Smiley’s Blog

UPDATE: Ha, apparently Habbo USA just upgraded its looks as well. I might move back if they trigger the “FREE Furni per day on Xmas!” promotion…

I just noticed the Habbo USA uses the old homepage that no other Habbo Hotels use any longer. See for yourself (Habbo USA , Habbo UK , Habbo Finland [First hotel]). The new intro really gets you into the idea of joining, plus its fun to watch over and over and over…

About the revamping thing, the new hotel sites use a much cleaner page that (tested) takes less resources to display, render, and load on Firefox, Internet Explorer, and (possibly) Safari. Plus, they have all-new hairstyles (new ones, that is), glasses, hats, facial hair, belts, and a wider selection of shirt, pants, and shoe colors. If Habbo UK will work faster than Habbo USA (due to real geographical location), and Habbo USA won’t update, I may move! I will lose my current (3 lousy) coins, furniture, and friends . On second thought, i’ll stay on Habbo USA for now and Habbo UK…

Here’s a little comparison between my Habbos on the two hotels (left is US, right is UK):

VS.

So, do I look cooler in Habbo UK or what??? Oh, and did I mention their price of Habbo Club is 20 coins a month instead of the regular 30 on other hotels??? Wacky! Plus, their Habbo Club program has the 4 other dance moves that others don’t…

Oh, and here’s the new intro if you wanna see. Stay a little longer before hitting “START VIDEO” to see some sample Habbos (that are REAL! It picks them randomly):

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I just went to check my blog subscriptions, and lookie here. Sony’s (ALPHA) “Home” virtual world application for the PlayStation 3 is getting tons of new stuff, one of them, and listen carefully, in-world building. The world was up ’til now just a buy-and-place world. Did Second Life just lose the only feature it has that no other world has, or can have? Did the “Prims system” get a kick in the crotch just now? Will I be able to get a friggin’ invite any time soon to report? We’ll have to wait for the official release in 2008 to find out, or until I get an invite and a proper connection. Stay tuned.

You can view the full post at PlayStation Universe right here.

I have been around the net, looking for “open simulators”, other than the one for Second Life. I found one for World of Warcraft, and one even for Habbo Hotel. Both run very smoothly, especially the World of Warcraft one even with up to 10 people, while playing. Both do basically nothing, but save variables. The World of Warcraft “Ascent” server only saves locations, calculates damage, and sends other objects’ (monsters, players, NPCs [non-playable characters]… etc.) locations and stats. People’s clients do all the physical thinking. Second Life should get that .

The Habbo Hotel “Debbo” server, works pretty nicely, and is VERY stable. I’m building a sky city in there, and a single-player mode called “Habbo Hotel: Living in the Metaverse” (Sorry, Dan! ), though the quests part is kinda tricky.

In the end, I see OpenSim still hasn’t reached a nice landmark where it can be used with up to 3,000 people per-realm like the World of Warcraft Ascent server can . Linden should REALLY release the code, or at least optimize it further. Now with Havok 4, they can make regions much bigger, even increase their size by their current size! (current * current = current²). I still haven’t got to that part where i’ll take photos from WoW for my blog logo and Flickr, but I will, soon…

Oh, and did I mention i’m setting up a World of Warcraft server for Israeli players? You’d have to apply for membership though. Sorry! (Plus, no addicted 24-hours-gaming-per-day gamers!).

After tweaking around with some Nvidia settings, I managed to get to a nice 30FPS when seeing an avatar in-building, and 45FPS when outside, which was GREAT for a minimum requirements PC! (NOTE: This does NOT include WindLight, reflection water, or ripple water enabled.) But, the objects seem to flicker… Well, must be because I moved the “Quality versus Performance” meter to “Performance”, rather than the normal “High Quality”. After moving it to the “Quality” spot, I got the same results, no flicker, but my network and viewer are unstable again. I’ll check again tomorrow.

Adding ripple water to the batch, lowers the FPS by about 5-7 frames to 23-25, but when enabling WindLight, I poof right down to 3-5. Argh!

I’ll tweak with it tomorrow as well, I wanna see how far I can get with it…

1. The end. — Kathy’s now leaving forever (or until the grids are merged or she turns 18, whichever comes first) and she’s closing AjaxLife! WE’VE GOT TO STOP HER!!! And, there goes my last stable “portal” to Teen Second Life .
2. Xbox 360 returned, critical components not included – Ouch. The one time they don’t check the returned Xbox, it’s gutted. Bad luck?
3. Charlie, she’s trying to tell you the iPhone’s upside down – This is the second time this is happening! Don’t celebrities know how to hold a phone god damn it?!?!
4. We’re SPINNING the WHEEL of FORTUNE… — Come on, come on, daddy needs a new pair of teleporters!!! AWW! The Habbo Team spinned a (new) virtual wheel of fortune (which should open about a zillion new competitions and upgrade some, like the notorious Fridge Game), and we had to choose one of five objects. The ones who chose the (useless) camera won one for FREE. The camera allows people to take snapshots in vintage colors (for some reason) and upload it to a little PostIt-note-like photo on any wall around their little room(s). WHY DIDN’T TELEPORTERS WON???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcAylFKpeb8[/youtube]

I recently rented a Playstation 2 game called Mortal Kombat: Armageddon on my Backwards-compatible Playstation 3 (i’m mentioning this as the new 40GB Playstation 3 does NOT support Backwards-compatibility at all! [it does support Playstation {One} games, but those are too crappy to be count.]), and I gotta say, it’s as good as a Playstation 3 game. Up to 62 players playable, amazing “Konquest” (Conquest = one big quest consisting of normal-sized quests) mode, Motor Kombat (an option to play a small racing game with mini-characters, one of the mini-games released in every series game), Kreate-A-Fighter (self-explanatory), and of course, improved fighting system.

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I recently get annoying human-like spam comments, that I can identify by a known bug in ANY program: apostrophes fail to format well, meaning they say “…regarding s Blog…” instead of “…regarding Smiley’s Blog…”, plus, it doesn’t “regard my blog”, it is my blog! So, no matter what, spammers will nevah get me! MUHAHAHAH–*clears throat* yay.

Are there other virtual worlds, or are we all in one world consisted of different realms?

Well, my two Ubuntu (pronounced oo-boon-too) CDs arrived in the mail — for free — in less than the assured six weeks plus. It took about 26 days, which is pretty fast regarding non-commercial shipments to Israel. Like my Playstation 2 Network Access Disc back in the day. Took them two and a half (2 1/2) months to ship it over. Back to Ubuntu, I need a few more for friends, so i’m now ordering more. I’ll soon clear some space on my bought-during-year-2001 PC, so I could install Ubuntu. Tons of people say that system is kick-ass and can take on Vista and Mac OS X, so I wanna get it installed side-by-side with my Windows XP, and soon-may-be Mac OS X Leopard, hacked to run on PCs.

Want Ubuntu in nice looking CDs as well? You can visit here to order your free CDs, but if you don’t wanna go through the trouble of another registration, feel free to email me at Smiley [at] DuoGrid [dot] com, and i’ll open a special order. If some people request, and are in the same region, I may suggest them to share a postal mail envelope to save up on Canonical Ltd’s expenses. I mean, we may not be paying for the CDs, but they are!.

A very nice flash movie, watched it about 10 times in a row… I gotta find a way to get that “song” as my ringtone…