Advantages

[Bruce Lehmann]

One of the good things about these various communities is that they use the Blaxxun Contact plug-in for 3D and it doesn't necessarily require alot of PC power or a broadband connection to participate. As a matter of fact, you can join a participate without the 3D experience. You can chat to people and participate in a 2D interface. This is lacking in other virtual platforms. Of course, there is an argument as to whether this is a good or bad thing. Kind of depends on what you want out of the experience, but it does give everyone the opportunity to join and interact. I personally prefer 3D, but there are people that merely wish to chat and this works for them. Another thing is moderation. With the exception of Jewel of Indra, which is strictly adult, these communities are moderated which makes them "family friendly" and relatively safe for younger chatters.

[Hiperia3D - Jordi R Cardona]

The only bad thing is the buggy that they are, but it is something that happens on ALL browser-based solutions. I read that it is inherent to the browser, that 3D plugins tend to crash them.

VRML/X3D requires a very small bandwidth if optimized, I agree. I still have Blaxxun as my main favorite. And we had so good moments there...

[mars]

the 3d doesn't really crash unless you want it to, it is the chat component which leads it astray by producing a kind of event horizon, so unfathomably and deeply obscure, so obliterating to attempts to even begin to understand it, that I have not, in all the time I have been in the worlds, heard one definitive statement as to what causes the crashes.
nobody has been able to fix these bugs, not the hundreds of techs who were members of cybertown once; before the crashes killed it.
Not the coders bxx have no doubt at some point drafted in, since the date of doom, October 25, 2001, the xp launch date. crashing probably started to present itself at that time.

my pet theory is that the crashing has to do with nodes/urls being added to chat, incuding send to chat strings. avatar added etc. the timing could get messed up so that perhaps fields/urls are looked for, perhaps in the wrong order, or even aren't there. things like that.
a solution would be to write a new chat client and rig it up to send the right kinds of messages to the activex.
i think thyme was working on something like this once for seamless3d.
something i have noticed is that what should be safe code, stuff which just adds external files like protos or instances, rendered by script - will produce similar crashes to the ones one gets in the communities.
chat strings seem to do the same, instancing the chat shared zone in world might possibly help. perhaps chat could be filtered that way and broken time-stamps repared maybe. although i imagine that bxx have tried this too.

[alain]

btw , when I was tired and bored on some evening chats , and with no excuse to say good bye , I disconnected , and thought " they will say I had crash " .
( I beg you pardon all friends , it was years ago )