Class 3: Exploring the Virtual World Framework (VWF)

I entered the virtual.wf link and for the most part enjoyed it! There were multiple places to pick, unlike having to connect to the church the first time we used meshmoon. These screenshots are from the first place I visited. I will space out my 2 paragraphs throughout this post.

I first noticed that this world, running on this program as opposed to meshmoon seemed to have better graphics. The detail of the mountains off in the distance was great, as well as the sun and glare that came with it making it look more realistic than meshmoon. However, when I tried to move I learned why I think meshmoon is better; it is incredibly laggy! It was hard to even get my avatar positioned correctly to take a scenic screenshot, and after checking my activity monitor on my laptop I realized this was making my computer use 11GB of ram, nearly all I have, and it was slowing down considerably. I didnt have this big of a problem on meshmoon.

Next I visited what looked like a town that had gone through a warzone, complete with soldiers and army vehicles. I sadly could not explore that much here, because the lag and glitches on the screen made it hard to even stay in the street (a lot of lagging into walls, etc) In that respect, I think meshmoon is much better because the world was detailed enough to look around, but not so much that it caused things to slow down greatly and made even basic functioning difficult. Also, as I mentioned there were soldiers in this world with me, as seen in some of the pics, but they were frozen still like statues. In the web browser version of meshmoon there were no template people, but other players could be seen moving around freely, not frozen.

In this last place I went, the graphics were not as good, but I liked it better than the first two! It put me in some kind of game, which can be seen with the "score" and "kills" on the side. I could move around freely with no lag, but there was nothing to kill or get a score from, just walls and random blue pyramid-looking things. I think if there was a world in this program that combined a world like this with something like the first two, and you had an avatar that could move around with no lag, even if it meant sacrificing some graphics and detail, it would be better than meshmoon. However, meshmoon, to me anyway, remains easier to use, as well as much more fun, and comes at a lower cost to your computers processing power.