OpenLife Update: Rough Spots Still

By Guest Writer Mojobox Kane
Location: OpenLife, at Juliana Fivestar’s Freebies in Tune Valley

Ain’t I lovely? OpenLife has been very laggy today. I kept trying on a package of freebie skins, and I ended up looking like the Frankenstein monster remade by Beeble Baxter.

Skins and my fetching looks aside, there are improvements already in my OpenLife experience. The teleporting works, but I do not have these in OpenLife:

• SLURL links (they take you to the Second Life grid)
• Search (they take you to the Second Life grid)
• Home (Thomas Wolfe was right). When I tried to go home to escape some gray-avatar lag, I fell like Icarus into a patch of open water called The Black Sea
• Money. It all seems like play money, since there is no connection between OpenLife Credits and a real-world currency. I do know that between logins today I somehow lost 9,000 of my 10,000 credits.

I was able to upload some SL textures to OpenLife so now I have blue jeans. And now that teleporting works…I have found Tune Valley and a life-raft called a freebie shop. No more barefoot Mojo.


Stylin’ shoes, no? Shut your mouth.

I can say this much: OpenLife will be a boon to content creators on the run from SL or simply looking to find a world that enables them to employ their SL skills and textures. True, you gotta rebuild from scratch complex content, but this virtual world could become an open-source paradise. When I made my jeans, I gave Ms. Fivestar a pair so she can give them away again.

For free. Just like the best things in real life.

Cybersex also followed us quickly to OpenLife. In trying to find some male-walk anims, I came across a pile of free animations. Many of them are sexual from their names and a few have “Gor” in the name. Oh, GREAT. the Goreans will be here, too.

I continually relogged in an attempt to get my skin and hair correct. I did find, by randomly teleporting, a region called Hell that is decidedly idyllic for a new and half-made world. That’s me in the picture..the little cloud of gas.


Later I tried again from a much faster connection. I remained a ball of gas for some time. I managed to meet another OpenLife resident, who noted that he was quite new to it and Second Life. The latter, to him, seems to be “one big storefront.” More on that later. I fear that too in SL; we’ll see if OpenLife can remain a creative frontier for long.