The INWORLDZ Interview

During this past week, I was fortunate enough to interview Elenia Llewellyn, and she was kind enough to find time in her hectic schedule to allow for this. Elenia is one of three founders of the virtual world, Inworldz.

The Facts

The three Founders are:

Elenia Llewellyn (InWorldz name) – Beth Reischl
Legion Hienrichs (InWorldz name) – John Arnolde
Tranquillity Dexler (InWorldz name) – David Daeschle

Login URI: http://inworldz.com:8002/

Current number of registered accounts: 18,484+

Economy: 500 I’z = $1US. Currency purchased and sold via paypal account

The Interview

Thank you for agreeing to this Q & A interview, I do understand you are extremely busy. How many new accounts can you handle immediately?

New accounts are not an issue. Even if there is an issue for them registering, we handle it very quickly with a simple note to us in the forums or emailing support@inworldz.com

How many logins can your grid cope with? What would happen if 5,000 people attempted to create an account and login this weekend?

I would love to say we could handle it no problem, but that would be very unrealistic. Right now, the back end hardware can handle easily 1000-1500 avatars spread out over the grid. If they all logged in at one time as first time registrations, I know InWorldz Desert Isle would be very unhappy until we are ready to start our revolving regions for welcome area.

Do you see an upsurge in interest in Inworldz in recent weeks?

We track our registrations pretty closely, and we do see spikes in registration depending on the outside metaverse news. We are aware of the interest of other groups, seeing where we go, what we do, and we’re fairly sure that interest is just going to continue to grow.

Do you want there to be a move of the education stream from SL to IW?

The education sector is very welcome here, and we’re aware that there are education groups looking very closely at us as a viable alternative. With that in mind, it’s important to make sure that we’re all aware that InWorldz is growing, and we don’t have staff dedicated to Education at this time, and some of the things they are looking for may or may not be readily available just yet. We hope that as we nail down the stability further, that we’ll be able to provide them with more of the standard features they’ve become accustomed to, and take their other needs into consideration for the entire grid as a whole. There’s a lot of good ideas that come out of the varied groups out there.

Do you welcome all communities (child avatars, Gor, BDSM)?

We currently have Gor sims, and BDSM and we even have child groups as well. InWorldz Kidz (by Kristobell Jiminy) was created and a charter was put together with our input to ensure that nothing inappropriate could be misconstrued, and we state very clearly sexual ageplay is simply not tolerated here. We also have many PG groups here, and we work with any group on their various charters to make sure that nothing violates ToS and we’re active with the community when there are questions about these groups and charters.

When do you plan to have voice capability?

I seem to get asked this a lot! We had started work on the Freeswitch voice module, however, there were some serious integration issues with it. Looking at the Whisper/Mumble system, it also has integration issues, such as the users would have to replace their SLVoice module to use their favorite viewers. We have not determined yet, whether we’ll have to just create a custom viewer for voice as of yet, so a timeline is very difficult to give on that. We had hoped to have it much sooner, but at this point, we’d rather look at a solution that doesn’t require custom coding our viewer unless we’re absolutely forced to do so.

I have been told that your physics engine will be Nvidia PhysX – is this correct and when do you plan to introduce it

Yes, we are going with the Nvidia PhysX engine. Tranquillity’s current timeline for it, is to be started around Jan. 1. His roadmap right now is to handle the network stack rewrite, then scrap the script engine and rewrite it so physics can become a reality. I think people will really like the physics engine, we’ve spent alot of time studying it and going through it’s capabilities and we’re fairly sure the residents will love what they’ll be able to do. Not to mention, we’re excited to see where we can take the script engine side of things and what neat things we’ll be able to do with the various options in PhysX.

Are you working with standard back-end protocols for everything?

Our backend protocol for assets is custom designed for maximum throughput and built in load balancing. other communications are done via SOAP, XMLRPC and other standard internet protocols.

What are your biggest technical challenges, at the moment?

Managing the many, many bugs that need fixing

Where is your funding coming from?

Our funding is strictly from our residents. Have we discussed other venture options? Of course. However, while we may debate the options occasionally, we feel very firmly that we answer to our residents, and anything else would sidetrack us from giving them the grid they want to see develop.

What sort of stability can you offer on your grid, especially for people keen to invest in land purchases?

Over the course of the past few months, stability has been our number 1 priority, and to that end, we have spent alot of time cleaning up memory leaks, streamlining code, completely rewriting the assets, and all of these things have greatly enhanced stability. Originally when we started, we would run rolling restarts daily, now we average a rolling restart every 3 days for regions. Stability is always at the top of our list, if our residents can’t get to their regions, then they have no reason to be here. If this means we monitor their region, pull scripts, or patch areas of concern, then that’s what we do.

Other grids have come and gone, which initially showed promise. You seem to be working at a steady pace, rather than providing all the bells and whistles immediately. What are the medium and long term plans for IW?

Bells and whistles are great if you have a solid stable foundation. Our feeling is until we’re at that point, the bells and whistles can stay as goals while we work out the core issues.
Short-mid term goals: stability, the new script engine with better controls, PhysX implementation.
Long term goals: Custom loadable modules for customers (we’d love to create an RP module for various forms of RP, and other modules our residents have ideas on), peer reviewed interoperability, and to actually bridge the 2D/3D gap between the web and Virtual Worlds

I would love to see an Arts community, live music, radio, and a diverse fashion industry here in IW. do you think all this is possible?

Interestingly enough, we have one resident already with two sims dedicated to the Arts, Stefanik Dagostino with Artlandia and West Artlandia. There’s also Jeri Rahja who has been working with some artists as well. Then we have soror Nishi who came over, and she’s just great, her work is amazing. We have dj’s in world, and music urls and streaming work fine here. Our fashion is really starting to get pretty diverse, as you blogged about. Although I think the gentlemen in our world may disagree, as they need far more variety.

Thank you again for your time!

Set up fee for a private isle is $75US, monthly tier is $75US, so an initial payment of $150Us. This gives you 35,000 prims for your sim.

Inworldz has a mentor programme to assist your entry into the environment.

Inworldz Arrival area – Inworldz Desert Island (IDI)

More information and FAQ on Inworldz can be found here

Metaverse Interview video here

Elenia’s blog here

Prims can be exported from SL and imported into Inworldz IF you are the creator of the prims. However, textures do not import and must be reapplied to prims in world.

Inworldz Servers

Inworldz has huge room for growth, at a surprisingly reasonable cost. There is a rapidly growing market for creators wares: clothing, shoes, hair, AOs, furniture, botanical, jewellery, skins, shapes, accessories – in fact, you name it, there is a place for it. The demand is for high quality and known SL brands (although not only known brands). There is a growing arts community, music, live music, education, business and government sectors. Come and see for yourself!