Ciaran Laval

February 21, 2014February 22, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 7 – Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before!

Episode 7 of the excellent Drax Files Radio hour opens with an introduction from Karl Stiefvater, aka Qarl Fizz, aka Qarl Linden. This week’s episode is unashamedly Linden Lab centric, with the Ebbe Altberg meet and greet being the central attraction.

However they do cover other issues, for example Draxtor wants to see sim cams, like web cams, covering selected sims 24/7 …. this won’t end well! I seem to remember someone going around recording in sims and it wasn’t popular.

They talk of Ebbe discussing the TOS in the forums, the thing there is that the TOS changes remain poorly implemented. The language really is not the problem, the old TOS should have been suffice, I have no idea what these strange edge cases were.

Then they have a recording of the meeting between Ebbe and the officially sanctioned SL media, however if you’ve already heard this via Inara Pey’s post then you may want to skip this part, although really it’s worth listening to again. as this has been covered and discussed so very well in Inara’s blog, I’m not going to discuss that, I may have to whistle for a while though.

You may need to play some music, watch some youTube videos, login to Second Life if you don’t want to listen to the recording again. Maybe we could hangout here and talk about getting the Versu project going again … oh wait Versu is my next post!

When that’s finished they get into a really interesting discussion with Harvey Crabsticks. I don’t agree with everything Harvey says, but he has some really interesting views. Draxtor gets into a discussion with Harvey on whether Second Life could have a marketing campain along the lines of the Chuck Norris campaign for World Of Warcraft….. actually who would be a good celebrity to advertise Second Life? I know Kim Stanley Robinson was once active in Second Life. Ok, he’s not Chuck Norris of course.

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February 20, 2014

Emily Short Wants Versu

I was reading recently that the family of the man who wrote the song “It’s a long way to Tipperary” still receive £30,000 a year in royalties. Obviously by now that’s going to be quite an extended family. I’ll expand on this later in the post.

Two blog posts from Emily Short identify some pain from the closure of Versu by Linden Lab. The first post actually has nothing at all to do with Versu initially, the conversation regarding Versu appears in the comments. The first post is about general examples of what can be achieved from Interactive Fiction : A (Mostly Recentish) IF List, For Breadth. That post excited me purely because it mentions Sorcery! by Steve Jackson and Finkle. I played the fighting fantasy books by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone when I was a lad! I loved those books.

However it’s in the comments where Versu gets a mention with a commenter suggesting Versu should be added to the list and Emily replying:

Versu I’m not listing here because there isn’t currently anything that people can pick up and try: Linden is no longer supporting it, has not released Blood and Laurels, and has taken down the older Versu app. I am investigating whether there is a way for me to regain ownership of the IP and carry the project forward on my own, but I don’t have concrete information to share about that at the moment. I made a pitch for Linden to open source the project as it currently stands, but did not succeed.

I suggested that Linden Lab might want to consider open sourcing Versu or handing the IP to Emily Short, Richard Evans or some other interested party in my recent post about the closure of Versu.

Emily followed up on that comment with a blog post about the closure of Versu : Post-Linden. In this post Emily explains about the closure of Versu. Emily also mentions how she would like to see people who may have started working on Versu in academic environments being able to publish their work in some form. Emily also says:

I am currently trying to see whether I can get back the IP for Versu and the apps that we built that Linden did not release, including Blood and Laurels.

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February 20, 2014

Ebbe Holds The Jira Door Ajar

Ok well I’m having to improvise here because Inara Pey has basically hit me with some sort of psychic rays and stolen my planned blog post! Inara’s post of Ebbe: the promise of better communications and a more open JIRA is basically the post I had planned, obviously far more polished and eloquent in Inara’s format, but that’s the post I had planned, including the Innula Zenovka citation too, I will still use that.

So I’ll just concentrate on the Jira aspect here. In a forum response to Second Life builder Pamela Galli regarding the nerfing of the Jira, Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg responds with:

Funny, both engineering and product heads here also didn’t like that jira was closed and want to open it up again. Proposal for how is in the works! I hope we can figure out how to do that in a way that works/scales soon.

