Anya Ristow

For the purpose of socializing, the FB version could be superior soon-ish. As in, before summer is out.

Yeah, SL is where I go to create a better avatar, but with a social grid to compare to it may dawn on me how difficult it is to find anyone who cares how awesome I look.

CP might highlight the strengths of SL. It might also highlight its weaknesses.

The best way to keep CP from going anywhere is to make it like SL by signing in a shitload of idle avatars.

Eata

I think office politics are a major issue.

From what people said about LL it's got a lot of little kingdoms and employees don't expect to be ordered around. If the rumours are correct we have seen that in Oz Linden screwing everyone around with Qarl's deformer. Rodvik probably doesn't have the budget to get in a lot of new hires, getting them up to speed would be slow and it would be very hard to manage morale if the LL old guard feel undermined.

Aribeth Zelin

I'm hoping that CP gives a bit of a kick in the pants for those folks at LL who are still dragging their feet on giving us improvements.

And yay, good to know you're still alive, Rodvik.

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Kokoro Fasching

Well, until I can put my wings on, and change my skin color to a more realistic color, I won't be in Cloud much. But it is a nice start.

Adeon Writer

I'm pretty sure you can't be a ferret. Raz says you can, but didn't explain how. I think you can Rez an awesome rigged ferret, but you can't BE the awesome rigged ferret.

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Cerise

It will be possible, you have to use a compatible skeleton kind of like in SL, then associate the mesh with a costume part. I was able to wear a custom mesh. It didn't actually work right, but it let me wear something so that is a start! Some tutorial info and asset files are beginning to appear at Building - Cloud Party Forums

Adeon Writer

If that's the case, I may make a fake Facebook account if only to ruin the game forever by putting some free furry av's in it.

Stacy Bluxome

Well I wouldn't reccomend just going ahead and creating a fake account tied to a free email address. I wouldn't reccomend that because its against the FB TOS and obviously no one would avocate breaking that.

Just because I've known people with multiple fake accounts just for extra neighbours in zynga games for years.
And, ok, the chances of FB realizing its not an account for a 'real' person is virtualy nill, especialy among half a billion accounts all sharing varying ammounts of personal info.
And even despite the fact the worst that could happen is the account gets closed.

So yeah, don't do that...

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Aribeth Zelin

I have three, all tied to me and real email addresses - but no real info on any of them. And yeah, for Zyngo games, a habit I broke, thankfully.

I don't use any of them though.

Lil Hapmouche

Just looking at the visual stuff on a first impression approach... oh my gosh, I'm willing to officially revoke every bad thought ever and word ever said about shadows in SL. What the heck is wrong with that ugly blocky crap that is probably supposed to be shadows casted by the windows? Though the outline of the piano shadow doesn't look much better. If I had seen that on my own screen, I probably would have concluded that the graphics card is about to die.

Sorry, I haven't looked at any other resources except what's posted here and I'm extremely narrow-minded right now and it's beta and testing and all ... but yuck!

And why is that guy always jogging instead of walking?

Trinity Dejavu

Mumbles something about a fixed fake lighting model and stencil shadows. CP can simply never look as good as SL, ever.

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Cerise

The atmosphere in those domes is apparently laced with epinephrine, those are the most nervous avatars I've ever seen. They won't stop flipping their heads from side to side when they are standing, they never sit down, they run or jump everywhere, never walk. Even when they teleport, sparks fly out.

Nika Talaj

I would think the FB tie-in would push them to enhance their avatars and avatar editing tools sooner rather than later. Presumably there will be a lot of friend networks casually dropping in on each others' 3D homes, and nobody wants to socialize as a dweeb.

I'm most interested in how it will work out downstream if CP doesn't hook islands up into contiguous continents (as Cerise pointed out elsewhere, that makes scalability much less of an issue). Will people work around that by setting up chains of teleports to travel between islands? Will they care?

Han Held

AshaSekayi Ra was running around in a tiny avatar, with a tail. Someone else I don't know had made a mask and was running around in it. The avatars are already more customizable than I'd thought; though it sounds like you have to have maya to do that.

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Allison

I signed in yesterday to check it out, and it's interesting to me as an SL content creator, although I have to wonder if it will be compelling to the typical Facebook user. I am not a typical Facebook user, so I don't know how it will be received. Will people really sit around on their iPhones at Starbucks logged into this thing?

So while the technical parts look promising, I can see a few open questions:

1. Will the Facebook TOS apply?

2. What are the privacy protections?

3. Will it be a strictly PG based VW? If not, see question #2 above. If so, who are the target demographic? What is the likelihood the target demographic will spend money inside of this VW?

4. Are there any studies that show that there is actually a demand from the Facebook user base for something like this, or is this something that Facebook execs hope will be well received?

5. How is this VW different from Google Lively or Blue Mars other than under-the-hood? Why would this one succeed when the other two failed?

Anyway, this will be interesting to watch.

Couldbe Yue

I'd agree but on the main strengths of the thing so far I don't see how it is inferior. getting into it and customising your av is staggeringly simple and it's far superior to farmville and the other chatroom/games apps that are on facebook. The visuals may be a bit rubbish but so is an empty sl region. The creators are already in and getting ready to set up and if this is their basic platform they're expanding on then they're in an extremely good place to start.

The thing about sl is that it's not a berry farm, it's more like Dave's Adventure World. Disney coming in may generate some drive by traffic but the risk that people will spy Disney when they're looking around for some fun and be sidetracked is very real.

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Nika Talaj

Providers of games to Facebook have their own Terms of Service and Privacy Policies. Presumably FB has reviewed Cloud Party's and found them adequate - it is likely that a game's ability to link to FB is contingent on continuing certain aspects of their TOS.

Cloud Party employees have stated that the product will include a non-FB login portal. This (very early) Beta version has non-FB logins with limited privileges (no build). I see no reason why, in the future, they couldn't provide different portals with different TOS's, and limit access to islands depending on their "ratings".

Anything's possible. Just have to wait and see.

Nika Talaj

Look at Des's statement from his point of view. Currently CP provides no contiguous land masses - each island is a separate bubble. And I'm sure their asset management etc. cannot currently scale to SL's concurrency.

OTOH, I'm sure that CP will quickly provide ways to fashionista up your avatar that will surpass SL's.

Which is inferior? Depends on what you want.

Nika Talaj

Oh, and the "Other Grids/Virtual Worlds" section has a couple of threads on Cloud Party, this is the main one:

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/oth...oud-party.html

Maybe this discussion should move over there?

Quiplash

Yeah, we should take it over to the Cloud Party threads over in the Other Grids/Virtual Worlds section.

Kokoro Fasching

You can increase/decrease your AV height by 0.5 to 1.5 by using the slash command /AvatarScale I think it was.. if you do a / and a letter, shows you the available commands.

Khamon

Yeah, start a thread for Rodvik to talk up SL a bit and people are more interested in discussing Cloud Party. Hope that's not the new norm. Oh but then I don't really care after all.

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Lord

Well, after he disappears for a month then shows up just to say 'I'm still around and been too busy to talk to y'all, ta ta !'...what else is their to talk about ?