Introducing Second Life

What is Second Life?

Second Life is an online 3D game providing access to virual worlds. A player can create their own fully customisable avatar which is able to interact with the worlds. A player can also create their own objects using the in-built 3D modelling tool, which they may share with others.

Second Life's hierarchical system of objects is as follows:

• Main Grid - The main area holding everything
• Regions - residing in the Main Grid. A region pertains to a specific server and is made up of multiple prims
• Prims - objects in-game are made up of prims (primitive types - geometrical shapes)

For these next few weeks, we'll be tasked to delve deeper into Second Life and understand and create our own objects as an end-goal.

The Basics

Downloading the client and creating an account was a breeze but upon logging in for the first time, the first immediate reaction was the amount of lag you experience. The objects were taking ages to load, so I headed over the the Preferences and reduced the quality to Low and increased the "Drawing Distance" slightly for the default Low value. Doing so resulted in good gameplay over better graphics and bandwidth usage.

The controls are very easy to understand, being quite similar to a typical 3rd person game. The addition of being able to fly always everywhere was also quite welcome. I started by changing my avatar's physical appearance.

After changing the appearance, I started to get more familiar with all the game's interfaces. How to handle objects, add friends, make landmarks, switch worlds and such.

Exploring

Being quite into planes and any type of vehicle myself, I decided to find out if I can drive one. After some searching and a few pointers from fellow players I learned that you can own a plane/vehicle by buying it for the Linden in-game money. The vehicles are advanced prims built by other players. When you buy one, you can keep it in your inventory and "use" it when you like. I also found that there are areas which let you test these vehicles, so I went to specific world as advised by another player.

The in-game objects that lets you create a temporary new plane, gives you an object which need to wear. This object is the controls for the plane and needs to be unequipped after each flight.

I also explored many world at random and found some pretty neat concepts such as: Central Dublin, multiple castles, paradise islands and even space/stellar worlds.

Conclusion

All in all, the game is quite enjoyable with a great concept but somewhat lacking in execution. The lag, unexpected crashes and multitude of buggy features tend to overshadow the game. In combating the latency issues I ran the game on both Windows 7 and the latest distribution of Ubuntu. On Windows 7, the game was quite stable but a bit laggy, while on Ubuntu, the viewer crashed every time I switched a world but on the other hand was less laggy (using same settings). I still have to get round to building objects, which I think will be even more interesting.