Yeah, and that’s exactly why Metaplace was a total failure. Just like everything else that Raph Koster has worked on since UO days. Sex sells, prudery does not. Who needs that enormous creative potential if you can’t be a sexual human being in an online world?

https://alpha.metaplace.com/wiki/index.php/Developer_Overview
https://alpha.metaplace.com/wiki/index.php/Client_Writing

I could say the same thing about SL. 6ft tall blonde whores with bling? It’s like playing on a Barbie website, only the vaginas and tits are viewable.

Amanda, you can’t evaluate Metaplace by what you *see*, you have to look at the tools and think about what people are going to build with them. If no one adopts the tools and builds things then it will be a bust. If Flash technology and browsers don’t advance then it will also be a bust (but I consider the probability of this to be close to zero) One thing I have seen already is that the task of building PvP and D&D type games in the world is going to be much easier (I still think about what a long march to nowhere the Simcast project in SL was). There don’t seem to be any serious limits on what pixel artists and scriptors can do (Lua is a great scripting language). Like SL, it all depends on what the users do with the tools they are given.

If they do that, SL may go the way of the dodo. It’s been said before but MP offers content creation and it will be offering a 3d setup like SL does soon enough, and more than likely with less resources than what SL requires.

SL is a dying dinosaur, the only groups it will appeal to in the end are furries and sexual deviants (oxymoron, I know.)

Though as much as I knock SL, you do have to give it credit, it did do what many failed to do before. IE, relevant. But since Linden Labs decided to not move forward, and is actually going in reverse, plus a crappy buggy client that gets worse and more bloated with each release, even if MP offers a fraction of what SL offers when it comes to avatar creation, people will deal if they can create what they want. Which is something that SL did get right and many of its alternatives got horribly wrong.

Also, @metaplastered, I’d say it’s better off than opensim due to the fact the servers don’t crash if you create a basic object.

My gripe with OS is the fact with all the knowledge they have now how to make a grid, and a networked gaming environment, instead of rewriting from scratch and making something new, they’re just going to mimick an unstable and shoddy platform, and thus, create an even shoddier alternative. Why mimick shitty software when you can create good software from scratch. Interactivity with the SL grid eventually? In your dreams! Linden Labs will likely release licenses for their own server software before linking with any opensim grids. I know they tried it already, but that was with IBM.

Also, I’d like to point out that browser (more appropriately, flash based or plugin based 3d worlds that embed inside a browser) based worlds aren’t new at all. There was that penguin world thing (which disney now owns) and Habbo Hotel (POOL’S CLOSED due to aids) which the latter was isometric 3d as well.

However, this should prove to be interesting. I like MP’s take on it, eventually making the browser interface am optional method, or at least the method to initially test it out)