This could be a step in the direction of lower tier bills, if your region is idling, maybe you won’t get charged as much for that period, one day. However I’m speculating there, I certainly like the idea of being able to turn my region off and pay less tier per month for it, but Linden Lab haven’t indicated that’s where we’re heading and that’s where the concerns come in.

My region may well be deemed to be idle, but it will be doing something, whether it’s talking to webservers,or acting as a delivery agent for remote notecard boards, generally, I have something going on and that’s what I’m signed up for. Mainland is Linden Lab’s estate, they call the shots and I have no arguments about my Mainland parcels being part of this process, because my landlord wants those regions to be part of this process, however I do strongly feel that I should have the choice as an estate owner as to whether my regions are part of this process.

Simon Linden makes a good fist of promoting the positives of this process, it’s like a modern building turning the lights off when nobody is around, I work in buildings like this and wave my arms around or hit a switch to get the lights to come back on. There is logic to this idea, however as I said earlier, this should be a choice and it should come with some sort of carrot. Estate sims are the most likely to be idle because looking into an adjacent sim keeps the sim on, Mainland is therefore less likely to be hit by this.

This concept isn’t new, Jack Linden talked of this when he was here but the barrier was always how long it takes a sim to wake up. Linden Lab appear to have gone for a compromise by slowing an idle region down rather than putting it to sleep. There is merit in these proposal but really, there should also be choice.

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Due to the problems we’ve all witnessed, Fantasy Faire has been extended by a day. This is great news and gives people more time to go and see this wonderful event.

Here are some great machinima examples of what you’ve been missing in case you haven’t had time to go there:

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My assignment was for Mandragora/Lilith’s Den:

Full disclosure here, Runa The Elf is my chief Elf on my Roleplaying Sim, so I know her!

The Elf sent me a few words about her participation in this year’s event:

Few words about me as creator and Elf

Educated as Interactive Multimedia Content Creator and Designer, I use SL to create and live my personal unique and sometimes eccentric style.

I live and created a ” third life” as Wild Elf at the True Medieval Isle of Dee, a roleplay community and high detailed intense atmospheric fictional Sim. I love to roleplay and to create.  The range of my builds goes from  attachments, Clothes, over scenes/landscapes, buildings, furniture and Roleplay Items. My inspiration comes from dreams, books, images or roleplay scenes, and sometimes from suggestions of friends or customers.

Most of the textures as well as the scripts I use are my own work.

I have two labels.

Mandragora

MANDRAGORA – Medieval Rustic & Elven Roleplay Furniture & Items. My main and first label , started in 2008.

Lilith's Den

Lilith’s Den – The Horned Side Of Paradise, I started in 2010 as sub label for all that is less Elvish but more……twisted?  Lets say, you  find there ” all you don’t need from creepy to silly”.

As Roleplayer and Creator I am NEVER bored. I try to support always as best as I can, though it is possible that you need to poke me twice or more to remind me. I am at times in too many projects at once, that’s why my stores tend to be somewhat chaotic. This may be for I am more an  artist than a merchant

Mandragora at Fantasy Faire 2012 SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Tides/183/91/42

Tables where you can host your feast or chairs where you can sit down and command your minions are available.

Searlait Nitschke sent me details about a special edition item that will be auctioned to raise money for the event.

This special edition set is only going to be sold here at the Fantasy Faire for the silent auction.  Done with purples for RFL it will not be offered as part of the Roawenwood line after this.

Forest Glen Bed

It was created to inspire and have a ‘scene’ within a forest glade or woods… but I’m sure that there are all sorts of places people could place it.

The set itself is large including not only the bed but pieces to outfit and decorate the area around it.

Forest Glen Bed

FEATURES

♦  nPose scripted bed – No nasty poseballs and easy to use with the ability to sync!