This isn’t funny really, it’s quite alarming. However let’s jump into the history machine, which shouldn’t be confused with the mystery machine, we’re not taking Fred or Daphne with us on this journey and there will be no doggy snacks. I am so easily sidetracked, where was I? Oh yes, back in time to examine when Jira’s go bad.

First of all let’s look back at what the Jira was and in many ways still is. The Jira was the place to report bugs and issues. People could also suggest new features there. The problem was that the Jira had a voting system and wasn’t exclusively used for bug reports and new feature suggestions. People would report their pet policy peeve on the Jira and gather a lot of votes. Now although people thought votes were important, the reality was that votes were not important in action being taken, although issues with high votes would obviously attract the attention of Linden Lab.

Then there were the Jira wars where people with admin rights would close a Jira and someone else would re-open it, a lot of commentary would be about opening and closing the Jira, people trading insults, in short there was a lot of off topic commentary. On top of that the Jira was, and remains, a clunky platform for people to use in general, although the more you use it, the easier it becomes to get your head around.

Despite all these issues, the Jira was a bloody useful resource. I used it as an official knowledge base when I ran into technical issues because it was far more informative on technical issues than the knowledge base is. I would also try and search for my issue before reporting it. The Jira worked well in this capacity. However some Lindens appeared to be tired of the off topic commentary, flame wars and lack of efficiency of the Jira. Now here’s where it gets interesting and a tad worrying, in a blog post in February 2011 entitled Improving our Lines of Communication with the Community Linden Lab announced that voting would be removed from The Jira :

Submit Bug Reports in JIRA: For those that aren’t familiar with JIRA, it is our public bug tracking system and it’s the best place to go to let us know about bugs or suggest new features that are proposed in User Group meetings or outside of those sessions.

Our development teams actively review the bugs that you submit in JIRA and do one of several things: place the item onto a development team backlog to address, ask the submitter to contact Support or provide more information if the developer cannot reproduce the bug, or close it and explain why we aren’t going to tackle this particular bug or idea.

It’s also important to note that we are going to remove the “voting” feature in JIRA in one month. Today, we do not use voting to triage or to make product decisions and the last thing that we want to do is set false expectations. So, when you are interested in what action we will take on a particular JIRA, use the JIRA “Watch” feature so that you will be immediately updated in email when there are new comments on that particular JIRA issue. We will continue to use the number of Watchers as an indication of the level of interest.

This was foolhardy for two reasons, the first that people started to watch instead of vote, under the false belief that the number of watchers would mean action would be taken. The second reason it was foolhardy was because it turned out that it wasn’t possible to remove voting from the Jira. The reason I said earlier that this is troubling is that Ebbe is looking at improving Linden Lab’s lines of communication, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

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February 19, 2014

Versu Should Get A Second Life

Well my spider senses have proven to be correct with Linden Lab issuing a press release : Linden Lab Refocuses Product Offering

After careful consideration, Linden Lab has decided to cease development and support for dio, Versu, and Creatorverse. We’re grateful for those who took the time to experiment with these products in their early days, but ultimately we have determined that due to a number of factors, we and our customers will be best served by focusing our efforts on continuing to provide exceptional service and compelling new experiences for the users of our other products.

Whereas most product closures upset some people, the most disappointing aspect for me is the loss of Versu. From the blurb of the soon to be removed website:

Versu is an interactive storytelling platform that builds experiences around characters and social interaction. Each story sets out a premise and some possible outcomes. As a player, you get to select a character, guide their choices, watch other characters react to what you’ve chosen, and accomplish (or fail at) your chosen goals.

As a content creator, you’ll be able to create your own characters, improvise new dialogue and gestures for them, and even build entirely new stories and games for others to enjoy.

Unfortunately Versu didn’t make it to the content creation part. However there’s a lot of potential in this concept. So here’s the thing, is Versu dead or will Richard Evans, who may well still be the owner of Little Text People, or Emily Short, of Emily Short’s interactive storytelling, be able to continue with the product?

This is where things get a bit confusing, has Little Text People been released from Linden Lab back to being an independent company?

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