Where I Went…

My friend Sarah and I decided arbitrarily chose to go to an event called NlightN Nootan. It was basically a huge techno dance party in a venue that resembled a scorpion. It looked like a lot of fun, but I could not get many aspects of Second Life to work all at once.

Once the setting rezzed, I was very impressed. I had no idea how much detail was involved in Second Life. I had seen some parts very detailed, but never so much so detailed.

No matter how good the setting looked, it still does not change the face that it was so slow. Even though I was plugged into an Ethernet cable, my connection was still very slow. I even closed all of my Safari windows and iChat, but this only made a slight difference. Rezzing took forever as well. After nearly twenty minutes, half of the people dancing were still colorless outlines of their avatar.

When I tried to actually join the party and dance, my avatar would only dance for about ten seconds at a time, and then he would stop. At one point, me trying to dance crashed my Second Life window. It just froze and I Mac’s color wheel of death. When I forced quit Second Life and tried to reboot it, it told me “Second Life has seemed to crash last time”. I felt like this was adding insult to injury. No duh it crashed. It then also would not let me re-log in until a few minutes had passed.

Although I was very impressed by the aesthetic values of the dance party, and the rest of Burning Life, I was thoroughly unimpressed by the stability of the connection. In total I crashed twice, and even flying was difficult. I would try to go in one direction, and nothing would happen. Then I would randomly fly very far without touching any keys on my keyboard. I got lost a few times this way.

I don’t know if this lack of stability was due to the mass of people logged in to Burning Life, or what, but more stability is needed for a better experience. I still plan on furthering my Second Life experience by attending more events and parties.