Can't believe SL is still around. I've never used it but I remember when it was brand new it looked 10 years old. Scary stuff, and a licence to print money.
Something similar is DayZ. Total waste of time.
Ps - G'day, new user. Couldn't find an intro thread
Actually I remember getting into SL for a brief period of time (like a weekend) because a friend of mine told me it was "Like the Sims, but online!"
They lied.
Also my only memory of it was trying to build a house or something, and immediatly getting a memory overflow error despite having 4GB at the time, and this was back in the 32bit days.
Can't believe SL is still around. I've never used it but I remember when it was brand new it looked 10 years old. Scary stuff, and a licence to print money.
Something similar is DayZ. Total waste of time.
Ps - G'day, new user. Couldn't find an intro thread
The thing about SL and its graphics is that, on a really good machine, you can make the game(?) look beautiful. I'm going to sperg a bit, but if people are into art and shit, and they have computers that can handle the ungodly amount of memory it takes up, you can get some really nice screenshots. Of course, that also implies that you spent money on SL or had a sugardaddy or some shit who gave you money so you can have nice clothes.
Can't believe SL is still around. I've never used it but I remember when it was brand new it looked 10 years old. Scary stuff, and a licence to print money.
Something similar is DayZ. Total waste of time.
Ps - G'day, new user. Couldn't find an intro thread
There is one, but it's in the Off Topic section. You get access after a set number of posts and likes. Hang out and post for a short while and it doesn't take that long. Welcome to the site :-)
Second Life is sort of like Minecraft to me in that I see really cool things people have done with it, and I'm like "oh damn will you look at that," but the community is entirely too weird and diehard for me to ever go near it.
Trolling with the second life physics engine is fun.
So let me update this.
I kinda grew up on Second Life. When I was 14-17 I was pretty much constantly on Second Life, and I met two of my best friends on there. Even on SL though, we were introverts, but I have definite inside knowledge on the communities and workings.
Every now and again, I login and oldfag around about how different things are.
Maybe ill write you guys some stories on my break, but if anyone has an obvious questions, ask my and I can probably give an answer from a Residents perspective.
I was on second life for a very brief period of time before I realized I had to spend money to have any fun on there. I also had a shit connection but that didn't help. A lot of very pretty people there though. Also a lot of drama. Like the aforementioned child roleplaying etcetc Also a lot of mesh stealing and not stealing but reporting DMCA
Maybe I just hung out in the wrong places because most of the spots are empty. Like, events aside I have maybe seen 3-4 people at one time. The weirdest people I have seen so far are the duckfaced horse riders
Second life to me is just a place to look at really pretty people like jadezillas@tumblr
At that point I just quit second life and just followed their blogs
Welp that's my short story lmao o v o Maybe I'll come back when VR is more fleshed out or SL 2.0 comes out
You really hit the nail on the head here. Especially with the cliques, the ones you listed are exactly what I'd also consider the most major groups on SL as well.
While I explored SL I did have a fun time learning how to script and build. I made some pretty neat stuff (including some really obnoxious shit I made that I managed to crash a sim or two with) though it does take quite a while to learn. As a lot of people have mentioned, it's REALLY hard to just learn how to get around. It took me forever. I gave up twice before my friend and I really tried to figure it out.
I played SL on and off, especially when I had to drop off the grid I'd wipe my friend's list, leave for months and months (maybe even a year or two) then come back. I think it's safe to say I have some definite expertise when it comes to SL as well, I still have my oldest account that I revisited a couple months ago. It was so laggy I bailed within a few hours but I've gone ahead and fixed up my computer so I think it'll be easier if I want to try and pop on again.
Maybe I'll go take a look and really see if anything /has/ changed.
I first heard about Second Life when stumbling into an article about griefers. This particular incident involved someone using the sandbox to create an invisible “gatling gun”. The bullets were designed to teleport the player to a random location on the grid upon being struck. This person dropped a few of these “guns” into heavily populated areas, and the servers crashed due to the strain of loading so many teleports simultaneously. I decided to check it out just to see what kind of game it was. After a couple of days dicking around with the sandbox, I wrote the whole experience off as “boring” and uninstalled it.
Jump forward several years: An old friend of mine was having some personal IRL problems, and often used Second Life as an escape. Because this friend spent so much time there, that was the only reliable way of staying in touch. I signed up again for this reason and, long story short, was thrown headfirst into the wacky world of the furry subculture. This was also when I discovered that apparently people made a mint designing realistic sex organs to slap onto your avatar, and even more so if you scripted them to include animations. I'm sure your imagination will take care of the rest.
I've met people who sank hundreds of dollars into digital fursuits, hot-swappable phalli, really bad looking tattoos, BDSM-ish attire, and all kinds of stupid appliqués.
And then there's drama. Sweet mother of Quetzalcoatl, the drama.
But this short, scattered tale has a happy ending: we both moved on from SL, and my friend's issues did get sorted out. In the end, nothing was really taken from us, emotionally. I mostly look back on those days as a just another weird distraction from high school.
And with that, here's a few amusing articles relating to SL:
Oh sweet jesus Second Life. I have a strange personal experience with it. Hopefully this story doesn't reveal too much about my power level, but...
