Ciaran Laval

December 14, 2012December 14, 2012

The Second Life Forums Could Do With A Rejig

The Second Life forums have over the years taken on various forms, each time they change a group of people pine for the older forum. Personally I don’t think they’ve ever recovered from the day that the forums running on forum software were replaced with the all singing, all dancing, extremely frustrating Jive, which in turn has been replaced by Lithium.

The not so secret but still private, merchants roundtable is currently as dead as a dodo, although there are older posts there from Darrius Gothly, which may soon become a collector’s item as Darrius is currently banned from the forums apparently, for crimes unknown to anyone other than the forum moderators. Darrius is a rather lively and informative contributor, so it’s a shame he can’t contribute right now, hopefully that will change soon.

However the current forums are a strange beast, you click on sections and see forums you never knew existed. I clicked on the creation forum link this evening, to find there’s a Building And Texturing Forum Knowledgebase Forum, which actually seems to be part of the knowledgebase section of the main site. The plot thickens though because the Building And Texturing Knowledgebase Forum is empty, completely blank, it’s sitting there all lonely and neglected.

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December 13, 2012December 13, 2012

Indiana University Northwest Takes Teaching To Second Life

Sometimes I read an article and have to check the date, then check it again. This was the case this evening when I was reading about Indiana University Northwest University Professors Taking Classrooms Into the Virtual World. The reason I needed to check the date was due to some of the terminology in the article:

On the surface, Second Life appears to be nothing more than a gamer’s paradise, but educators say it is also what’s next in distance learning.

The article really was published on December 13th 2012, even though that sort of talk sounds like something I may have read in December 2006, then there’s this:

As with any new technology, Second Life brings inherent technical challenges and a steep learning curve.

…. mm yes Second Life has a steep learning curve but not many people would call it new technology in 2012. However the article is interesting to read, it talks of good use cases for Second Life in terms of collaboration between students in a distance learning environment and how well it worked, Dorothy Ige, Ph.D., Professor of Communication is quoted as saying:

Since this is the first time trying the Second Life approach, I was not sure that students could bond interpersonally at a distance through technology,” Ige said. “I was pleasantly surprised that they not only bonded, but took interpersonal communication to another level.

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December 13, 2012December 13, 2012

Merchants Need A User Group Meeting

A cursory glance at the Second Life user groups page is extremely disappointing these days.

Adult Content
Content Creation/Mesh Import
Server/Sim/Scripting
Open Development
Pathfinding
Server Beta

Of these adult content is listed as no longer running due to lack of interest, which is fair enough but still disappointing. Then there’s Server Beta which I’m pretty sure has been merged with another meeting. Oskar ran server beta but he has left the lab.

In years gone by there used to be meetings for land owners with Jack, general community issues with the likes of Lexie, Amanda, Robin and Blondin, governance with Michael, marketplace with Pink, yadda yadda yadda. There were numerous meetings, they’ve quietly been removed in the wake of a rather appalling attitude to communications with the general community from Linden Lab.

Now there have always been gaps, even when there were numerous meetings, merchants who wanted to complain about content theft had little options, but they’d be squeezed in somewhere. These days, they don’t really have anywhere to go and now they appear to be hijacking other meetings, which in turn is causing a strain in tensions with other residents who are getting frustrated that their meetings are being taken off track.

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December 11, 2012

LL Improving Building Resources On Wiki

So I was reading Nalates Urriah’s blog, which I do quite often, when I noticed a post about SL Best Practices. Then I met The Dwarfins and got sidetracked, but now I need to go back to blogging about more than Dwarfins … they’re so cool though and I should be getting a free camp fire today … where was I? Oh yes, Nalates alerting us to best practices.

This is a very good development, Nalates points out that there is a Good Building Practices page, edited by Jeremy Linden and it has some very handy and useful information. The page is aimed at moderate to advanced creators, sorry new builders, although new builders will find useful information in the knowledge base to get them started and may even benefit from reading the resources on this page anyway.

The page has links to articles on good building practices for Mesh, Sculpts, Textures, Scripts, Physics Optimisation and such like and is quite frankly the sort of page that should be around on the Wiki. I’m very enthused to see it being developed.

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