Ciaran Laval

December 14, 2011

Exit The Dragonfish?

In November 2009 it was announced that Linden Lab had struck a deal with Dragonfish, the payment processing arm of 888.com. This was discussed on the official forum back in the day. This was followed by a beta billing option entitled local payments, which you can read about here. Basically local payments allowed people to pay Linden Lab via a currency other than US Dollars, which will explain why US residents may have no idea what I’m talking about, US residents were never put in the local payments beta.

However over the last week or so, those of who were in the local payments beta, many of us not through choice, will have received an email informing us that local payments beta has ended:

Dear Ciaran

This email contains important information that affects your Second Life account and requires action in order to continue any payment transactions with Second Life.

Due to the conclusion of the Second Life local payments beta program, it is required that you add a new credit card or PayPal account by going to your billing information page on Secondlife.com.

Best Wishes,

Linden Lab and the Second Life Team

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December 14, 2011

Linden Lab Rediscover Community Spirit

Linden Lab seem to have decided to embrace communities and community spirit again, as well as embracing the concept of Second Life being a user created world, both moves are welcome.

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes reports that the tagline “Your World, Your Imagination” is back on Second Life marketing images. This is long overdue, this was a perfect tagline for Second Life and I’m really not sure why Linden Lab appeared to move away from it.

Meanwhile in the official General Discussion forum Linden Lab have unleashed three posts about community, friendship and interactions.

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December 9, 2011December 9, 2011

Save Our Release Candidate Channels

A look at server deploys for this week has uncovered another goodie in the shape and form of a new function, llGetParcelMusicURL(), however a look at the Server/beta meeting minutes for this week reveals a baddie in the shape and form of hiding server channels, this should be resisted, despite the reasons for wanting to do this being fairly reasonable, it’s the wrong solution.

Let’s start with the goodie, in scripting it’s common to have setters and getters. There’s no great mystery to what they do, setters as you’d exepect set values and getters, as you’d expect, get values. We’ve long had a setter for parcel music in the form of llSetParcelMusicURL() , this is used to set music streams on parcels and requires permission to do so, often the scripted object will need to be deeded to the group, well it will be on group owned land, people who have used radios and televisions on group owned land will be familiar with this procedure. However there had previously been no getter counterpart, although Jira SCR-31, requesting the creation of llGetParcelMusicURL() was created almost four years ago.

However we haven’t had the getter, until now, it’s currently only available on the Le Tigre RC channel but will soon be grid wide I’m sure. This function will return the parcel music URL, as you may well suspect already! Like it’s counterpart you may need to deed the object to a group for it to work and it won’t matter if the parcel music url has been set manually or via a script, as long as you have permission to get the URL, you will be able to do so.

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December 6, 2011December 6, 2011

Region Crossing Improvements In The Pipeline

Taking a look at this week’s server deployment I notice nothing that stands out and excites me. The new profile system is getting closer to whereby anyone on your inworld mute list won’t be able to hassle you on your web profile, that will be fully rolled out when the code is in all versions of the server release.

However there is something in the works that looks interesting regarding region crossings, the truth is that this will be a long time in the works before it makes life much improved, but they are getting there with something called “Threaded Crossings Project“, keep your eyes on the Blue Steel Release Notes for this. The more technical term for this is: “threaded RPC/thread state machine mechanism” I have no idea what this means, but I’ll keep an eye on it anyway, to do so initially I had to go back to the Beta Server user group meeting of November 17th, there wasn’t one last week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the USA.

If you’re unsure of what the issues are with region crossings, Carmilla Linden sums up the current problems in their opening comment in that meeting : “The existing region crossing code is a horrible piece of crap” after that it gets quite geeky!

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December 2, 2011

The Revolution’s Still Huge Bandwidth Away

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has produced a couple of excellent discussion posts recently. The first points out why Skyrim is nothing like Second Life. The reasons are of course technical, Second Life is a dynamic world, quite possibly the greatest dynamic virtual world on the planet. Skyrim is more static, I’m sure at some point there will be updates to this visually stunning and engaging looking single player game, but it is a single player game, the content is downloaded and it is far easier to get top notch performance in those circumstances. This isn’t intended to take away from the excellent game of Skyrim, but the reality is that dynamic content created by thousands of users is far harder to optimise.

The first post, where Hamlet points out how long it takes scenes to rez in Second Life is an important introduction to his second post, where has asks why the Linden Realms games aren’t included in the client download, because that would improve performance for people who are playing Linden Realms games, that Linden Lab controlled area is not as dynamic as other areas of Second Life, this is an important point to note. There was a time when Linden Lab’s tiny client was ahead of the game, downloading patches for the likes of World Of Warcraft could take ages, but with the rise of broadband internet, Linden Lab could make their client larger without much of an inconvenience to users, the Mac client is already bigger than the PC client and I don’t see many complaints about that.

The second post includes comments from former Linden’s Pathfinder and Qarl as well as a comment from Linden Lab CEO and Aston Villa fan Rod Humble.

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