♦  20 Different Couples Animations Sets, Includes 3 different massages, various kisses, cuddles, and quiet moments. Smooth animations picked from the very best

Forest Glen Bed

♦  9 Singles animations. Sleeping, drawing, reading, and relaxing for one

THE WINNER OF THE AUCTION IS ALSO ENTITLED TO A COPY/NO TRANSFER VERSION OF THE SET

INCLUDES

• Bed [MESH object]:  48 P.E.
• 2 Different Trees: 2 Prims Each
• Hanging Lanterns for the bed: 4 Prims Each
• Hanging Lanterns on Crook: 5 Prims Each (( 2 styles ))
• Mushroom Cluster: 4 Prims
• Wild Grasses: 2 Prims
• Grasses and Flowers: 2 Prims
• Ferns: 2 Prims

Forest Glen Bed

Roavenwood at Fantasy Faire 2012 – http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Shadows%20Claw/184/128/26

Roavenwood Mainstore SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Five%20Blades/43/117/502

There are two avatars behind Solarium; Rynn Verwood and Encaitaron Korobase. Rynn sent me some details on the store and provided me with this description:

Solarium is a Hud store that focuses on small, but important details:

• Creativity
• Simplicity
• Quality
• User Friendly Prices

The majority of the huds within the store are SpellFire and DCS2 enabled. Some huds, however also work with, SCM (Solarium Combat Meter) Chi meter and others similar to DCS, CCS for example, being mostly designed for Combat and Roleplay, our products have 3 main categories:

• MAGIC – Focused on bringing every sort of powers you can possibly associate with magic from elemental, staff weilding, wand to “abstract” Magic.
• SUPER HERO -  Focused on bringing  the powers of their favourite superheros or supervillians.
• WEAPONS – ranges from swords, staffs and wands to skurikens, bombs and claws.

Solarium also offers “customer’s choice” it means that the creators are allways avaiable for discussion about new and old products aswell as openly love to recieve Idea’s of possible new huds. Afterall, if it is the user that buys the product, they should allways have some say on the end result of a product.

However whilst wandering around the stores I cam across some Dragon Hatchlings, which are accompanied by a HUD, these guys didn’t attack me!

These HUDS aren’t just point and click with funky particle effects, they are used for roleplaying and often involve creatures, in the bloggers pack I was provided with there was an example inviolving a crystal wolf.

The HUD allows you to use a couple of modes, one is to use the Wolf itself whereby you can change the name, the colour of the eyes, summon the wolf which will then follow you around, using a chat channel you can roleplay as the wolf itself, clicking the wolf causes it to howl, you can even sit on the wolf and ride around on him.

The second mode involves you yourself becoming a crystal wolf, your armsand optionally your back will be covered in crystal and from there you can perform roleplaying combos.

Shifting Sands Solarium SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Shifting%20Sands/109/126/36

Mainstore SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Whisper%20Cave/58/215/51

I’ve been taking a look at Pathfinding in Second Life, being able to select where my characters can walk and select whether objects can move obstacles or collide with static obstacles does not sound exciting, indeed it’s not exciting at all. However what is exciting, although it doesn’t sound it, is watching prim cubes race around your sim after you’ve engaged in a bit of setting up and scripting.

There are bugs with Pathfinding at the moment, which is no surprise as testing is only just getting extended to sim owners, we’re back into the more variables the more issues arise territory, but the support I’ve received on the issues I have had with Pathfinding, have been absolutely superb, the team behind this are extremely enthusiastic. Unfortunately I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to poke around with it, but I’m getting there.

Now, so far I’ve managed to set some paths and then with the aid of the Pathfinding LSL functions I was able to create characters and set them on patrol on my sim.

The first hurdle I ran into was getting overexcited and trying to get things working before I’d read the notes properly, yes yes Ciaran should RTFM, so I did, well a bit. The next thought was that it all looked a bit daunting, I had all objects on the sim listed, did I need to set a setting for all of these? Well the answer is no but to get my characters to patrol I needed to set some of my paths to be walkable, which is an option that you will find in the pathfinding development viewer.

