Second Life (Virtual Life)

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
There are two kinds of membership. The basic membership is free. The prime membership is about $10/month. With the prime membership, you are allowed to own land, and you're given a stipend every month of about $3-4.

Basic Members can own land, too.
The exception is that Premium Membrs can own Mainland, whereas the Basic Members can only Land in private Sims, i.e. Land which was bought by others directly from Linden Labs.

Also Premium Members don´t have to pay upkeep for 512 m² of the land they own.


The interesting thing about SL is also that you can even create complete game systems with your own rules, for example RPG-Systems (which for example is used by the large gorean community [which could be dubbed to be partly RPG, partly lifestlyle ])
One of the successful people in SL even created a new game called Tringo (a mix of Bingo and Tetris) that was recently bought by game companies and is ported to game consoles outside of SL.

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Proteus_MST


Basic Members can own land, too.
The exception is that Premium Membrs can own Mainland, whereas the Basic Members can only Land in private Sims, i.e. Land which was bought by others directly from Linden Labs.

That's probably new...in the last six months. Either that, or it's a wrinkle I missed.

[Proteus_MST]

Probably the latter.

Linden Labs normally doesn´t openly mention it because (of course) they like their members to get premium acounts (as it earns them money).

It works much like subleasing.
The estate companie (for example azure islands) buys a large portion of land from LL, usually a whole sim.
Then they zone it, usually into public land (that isnß´t sold and only serves the purpose of giving the land sold more Prims per m² and also as streets for allowing the land owners access to their parcels [in contrast to mainland where it may happen that your parcel is surounded by "Do not enter" barriers and you can only get there by teleport ) and in to commercial and residential zones that contain parcels for sale.

You buy parcels from the company and are entered as owner of the parcel, giving you every right on the land.
You can erect buildings on it and can as well as resell or lease the land to other persons.

The company however ist still entered as the estate owner, meaing that they still might kick you out if you violate the rules, for example by buying a mall in a residential area or opening a BDSM club in a PG sim
The cost for the upkeep of the land is also paid to the company and not to Linden Labs.

AFAIK most of the land owners in SL own their land this way and only a small percentage of the users that have their own land are remium members.

[Provost Harrison]

Another bleeding geek haven...

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison
Another bleeding geek haven...

Wow. I just clicked on the link. They're up to 4 million members now. When I found the site last fall, they hadn't yet reached 1 million.

$1,530,170 in U.S. dollars has changed hands in the last 24 hours.

[Provost Harrison]

What?! These people ought to discover that there is a real world out there where you can meet real people...

[Zkribbler]

True. But they can neither fly nor teleport. They cannot breathe underwater. And when you shoot them in the head, they don't flop over, only to bounce up a few minutes later.

[Gibsie]

I agree with Zkribbler's "shoot them in their ****ing heads" proposal.

[Koyaanisqatsi]

It's been hot for a while in some circles (my advisor held meetings in game for a while) but I'm still somewhat underwhelmed. If you have the time to put into learning and playing with the scripting language you can do some interesting things, but otherwise I've never understood how it was any different than the Palace, etc.

On the other hand, the scripting can get fun...

[Provost Harrison]

I'll go and get a gun then. Should be a doddle in Lewisham or Woolwich

[Proteus_MST]

Guns are easy to get, even as Freebies

I even have a Nuke in my handbag

[FrostyBoy]

I tried it out lastnight, kept crashing, I suspect a graphical glitch.

It is quite laggy to me, and the controls are stupid (actually its the animations of the models that look stupid).

I think this world would function better if everything were procedural, like the upcoming Spore.

Will try it one last time tonight, see what I can get out of it. I do believe on some level that this idea has good potential to grow into something very useful in the distant future. Currently we are all living in a 2D Internet, the future could very well be a 3D internet with something similar to what you see in SL.

[Proteus_MST]

The problem with the lags has very probably something to do with the area where you rezzed.
Upon the first start you rezz in a newbie region where you aren´t the only person that starts there.
The more persons in a paticular region the more lags you have (if it is more than 50 persons it gets laggier and laggier)

It is also influenced by the total numbers of users that are logged in into SL.
If you log in in the evening times (servertime) then many american active users are logged in as well as many european users, so that the system slows wdown or even crashes (if the number of active users is miore than 30k it begins to get problematic).

Better try it during the morning till noon times (servertime) if you can as that´s the time when the number of users is still moderate.

The number opf users grew by 200% during the last 3 months. I think they have just problems keping up with installing new hardare.

[Jon Miller]

I think it is a haven for sexual and social deliquents.

JM

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
I think it is a haven for sexual and social deliquents.

JM

CooooOOooOooOooOOooollll