Avination, the beginning

This blog will tell some about my experiences in virtual worlds, starting out with the world Avination.

Backlog

• 2011-02-12 : I came to Avination to investigate alternatives to Second Life.
• 2011-02-13 : I was joined by my dear friend Maid, who has been with me in Second Life for 16 months. We explored some and we found our first freebies, me a T-shirt from FYI and a vendor from MLPV. I tweaked my avatar some to make it more to my taste.
• 2011-02-14 : Maid and I explored some in Avination. We found a freebie demo cuff set from Satiated Desires.
• 2011-02-15 : Maid and I explored some in Avination.
• 2011-02-16 : Maid and I explored some in Avination. We found a freebie shelf from Time Engineer, a wall shadow box from Allegro Chan and a cat suit from Fashion Vaher. I decided to get us some money (bought C$ 4000 for USD 16 and gave Maid C$ 1000), rented a shop for Maid and me in the region Sweet Hideout from trad Aeon (C$ 1 for the land and C$ 200 for 4 weeks rent), and created a simple 3-prim fountain for sale there.
• 2011-02-17 : I started creating a 1-prim stellarium, much as a scripting exercise to create a basic and re-usable interaction script (C$ 160 for texture uploads). I rented a small seafront house in the region Sweet Hideout from trad Aeon (C$ 80 for 4 weeks rent).
• 2011-02-18 : I kept working on my stellarium (C$ 10 for texture upload).
• 2011-02-19 : I created a shop sign "Magnuz & Maid", a hole texture, two vase sculpts, a general plant sculpt, 3 flower textures, and 4 2-prim in-world flower arrangements from the latter (C$ 80 for uploads).
• 2011-02-20 : I found freebie jeans from FYI, got the main features of the stellarium script working, and celebrated by letting Maid teach me how to play Zyngo (won C$ 36). My sweet Maid bought me a suit from Rosie Marksman in our home region Sweet Hideout to share some of her winnings, after we had explored Avination some and found the prices in other places rather high.
• 2011-02-21 : I sold my first creation, the simple 3-prim fountain for C$ 10. I rented a main street shop in the region Sweet Hideout from trad Aeon (C$1 for the land and C$ 200 for 4 weeks rent). Maid and I set up a small garden with my stellarium on the roof terrace, moved our things from the first shop to the 1st floor of the new one, and I created a simple 3-prim garden chair.

Summary

Avination is still a young and comparatively small world, even if it's growing rapidly (from 11,000 to 14,000 residents and 850 to 1,000 regions in my first week). It is of course much less rich in content than e.g. Second Life, but many content creators are moving there, or at least have part of their activities there. There are still some technical problems with the platform, but usually nothing that can't be sorted out by re-logging and clearing cache once in a while.

Avination is profiled much as a commercial world. One risk, partly already verified by in-world excursions, is that there is an over-establishment of malls, their owners wanting to make money on the content creators, but also an over-establishment of content creators, compared to the number of buyers. This results in many ambitious but more or less empty malls, and few or no customers in the shops that do exist. Also, both land rentals and content prices are often surprisingly high, considering the low cost of sims (USD 60/month), probably owing to many believing that lack of competition enables them to set their prices with large margins.

There still seems to be a lot of pioneer attitude in Avination, with people on an average more friendly and willing to help out than in e.g. Second Life. Or, that may be because we've just been lucky and run into the right people so far.

Thanks

Melanie Milland, the founder and director of Avination, also a lead developer of the OpenSimulator platform it's based on, for providing a full world which is surprisingly stable considering it's run on what the developers themselves say is a pre-alpha software.

trad Aeon, the creator, owner and manager of mine and Maid's now home region Sweet Hideout and neighboring sims, for creating a very nice environment, offering places to rent for very humane prices, and being an extremely nice and helpful guy.

Ying Inglewood, the owner of FYI, for providing Maid and me with our first useful freebies in her shop FYI, and for leading us to Sweet Hideout, our now home, in the first place.