Wandering Yaffle 1 - About Face
Second Life begins with a short orientation course that is well worth the few minutes it takes, it's clear from the outset that driving your Second Life avatar is a complex process.
When you choose a game name, you choose it in two parts. The first name is a free choice, while the second name is a surname you choose from a list. As long as no one else has chosen your first name with that surname you're laughing.
I am Wandering Yaffle. I wanted to be Professor Yaffle after the old wooden book-end woodpecker in Bagpuss but someone beat me to it. Hardly surprising.
The next step is to customise the appearance of your little computer surrogate. The options for customisation are vast, every part of the model has loads of sliders to make it fatter, thinner, rounded or more pointy. With such massive scope it's not too far-fetched to imagine you could create a reasonable facsimile of your own mug, should you so desire.
I spent about two hours tweaking Yaffle's features:
...and in the end I had to admit that it was never going to look like me. Facial recognition is one of the most sensitive parts of human perception and it's never going to be easy to fool. So Yaffle will have to remain 'inspired' by me. The film of the book. With less of a beergut.
Of course, not everyone in Second Life wants to look like their real world counterparts:
When you're done rearranging your face you start here:
...which I believe is called 'The Boardwalk'. That's someone called Killa Doll Gala Phoenix:
...I didn't speak to her.
The Second Life engine is a bit rough, in my opinion. The animations are jerky and it's hard to trade a decent framerate with reasonable image quality. Moving around is stilted and awkward and has none of the slick and seamless quality of There. In a side by side comparison, Second Life actually limits some of the immersive qualities to be had the social sim through constantly reminding you of its technical flaws. Wandering around the boardwalk I was forever bumping into things and falling off things and swearing under my breath.
Oo! Oo! I forgot to say that I can fly! Second Life lets you do this by default:
...rather than making you earn the ability a la City of Heroes or else put your hand in your pocket for the necessary equipment, a la There. It's not a bad way to get around. I found a signpost that told me about a hoverboard park to the south and made that a little short-term goal. I used to like the hoverboards in There so I flew off to check it out.
This is the basic hoverboard:
...which cost me 50 of the 200 bucks I appear to have started out with. There's a significant difference between the way stuff is traded in Second Life and the way it's traded in There. In There an item is treated as a physical object that you pay for the right to own. If you want two hoverboards you have to stump up the cash each time. In Second Life the scheme seems to be about Blueprints. For my $50 I didn't buy /a/ hoverboard, I bought the ability to sit and make hoverboards all day and any time I like. How the world is prevented from being cluttered with mountains of junk, I'm not sure. Maybe that's why the framerate is so lousy.
Flying the hoverboard:
...actually makes for better screenshots than it does a play experience. If the engine's performance is rotten walking around then flying at high speed atop a hoverboard is a nightmare. Several times I got stuck just hanging in mid-air and had to destroy and rebuild the thing to continue. Somehow I think the Second Life experience is going to be less about racing around on fantasy vehicles than There.
No, Second Life must be about something else and the clue to what that might be is in the huge number of custom objects that are lying around the place. Second Life allows you to alter almost anything creatively, even down to the scripting code of individual objects. At first glance, it appears that Second Life is about co-operatively and colelctively building the game world, but I guess I'll figure more out about that aspect things as I go.
