Tillman Terra (Sept. 2003): The account that preceded Cubey Terra

In the past, I’ve engaged in retrospectives:

• 2005
• 2008
• 2010

And a little flight of fiction:

• The Oldbie

This time I’m going to just say that, although I recently sold Abbotts Aerodrome, I’m not dead and gone yet. I’ll be here playing with aircraft, gadgets, and crap in SL until Linden Lab turns out the lights.

Thanks for all the memories, Second Lifers. Now let’s go make more.

Update (Aug 11, 2011): Although Abbotts Aerodrome is closing and I’m moving on, a buyer has stepped up who will repurpose the Abbotts build  (the tower, runway, etc.) as a new facility. See the relevant comment here.

Standing at the edge of the runway in Abbotts, I can hear the waves shushing against the supports underneath. A short ways away in the trees, a bird whistles a song that is suddenly overwhelmed by the roar of a 737 taking off. In the distance, a steady beat of helicopter blades rides the cool morning air. These are the sounds of Abbotts Aerodrome. I made this.

About seven and a half years ago, Apotheus Silverman and I closed our short-lived Zoe Airfield and bought up the majority of parcels in a new southern region called Abbotts.

Zoe Airfield in 2003: The predecessor to Abbotts Aerodrome

We built a floating airport with an art deco theme, called it Abbotts Aerodrome, and welcomed pilots and aircraft makers.

The region of Abbotts in February 2004, before Abbotts Aerodrome was built. That's not a typo on the sign; the region came online as "Abbots", but the Lindens later changed the spelling.

In subsequent years, we expanded, I tore it down, rebuilt, tore it down again, and finally realized the structure that you see today — literally from a dream.

An early version of Abbotts Aerodrome in 2004, when it featured floating platforms around a central tower.

Abbotts Aerodrome in 2005: More art deco, more floating stuff!

We held small aircraft building contests, huge exhibitions, and design competitions. We fought off attacks from sandbox griefers and two-bit newbies with cage guns. We’ve had Aerodrome members join our ranks, and others who faded away and left.

One version of Abbotts had small, low-lying structures that hugged the hillside.

All of it was great fun. But as they say, all good things must come to an end. It’s the end for Abbotts Aerodrome, Second Life’s second oldest airport.

Abbotts Aerodrome in its final configuration

On September 1, 2011, we are closing the doors and grounding the aircraft for the last time. The lights will turn out and the aerodrome will go silent.

Watching the sun set over the southern passage.

On that day, I’ll retreat to a corner of Abbotts to build a little cabin, where I’ll take up fishing and learn to make primfish sushi.

I’m looking into possible ways to fix this, but until then I hope I can ask for your patience. Sorry for any inconvenience.

If you’re looking to try or buy Terra products, you can still do that at Abbotts Aerodrome!

Exploring the new coastline south of the City of Nexus Prim in Gibson

With the removal of the sandboxes and ridge that separated them from Abbotts, now we can perform proper approaches to runway 9.

Making the final approach to runway 9 at Abbotts Aerodrome

Of course, wide swaths of new ocean are perfect for Second Life’s sailing enthusiasts, and some have already approached me to ask about my plans for Abbotts regarding sailing. Since Abbotts Aerodrome’s founding in 2004, it’s been our policy to allow anyone to rez any kind of vehicle. So our marina in the northwest corner of Abbotts is, as always, open to the public for launching their boats on their way into the new southwest passage. It’s not a big marina, so giant yachts won’t fit, but we’ll certainly let you temporarily place smaller vessels.

It’s almost the weekend, which means I’ll have some time to upgrade the Abbotts marina to accommodate the sudden increase in demand. I hope to see you out on the water and in the sky in our new seaway.

My first object imported to OpenSim from Second Life

The Imprudence viewer exported the biplane model as XML, minus any textures I didn’t actually own (I’m not sure which those would be, since I textured this myself). Then I ran Sim-on-a-Stick, logged in with Imprudence and imported the XML. Over a period of about 30 seconds, I watched Imprudence assemble the plane in pieces — all 248 of them and all textured correctly. Proof of concept: Now I can start migrating my content away from Second Life.

