Socially|Mundane

Wouldn't it be cool to have an alternative to Second Life, be able to run your own sim and estate on your own computer and have all your Second Life inventory... but Linden Lab is nowhere to be found?

You can.

Second Life has been around awhile and though it may not be the most popular or largest of the online 3D worlds, it is the best known of all of them and the largest, most popular Virtual World (as opposed to massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game - MMORPG).

As a 'resident' of Second Life for a couple years, I've seen a lot of drama, a lot of new technologies come through, and a lot of complaints against Linden Lab for a number of things. Beyond bugs and grid stability and other corporate culture decisions is the issue of inventory.

There is no way to back-up your inventory easily. Creating objects mu happen within SL, you can't easily build anything on your local computer and then bring it into SL other that textures, and but that, using sculptie texture maps to create objects. Otherwise, you are simply limited to textures images, sounds (a paltry 10-seconds worth) and animations.

Additionally, the textures must be in a particular format, the sound files must be in a particular format and animations must be in a particular format. It can be quite complicated and certainly daunting for newer users. It also can be a bit pricey as it is a L$10 cost each time you upload, making trial and error a bit expensive.

On top of all that, there have been shouts and whining about Linden Lab elbowing their way into the scene 'politically' where they have never really been before. It used to be that Linden Lab was 100% hands-off. However, because of some bad press, they are taking a more proactive approach to governance within the virtual world. The wild west needs to be tamed a bit.

With stability issues, bugs, governance, and the ability to maintain, create, manipulate objects and so oan, there have been cries for years for an alternative Secind Life. Many can't wait for the so-called web 3.0 (vis-s-vis Second Life) to become the norm as development will become wide open and the stability and tools will eventually come.

Well - it's official.

The alternative Second Life grid is here, and I am not speaking of open sim or the other 'above radar' efforts.

Enter Tribal Net.

Not just some alternative hosted grid. But truely like the way theworld wide web is configured and set-up. Like a web server, you can run and host your own island. Plug into the Tribal Net network and voila! You are live. You have complete control over you server. Even set it to private for building and whatever else you want to do. There already are many sims running on the Tribal network. Don't want to run your own server? Just like the Web, you can pay to have your sim hosted.

Of course, one of the reasons Open Sim and others are slow to take-off is that not only is the set-up similar to Linden Lab, (hosted for you and you pay "tier",) but it also has a dearth of residents. They are ghost towns. And it's an empty canvass. Everything has to be rebuilt from scratch.

Now with a new update to Tribal Net, there is a tool called "Second Inventory" that allows you to copy your inventory from Second Life to your Tribal Net account. Now don't panic, all you against-theft-aggregations and I. P. advocates. You can only copy your inventory and you must be using the same avatar name on Tribal Net as you are using in Second Life. All the permissions remain the same. So, creators, fear not: your hard work is safe. Well, every bit as safe as it currently is in Second Life. Although it is unknown how scripts and other things will react. But hey, if you are the adventurous type with the resources and time, give it a shot.

So, dying to jump to a Second Life alternative that's still Second Life?

Try Tribal Net. I've been tinkering with it for a couple months. It's really not that difficult to play with. Besides, I'm curious to what you think of it.