Ciaran Laval

February 12, 2015

Friday 13th Meets Valentine’s Day At The Isle Of View

Linden Lab have decided that Friday the 13th shall be a day of love this year, with a blog post of Valentine’s Day fun : Valentine’s Day Fun on the Isle of View – February 13th! Rumours that there will be camping and a host called Jason have been strenuously denied. Indeed Gray Of The Lab from San Francisco almost told me :

Love is in the air, Everywhere I look around, Love is in the air, Every sight and every sound.

The blog post informs us :

Come to the Isle of View on February 13th for some Pre-Valentine’s Day fun. Meet up with other Residents and enjoy all the romance that Isle of View has to offer – boat rides, fireworks, kissing booths – a treasure trove of memorable moments just waiting to be made with someone special.

Why February 13th? Because we believe in love, and there is still time to find a special someone for the big day.

If you’ve got a Valentine – bring them to the Isle of View.

If you’re currently looking for a Valentine – come to the Isle of View.

If you have several Valentines – well lucky you – bring them all to the Isle of View!

However I’m not actually buying their reasons for Friday being the day and a more realistic explanation is that :

I don’t care if Monday’s blue, Tuesday’s grey and Wednesday too, Thursday i don’t care about you, It’s Friday I’m in love.

The Isle Of View it has to be said is pink, very pink, with a hint of red.

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February 11, 2015

The Computer Gaming Industry Should Pay Attention To Linden Lab’s Community Relations

When it comes to the computing gaming industry and communications, there’s a very sorry picture lying before us in 2015. The industry as a whole has an extremely immature reputation and this applies to gamers, gaming publications, gaming journalists and game developers. There’s a toxic pile of cack in front of them that far too many are happy to pour oil onto the fire of.

The industry as a whole could do far worse than to take a step back and look at how Linden Lab have approached community relationships over the years. Linden Lab have certainly not always got it right, indeed at times they have got it very wrong, the communication blackout being one glaring example. However at no point in the history of Second Life have I ever witnessed anything close to the sorry state that the computer gaming industry currently finds itself in.

There was a time when the official forums were far more vitriolic. Office hours inworld could get vitriolic.The Jira could get vitriolic and of course the blog post comments could get vitriolic. Linden Lab cut off some of those vitriolic sources by removing those communication channels. That wasn’t the smartest move and in some cases it appeared as if Linden Lab were burying their heads in the sand. Recently Linden Lab have vastly improved their communications, brought back some of those communication channels, engaged with their community and it’s working well.

Ok when Rod Humble was interviewed by Draxtor Despres he was quoted as saying :

I come from gaming communities, where I was running a gaming community, I received three death threats in a day! I’ve never received three death threats in a day from Second Life users, I’ve only received only one death threat here. And that was from a guy who got banned, you know, he was angry.

We shouldn’t make light of death threats but I think this puts into context some of the levels of vitriol that have been around. When Second Life did receive vitriolic comments they were more measured than what we see in the computer gaming industry. When I was more of a git in the forums, blog posts and office hours, the idea of threatening en employee would never have been on my or pretty much anyone else’s radar.

I used to point out in the Second Life forums that the levels of vitriol were tame compared to other forums. This tells me two things, one that I’d accepted that vitriolic behaviour was something of a norm and two, that I thought the level of vitriol aimed at Linden Lab was at an acceptable level. As I’ve aged, I’m puzzled as to why I accepted this behaviour as being part and parcel of online communities.

However Linden Lab largely continued to engage, to talk, to try and work around the noise. As I’ve said, sometimes they took extreme measures, but Linden Lab’s employees in public remained professional, courteous and engaging. That’s not something you could say about the computer gaming industry.

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February 11, 2015

Linden Lab Ask For Help To Improve Second Life With Inventory Loss Survey

Linden Lab are asking for residents to help improve Second Life with an Inventory loss survey. The survey is in relation to inventory loss in the last 12 months and consists of a maximum of seven questions which are answered via a radio button or choice box with multiple choice answers. There’s an option to provide more details via a text box and for you to provide an email address and account name if you agree to be contacted by Linden Lab should they have further questions for you.

The blog post, like the survey, is short :

As we continue to improve Second Life, we’re looking into the issue of inventory loss. If you have experienced some form of inventory loss in the past 12 months – whether partial (such as a single object or subfolder), or full – please take a moment to share your answers via this quick survey.

