3 Years Ago…
On May the 2nd 2006 I decided to ahead and create an account for Second Life and join in the fun of podcast scene entering Second Life. While a lot of people from the early days have now left the virtual worlds and some joke about the world, probably because they just didn’t get it (which sadly seems to be the case even in some shows I listen to) the core community from the early days are still around and I think it just shows the strength of the podcasting community. Why I am talking about this is because a couple of weeks ago at the ninetieth episode of The Podmafia Podcast we were reminiscing about how we came into the world.
Some of the people came in via TWiT when Leo “Pruneface Spatula” Laporte came in after discovering the world and promptly left and never came back, he seems to do that alot with communities.
Others came after Adam Curry of Podshow (then Mevio) was touting about his castle in the world and talking about all his ideas to integrate podcasting into Second Life and the sense of excitement about this virtual world and the endless possibilities. I was one of those people, Now while I do think he is an ass now, listening to all the stuff happening in this virtual world inspired me and made me want to be a part of that world. I also think that i wasn’t the only one who got inspired.
Looking at other people in the podcasting scene, some went off and became not only builders, but successful builders who are able to earn enough money to work just doing builds in Second Life or at least be able to help pay for their time and effort in the world. Others have successful stores selling gadgets and devices to help improve their second lives.
Looking back at everything that has happened in this virtual world it makes me smile to see how far we’ve come in just 3 years. I can’t think of anything that has changed so drastically in just three years. I can remember the number of accounts when I joined, it was 200,000. I think the highest concurrency was like 15,000 maybe a little more or less. I can remember the days when we couldn’t log in to SL for a day due to SL going broke at 20,000 concurrency.
Actually, another thing that used to be a regular occurrence was that EVERY Wednesday SL would shut down and the podcasters would get together and we would have a die-in. AKA we would be booted off SL and not be able to return for 5 hours. Now people get annoyed not being able to log in for an hour. Granted its unscheduled and therefore a pain, but in retrospect, it’s not as bad as it used to be.
SL is far better and far more stable than it was a year ago.
Also 3 years ago you couldn’t skip across the island your house is on and see my flying pig and mole. I can’t imagine living in such barbaric times.
Happy rezzday! When you’re old enough to shave, let us know!!
Happy Rezzday
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…
[...] 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 [...]