May 2013 – Ciaran Laval

May 31, 2013May 31, 2013

A Humble Mystery Unfolds

Sighted inworld less often than Magellan Linden in the past twelve months, there have been concerns about the well being of Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble. Had he been kidnapped? Had he been turned into a High Fidelity Voxel? Did he have clowns to the left of him, jokers to the right and was stuck in the middle with you? The search for Rod Humble has been well and truly on.

When you need to find out some information about goings on in Second Life, sometimes you have to go to dark corners, corners filled with fog, hansom carriages, dens of iniquity, places where you have to wave a purse full of gold coins around to get information and being a fearless fighter for truth and justice I have done all of this to try and uncover more about the mystery of the hidden Humble …. and then I turned to Twitter! (dramatic music plays). I’m scarred by it all but I have heard some whispers!

I’m reliably informed that an avatar in an Aston Villa shirt who isn’t Prad Prathivi or me has been known to be roaming inworld. The word on the streets of Bay City is that he has been spotted in Bay City!

Thanks to Daniel Voyager for the snapshot.

There’s also talk that he has time travelled to 1920’s Berlin and allegedly been interviewed by a Barbarian … I mean Bavarian called Drax. However the details of the interview are sketchy, it has been leaked by Frau Yardley that Rod Humble uses alts …. wait, so do I! However this begs the question, who are Rod Humble’s alts?

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May 31, 2013May 31, 2013

For Flickr’s Sake!

So whilst I was away, Flickr got a makeover and it’s not one that has made the site more attractive for me, indeed it’s so bad that I’ve had to bookmark another Flickr page to avoid the horrendous experience of the default Flickr landing page. I’m not the only one unhappy about this. Originally there was an official feedback thread, however this got abusive and too busy for the Flickr staff to keep up with, so they opened a second feedback thread, which isn’t quite as abusive but there’s a running theme that plenty of users don’t like the new Flickr.

I know I know, people don’t like change blah blah blah. We’ve seen it with Second Life when the client has drastically changed, but Linden Lab should actually be commended for some of the changes they’ve introduced after user feedback and with third party clients around, there’s plenty of choice in the design stakes for Second Life users. Flickr could learn a thing or two from Linden Lab about user interface changes, so too could Microsoft because I recently tried Office 2013 and that was bland, boring and painful on the eye, to such an extent that my boss agreed with me that we’d never get away with rolling that out to our users and avoid them forming a line at the helpdesk armed with torches and pitchforks. I’m also not the only one who finds Office 2013 painful either, an example of one of many technet threads on the issues can be seen here.

Microsoft have however announced that some old features, such as a start button, will be returning to Windows 8, so maybe there’s hope they will get around to dealing with Office 2013. However what of Flickr? Well there’s some bad news for a start, staff have said: “To put an end to speculation, and to hopefully give some people closure, the old site is not coming back.” Booooo! Well I don’t want the old site back permanently, some people like the new site, I want the choice of the old site view back, which really shouldn’t be that difficult.

There is so much wrong with the new site, but here’s one aspect of it, the help forum where the threads asking for feedback can be found via a link at the bottom of pages. Good luck getting there from the main landing page if you have a busy feed because the photos keep loading as you scroll down, users of Twitter or the Second Life My Second Life feed will be familiar with how this work, but on Twitter and My Second Life, the links to other pages about the company are positioned so you can, you know, actually click on them. The links are there on Flickr, they just vanish when you scroll down because more pictures start loading.

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May 30, 2013

Dwarfins Go Gardening

Another development whilst I was on my travels, was the introduction of gardening for Dwarfins. This is more than just an interactive item for your Dwarfins, although Dwarfins will interact with your garden, it’s a way of growing your own food too and can work out cheaper than buying ham and anyway, who wants their Dwarfins eating ham all the time, that’s not a balanced diet at all!

In order to engage with gardening you will need to buy some items from the Dwarfins store, you will need at minimum:

Garden Plot: Required to plant seeds.
Seeds: A variety of seeds are available to plant and grow.
Water Bucket: You can pick up a free bucket of water once every 3 days. One bucket of water is enough to water a 6 plot garden.

There are a couple of other items you can buy to aid your gardening, these include:

Interactive Neverending Well: A rustic well that your Dwarfins will interact with, as well as providing an endless supply of water for your gardens.
Instagrow: An Elixir that can be used on your plants so that they mature instantly.

Now there are a few things to note, plants will take three days to grow, that is as long as the garden has enough water, if a garden doesn’t have enough water a plant will wither, although this can be rectified it will slow your gardening down. Once a plant is fully grown you have a choice of harvesting it for food, or sending it to your online pantry, where you’ll be able to create recipes.

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May 30, 2013

The Drax Files Episode 6 – Abramelin Wolfe

The thing about going on holiday is that you miss things and I’ll try and catch up this evening if I can, a bit at least. One of the things I missed whilst walk along the beach in Majorca was episode 6 of the excellent Drax Files, as usual I’ll embed the video at the end of the post.

This episode featured Abramelin Wolfe, AKA Animation King of Abranimations in Second Life, which for those unfamilair with the brand is an animation store, one that even I’ve heard of and as I’m often poked for not wearing an AO inworld, that’s rather impressive! At their store you will also find avatars, skins, games, toys, vehicles and gadgets.

The thing about this interview is that it gives you an insight into the eye watering costs of animation accessories, Abramelin talks of how he purchased his first mocap suit back in 2005 at the eye watering cost of £14,000, the suit also looks very painful. Most people think of Second Life content creators as being plucky amateurs but with setup costs like that, we’re delving into a far more professional world.

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May 29, 2013

The Partially Hidden Cost Of Display Costs

I’ve mentioned the Good Building Practices section of the official Second Life Wiki before, I’ve also mentioned the extremely useful Texture Usage page in that section. The good building practices is an under promoted resource in my opinion, Linden Lab haven’t forgotten about it, I see that they have added a case study on how June Dion used normal and specular maps to add details to a Katana imported from Lightwave. However that’s not what I’m going to talk about today!

The Texture Usage page describes a situation many of us will recognise:

“We have all been there, teleporting to a new location, everything grey, the need to stand there for 10 minutes waiting for everything to load. Even then many textures still remain blurry. Some people give up and teleport away, some people leave to make coffee. Land owners can lose traffic over it. Store owners can lose customers over it. So optimizing your textures to ensure that they load quickly, without losing any of the visual impact, is important.”

The tip is to use as small a texture size as is reasonable, with advice to try and avoid using 1024 x 1024 textures if possible. Now some people will argue this point, because good usage of 1024 x 1024 textures can actually make an item efficient in terms of performance, however as a general rule, you should not use a 1024 x 1024 texture when a 256 x 256 will suffice, but it’s not a simple numbers game because the number of textures you use is also a factor.

I’ll do a small example, I created a prim and used a single 512 x 512 texture on it:

An Image Should Be Here — Single Texture

Now I’m going to click the more info link because that’s where I can find out some extra inforamtion about the display costs of my item:

Now this has a display cost of 404, but what happens if instead of using a single texture, I use three different textures on my prim? Well in this case I’ll use two 512 x 512 textures and one 64 x 64 texture.

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