The next mistake I made was not setting all the paths I wanted my characters to patrol upon as walkable, which meant that when I set my patrol points, they weren’t going on the route I expected. Once I’d corrected this, I had the sheer excitement and joy of watching a few prim cubes patrol around part of my sim and avoiding me when I stepped into their path, this may not sound exciting to you but believe you me, this was a big Eureka! moment for me with regards to some of the potential of these tools.

As it stands it’s all at an extremely early stage and it’s way too early to say how well it will work, I’ve only seen it from a sim owner point of view, it will still need to be developed to some sort of parcel level I’d imagine, but we are very early into the process, all I’ll say is that it works, I find it exciting and feel there’s a hell of a lot of potential here.

Now you may well feel that if I find prim cubes patrolling around a sim in a pre-defined path exciting, that I need to get out more, but this is how our creations excite us, when our creations, albeit with the aid of Linden Lab, work, it’s a great moment, it’s one of the things that make virtual worlds with user generate content inspiring, be it a clothing item, a script, a build, getting it to a stage where it works, or it’s ready for launch is exciting, because “I did that” is a cause for optimism, even if nobody else even sees it, it’s your creation, that’s the joy of user generated content and what makes virtual worlds so bloody marvellous.

Now it’s time to calm myself down with a beer! Hurrah!

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Oren blogging is nice to see because Ilan is the person most recognised by people outside of Kitely and nice as Ilan is, it’s also worth pointing out the amount of work that Oren Hurvitz is putting into Kitely, Oren is the VP of R&D as well as being a co-founder of Kitely, meaning he’s a very important person! There’s a team behind Kitely and it’s good that their work as a team is recognised.

The new features have already been covered eloquently by Inara Pey, indeed Kitely added a choice of viewers for Kitely based upon Inara’s excellent viewer reviews and roundups. I’m not eloquent like Inara, but I have taken a  dabble with the new features and they work rather well, although one does need to remember that Kitely is very much in beta still and in many ways the publicity for Kitely arose earlier in the process than they would have liked, having said that, I’m sure Oren and Ilan aren’t complaining!

Teleporting works in a number of ways:

• Using the world map
• Using a landmark
• A friend Teleport offer
• The World Pages on the website

As Kitely is an on demand virtual world, it may be that the world you want to teleport to isn’t online, therefore the world needs to wake up before you can teleport there but this does not take long at all and does not hinder the user experience.

The default viewer for Kitely is now Firestorm, however whereas before you had to edit a text file to change your viewer of choice, you can now do this from your settings on your account, which makes the whole process a lot easier, the viewers Kitely now officially supports are:

• Catznip Viewer
• Dolphin Viewer
• Exodus Viewer
• Firestorm
• Imprudence
• Kokua Viewer
• Nirans Viewer
• Restrained Love Viewer
• Second Life Viewer

These are the viewers available from the dropdown menu in your settings, but only viewers you have installed appear as an option, which is sensible!

Kitely is evolving, world to world teleports are an important feature as closing down the viewer before going to a new world is cumbersome, this is an important step in making the place feel more like a world rather than single sims, if they evolve the way the owners hope, there are exciting times ahead for Kitely but they are ensuring they walk before they can run, which is a sensible approach. The creators of Kitely are investing both time and money into this startup and working 16-20 hour days, six or seven days a week, so they are serious about this and want to make it work.

Some of the features Ilan spoke to me about would really give Kitely a boost, but before any of them are unleashed they need to ensure they are feasible, won’t cause chaos with what already exists and that they have longevity, but I’d suggest you keep an eye on Kitely, it does have great potential and ambitious owners.

There are of course challenges ahead, not just for Kitely, but for OpenSim grids as a whole, I find the best place to keep up with what’s happening in the OpenSim world is Hypergrid Business. Maria Korolov writes many excellent articles and links to resources. However Maria also has a mention for Second Life too, OpenSim is not the enemy, even if you’re an extremely happy and proud Second Life user.

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The rumour mill suggests that Linden Lab are looking for ways to get people shopping inworld again, not that people have stopped shopping inworld, but the rise of The Marketplace has caused concern for inworld ventures. I’ve spoken about this before, I am not a huge fan of The Marketplace but it’s here, it’s convenient, it works (usually, there have been glitches lately) but it undermines some key aspects of Second Life, such as store rentals and sales which help fund roleplaying sims, Arts sims, Club sims, social ventures, hangouts yadda yadda yadda. Personally I think the horse has bolted now, the time for some joined up thinking was months ago.

The Marketplace isn’t the only reason for concerns on the viability of social and arts ventures, Styles Of Edo have announced they are closing after five years of trading in Second Life. This is a Mens fashion store for those who aren’t familiar with the fashion scene. When I originally published this post, this paragraph suggested Styles Of Edo was closing due to not making enough sales to make tier, this is not the case and I apologise for any confusion, I have not spoken to anyone from Styles Of Edo and do not know why they have chosen to close, however there is a comment from Chrissy Ambrose in the comments of this post. Stores and Sims in Second Life close for a variety of reasons, new ones arise from the ashes and we carry on, times change, tastes change and culture changes.

Deja Letov posted in the official forums on their views on why getting shopping back inworld is a great idea, however again we’re back to inworld shopping not exactly being dead and my view that the horse has really bottled, we are too far into the bricks and mortar challenge here, the online shopping experience in an online world is now very appealing and yes there is something wrong with that picture because Second Life is a 3D virtual world and The Marketplace is a 2D Shopping site.

Shopping is a key factor of Second Life, well sales of goods are, because that’s what makes the wheels turn, what’s needed is not a return to inworld shopping, but more options on tier, lower tier and some dynamic thinking …. my dynamo is running lower, it may be fuelled later by beer. However, let’s get back to shopping … did I really just type that … anyway, shopping inworld can be a social experience, Second Life itself is a social experience, moving social experiences away from the inworld experience isn’t ideal. However some people find shopping malls inworld ugly, they’d rather see them replaced by more fun things to do and shop on The Marketplace, this sounds good in theory but then we get back to shops supporting communities by renting inworld spaces to allow those communities to have space for community projects.

Kitely has a different model, in Kitely you pay for your minutes spent inworld, I’ll talk more about Kitely in another post but the model is appealing for those who want land to build on but not so appealing for those who want to explore. Second Life is extremely appealing for those who want to explore and socialise but not so appealing for those who want to own a sim or two due to Second Life billing you on how much land you own, not how much time you spend on the land.

A quick comparison on options between the two shows that in Kitely you get two sims for USD$5 a month, 1200 free minutes and 300 Kitely Credits, so you could stay inworld for around twenty five hours a month.

Second Life on a yearly premium membership, so call it USD$6 a month, gives you  512M of land or a Linden Home but can stay logged in for a whole year if you choose. Pros and cons to both models.

There was a time when Linden Lab were putting out suggetions such as having an inworld store but paying commission instead of tier, this didn’t really get off the ground but we’re at the stage now where current land owners, those of us looking at Pathfinding, need a boost because as I’ve also said before, it’s all very well putting new features such as Pathfinding in to create NPC’s and more experiences, but Tier is too high, people aren’t going to spend USD$295 a month for people to play games on their sims in large numbers.

Tier needs to come down, it needs to come down to allow people breathing space to create those creative experiences that in turn attract new and old users alike to embrace Second Life. The Marketplace will continue to take a chunk of people out of owning Inworld land and onto the Marketplace and Merchants need to embrace The Marketplace, it has been the growth area over the last couple of years but there is a price to be paid for that, as there is in High Streets across the world as business has embraced the world wide web for selling to consumers. The Marketplace is here to stay.

Linden Lab shold be looking at the concept of per minute cloud based solutions as an alternative to always on sims, there are plenty of sims whereby they don’t need to be always on, they need to look at how they can bring tier costs down, give people tier holidays, increase other revenue streams via advertising and help keep the creativity and social aspects of Second Life thriving. Standing still is not an option here, Linden Lab need to get their thinking caps on to help their well intentioned new features prosper.

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“What mesh brings to the terraforming table is the option to use subtractive modeling. Think caves, tunnels, subway stations, underground cities. It’s all possible now.”

I’m not quite sure what Masami means, but the idea of sims being to have cave tunnels, subway stations and underground cities is something that could really add a new dynamic to Second Life. Think of exploring deep mines or dungeons. People have long wanted  to build underground in Second Life, the problem is, you can’t, you can’t build at a base level and then raise the terrain, that causes chaos, you get error messages or items returned to your lost and found.

This is a great pity, being able to build underground would offer some extra richness, now there’s probably an obvious reason why you can’t and it’s clearly problematic to implement a system that allows us to build underground, because otherwise it would be here.

However it’s an area that would unleash something new to the Second Life experience. There are of course ways of faking underground and this is where Mesh, sculpts or even prims can come into play, but they take up prim space, which is probably why the practice isn’t widespread. These days of course we can rez 64 x 64 prims natively in the viewer, so that would enable a prim saving, but I still don’t see much of it in practice.

Whilst looking into these issues and potential, I stumbled across the following blog post: Landscapes Unlimited: Magnificent Vistas in Second Life where there is an example of Mesh landscaping and there are tunnels on the sim, presumably made from Mesh .. I think! The sim is worth a look to get a feel of what you can do with Mesh landscaping, although I’m sure there are examples of where sculpts are used this way too.

Linden Lab aren’t hiding the issues, they have a post on the forum detailing Jira entries on issues. Linden Lab have also made changes to the migration schedule, the original schedule was:

• April 2 through 13, 2012: Inworld Q&A sessions on using and migrating to Direct Delivery.
• April 18, 2012: All listings priced L$10 and lower must use Direct Delivery.    
• May 16, 2012: Magic Boxes no longer allowed for any Marketplace listing.

This has now all changed, with the FAQ updated to state that merchants will not need to migrate before June 1st and that a new schedule will be posted closer to this date, this means the Q&A sessions as well as migration are now going to take place further in the future. This is a sensible move, I felt the migration dates were too short in the first place and that was without the problems that have surfaced.

Direct Delivery migration in itself, isn’t that painful an exercise. The FAQ that I linked to above takes you through the steps, so far I’ve found the easiest way to migrate is to copy all of your magic box into your inventory inworld and then put those items into the outbox, then they should largely auto associate.

If you want to take advantage of the new system that allows you to sell by folders, instead of boxed items, then the easiest way to get an item to auto associate for me was to rez the boxed item, copy the contents to my inventory so that my folder has the same name as the magic box item, and then drag the whole folder to the outbox. This may not work for everyone but I’ve found that most of my items auto associate when I follow this route.

Direct Delivery migration will get very painful if you have a lot of items that don’t auto associate, that would be a tedious task indeed, but from my experience, it’s a rather smooth process and I haven’t had any association issues.

However now you don’t have such a big rush to migrate, you can take your time, do a bit of testing, enjoy a bit of sun during spring and migrate slowly. The issues that have arisen are not all due to Direct Delivery, there seem to be some other issues going on, so not migrating does not mean you will be free of the bugs that are manifesting themselves, keep your eyes on your store and see what’s happening. I have been fortunate so far, others haven’t.

One issue to be aware of is that No Copy items cannot be sold via direct delivery, so if you’re selling an item you don’t have copy perms on, don’t migrate that item.

I know there are quite a few unhappy campers out there at the moment, I have sympathy with merchants who are experiencing issues, I also have sympathy with Linden Lab, they haven’t gone out of their way to create problems and now they find themselves in a fire fighting situation, the best thing merchants can do is keep an eye on the Jira, add new information, rather than saying you have the same issue and provide as much information as possible to Linden Lab to assist them in resolving these issues.

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