So I spent some time in Second Life years ago (not gonna say precisely when, just before they allowed actual .obj files to be uploaded, all the furry heads were made out of like 45 primitives strategically placed.) I did this because I was obligated to by a class assignment. I had a Fine Arts course focusing in Digital Arts, specifically alternative printing. This was a higher end course, mind you, like a 300 or 400 level course, not a 100 or 101. The professor was... interesting.
An older student I looked up to who went through the same course described the professor better than I can with words in a webcomic:
This is 100% Accurate. I have more "Alternative Print" stories with this professor to horrify some other day.
Anyways, my professor got it through her mind that Second Life was the wave of the future. Maybe not specifically Second Life, but the general idea is that the internet of tomorrow wasn't going to be flat, simple html websites, but processor and bandwidth intensive complex virtual worlds, that would be universally adopted over our means of communications of the past. And we, as young artists, should become familiar with this new means of reaching people with our art.
So, for something like a month, month and a half, we were to just make accounts, explore and experiment with Second Life. Get to know the *shudder* culture, learn the tools on how to create and texture stuff, get invested in it. Then we were to produce some artwork based on our experience there, which was going to be "published" in Second Life in a virtual art gallery!
It was as stupid as it sounds. To elaborate, this wasn't a 3D sculpting course - this was an "Alternative Printing Methods" course, meaning you'd take digitally created art and instead of just printing it on paper you'd transfer it to different mediums, such as woodblocks or silks or sublimate it onto something metal or whatever. Because of this, the focus of the course was on 2D artwork - not 3D modeling. The professor herself was not familiar (except with the very, VERY basics) of 3D modeling or animation, other professors were in charge of that.
What this ultimately meant was that the assignment's final form was taking some artistic photography or digital painting or whatever, and applying it as a texture to a primitive rectangle or cube or whatever in Second Life. Some of the students made (or bought with Lindenmoneys) some fancy frames to put around the primitive rectangle with texture, or tried to break up the image into layers and put each layer onto a different primitive to create depth or any number of simple experiments, but in the end we all sat around computers looking at very low resolution version of our highly detailed work designed to be viewed flatly; Second life wasn't (and I assume, today is not) a very optimized game engine - its laggy and slow and doesn't like it when people upload big fuck textures, so most people were having to scale down their 3000x3000 paintings photographs, whatever, into 256x256 or 512x512 textures. Meaning part of the "experience" of the internet as it shall be in the future was being able to look at your paintings and what not from different angles, like you could in a real gallery, sure, but that in general everything looked like ass in comparison to the original, high resolution .tif file. I guess this was part of the experience?
At the end of our assignment, the class had a roundtable critique / discussion of our experience in Second Life, working with it as a new means to get our art out in the world, etc. etc. The majority of the class hated the experience and thought the thing was rubbish, some were on the fence and thought it was a neat program to dick around with, but not practical as the heir to "our current internet" (I remember other students opening web page Rembrandt galleries on the class projector and showing how easy it was to browse a web page with high resolution images as compared to navigating 3D space with horrible SL controls and lag and talking about how fewer resources both bandwidth and processing wise it took), and a couple students (the particularly... artistic ones), were enthralled with the program and converted lifelong members of the community - EXCEPT that, they too, did not see it as how the internet will evolve. Though a few saw it had some potential or use, universally, every student had come to the conclusion that outside of novelty, Second Life (or the program to come after it) couldn't serve the communicative functions any better than the way our current internet tools do.
The professor was visibly distraught. She bargained and pleaded with us, attempting to make us see things from her view - ignore the technical limitations of bad controls, slow internet speeds, low resolution texture caps, those are technical limitations, and those will be solved! The ideas behind it, the concept that one day our communication tools will all be integrated into a single virtual space with near infinite possibilities, that's what we should be focused on! Through most of the final critique day, when she wasn't arguing this idea's case she was looking around, extremely quiet, with a mixture of self-embarrassment and disappointment in us - We just didn't get it. Next year, when I poked my head in on those classes, I don't think I saw them explore Second Life again.
Anyone else remember the "my ponies hate you now" guy? Dude who played a (girl, natch) bunny on SL while also pretending to be a girl playing the girl bunny?
The Goreans (Picture a shitty, budget Conan written by a coked-out L. Ron Hubbard, with the book being 95% dirty rape-slave sex, and 5% run-on sentences. That's the world of Gor, for you.)
It's such a shame because while the graphics have improved significantly, most peoples' initial thoughts on SL are about how bad the graphics are.
I used to make a lot of pretty avatars specifically to screenshoot them and put them on Tumblr because I was a wannabe SL fashion blogger. (Yes, that is a thing that exists.)
As a few others in this thread have said, SL has a lot of tools, and some of them are fun to play around with. Now, I'm not much of an artist, but being able to play with the lighting and the depth of field or whatever was pretty fun. I wish that the community wasn't so shitty and/or creepy, though. Because if you're on SL solely because you just like making pretty things, it has some merit. Just don't deal with the people.
One comment on the video pointed out the dissonance in how these are old people using avatars of young and "sexy" models to play as. Another pointed out said dissonance.
lmao all the decrepit voices that come out of these "hot woman" models, just lmfao forever
One comment on the video pointed out the dissonance in how these are old people using avatars of young and "sexy" models to play as. Another pointed out said dissonance.
Check out this video at the 5:00 mark for a perfect example of this.
(The whole video is great though, I like the part with the super pretentious dragon avatar.)
