First day exploring Inworldz

A friend told me earlier this week that he was going into Inworldz to have a look around, and so, as I had never checked it out, I decided to sign up and see what it's like.  Eelco tried to sign up too, but he failed to get his authorizing email and was caught up with some coding he needed to do and so I went in alone.

I chose my starter avatar, a green fairy, and signed in.  The first change from SL is that you're greeted by a mentor who gives useful information and hands over things like a free animation overrider to get rid of the loathed duck walk, and a exploratory HUD which has landmarks for all sorts of different places.

I wasn't very happy with my avatar, even after I had changed her shape, and so I went off to do some shopping.  There was the same problem as in SL - I found mentions on blogs of good designers but had to search through whole shopping sims with dozens of shops to track them down.  Some sims had a very high quality of goods on sale in a market, and others were very variable.

I found some really bad shoes in other sims.  I quite liked the ones from Pulse, but I would have liked some spikey heeled shoes which didn't have quite such a precipitous heel.  In general (and based upon one day only) it looks as though Inworlds is about three years behind SL in building, use of mesh and clothing and skins.  I was a bit wary about freebies in case they were ripped from other places.

There are a lot of people selling sculpty-based furniture and objects which have become old-fashioned in SL because of the advent of mesh.  I bought several skins from Pulse, clothing and shoes from Pulse and hair from Emotions.  The end result didn't look too bad.  I also bought a few replacement animations for the AO from creators whose names I recognized.

There are a few differences from Second Life.  Uploads are free, there are wide open spaces on the sandboxes - at least European evening time.  Some aspects of scripting are different in ways I don't understand... I will have to ask my technical advisor to look into it.

Eelco and I did a little exploring around the scenic sims.  Some of them were well done and others less well done.  The sims with a *lot* of sculpties were laggy for me.  I'm looking forward to exploring more.