Okay, I promised to provide you with more information, so here it is.
Photo’s from the inside are requested too, but I’d like to keep some privacy if you don’t mind ^_^

Since yesterday evening I have an apartment at the third floor of Kleine Präsidentenstraße 4, Berlin!
My real estate agent failed to notify me of the railway, but oh well. It’s large and luxurious

Satellite pic here: Click

It has 4 rooms and a total surface space of 264 sqm over two stories.
I can’t make pictures at the moment since it was dark ofcourse, but I will post them soon!

Mah Novo has no mojo. We’re talking about NovoKing here.
Another China-land SL clone with great potential!

I’ve written about this in my previous blog and it was kinda fun to walk around there. However, if you’ve read my post about HiPiBye and Twanger err.. Twinity, I am not so positive anymore about new and upcoming 3D worlds.

Downloading and installing NovoKing

Just as HiPiHi, the install file of NovoKing is on a slow, very slow server. 211Mb to download, it took forever.

Installing could be fairly easy, but ofcourse everything is in Chinese and NO option for English. But okay, no worries here. I know Chinese and i’m sure some Chinese know me. What? Who? Never mind. On with the install!

Just keep pressing “??” and all will be okay!

Do NOT get mislead by these pretty pictures.

Running the software

Okay, the usual startup screen, all in CHINEEZE but you’ll discover which button to press and which not.
I’d go for that big yellow round button saying “OMFG LOGIN HERE”. But then in Chineeze ofcourse.

Intermezzo

We interrupt this message for the folling announcement

Running the software

Since WHEN does software have legs? Well? D:

Running the software (2)

Well, all hopes are on that BIG… YELLOW… BUTTON! Click click, but no response. Oh boi, whats wrong this time? Then a blinking thingy in the taskbar caught my eye and i clicked it. This is what i saw:

IMMA FIRING MY UPDATORRRRRRR ===D:

Yes, i’m not bullshitting you. UpdatOr… Bahahaha. Omg. Welll, lets find the updatOr, okay?

Where aaaaarrrrreeeeee uuuuuuu?

I am so done with this crap. Just like HiPieBye, I’ll return in 6 months to see if there is any improvement….

LOL. =\

Okay, running this Grid software was quite fun and very interesting to see how stuff works behind the 3D view of a sim. A whole bunch of data races by and it actually makes sense even. But, it’s actually only good for creating height maps and that’s about it.

It is still not really possible to add attachments to the avatar, let alone edit the avatar itself. Another downside is a computer constantly running in your office/bedroom/hallway. Especially mine, which is old and very noisy.

This is something worth keeping an eye on and I will certainly do so. Because dear Linden Lab, you guys are nuts to charge so much for a sim and even raising the costs for an OpenSpace sim.

Today I decided to see how far HiPiHi has developed and downloaded a fresh client from the website.
The download alone took almost 20 minutes for a 68.5Mb download. Please don’t get me wrong here, this download should be here in just a few seconds with my precious 10mbit connection. But the servers in China-land are far away and slow.

Installing the heap of bits’n'bytes

Kay, fine. Download finally in and installed the whole thing. Now bare in mind that this software is Chinese, but it offers a install in English as well.  I chose the English language ofcourse and see a licence agreement in… you guessed it… CHINESE. Fine. Whatever!

I’ve been a closed beta tester for a long time at HiPiHi, but they just don’t seem to learn at all, nor progress in their development.

Starting the software

Allright. One might expect that when one chooses to install it in ENGLISH (…MOFO, DO YOU SPEAK IT? D:) the interface should be in English too. Right? Noooot. So, I remembered a trick by manually haxxoring the settings file and replace the zero by minus one. Why minus? Because plussus dun wurk.

Whooo, after kicking Vista’s security frenzy in the nads, I was ready to start HiPiHi again and start exploring my land and see what was happening there lately.

FAIL. HiPiHi crashed. Wtf? It ran nicely right after the install. So, i set the language setting to one (1). Crash. Fuck. Fine, lets put it back to zero and deal with China-land language. Crash.

Okay, HiPiHi… My computer is top notch, it makes an instant boner when performing graphics tests. This whole machine is faster in producing a blistering sweet image then you can say “whooptydoop, poop on my scoop”

By demonstrating -again- that you have produced a fine product (NOT), I resign from beta testing it for now and shall return in about 6 months. Maybe, just maybe you guys and gals finally have a proper working client.

The world of HiPiHi is at some levels way better then SecondLife, but you know, it takes a good client to enter it. A client that does not crash when being asked to work properly.

HiPiBye!

Just a short post this time.

Currently I’m testing New World Grid and I’m currently running two sims there.

Want to see and test?

1. Create a free account at http://www.newworldgrid.com
2. Make a copy of your SL shortcut
3. Right-click and select properties
4. Look for “Target”
5. Remove everything AFTER “C:/Program Files/SecondLife/SecondLife.exe”
6. ADD  -loginuri http://grid.newworldgrid.com:8002 -loginpage http://grid.newworldgrid.com:8002/?method=login
7. Press OK

Alright, the complete line at the Target should look like:

“C:/Program Files/SecondLife/SecondLife.exe” loginuri http://grid.newworldgrid.com:8002 -loginpage http://grid.newworldgrid.com:8002/?method=login

Yes, i know… I’ve used forward slashes in the first part, but that’s caused by wordpress. So it is backslash indeed. O.o

EDIT: Look for the “Bad Bunny” or “Good Fox” sim

As a resident of SecondLife, I’ve always been interested in new players on this market.
So far, I have been testing HiPiHi, NovoKing, ActiveWorlds, Lively and more 3D stuff.

Today, I’ve registered to beta test Twinity.
I can’t tell yet how long they are active, but the domain name is registered at the end of 2006, so I am supprised that I haven’t seen this one before. I stumbled upon this via a Google-ad o.o

Registering for beta testing

Registering for the beta is quite easy because it’s an open registration and it is in English. I say that because HiPiHi (closed test) and NovoKing (open test) are both in Chinese which makes registering a leeetle harder.

After filling in the required data and running the setup.exe (which might be an idea to change to Twinity_install_35313.exe or something to make things more clear) my first attempt to login failed.

The client contains an auto-updater, so that is a good thing.

Log in screen

Something I have not noticed with other 3D world clients is a good diagnostic tool, in case there are any problems. Hmmyeah, so my screen gets stuck at “connecting to jabber server” but diagnostics says that everything is okay.

LEMME IN! D:

Contacting support

The good and rather cute thing of an upcoming company and it’s product is that support works via simple email. I’d like to see them using a ticket system, but all in time, i guess. Okay, I cant log in, so i wrote an e-mail (sent at 11.45am) to the support and now it’s time to wait and see.

Time is critial for happy customers and I still have no reply as of yet. (12.45pm)

I still have no reply and after reading the forum, it seems to be an ongoing problem.

Goodbye Twinity. You failed.