MT34901: October 2007

Sunday

Review for Second Life

Full name:Henry Cheung
Virtual World tested: Second Life
Testing time period : 2007-09-30 to 2007-10-28
Computer make/model:Homemade AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ 3.2GHz
Operating System:Windows XP
RAM:1gb
Video Card:256M GeForce 8600GT

:::::::::::: Stability and reliability ::::::::::::

This section contains my log file (which I updated each time I ran this
virtual world) that details:

1) How often I've run this virtual world program
2) How often it crashes/freezes or otherwise can't be used
3) How often I have other problems (if not #2 above) using the software

Below is my log file:

While running Second Life I haven’t experienced a crash from the game yet.

I’ve run Second Life about 20 times now.

The game does seem laggy at times and it takes a second or two for the lag to catch-up.

There was one incident where my character was glitched and appeared under the ground. It took a few moments before my character respawned back on a normal plane.

There was another incident where my character was glitched in flight and I could not land, this caused my character to move extremely slow unless I was in the “flying” action. It required me to restart Second Life and teleport to another area before I could fix this. It happened inside a building

A lot of video/audio in the game take a long time to load I don’t know if it is due to the fact second life is taking up a lot of bandwidth from my connection, but im assuming this might be one of the reasons for the slow loading.

The game has yet to crash completely but glitches seem to be common.

Clothing and other graphics often appear glitchy.

Taking screenshots with the Second Life program seem to use up a lot of my computers power but ever since IrfanView was introduced to me I haven’t had any problems with screenshots.

I haven’t encountered any problems with building as of yet, but not all areas allow building.

Often times when I build something it gets put into my inventory after im done, I don’t know if that’s supposed to happen but it does it all the time.

:::::::::::: Exposure to inappropriate content/avatars ::::::::::::

yes: Encountered an avatar who attempted to engage in inappropriate conversation
no: Viewed more or more avatars exhibiting sexually explicitly acts
no: Solicited by "prostitute avatars" offering services in exchange for money
yes: Entered areas containing nude or partially nude avatars
no: Entered areas containing sexually explicit photos or videos

building in second life

i used youtube to search for a faq on building in second life and here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6XqQM9hgB0 alfred also found a sandbox for us to build inside of and he helped us out with building a few things.

Thursday

weekly hw 3 (part 3)

these are the various screen shots that i took and the various area's ive been exploring more and more. as ive tried to make new friends within the second life world ive noticed alot of different types of people. from the extremely friendly to the ones that ignore u constantly making friends withing second life isnt as easy as it sounds. i encountered a few problems this time where servers would fill up and not allow me to go to various places and sometimes the sheer number of people in one area just makes the prog run extremely slow. and sometimes the graphics would glitch and cause my avatar to do strange things. thats most of the information i can remember from this. ill post more as i continue on with this class. i also had to split this into 3 post due to the fact that blogger only allowed me to put 5 pictures per post and had a word limit to each post.

weekly hw 3 (part 2)

weekly hw 3 (part 1)

weekly HW 2

i went back into second life and just walked around and explored most of it. i went to dl the Irfanview tool that the Prof suggested. it seems much better than trying to save the screen shot...and then paste it into adobe just to make a new picture everytime. Irfanview really saves alot of time and effort and im glad this was suggested to me. yet again nothing major has happened in second life as in...no problems of anysort.