Grendel’s Children – Birthday Parties, Mesh And Downsizing

Grendel’s Children are in the news for their decision to downsize, now you may never heard of Grendel’s Children, or visited, but trust me this is a big Second Life brand and was one of the first places to appear on the revamped showcase. Prim Perfect, Tateru Nino, Daniel Voyager and New World Notes have all covered this story, there’s good commentary there, I decided to ask about a couple of other things whilst I had the ear of Toady Nakamura.


Grendel’s Children

Grendel’s Children has pets, dragons, jellyfish, full avatars, and new skins that can enhance (or completely change) your avatar’s appearance.

Visit in Second Life

 

Now I’m sure there will be speculation about the reasons for their decision to downsize, but Toady Nakamura of Grendel’s children contacted me to assure me that this is due to frustration with support and that it is nothing to do with the inworld economy:

Our sales are solid.  We downsized due to frustration with Lab non response to fixing sim problems.  We sold and got rid of the problem as it was taking too much time from staff making avatars.

Well having the ear of Toady I decided to get some more information, namely birthday parties and Mesh!

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When Did Will Wright Join The Board Of Directors?

Whilst reading the epic JLU thread over at SLUniverse, with one eye open because it’s such a busy thread, my skim reading found its way to a conversation about Rod Humble (Linden Lab CEO), where someone thought Mr Humble created The Sims, however Stroker Serpentine corrected this person, pointing out that Will Wright created The Sims, and also pointing out that Will Wright is on the Linden Lab board of directors ….. WAIT! When did this happen?

Now I don’t know what the board of directors do, obviously some important stuff, possibly in the super secret hidden bunker of Linden World, but more likely in an office or the odd email or telephone call, the real impetus behind Second Life is from the management and staff, we don’t hear much at all from the board of directors, but they must do something!

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JLU Appear To Be Far Off Track

The unseemly spectacle of the latest Justice League Unlimited hoopla is not doing anyone any favours. Allegations, counter allegations, revelations about contacting realtives of people on their deathbed, Linden off the record chat logs shared and the brainiac wiki itself. The men in tights have been caught with their pants around their ankles and are desperately trying to pull them back up to avoid further indecent exposure.

The JLU are not roleplaying superheroes, they aim to protect and serve within Second Life to make the Second Life experince better for all, the Second Life Wiki listing for them has noble aims and it’s not surprising that groups who have been thwarted by the JLU relish opportunities to embarrass them, howver the JLU make it all too easy. They appear to go way beyond their remit with some of their actions, especially with allegations that the brainiac wiki stores Second Life and real life information on people and the Deadly Codec incident really is beyond the pale, contacting a relative on Facebook, apparently out of compassion but how compassionate would you be if someone contacted you about a dying relative and you later found out they’d been fishing for confirmation of the condition of your relative for such a group?

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Is Traffic About To Become Relevant Again?

Wade1 Jya over on The Merchants Roundtable (private forum so you may not have access) has pointed out that some new icons have appeared in search, that could well be an indicator that traffic may well gain some relevancy again. The icons have three symbols that seem to indicate whether a sim place is active, popular or busy, although I am yet to see any places with two out of the three icons lit up.

What are you talking about Ciaran? I hear you ask, well in search on the latest viewer you will see on some listings (a minority) things like this:

active location in Second Life

popular location in Second Life

Busy location in Second Life

What qualifies a place as active, popular or busy? I have no idea!

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The Trouble With Mesh – Texturing

Mesh is still making a lot of noise in Second Life circles, but Mesh won’t be for everyone and there are times when the good old prim, the lovely wonderful prim is far more useful for creators and consumers and here I’ll give an example, a door. I decided I’d make a Mesh door, now doors in Second Life generally require some path cutting so that they open nicely, objects rotate on their centre so a door has to be half invisible to work nicely.

Bearing this in mind I created the door in Blender, I decided to do a loop cut so I could have one half alpha textured and the other half with my door texture, so it would be able to perform the spinning on its centre door trick, this didn’t work well but one point regarding all this is texturing, I created my UV Map and ended up with this:

A UV Map for a door

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