Miscellany

It has been more than a decade since the technical wiki has been updated. Given that it has been running a version of the even older UseMod wiki software all that time, I thought it was about time to remove that dependency and tidy things up a little.

It has been a few days now since the announcement that There, Inc. would be shifting effort almost entirely from providing the consumer service — running the world we’ve come to know and love, in other words — to working on the “technology platform”. I’ve seen a lot of strong reactions by others in forums and elsewhere: ranging between “the sky is falling” to “this is a tremendous opportunity for the membership”.

The sky has clearly not fallen, as yet, and we have been half-promised that the service will remain open for at least 90 days. I can still do the things I enjoy with the friends I’ve found here, so I’m certainly not on my way elsewhere as yet. This blog, the technical wiki, my There software and the Community Rapid Transit System aren’t going anywhere either.

I’m not as optimistic as some about the longer term future of the There world. Even if There, Inc. successfully refocus on platform development, I don’t foresee a time when that new platform will be reintegrated with what we have now; that’s just in the nature of “forked” development. We are more likely to see, for example, There, Inc.’s wonderfully expressive avatar technology in Half Life 3 in 2007 than we are to get any significant enhancements to the existing world in a few months time.

The reality is that this change has come about for hard commercial reasons: not enough members have joined the consumer service and spent real cash in-world to make it worth expending the significant effort required to continue actively enhancing it. What’s more, I can only guess that this must be quite definitively true; the figures must be such that There, Inc. didn’t see that situation as being likely to change in the foreseeable future.

We can hope that the cost/benefit equation is much closer to balance now, after re-deployment of many technical resources and (we understand) a significant round of layoffs. Maybe that will keep the world alive beyond the 90-day evaluation period; I certainly hope so. Whether the world survives or not, though, the commercial failure of There’s consumer service is a disappointment. As Dan Hunter says at Terra Nova:

… it can’t be good news for the development of virtual worlds beyond the typical D&D-inspired MMOGs.

See you in There… I hope.

Well, here we all are in V2.12 of There. A nice new starry sky above that island with the crater in it, a swing to sit in at iVillage, even a map of Motu Motu! I even quite like some of the new Tyr housing neighbourhoods, although the price is a little rich for me.

Of course, there are things I dislike too: this release sees draconian reductions in the permissions for sign and ThereDoc usage, for example. This is supposed to address lag and clutter but the downside is that a lot of interesting free-standing content in the world will die over the next day or so. I won’t duplicate my forum rants on this subject here, you’ll be glad to hear.

And then there are ignores, which are now not visible on your profile or on anyone else’s (they are still there in the XML, but the stylesheet doesn’t show them any more).

I have 14 avatars ignoring me at present (I won’t say people, because a lot of them are from a single person in multiple chained “fauxbies”) and it was beginning to look like I was a bad person. I didn’t go the route of hiding my shame by making my profile “buddies only”, though, because I want people to be able to find out a little about me if they meet me in-world. I’ve personally never met anyone objectionable enough to warrant an ignore; I guess I’ve been lucky so far.

My hope is that, now that your ignores aren’t displayed for everyone to see, at least some of the many people who seem to have protected their profiles because a few people have hit “ignore” on them will now go back to showing us all who they are.

The otherwise cool and unapproachable There_Monitor has apparently decided to take a vacation from her permanent spot on the side of the Caldera volcano (X=0, Y=0).

As you can see above, she is currently to be found (briefly, every couple of minutes) at Kangaroo Island off Ootay. New location, new clothes, and a daring lack of forcefield. Where will she be seen next?

I have reworked the archive hierarchy on this blog (again) to make it (even more) future-proof. One side-effect of this is that all the individual article links have changed. So much for “permalinks”.

My apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this; the good news is that it was a lot of work, so I am unlikely to do anything like that again soon.

There is something just a little Escher-like about this one. Maybe if we can get some Roman builder sets and enough people on hoverpacks, we can do a full version…

In which our hero visits There, a virtual world where it’s still sunny at 3am but you never seem to get a tan.

[Originally posted 20031111 to Technology Stir Fry.]

Welcome to iay@there, a repository for my musings on the virtual world of There. If you come across me in-world, you’ll find that my avatar goes by the badly-chosen name of iay.

Although I already have a blog covering my main interests, most of the posts appearing in iay@there will only be of interest to other Thereians. If I post something here that is of wider interest, I will also post a link in Technology Stir Fry.