SL Go – Feel The Technology And There May Be A Subscription Model After All

First of all, a public service announcement. Many of our dearly beloved bloggers were given equipment and an extended trial to test SL Go by Onlive. This means those bloggers can give a far more informed opinion on the technology than many of us. However please don’t take this to mean those bloggers have been paid, they haven’t. Providing people with equipment and extended free trials is perfectly normal and perfectly above board.

Some of these bloggers are being unfairly criticised over this and I say unfair because those bloggers have declared they were involved in the trial and in some cases provided with the equipment or even working as a consultant. That the bloggers are declaring this is positive, if they were hiding these facts I’d be highly critical of them, but they aren’t hiding these facts.

Obviously this means they have a different perspective on matters in some cases because they have had more time to play with the technology, but they have provided a hell of a lot of important information on this product. Having said that, I can declare I have been given nothing at all and have not been involved in the trial in any way, shape or form. Indeed my sources didn’t even tip me off about this or give me any inside information! My sources are currently being frowned at, a lot.

Now let’s take a look at the actual product. Actually first of all, let’s look at the blurb:

Enjoy Second Life at speeds over 50 FPS with a 512-meter draw distance. During each secure session, a powerful cloud-based server streams SL in full 3D to your mobile device in real time over any fast Internet connection.

Stay connected to your in-world friends and events. Manage your virtual business from anywhere you can get online. You’ll have access to the full Second Life Viewer interface, plus touch controls for navigation. Leave your desktop computer at home and let us do the heavy lifting.

Bold claims, can it deliver, well actually, yes it looks like it can. I’ve tried it for a few minutes on a Google Nexus 7 and for a few minutes on my desktop PC. Let’s just pause here and be a tad critical of the free trial, at twenty minutes long it is nowhere near long enough for people to appreciate this product and therefore want to pay for the service. Having said that, I would highly recommend people who are interested in how this works do engage with the free 20 minute trial, it will only cost you time. Oops, you have to be in the USA, Canada or the UK to try this unfortunately, but the trial, as brief as it is, is worth engaging with.

I’ve been impressed with the performance on both devices. On my desktop, I can set the graphics to a higher setting than my desktop PC suggests I should set them and I can walk around happily with those higher graphics settings.

I did experience a few glitches, yesterday the desktop client informed me I hadn’t configured my firewall for UDP, today it loaded fairly happily. I received a warning about my controller, which isn’t surprising as it’s a Nostromo N52 and I received a warning about low power settings, but it worked, I could login to Second Life.

Now this is where the short trial really is a pain point, it’s easier for me to play around with the desktop client because the controls are ones I’m familiar with. On my Nexus 7 they aren’t, but you feel rushed by the limited trial and so I felt the desktop version was the way to go.

Another glitch was that the text on the menus sometimes went blurry, I’m not sure why that was but as I’m sure some of you will have figured out, I don’t exactly have a state of the art PC!

Another issue for me was that on the desktop the image and menus weren’t as crisp as they are on my Nexus 7. I don’t know why that is and due to the limited trial, I really didn’t have time to try and figure it out.

From my limited perspective, I like this technology, both for mobile and desktop delivery to be honest. There’s heaps of potential here and I really really want to see this product become a success and not just from a Second Life perspective either.

However as I’ve explained, I haven’t looked at it for long enough to give a reallty informed opinion, fortunately I know some people who have. Iris Ophelia over at New World Notes writes:

I trotted down the boardwalk and into the glass-domed event hall. I shopped, I walked, I cammed around the crowded space, I took all the screenshots included in this post and emailed them to myself (since Save to Computer isn’t available when you’re streaming from not-your-computer, obviously). I did the things I always do. The whole time, SL Go was running better than my PC viewer of choice, without having to compromise by lowering any visual settings. On the contrary: I was raising them, and OnLive’s viewer, running on this thin little screen sitting my lap, wasn’t even breaking a sweat.

However Iris did run into some niggles too, as she explains:

I found that when I first logged on I needed to give SL Go about a minute to load in and settle down before doing too much, and being overeager during this warm-up stage occasionally lead to crashes. The touch controls were good, but the camera controls often felt far too sensitive, and I found that I preferred using SL’s built-in camera controls to SL Go’s HUD controls as a result. There is also currently no right-click functionality in the tablet-version of SL Go (likely due to the limitations of touch controls) but this could change as OnLive tweaks the viewer based on user feedback.

Strawberry Singh, Of Strawberry Singh.com … that’s quite a fortunate coincidence that she has the same name as her blog .. anyway, Strawberry Singh wrote:

I have to admit, I’ve been playing with SL Go for the past week now on an android tablet as well as on my tv and, at times, it actually worked better than it does on my computer. I crashed a lot less, things rezzed a lot quicker and I was able to move around and go about doing things faster with a lot less lag.

However Strawberry also ran into some difficulties, remember folks, this is beta:

I did crash twice because my inventory was still loading (it’s over 100K.) While on my main avatar, Strawberry Singh, I crashed twice with this and I got these two messages: Network Problem and Network Quality Problem I’m assuming this also possibly had to do with my network connection during those moments. This didn’t happen to me when I was logged in with my ALT (ManBerry) who has less than 5K inventory. It was so smooth and fast and lag-free for me. I was on a 10 inch tablet and had shadows and was exploring around lag free.

There’s probably a lesson there for anyone using Second Life in general with a large inventory by the way.

Nalates Urriah turned down OnLive’s offer of a loan of a tablet and tested the service on her own Galaxy S4, she ran into some issues with her nails! However Nalates was positive about the service:

The SL Go render on my Android is gorgeous. 

SL works amazingly well on my S4. I am horribly clumsy with my Controls. What I find very quickly is that I need a stylus. Between my fingers and the length of my nails it’s very hard to select controls. I’ve even shortened them since getting my S4.

Nalates also noted that she felt the trial was too short but is overall very positive, as are most of the more in depth reviews I’ve read.

Finally I’m going to turn to Draxtor Despres, unfortunately I haven’t got time to link to all the excellent reviews I’ve read on this, but there are plenty out there. However I’m turning to Draxtor Despres because not only does he has a YouTube video of SL Go, he also has a comment suggesting a subscription model may be available one day, here’s the link. Here’s part of the comment:

Dennis Harper from OnLive tomorrow 7am on The Drax Files Radio Hour “We need to study usage pattern and we may be able to in short order offer a subscription package! 

Tomorrow’s Drax Files Radio Hour sounds like it will be well worth a listen. I’ll leave you with Draxtor Despres spending 10 minutes on SL Go, really good stuff:

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