Just to be perfectly clear, I’m not abandoning Second Life. I just think that it’s good to have a lifeboat available if the Titanic goes down.

UPDATE: After playing around with Imprudence in Second Life for a bit, I find that I can export almost nothing, because there’s always at least one part of the model or textures that have someone else as the “creator”, even if that name is my own alt account. What I need is a viewer that ignores the creator tag. Without that, all of my content is stuck in SL.

That things are improved by putting them on a stick holds true in other industries too, including software. Since former Linden, John “Pathfinder” Lester blogged about it back in October, I’ve been intrigued by the idea of putting an OpenSim server on a USB stick. It seems Second Lifer, Ener Hax, has been experimenting with the “sim-on-a-stick” idea for several months now and has gotten to the point where she is now sharing the fruits (on a stick) of her labour with the world at simonastick.com. (Who is Simon Astick? It’s a mystery.)

Today, having a bit of time on my hands, I decided to give Ener’s Sim-on-a-Stick a try, so I downloaded the zip file from simonastick.com. The setup was amazingly simple: you just copy the files to a USB stick (or to a folder on your hard drive, as I did) and run the various components. Within a few minutes of unzipping it, I had a single-region grid running locally, and had logged in and rezzed this cube:

It all starts with a cube: running OpenSim server, MoWes, and the Imprudence viewer.

The possibilities for applied use are intriguing. If I can find a way to export my content from Second Life and import it into OpenSim, then there’s a chance that I can take Abbotts Aerodrome and all of my creations with me should Second Life or its economy falter. Because it’s hosted locally, and therefore private, I could use OpenSim for simulations, demonstrations, and presentations for work-related projects.

Sim-on-a-Stick makes OpenSim approachable to an average user. It requires little in the way of technical skills to set up, and it’s completely self-contained so that it can be easily carried with you on your keychain. Everything really is better on a stick.

1. Terra Ornithopter

2.Terra Cormorant

3. Terra Tigershark 2.1 (in-world only)

4. Terra Tigershark 3

5. Terra Talon

6. Terra Manta

7. Terra Sparrow

Blue skies and happy landings!

Arriving at their site, I clicked the link to “log in using Facebook”, which is essentially adds Kitely as a Facebook app with full permission to access all of your Facebook account. If you’re at all concerned about privacy or identity theft, this is a point of concern already. Any app to which you hand over the keys to your personal info can essentially mine your data or post on your behalf. However, since my Facebook account is largely free of info that I need to hide, I went ahead and agreed.

The next problematic step, after creating the world and naming it (in my case, it’s named “Terra”), is that to enter the world, you need two things:

• A Second Life client installed on your computer.
• A “Kitely plugin”, which is an installer that you download and run.

That you need a Second Life client isn’t a problem for anyone already in Second Life, but that’s a big step for a lot of casual Facebook users. Also, there isn’t an obvious link for users to download the SL client, but maybe I just missed that.

The Kitely plugin is an installer for a small program that launches the SL client to connect to a particular Kitely world. Now, if you’ve ever connected to a grid other than the default Second Life grid (“Aditi”), you know that you can do this manually at the SL login screen, so the “plugin” is simply a convenience to users who are less technically inclined.

I did have strong reservations about installing this plugin, but mainly that’s a trust issue. As in, do I trust Kitely enough that I’m certain there’s no malware in the plugin, for example. I installed it despite my concern, because there are no instructions on how to connect to a Kitely world without the plugin.

Once in my new world, Terra, it was perfectly familiar. I had an avatar, a male one, though I hadn’t been presented with any choices there, and a tiny round island in a vast ocean. It looked like my world was ready to be terraformed and filled with goodies.

