.

As I type this, I’m watching HBO having Obama’s Inaugural Celebration, an overly stuffed show of top stars and performers gone completely apeshit introducing celebrity after celebrity every three minutes at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC (on a side note, it seems funny seeing the Lincoln Memorial since I’ve been playing Fallout 3 for the past month).  Anyway, the point is that if anyone but Obama won the election nothing like this would be even considered. No hype, no parade of celebrities, no endless bullshit.  Hell if Hillary won, they wouldn’t be doing this, along with all the hype that’s been going on since the night of the election last year.

So is it really all because that Obama is (arguably) a black man? Are we, as an apparently color blind society, supposed to look past this superficial fact? I mean you rarely hear anyone mention the fact he is a black man; perhaps once or twice on Leno.  However I find this overly disturbing on many fronts.  Obama is seen as the next Messiah as if he will magically fix everything that’s wrong with America, placing him so high on a pedestal that everyone will be MORE disappointed and upset than we were with the Bush administration when eventually Obama administration does fail at something or cause some sort of controversy.

Secondly there’s so much of this silent emphasis that he’s the first black president.  Sure that’s great, I have no problem with the fact he’s black (or any racial background for that matter; I’m Hispanic my self) but this dosen’t automatically make him a better person for president; indifferent from the fact he is better person, but him being a black person isn’t why.  After all there are plenty of black people who are complete douche bags in this world.  If we truly have gotten over our racial tendencies, then the fact Obama belongs to a so-called “minority” we should be completely indifferent to that, like the fact that Hillary is a woman, and McCain is an old white man.

If I was Obama, I’d feel incredibly embarrassed. Even he himself has said that the times a head will be difficult, and things might not work out as we want to and we will have to make sacrifices. So Obama has a much more realistic approach to what lies ahead, but the media certainly dosen’t; as if the media ever did.  Mass media is all about hype, ratings and making money.  The fact that this inaugural celebration is on HBO means they are making money off of this. But then again I don’t think all of these celebrities are being paid to perform in this; there are WAY too many celebrities for HBO to pay them to perform.  I haven’t noticed if yet if any of this is being done for charity, as HBO has not mentioned if it is and I’ve been watching this for about an hour now.

Anyway, I’m happy Obama will be president, and I’m happy to see the world at large is excited to see him coming into power after the fiasco the last administration was.  It does help all of us that we are in better morale for our country, if not the entire world. But come on! This is getting too much.

Windows 7 beta

Yep I got it, and installed it and first impression is…. It’s vista v1.5

But it has a Linux feel to it where every user has thier own folder on the hard drive that everything comes from. There is no direct access to the “root” of the hard drive, at least not from Windows Explorer.  You can still drop into cmd commands line and use good old DOS commands to navigate around. Suprisingly there’s not much sitting in the root when you do a directory list.    Intresting.

All users are given a basic set of folders to save typical stuff, movies/videos, music, images, and everything else ends up in “downloads.”

First thing I tried to do is run Second life.  No go, the viewer complained that the drivers were bad or not installed. But considering that Win7 started up with the Areo desktop, I’m quite sure that it’s not running genertic VGA drivers.  Problem is I haven’t figured out where to go in Win7 to check out my hardware settings, and see what it’s using for drivers, if any.  I’m also assuming that since Second Life is a OpenGL software, Win7 beta didn’t come with that installed (nor any widely used 3rd party apps like Flash or quicktime)

So I’m going to attempt to install the 64-bit vista drivers for my nvidia card (on my 2nd PC).  Wow! The installer I downloaded from nvidia actually shows “Widows 7 [64-bit] display drivers” even though I chose the vista 64-bit drivers from the website. But as most people know, nvidia (and ATI) use the same download file package that works with nearly all thier video cards. So the install worked just fine no obvious problems or error messages and it wants to reboot (though we were past needing to reboot our PCs?.. well it still happens in linux)

Hot damn Second Life viewer is running! Seem to run just fine.. but I really do hate it when the SL viewer assuming im a total noob and it pops up all these message about how to do shit I’ve known how to do for the past 5 years, and displays all these lame hud controls.  But it’s running just fine, as per-usual nothing weird yet.  Excpet that the top of the window, as well as the menu bar at the bottom is transparent so I can see the desktop behind it.  Keep in mind I didn’t bother diving into Windows Vista (except I did play with the beta years ago) so this might be all old-hat Aero stuff.

I’m also wondering if I need to install any chipset/motherboard drivers for Win7 yet everything seems to be runing fine and smooth. Sound works, ethernet worked right after the DVD install, so I’m assuming I don’t need to.  At least not until nvidia comes up with something new.

The install of Widows 7  (64bit) is over 12gb on your hard drive, with over 66,000 files and nearly 40,000 directories.  The DVD .iso you download is only 3.15gb so it does expain quite a bit.  The 32bit .ISO is slightly smaller at 2.34gb, and about 700mb difference.

I’m still lost as to where to find the common things I want to do to change things here and there.  Like where the hell is windows update so I can manually check my self? One of the things I’ve always hated about new versions of windows is once you’ve learned and gotten used to all the newaunces and esoteric settings, and locations on where to find things in the old version of windows… the new one totaly changes this around, while claiming at the same time that “it’s easier and more user friendly” than previous versions.