Grids Status Reports

In five worlds now this gal is such a grid hopper. Here is a rundown on what I see as October begins.

SL seems to still be going strong sales wise. There were a few dire days there but they were made up for by stellar ones, so stable seems to be a correct term -- from my point of view anyway. There are still venues opening at every turn and plenty of folks sitting on their mouse buttons trying to get in at the FIRST opportunity.

Inworldz's stats are good. I notice over 300 people online often these days. FrightFest (a Founder supported event) is in the works and yours truly has her build almost complete -- some poseball additions and I am done.

I am still not happy that materials haven't arrived as promised. June was the date and now we are looking at "the end of the year". More on that as you get further down the page.

Avination? Well statistically it isn't looking good. The monthly log in figures are going down. I am not keeping a daily count or anything but I can note which direction things are heading in. I wasn't in Avination during the heydays, but from a newcomer's perspective it seems like the grid has peeked. It may have a resurrection and I hope it does. There have been many good choices on the grid. Perhaps it is meant to be a place for more closed systems like schools and organizations. There is honestly nothing I want to buy there -- and that is not a good sign in my book.

Virtual Life is growing consistently and at a fairly rapid pace. There have been some folks leaving the building almost before arrival (well at least one that dropped noticeable  breadcrumbs) and there were a handful of folks that apparently came in the very beginning and left after a month  -- well THAT didn't make much sense. The rents are literally seven cents a week for a huge store and 300 prims -- so why not STAY. My head shakes a bit.

VL has a couple of things going for it. The grid owner is the programmer and is on top of things AND accessible. There are weekly grid meetings with everyone welcome and there are several folks working on things to make the grid "seem" bigger than it is -- gridwide hunts and a shopping venue. There is also at least one role play sim (maybe more). So a healthy start for a new grid.

The Great Canadian Grid has taken a very different path with free land for homes and free (huge, very nice and with 1000 prims - oh my!) shops. There ARE some issues of course. Tuesday one sim completely disappeared (well the land mass remained). It was back on the map by evening - perhaps before. I met someone during the excitement and he is now my new neighbor. A fellow builder, we can compare notes.


Now to be fair, it was a tough week on all the grids with Second Life being the winner in the momentary disaster department with the mesh server at LEA7 ceasing to function on ominous Tuesday. Having no idea that could even happen, it took awhile before clarity reigned and the region was restarted. The following day there was a long period of inaccessible database.

There were bizarre rollbacks on two other grids and particles were broken on another. Virtual life is not without issues.



On the PLUS SIDE, I discovered by chance that TGCG has MATERIALS enabled. Now Avination has stated they have materials but I cannot get them to stick. They do work perfectly in TGCG (none of the alignment problems of SL - so far anyway).

There are a few other mysterious phenomena that have appeared concerning importing mesh that has had material layers applied -- the maps seems to carryover in not the best of ways to the next grid. Since TGCG is the first OS grid that I know of to have materials more testing will be needed and workarounds found. Only the builders will care.

And a bit of news for musicians that  just came in  from TGCG:

if you play here unlike some grids...we are and made sure of before opening the doors that you our residents were protected...look up SOCAN...we at the GCG are licensed here for you to do whatever and play however
Hopefully the folks that need to know this will understand what it means!



Go forth.
Explore.