Today Sakai Openlife of the OpenLife Grid hosted a Q&A Session on 3DX Island. Among the topics were SSOs and of course the coming currency that will be in the next server update and expected to be live this coming Wednesday, March 4th. 

Residents should be able to start buying credits on the Thursday following. Here are the current buy rates for the credits:

buyrates

sakai

Also part of the update will be stronger permissions. 

The way the update will occur is 3DX will shut down the entire grid and then apply the update region by region. When applied to a region 2 3DX staff members will check and verify and once the region is cleared move to the next one. This will take about 8 hours to complete the entire grid. Once the grid is open everyone will begin with a 0 Credit balance.

Sakai had this to say about the way credits work: “I guess something that worth noting although a little bookkeepers hat on. The accounting system we’ve created is very much like a real accounting system so every credit we make we debit somewhere too in another table.So credits can’t just ‘appear’ or ‘disappear’. Even when you purchase the diff is put into the difference account. The rate get’s slightly better the more you purchase. We will publish credits information after the 1st month.”

On cashing out he said “The system also doesn’t allow you to cash out until your region owners status is older than a month and your account is in order. there’s also limits naturally. I’ll put up a blog post entry this weekend introducing the proposed rates etc.”

Sakai also mentioned region renewals could be payed with credits and that they are working on a way for people to buy regions using credits as well. That is great news and a change from the early thoughts on how it would work.

Uploads of graphics and animations, etc will cost C20 as it appears now in the viewer. Features like land rights will likely become live the second week of March.

Sakai also said “We’ll bring your parcel management to the web too, (there’s no autorenewal just yet) so you will see it appear in your ‘region toolbox”. There you can click renewal and renew the region for another month or 3. We have some changes to how data and what data is stored about parcels in the next update which is a precursor to another march update for estate management at the parcel level and also online parcel changes, traffic statistics and search.”

The Search feature will also differ from what residents of other grids are used to. According to Sakai “It’s worth noting the way search was initially done in this viewer is not the way we’ve implemented it
or a bunch of other features. That search button becomes ‘World Portal’ which is like a mini site designed for in world use.”

The future goal is to have many of what Sakai calls “Web Panels” where we can adjust many of the inworld options right on the web. Imagine changing your parcel media URL for a DJ for your event without having to log in world to do so. That is the kind of options OpenLife is aiming to give it’s residents.

It appears the next few weeks will be exciting to watch “There’s a lot of updates coming over the next 3 weeks, probably 1-2 each week because there’s work we can’t deploy until other migrations have occurred.” Sakai remarked. So updates will build upon updates and as some things are changed new features will be introduced. Sakai also noted the “live” world is about 8 revisions behind the 3DX development grid (where they test out the new features and updates) but these next three weeks will bring the live grid up 6 revisions. That should give you some idea of the fast pace things will be changing in the next month.

SSOs (Server Side Objects) were brought up as that is one of the cool new features OpenLife is waiting for. I asked Sakai if running many SSOs would cause performance issues. This is what he said: “No there definately is not. We’ve run as many as 4000 SSO’s in a region without seeing a blip in cpu usage and no noticeable memory impact either. They don’t leak memory like the script engine too which is pretty handy. The impact you will see is some more network traffic because the region will send you updates about SSO’s changing or doing things in the region.” On 3DX Island where the meeting was being held Sakai pointed out that there were over 200 SSO enabled objects running. I had no lag to speak of.

The New update will allow network speed up to 3MB also so faster performance for those who can obtain that speed is on it’s way. Sakai expects the final version of “The Living Island” to be up for all to see tonight sometime. He says it is fun to apply SSO to a sculpty mushroom and watch them go wild. They grow during the night cycle. Also, SSO items will not migrate onto other region owner’s land so you won’t have a mad neighbor standing at your door with pruning sheers pointing to all the new trees in his yard. They will move over parcel boundaries in the same region though. This is something they hope to improve in later updates of SSOs. Only region owners can allow SSOs to be active in their regions though. Sakai also said “Later we intend to make it possible to turn on particular SSO’s with your region toolbox, ie an AO SSO to let everyone use a safe AO or not (scriptless AO).”

The meeting was very informative and lots of information was given. There were even a couple of brand new OpenLifers in attendance who sounded very happy about the things coming soon to the grid. I think that wonderment is a refreshing breath of air. Tonight’s meeting going over the features that are just within reach now was a reminder. OpenLife is in beta. Still far from a perfect and completed project.. but definitely alive and on a different path from the other grids out there. It is easy to get hung up on the issues but one should remember we are far from the finish line but we are miles ahead of just a few months ago. The future is mighty bright indeed.

read also previous related CTN stories: