“I suppose it is just a matter of time until someone leasing a $100/mo island gets kicked from FB for pseudonym use. Then CP will have to figure out the naming privacy thing.”
They already figured that out and added the option to recover CP accounts by their stored email addresses.
“I’m not sure CP is that much better than OpenSim and the price points and limits certainly aren’t. So, once the new wears off, like Blue Mars, we’ll see how it works for people.”
One of the reasons for lag in SL/OpenSim is the concept of “prim count”, which is utterly useless as a metric to determine the weight of a scene. CP uses triangle and material count instead, which actually makes sense. The fact that SL’s system can be gamed on paper (by multiplying prim count with the maximum possible triangle count per prim) makes it worse, not better.
The other advantage of CP is its use of web technologies instead of viewers or plugins. No other virtual world can be logged into so easily.
Sure, some features have yet to be added (e.g. body shape sliders, group permissions, asset transfer, marketplace), but none of these is particularly hard to figure out. Bringing the client into the browser was the hardest part.
There’s still “View Facebook profile…” in all our contacts.
Even if that were gone, there’s still a missing guarantee from Cloud Party on not flipping a switch a certain way to remove pseudonymity again.
Pseudonymity as a feature is a guarantee, not something incidental of playing with options.
“- Use a fake FB account with a pseudonymous display name.”
The problem with this is the fact anyone would consider this an ‘option’ Cloud Party is providing.
If you believe it’s an option they’re providing, what stops Facebook from thinking the same that Cloud Party is complicit in violation of their policies?
Endangering Facebook accounts, creations in Cloud Party, and possibly endangering the platform itself isn’t proper support of pseudonymity.
“They already figured that out and added the Socialverse appoption to recover CP accounts by their stored email addresses.”
To what end? Not like you can log in with your CP account even if you can be associated with it without Facebook Connect.
But it is very good news they’re at least storing one-half of what’s needed for authentication now. Now, they just need to support password authentication through those emails without Facebook, and signing up in the first place without Facebook.
I often contradict myself. I need to keep my second personality in check before he hands the keys to #3 or #4. In any case, my point for Amanda should have been clearer:
Let’s talk metaphors for a second. After all, didn’t Neal Stephenson’s characters talk about the absolute need to avoid “breaking the metaphor” in Snow Crash?
If you mean “world” in a planetary sense, Linden Lab invented one: continents of contiguous parcels and an archipelago of islands. But if no one is there, how is that a “world” in the sense of its social meaning, unless you wish to RP last-avatar-on-earth adventures?
An irony of SL now is that if you do want to mingle with others, you usually have to TP to find a crowd, so it might as well have CP’s metaphors of islands.
Those who prefer playing under a nym need SL’s sort of environment. Many educators don’t: our RL names are just fine on a CP or OpenSim avatar.
A few have invented pseudonymous FB accounts for CP because they really cannot have their RL identity linked to anything called “Party” at FB, even though their RL data is in their SL profiles. FB labors under stereotypes as pernicious as SL’s: college kids posting drunk party pictures.
@Masami, try another ride in SL. I’m going to do so again with a favorite vehicle and all the options ticked for good photos. Right now, things for a low-lag avatar in a low-lag vehicle show vast improvements over my last outing.
All i know is my personal experience!
That tells me, that now, Sl is an amazing place tob e, due to the much better cross sims, conbined with new generation viewers that makes it look amazing!
That let me host 7!!! full sims of each 45000 prims, for 0 ZERO USD month, easly, stable and with much more content and options to create new one that any other, OSGRID!
That Kitely allow Me to load and host 1 of my OSgrid regions, for free to any to visit as well!
That i dont need to be on facebook to log in in any of these worlds!
And that there are easy ways for any to have its own virtual World for free, see Diva distro, Sim on a stick, New worlds!
So Welcome to the metaverse Cloud, but make sure you do not forget that if your target is facebook users then you just lost a possible client already!
“the limitations are more to do with the speed of anything complex running using WebGL. And I think they are right to impose such limits – it is necessary because of their architecture.”
The fact that CP is considered inferior because it imposes polygon limits is absurd. SL wouldn’t crawl along with single-digit frame rates for so many people if similar limits were imposed there. We all know that the prim count/land impact metric can be abused, but the result is not a better-looking world. The result is that many people keep their pre-mesh viewers and refuse to upgrade, because all the high-detail eye candy is useless at 5 fps.
With the current polygon budget of a $15 Cloud Party island an experienced game level designer could build an entire city – and it would look better than anything in SL.