Month: July 2018

UPDATED: The End of InWorldz

Today was InWorldz’s last day. Grid co-founder Beth Reischl estimated that Rackspace would shut off the InWorldz servers at the end of their business day, 5:00 p.m. CST, which works out to 3:00 p.m. InWorldz time. While the main servers have not yet been turned off as of this writing, the InWorldz login server was shut down around 5:00 p.m., leaving only a handful of avatars still online on a few sims. No users can log in. InWorldz is now gone.

Over the past few days, avatars gathered at spots like InWorldz Desert Island 1 (the site of the original welcome centre) to chat and commiserate with each other:

Inworldz Desert Island gathering 27 July 2018_001.png

After InWorldz Desert Island 1 shut down (as many sims did throughout the course of the day today), people went over to InWorldz Desert Island 2, which was still up, to spend their last hours together:

InWorldz Desert Island 2 gathering 27 July 2018_001.png

Despite heroic efforts by Beth Reischl and her team to do as many OAR backups of as many sims as possible before shut-down, many people are still facing the loss of most of their inventory. Some are bitter and angry; others are resigned. Nobody is happy about this turn of events.

InWorldz was the victim of some poor business decisions and just plain bad luck. In a period of sixteen months, two of the largest and most popular OpenSim-based grids—Avination and InWorldz—have failed.

Does this mean the end for OpenSim? No. Many of the people affected by the Avination and InWorldz closures simply decided to move to other OpenSim grids, such as Kitely, DigiWorldz and the Discovery grid.

But InWorldz is officially dead, as of this evening. Now we wait to see whether a new grid will rise from its ashes.

UPDATE July 28th: After they completed doing the OAR archives of all the sims, InWorldz staff turned the login server back on. If you try to log into InWorldz this morning, you will be able to get into InWorldz Desert Island (IDI) 1, which is the only sim that is left running. Even though Rackspace has not been paid, the servers still seem to be running! Right now there are about 50 avatars chatting with each other. We have no idea how long the sim will stay up, so you might want to come and visit with some old friends before InWorldz really is gone for good!

Here’s a snapshot of us at IDI:

InWorldz 28 July 2018_001.png

Administrative Note: I Have Moved My List of Social VR/Virtual Worlds to a New, Separate Page

IDIA 1 4 August 2017.png
IDIA Lab: 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair (Sansar)

Effective immediately, I have moved my popular alphabetical list of social VR spaces and virtual worlds to a separate page on my blog, with a permanent link on the left-hand side panel, called List of Social VR/Virtual Worlds (right under the Home button). Note that if you are viewing my blog on a tablet or smartphone, you have to hit the three-bars menu button in the upper right-hand corner of your screen to find the link to the new page.

I will now be keeping that new document up-to-date instead of my old blogpost, which will no longer be pinned to the front page of my blog. I now realize that doing this was confusing to many visitors who thought that my blog was not being updated, and I do apologize for any confusion this caused in the past. From now on, only the most recent blogposts will appear at the top of the RyanSchultz.com main page!

Decentraland: A First Look at Their Alpha

Decentraland has given us the first glimpse of their alpha platform at a presentation given today by company co-founder Esteban Ordano at the NIFTY conference in Hong Kong.

More information on the event comes from the DCLPlazas blog:

After many months of blood, sweat and tears from Decentraland developers, and with an ever growing community patiently waiting for their first real glimpse of the VR world, today Decentraland showed the alpha version of Decentraland which was presented by Tech Lead Esteban Ordano at the NIFTY conference in Hong Kong.

Judging by the reaction in the room it was very clear that after a long in time coming, nobody in the room was disappointed and it was well worth the wait.

As if the demo wasn’t enough, Decentraland have also opened up applications to get an alpha NFT allowing YOU to enter the world and have a look around.

If you want to get access to the Decentraland alpha, you can send an email request to Genesis@Decentraland.org.

Quests and Questing in Virtual Universe

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am choosing to participate in the Virtual Universe (VU) Initial Coin Offering Partner Program. Why? Two reasons:

  1. After my recent guided tour of VU, I feel very strongly that this is going to be a successful and popular virtual world/MMO hybrid platform, and I want to be a part of it when VU launches their beta this summer. This is the very first blockchain-based virtual world that I actually feel excited about!
  2. As a Canadian citizen, I reside in one of the three countries where I am currently legally forbidden from purchasing VU tokens (the other two are the United States and China). This means that the only way I can legitimately earn VU tokens to use in this social VR space before the beta launch is via the VU ICO Partner Program.

I want you to know this up front: this blogpost is a promotion for VU, in exchange for VU tokens.  You can follow on this webpage to see how many VU tokens I have earned by completing tasks in this Partner Program if you wish (right now, I am at number two on the VU Token Leaderboard). There’s nothing stopping you from participating in this Partner Program yourself, and earning some VU tokens!

IMPORTANT: VU Tokens are not a real currency. They are ERC-20 based blockchain tokens intended to permit players of Virtual Universe exclusive access to digital assets within a VR game known as Virtual Universe (VU). They are a form of in-game virtual currency.  Virtual value attributed to the VU Token will be as a result of in-game efforts by players, and no future value is represented or guaranteed.

Virtual Universe has posted to Medium about the quests that will be part of the social VR/MMO platform, including a YouTube video:

There will be three different types of quest:

  1. Daily quests: small jobs you can do, like sweeping the street
  2. Random quests: you find these while exploring outside the city
  3. Story quests: these are the epic, long-time-frame quests, split into chapters

Looking forward to seeing what the quests will be, and participating in them!