The first thing I tried, of course, wasn’t the inventory, but the physics. I rezzed a cube, turned on physics, and dropped the cube from a height. The result: not good. It rubberbanded a few times while falling and bouncing, and oddly ended up in the exact spot where I rezzed it. At a guess, that kind of physics time dilation is a sign that they’re hosting way too many sims per server, and the physics engine is simply overloaded.

Next test: I put a simple airplane flight script into the cube. I encountered a couple of odd bugs in the script editor, where it wouldn’t let me paste overtop of existing text, but I worked around that and compiled successfully. Great… time to fly. I sat on the cube, which gave a status message, as my script should, so that meant the script was running. So far so good.

Touching the throttle, though, led to my avatar being mashed into the sim corner underwater with the camera flailing all over. Standing didn’t work, and teleport home resulted in an error message. So that was my first encounter with Kitely. Technically speaking, the performance falls well short of where it should be to be a usable SL-based VW.

But beyond the technical issues, I have to question the purpose of Kitely. What advantage does Kitely offer a user over Second Life? Certainly, Facebook users can log into Kitely with an existing user ID, but is that really much of a convenience? The Second Life sign-up process is easy and free. Where Kitely seems to suggest that you will eventually have to buy Kitely currency to use their service, you never need to drop a cent in Second Life unless you want to buy land or content.

And this brings up another question. Where does the content come from? Second Life’s user-created content is rich, vast, and arguably matured. While it is possible to upload an entire region based on an OAR file (an entire region ripped from an SL-based VW and saved to a file), the vast majority of Facebook users will arrive to their new virtual world with nothing but the virtual clothes on their back. In this area, Second Life seems to have the clear advantage.

Privacy might be an area in which Kitely offers an advantage, in that you can control who comes in, but Second Life offers that ability as well, albeit only to estate owners.

In the end, I’m unconvinced that Kitely is a viable product. It technically falls well short of Second Life itself, but in fairness, maybe the performance issue will be rectified with more money for hardware, and if it’s used for purely social reasons, like standing around chatting, I’m sure it would be perfectly adequate. And bugs can be worked out, given time. The key issue is that it fails to address any specific user need that Second Life doesn’t already provide or exceed. And for that reason,  I think that Kitely just won’t fly.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t tried games. I have. They all got uninstalled and the discs/cartridges gathered dust. Back in the nineties, I’d play all kinds of things: Quake, Duke Nukem, Descent, A-10 Tank Killer (or was that the eighties?)… and more. Since then, I bought a Nintendo 64, which, like my Wii, I largely ignored until I gave it away. I also tried MS Flight Simulator, Rise of Flight, and assorted others that just failed to catch my interest.

So no, I won’t try Angry Birds or Farmville any time soon, and I guess I missed out on the Portal craze, though even without playing it, I do know that the cake is, in fact, a lie. As for Warcraft, I gave it a try, got slaughtered in the newbie area a few times, and figured out that it wasn’t worth it.

Honestly, I have better things to do than grinding, shooting, and leveling up. In SL, I say that my winning scenario is to keep an airport running and in the black until Linden Lab shuts down the servers. I think I’m winning.

I may be wrong here, but Search is supposed to present organized lists of links, right? Isn’t that something that we’ve had for over fifteen years on the web? And somehow that’s beyond the capabilities of LL devs? You can’t navigate easily, the search basically doesn’t return expected results, and you can’t bookmark for later exploration without actually going there and making a landmark. It’s just phenomenally poor design and implementation.

I couldn’t find much with the search function, so I wandered through each of the dozen or so featured links and found a handful interesting but empty locations. Nothing truly engaging. I know there are people in SL doing fun things. I’ve been engaged in SL since 2003. But I can’t, despite my best efforts, actually find them. At that point, I ended up wandering through empty sims for an hour or so.

Essentially, there is no way to get to good content beyond word-of-mouth and shared landmarks. That is inexcusable this late in SL‘s life. We need a Google of SL, and then nobody will say there’s nothing to do in SL. They’ll say there’s too much.