Missed Chances – The Sims3

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3 Years ago…

I was reading about Stuart Warf’s rezday post now that he is 3 years old. I was starting to add my memories of the grid three years ago and it turned out to be a post in itself. So here it is … oh, and happy rezday Stuart.

3 years ago … it was more like the servers would break on Friday night or the weekend and wouldn’t be repaired until Monday. Sims would go down and not come up without linden intervention. Think “Relay for Life” as the main event happens on weekends with a track that covers multiple sims. People would just wait for hours hoping the sim would come back up so they could walk. Large amounts of content rezzed on sims would disappear (rarely) for unknown reasons. Logging in would reveal that inventory was missing when it wasn’t. Grid attacks were so destructive that the Lindens would have to disable scripts grid-wide until a resolution could be found. Push attacks occured so often that the best advice was to sit down to avoid the effect. You couldn’t change clothes or attachments while setting down. Weekly die-in parties would occur every wednesday. A grid-wide rolling restart would take a couple of hours, successively. Meaning you could track which sim was next to go down by looking at the ones that were currently offline (red). Sometimes there were multiple patches within the same day. The lindens would have regular town hall meetings and encourage people to give input via skype and/or text. Teleport hubs were removed, thus causing value of nearby property to decrease drastically and the prediction of boxes all over the mainland to create enclosed environments. People avoided groups of green dots on mini-maps to avoid lag. Now people gravitate towards them. Bad geometry wiki was the place to go for scripting advice, but then was taken offline and moved to various websites. Now we have the wiki back and its for more than just scripting ( http://secondlife.com/badgeo ). Hamlet Au was Hamlet Linden and would have yearly events to walk accross the mainland. Today it’s just a little to big to walk the distance. Promises of havok upgrade was a joke for many years. Dazzle and Windlight didn’t exist. Linked prims (joints) still existed (but buggy) and were primarily used for windchimes, revolving doors, and tire swings. People often knew their neighbors on a more personal level when living in the same sim on the mainland. First time land buyers could purchase a 512 sq. m. partcel for 512 L$. The weekly income for premium accounts was 500 L$ (mine still is) and basic accounts got 50 L$ as long as they logged in within the past week. Money trees were a great way to drive in traffic. The lindens paid dwelling bonuses (L$) based on the amount of traffic generated each week. The rating system was phased out since the lindens stopped paying for people to be rated high due to abuse. Flexies, Megaprims didn’t exist. Glow pre existed as “bloom”, but worked in a different way with fullbright objects. Lights existed a bit differently (on or off along with fullbright and based on prim color) but often caused crashes. People were just starting to figure out how to hack the clients god-mode to track where anyone was on the map. If you were friends with people, you couldn’t hide your location on the map back then either. Groups were limited to just 10. Snapshots sent via email would also appear on the main second life web page. The windows client still had a video recorder built into it to make uncompressed AVI movies. You were limited to 10 votes to put on issues that you felt need to be addressed. You could move your vote to other issues. A police blotter gave generic information about social griefing on the grid. The price of a private sim was 1000 US$ and 195/month. The color/texture picker didn’t exist 3 years ago. The list just goes on…

Hanging out with my sis

After talking with my sister about creating content for IMVU, I talked her into checking out SL. I invited her over to the public orientation island so that I could walk through the help stations with her. We met a nice person, Stormie Easterwood who came along to help her out as well. It’s a bit awkward for her to walk around, but she is getting the hang of it. We spent a good while chatting with each other while setting on a sign.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Orientation Island Public using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Buddha Layering

Flix Saiman found an interesting Buddha at Valkyrie Manor in Lime. He explained to me that he first through it was a sculpty until he took a closer look. It turned out to be 39 layers of contoured textures setting in front of the next to give the appearence of a 3D object. It was a bit impressive to look at how it was put together. Alpha clipping didn’t seem to be much of a problem either. We could get about a 90 degree viewing angle before the Buddha became distorted. The creator is listed as Grocon Emoto.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Lime using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Fiamma Blue for sale

Mastermind Parx notified quite a few people that he was selling his Formal/Casual/Urban clothing store for men for 40K L$ OBO. The store was new: no traffic, income, or user base. Land was purchased yesterday. 45 items would come with the store along with PSD files. All clothing appeared to be created by two people: Armani Pasterelli and Paulie Cinquetti. Mastermind claimed that both accounts were his alts and had been deleted. Paulie is a popular person on the teen grid from what I found through google and had attempted to sell a business for 250 US$ last year. The store looks great, and I had considered going into clothing before. If the alts had responded, I probably would have invested.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Liberty Hills using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]