Building an after Life

building is building, no matter the grid... talent is what show.

Hairy Thor

When bloggers are out of interesting topics, they give you the 'SL is Doomed!' routine. Supposing you're drinking that particular Cool-Aid, you may have wondered, what would happen if I went to build in other worlds? 

weirdness in veesome

On the downside, You're going to look like a noob for a while, and WEIRD STUFF WILL HAPPEN. If you go to a commercial world like InWorldz, and are prepared to pony up, you'll soon have good hair and skins. Otherwise, it's DIY or freebies. DIY can be an education, freebies are getting better all the time, but whichever way you go, be prepared to lose time reinventing yourself on your new grid. 

soror Nishi: I looked like a bagwoman for the first year, before we got shops in InWorldz!
   Personal appearance is only part of the learning curve. Don't be fooled by the laid back attitude outside SL - grid owners aren't lying down on the job, when it comes to protecting residents and their rights.

Elenia Llewellyn: My advice for builders leaving SL - not all licenses are the same! Keep your work legal!
Leannan Shi: Remember to check and make sure that everything in your SL builds is fullperm and YOURS before you bring it over. Sculpted parts do not export well.
Raphaella Nightfire: Scripting and animations require patience. And be prepared to be noob for a few hours.
Alizarin Goldflake: Builders need to be aware that not all SL scripts work here. Some have errors that can cause horrendous lag. And you can't edit linked parts.
Leannan Shi: Boobs don't jiggle in InWorldz. But next week though, right? LOL

Jo Ellsmere: Up until the recent upgrade coalesced objects have not been possible in Craft. That is a major deal! Some things just cannot be linked and have the scripts work properly; multiple rotation scripts, for example.

Moontan Valeeva: Don't edit attachments while wearing them! And building on a skybox and using animations will let you fall through the floor!  
Leannan Shi: Oh, and I miss my EasyTexture tool Want....it....back! EasyTexture fixes the texture collision problem but, I have only seen it on SL
soror Nishi: 'Sit' is crap in Iwz. And I'd like to get my Porgan in here, but it's not a big problem.
Alizarin Goldflake: Importing from here to SL is a bad idea. You get charged texture uploads, and SL borks the textures.

More bang for your buck is one huge advantage of leaving SL. You can rent a sim on a grid for as little as $15-$90 a month, and go wild terraforming! But not all servers are equal. Performance and features like physics (which allow things like sailboat scripts to operate properly) may be non-existent or much less effective than SL. Personally, I've four sims and 60,000 prims for less than I was paying for a single sim and 5k prims in Veesome, which was already a far cheaper deal than SL.
Moontan Valeeva: Everything is cheaper so I can take time to create. There's no rat-race advertising.

Bradd Laval: I love the low costs.

Roxie Dixon: I love the free uploads! Yes!

Oberon Onmura: If you like punishment and have a lot of bandwidth, you can run sims yourself from home. The cost in that case is free!, that is, no added cost beyond what you're already paying for. Free is good, but only you know how much time you want to spend learning stuff that only the nerds geekiest geeks would want to know. (I respectfully refuse to answer that question on the ground that it could tend to out me unmercifully.)

That ship has sailed, Oberon. No prims size constraints mean you need fewer prims for big jobs, and can make your own nanoprims.
Leannan Shi: I think I about kissed the screen as soon as I could work with prims over 10m without breaking out a megaprim.

soror Nishi: All that prim scrimping can go out the window. I mean, a 100 prim tree is cool here.

Oberon Onmura: The 15,000 prim limit isn't a law of nature, it's set by the system admins to avoid over-taxing system resources. In theory, you can have unlimited prim, depending on the how much you want to spend on resources. Constraints are always part of life, so we live with 15K prims in SL and don't think about it. In Opensims, the system admin can change that limit, so you often see something like 45,000+ available prims, on a single sim. "Wow!" you might be thinking. But don't forget the resources problem. When you put 45k prims on a sim with a normal server, things slow down. And then if you try to have a friend over to see it all, well, good luck. 
Life without Lindens is definitely different.
Alizarin Goldflake: I was having terrible lag on Aquarella the sim that Jeri Rajha has lent me to develop in InWorldz. I talked to Jeri and she contacted Elenia, one of the founders. She came to the sim in person, identified the problem as one of my scripts, fixed the script for me, solved my lag problem, and told me she liked my work. Good luck getting ANY support in SL, let alone on this personal a level.

Aquarella, Alizarin's build in InWorldz

It can be a technical epiphany, too.
Oberon Onmura: Running a sim from a text console is a tremendous educational experience. Every user of virtual worlds should be forced to sit at a console and watch all the textures downloading, and all the scripts initializing. Only then can you start to understand the concept of "lag". This should be required of all potential users, particularly anyone who would contemplate buying scripted shoes.
All worlds have bugs. We all know about the alpha problem (two textures with transparent bits in them tend to bleed when they overlap on your screen) but outside SL there's the Control-z fist-shaker. Control-z is the 'undo' shortcut. If you move an object and then change your mind, you can return it to its previous position with Control-z. But if you do that to a linked object outside SL, there's a good chance that it will either disappear, or move to coordinates 1,1,1 on the sim, or all the prims with flip in weird positions. This doesn't happen every time, but often enough to drive you nuts. Also, if you edit single prims that are linked, they will 'revert' after a few seconds. Which I discovered after I hollowed out all 16 prims of a skirt about 3 times before it occured to me that it seemed to be taking a long time to do the task...
Leannan Shi: Yes, but if you hit it TWICE, Ctrl Z will work! You have to hit it REALLLLY fast..lol

The Grey Inn Between, OpenSim

From exodus, you get diaspora. As people explore different grids and find a niche, rivalries develop, with silly 'hate campaigns' against those who choose a different path. Be prepared to lose a few friends, and to see fewer people. Craft, for example, often has only one or two people online in the evening, which is perfect if you're looking for peace and quiet. Insular groups often move to new worlds without feeling the pinch of loneliness, but for a single individual, the lack of venues where you can meet new people or catch up with old friends can be hard to deal with. And if you're trying to 'get famous', you're going to miss all the infrastructure of SL; the managers, bloggers, and patrons, the gallery openings, the themed parties and competitions, and all the people who make that happen.
Alizarin Goldflake: I would say the low population of IWz is both a plus and a minus. It is more peaceful and relaxed to build here, but you don't have as many customers.
Leannan Shi: Ahh, true.. but not as much competition, so you HAVE sales if you are not the god/dess of your genre of building.
Misty Harley: Here you can procrastinate to your hearts content then when someone comes along and honors you with a purchase of something you took time to build, you really are honored.  It's not about who's who or what name you have.  Savvy shoppers, savvy builders and the builders HELP new builders to succeed.  I hope it is always like that.

Happy InWorldz builders

Raphaella Nightfire: Many here already know each other from other grids, so chunks of existing communities are coming here, and that cuts any 'loneliness'. Inworldz is very artistic; builders, roleplayers, artists, musicians. It's a different community. No gambling, greedy, sploders and zingo.
soror Nishi: No real noobs here, which is quite good, also, people are more generous here.
Oberon Onmura: The community of users drawn to Opensim grids tends to be willing to experiment, to forge new Paths, to try the unknown. Or they could just be cheapskates, who knows. Either way, I have found them creative and resourceful, and much less likely to be there for the virtual sex than the typical SL Resident. And there is the added inducement of making new worlds, a feeling long lost in SL, now that it is the "established" grandaddy of virtual worlds.