Almost heaven…

Update: I have emphasized the 18+ aspect here. If you’re not 18 or older, don’t log in. If you do, when we find out (and we will), you’ll be banned, your IP and machines will be banned, and there will be NO refunds. That also means that anyone else in your house won’t be able to use There, even if they are over 18. Thanks for your cooperation.

Now, a short update from SamSyn:

No, we’re not fully re-opened yet, but here’s your Socratic FAQ on the subject…..

WHAT IS HAPPENING?

We’re ready to test the 3D Client Installer process on wide scale, and to let more avatars into the 3D world. One of them could be you!

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WHO CAN TAKE PART?

Any (non-banned, 18+) legacy There.com avatar (i.e. your old Avatar) that has been recreated on the new There.com, can take part in the download/installer testing.

And, of those, any avatar with the “Beta Test” privilege can then log into the new There.com 3D world!

So, do YOU have the beta test privilege? Meh, we dunno, just try it. If you had a PLATINUM funpass then you likely have the beta test privilege. If you had a GOLD funpass then you *might* have the privilege. If you didn’t have at least a GOLD funpass, then probably you don’t have the Beta Test Privilege.

But please try the download/install of the 3D client in any case! If you turn out to not have the Beta privilege, well, we still appreciate your testing the avatar creation and client installation. You’ll get in soonish, honest!

If you have not yet re-created your avatar, please visit http://www.there.com and click the “Invite Me Now!” link in the lower left. This will send you an invitation email with detailed instructions on how to re-claim your legacy avatar.

You must do this first, before you fetch the 3D client.

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WHERE CAN I GET A NEW THERE.COM 3D CLIENT?

We want to test the REAL client download process, so AFTER you have recreated your legacy avatar (see above), then:

* visit http://www.there.com
* log in via the name/password field at the top
* click appropriately to open your Avatar’s Profile
* Note the far right “tab” called “Get There”
* click it!

This will download a small program (quickly — about 1 megabyte) which will itself then fetch the full installer (more slowly. it’s about 50 megabytes)

Please watch the progress meter and slide show and take notes about anything you think we ought to know.

If you just can’t get that to work, please let us know via an email to feedback@thereinc.com and tell us your Windows version, a description of “what went wrong” (include error message snapshots if you like) and maybe a description of your Firewall/Virus checker software (no, don’t tell us any secrets, and we never need you to tell us your password)

After duly reporting the failure, you can then fetch the full installer directly from this URL:

http://www.there.com/installerdownloads/Setup_Min_Packs.exe

Just download it to your desktop, then execute it. You might need to right-click on it and “Run as admin” (particularly if you have User Account Control enabled)

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WHERE SHOULD I INSTALL THE 3D CLIENT?

Technically you can install it to any folder you like, but using the default folder is generally a good idea.

Please do NOT install it on top of your OLD There client (if you still have it). We don’t want to contaminate the experience with old files merged in. This might be a good time to re-name your old client folder if you have a sentimental attachment to it and want to keep it around, but not actually ever run it again.

Also, you want to be careful to preserve your old Gamekit and House Layouts. YOU HAVE THE ONLY COPIES. (They are NOT stored on the servers) and eventually you will probably want them back. They are stored in:

/Makena/There/UserData/GameKits

and you might want to make a backup of that folder before you start.

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CAN I SHARE THE CLIENT WITH OTHERS?

Well, we want everyone to download their own copy (don’t just send someone an installer EXE file). But please share this announcement with anyone you like.

But remember that only legacy avatars can take part at this time. (i.e. avatars which existed in Old There, and have been re-created in New There.)

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IT WON’T LET ME LOGIN

If you are able to log in to ThereIM, you should be able to log in to There3D using the same name and password. One thing which would prevent you from doing this would be if your email address was not successfully verified (ThereIM doesn’t care).

If that’s the case, the 3D client should give you an error message and offer a page (or a link to a page) to request a new email verification letter.

Other reasons you might not be able to login include:

* You didn’t recreate your old Avatar and/or follow all the other miscellaneous instructions we tried to provide.

* We’re down for maintenance (usually around 3am California time).

* We’re “Full” (we will be limiting the number of simultaneous 3D logins to a low value at first, then raise it as we draw confidence)

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WHAT HAPPENED TO CLUCKY’S TEMPLE?

It’s there, see if you can find it! ALL of the old ‘scene file’ data has been reloaded on the new There.com cluster. However, you will find none of your old PaZes, Lots, and Neighborhoods will be there. (Your PaZes and Lots will be back in your pocket, Hoods will need to be recreated one by one as people return to the service).

Things you will, however, NOT find:

* CC Metro is gone, even the very dirt itself. (Turns out all those red pixels are expensive! (That’s a joke))

* CosmoGirl! Village has become “Phoenix Park”

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WHERE SHOULD I REPORT STUFF?