Your answers will help provide our engineering team with information that will assist them as they make improvements to Second Life.

We greatly appreciate your time and want to thank you for responding to the survey.

I won’t go into the details of exactly what the questions are, but they aren’t difficult to answer.

Inventory loss in Second Life has long been a thorny issue but it’s fair for Linden Lab to be asking about inventory loss in the last twelve months as changes to the way inventory is handled have been made over time, so age old inventory loss reports aren’t exactly helpful right now.

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February 11, 2015

Linden Lab Ask Us To Check Out Improvements To Second Life

Linden Lab continue to demonstrate their vastly improved communication policies this week by making good use of their blog. A couple of days ago they posted : Check Out the Latest Improvements to Second Life. This post discusses improvements in areas such as :

Hover Height
Notifications
Mesh Import
Viewer Managed Marketplace
Graphics Settings
Second Life Developer Tools

Some of these developments are more technical than others. Hover Height deals with the thorny issue of where your feet may land in Second Life. The issue has always been that your feet may not land where you expect them to, leading to unexpected and inconsistent results. Linden Lab have been working on this and even have a Project HoverHeight Viewer involved in this work. The blog post explains what they are hoping to achieve :

This viewer, and some accompanying server changes, improve things in two ways: the order in which we make adjustments to your vertical position has been made more stable — combining the same set of attachments and animations should now always produce the same vertical offset: even if it’s not perfect, it will at least be predictable. Because it can’t always be perfect, we’ve also introduced a new final adjustment that is directly under your control: a new avatar right-click selection allows you to tweak your vertical position. This final adjustment is shared with everyone around you so that they too will see you correctly, and is saved locally by your viewer so that it persists between sessions. This new feature was inspired by a proposal from the Firestorm viewer team, and they’ve been helping with testing it.

In terms of notifications, let’s face it, they can be a pain, especially when you first login. The more notifications you get, the more of a pain it can become. Part of the reason for this is that all notifications look the same in terms of pop ups. A future viewer release is in the works that will provide different pop ups for different notifications. For example a money transaction notification will have a separate display when compared to a group notification, meaning you should be able to prioritise your notifications.

The Mesh Import improvements include one really interesting improvement, the ability to import models with more than eight unique faces. I’m sure this will please many Mesh creators. Better error reporting and improved association of physics representations and LODs by name are also promised. If this interests you then you’ll be pleased to know that work is already under way with this and you can check it out with the Project Importer Viewer.

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February 10, 2015

The Guardian Talk About The Second Life Penis & Virtual Romance

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has posted an interesting article over at The Guardian : Virtual love: is your Valentine an avatar? The article looks at the rise of digital romance and looks at virtual boyfriend and girlfriend apps, the website Tinder, the issue of cybersex briefly and even has a mention of Second Life. I don’t know much about those virtual boyfriend and girlfriend apps and the first I head of Tinder was via a recent story regarding some major websites being down for a short period of time recently, Tinder was mentioned. When I asked some of the folk at work about it after that news story there was much mirth and very little belief that I had never heard of Tinder!

The article itself links to a website that has advice for lovemaking in virtual worlds such as Second Life :

Virtual communities, such as Second Life, recreate all aspects of the relationship cycle, including pregnancy and birth. In fact, there are now multiple guides on how to have sex in a virtual world, which perhaps suggests that physical skills are not necessarily transferable to our avatars. One salient difference is that most avatars are not equipped with genitals. As an expert notes: “The first thing you need to do, get yourself a penis/vagina. Here’s a piece of advice: Second Life is a visual medium. Hence it does have a certain importance that you choose a penis that actually looks realistic and is in-line with the colour of your skin.” Other suggestions include upgrading looks – because “with the prefab [Second Life] avatar you will find it very difficult to get laid” – and making an effort to role-play a seductive or erotic situation. Indeed, directness and bluntness is as discouraged as in the analogue world.

The website it links to even goes into the murky world of the talking penis. I’m really not a big fan of the Second Life penis, indeed I don’t find it very realistic at all. There would be a world full of pain if you had to walk around with one of those all day outside of Second Life. Obviously there are some advantages, the detachable nature of the appendage would have uses and of course your partner could hide it when they were miffed at you, but realism isn’t something I’d associate with that accessory.

A more interesting aspect of Second Life and virtual world relationships comes near the end of the article.

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