Please send all feedback to:

“feedback@thereinc.com”

and please include as much information as you can, INCLUDING YOUR AVATAR NAME IN A CLEARLY MARKED WAY (in every email you send, please. Assume we have absolutely no memory at all from one email to the next).

If your comment is about a particular part of the world (say you find a ‘floating tree’ or something), please turn on the hostHud (ctrl-shift-H to toggle it on and off) and include a screenshot (of the tree) in your report.

That way we know WHAT your talking about and WHERE it is (the hostHud shows your x/y/z position) We also enjoy seeing your ‘performance meter’ (ctrl-shift-P) and ‘frame rate’ (ctrl-shift-F) meters in the screenshot.

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I HAVE SOME CRASHDUMPS, DO YOU WANT THEM?

If your client crashes (segvio), it should leave behind a couple ‘crashdump files’ which it would be nice for us to see. At this time, we’re mainly interested in the smaller files (with an extension of .TXT or .DMT) and not the larger one (.DMP) The crashdumps are left in your client folder. So if you installed to the typical c:/Makena/There, then your crashdump files will be in:

c:/Makena/There/ThereClient

When sending in a crashdump, please indicate what you feel was going on when it happened and any screenshots you might have of error messages, etc, that you think might help use understand the cause.

You can actually look at these files yourself (they are just text files) and at the end is a log of what it was doing right before the crash. Note that some 3rd party compass replacements have been crashing a lot. Could be our fault, but we’ll probably blame it on the 3rd party code if you’re using any. It’s nice for US if you don’t use 3rd party stuff, but we know it’s often nicer for YOU to use them. It just complicates bug reporting.

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WHAT’S A UUDOB?

A uudob is a “usually uniform distributed object” (think ‘tree’). And this client starts out with most, but perhaps not all of them. So as you walk around and get close to (invisible) things, they should pop into existence (so don’t freak out, that’s normal for this client).

Once you see a uudob once, it is cached on your computer and the next time it should appear ‘right away’ (well, ‘promptly’).

This paragraph is still roughly true, but our current client now includes pretty much ALL of the scene uudobs. We just include this info in the case that when you THINK you are “rubber banding” that you might ACTUALLY be bouncing off of some (invisible) uudob!

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CAN I LOGIN WITH MY OLD THERE CLIENT?

You really shouldn’t. It will confuse US, and it will definitely crash after you’ve used flash for any time at all. Also, don’t freak out if your login puts up a “mis-matched client” warning. That’s to be expected with the new client (for now).

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WHAT SHOULD I DO?

Anything you like (other than griefing), and let us know what didn’t work for you.

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WHERE IS A SPA?

The Welcome Walkway has a few Spas at the moment, but you can teleport to Karuna Plaza (The Fashion Stage area) for all the Spas you will ever need.

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ARE THERE LAND-USE POLICIES?

We’re glad you asked!

This is also our chance to test the “Can we all get along” policy where all members do their best to not aggravate each other, and try to tolerate the inadequacies of others as best as possible.

There is currently not much stopping you from defacing the world, as it were. Use your own best judgement, and understand that we will feel free to pick up anything for any reason at any time, according to whatever ineffable moral judgement we come to. But use your own common sense first. Please don’t intentionally drop stuff that you KNOW we’re just going to have to clean up. (Other than for temporary testing purposes, of course.) We assume that, at least in certain areas, we probably WILL pick up pretty much everything you’ve dropped before we open the world completely, and the Great Land Grab begins.

Again, just because an area is not yet ‘protected’ (by a ‘sacred paz’ sort of thing), doesn’t mean you should go ahead and stick your paz on top of it.

If you were renting a House or FunZone in Old There, that location should be back in world now and ready for you to rent it again (in fact, such locations are being held IN RESERVE for you and no one can rent them BUT you…. Other than us, and if we did, we’re sorry, and we only did it to give people 3rd party hosting privileges somewhere at this time for testing purposes. Please forgive us.

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WHAT ABOUT HOSTHUD?

Yeah, ok, no one is asking themselves that, but we wanted to point out that ths is a very small world still, with only twelve sectors. Sector 1, in partcular, spans the world, INCLUDING some of the loaded scene areas (like Club Makena). So you might find you cannot drop things in some areas that you otherwise could. You can use ctrl-shift-H to toggle your hostHud on and off. It will tell you which sector you are in, if you’re curious.

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AM I BEING CHARGED YET?

You’ll remember that you confirmed you were ’emotionally prepared’ to start paying a monthly fee. That could start up at any time (but is currently not enabled). But you can’t be charged without setting up payment info first, so you should never be ‘surprise-billed’

You’ll know when billing starts by:

* When you try to login, you will be redirected to a PayPal ‘subscription’ page.
* You will be able to purchase TB again, which as of this moment, you cannot.

In both cases, you will have to go through the PayPal process before any money is taken from you, so you, again, should never be ‘surprise-billed’

Note: It has come to our attention that people can go to PayPal and send us money already, but you won’t get anything in return for that, so don’t do that! Wait until you see us ask you to do it.

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WHAT ABOUT MY THEREBUX?

The Therebux you got as part of your Account Data Migration are REAL. If you spend them, they are gone. This is not the old Beta cluster where you could spend ‘virtual’ ThereBux. These are non-refunded.

Note that some members took advantage of a buy-back program when we closed the service in 2010. Such members will find that their avatars are still carrying the ThereBux they had BEFORE the buyback (i.e. ThereBux that, strictly-speaking, no longer belong to you). THOSE ThereBux will eventually be reclaimed from you. We hope you feel that’s only fair.

You will eventually be able to purchase more Therebux using the normal commands, but as of this moment you still cannot.

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WILL PAINTBALLS STAY FREE?

The official word is that PaintBall refills *will* eventually cost TB again, though they are currently still free (um, mostly).

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WHAT ABOUT PREMIUM ACCOUNTS?

There is no longer any such thing (and please report any references to “Premium” that you find in the product). Since you will (eventually) be paying a monthly fee, EVERYONE is ‘premium’ now.

So you should have Explorer Pack, Voice, and Music and can do all the things reserved for “paying members.” Because that’s what you are. Or will be in any case.

So when you see the “voice glyph” in an avatar’s nametag, that’s all it means: They have Voice enabled. It doesn’t mean “They think they are better than you because they are premium and you are not” as some people seemed to feel in the past. It means they have the voice feature enabled and just might hear you if you speak. If they do NOT have the voice glyph, then they can NOT hear you when you speak. And that’s what it’s for, to let you know who can hear you.

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HOW DO I GET MY MUSIC BOX TO WORK?

When you use the ‘Change Station’ option to pick your shoutcast radio station, you will need to (one time) use the Shoutcast HELP/SETTINGS option to select how you want to hear the music. You want to select “Use my default media player” for the music to come out of the music box in world. Otherwise, it will come straight out of your browser and no one else will hear it.

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KNOWN BLEMISHES

We know we’re not done. And we know about many existing less-than-perfections you might run into. The easiest to explain are:

* Problems with “Flash”. Adobe has spent the last year busily injecting new bugs into Flash for you. These currently manifest themselves in the form: “Flash 11 drawns big black squares around everything” and “Sometimes when I tell a flash window to open, it doesn’t” The client uses Flash for these controls: ChangeMe, Compass, The MessageBar, The FunFinder, The Shortcut Bar. We’re trying to work around these, but some are just insoluble without Adobe fixing Flash bugs.

* The Chat History window needs some TLC. clickable URLs are rendered in crazy locations, and if you drag the Chat History outside of the client window, and then shut down you client, you probably won’t be able to re-open the Chat History.

* Some as-yet-undiagnosed “Decoration Failues” where you find yourself unable to drop a particular item (without having to restart the client first)

* It is possible to select the DX9 rendering choice, even if your display card/drivers can’t really handle it. This can lead to a client crash on launch. In that case you will need to use ThereTweaker to set your render mode back to a working default. You will find ThereTweaker here (if you can’t find it in a menu):

c:/makena/there/thereclient/resources/dlls/ThereTweaker.exe

That’s with the default install location. If you installed the client elsewhere, please adjust accordingly

* The DX9 renderer, while mighty and powerful, and enabling exciting new options like bumpMaps, glossMaps, and environmental ‘reflections’, still has some bugs and will render some things oddly.

* Lots of other things, including some we don’t know about and that YOU will tell us about, as you become an exciting part of history itself!

You should expect fairly frequent client updates for the foreseeable future, as we resolve these and other issues.

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SPECIAL NOTE TO CABLE MODEM USERS

It turns out that a very popular brand of cable modem (“Motorola SurfBoard”, and possibly other models) has a serious bug, pretending to be a feature called “IP Flood Control”

Clearly they thought they were being helpful and added the feature to ‘protect you’ in the case you came under a Denial of Service attack from someone sending excessive data to you. However:

* They think There.com packet data is such an attack
* They think video streaming is such an attack

Their response to these ‘attacks’ is to start throwing data away. But they don’t just throw away data from ‘bad people’ they throw away any old data as they see fit. This makes There.com fail, and makes your movie stream fail, until you wait or reset your modem. Basically, they commit suicide to prevent from being murdered. Kinda lame, IMHO

IF you have one of these modems, your life (Not just There.com) will be immeasurably better if you turn this feature OFF. You will have to consult your modem documentaion as to how to do that.

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OK, you now have enough information to be dangerous! Go out and conquer the new There.com world!

– Team Phoenix, There.com