Ciaran Laval

November 22, 2011

Drow Kiss Of Death?

Hmm I’m getting worried about this now, Hamlet has informed us that Kim Linden has left Linden Lab, largely it seems due to having to commute from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Kim was rather quiet as VP of Marketing, but came from a background of having worked in the gaming industry, I bumped into Kim at the Valentine event earlier in the year:

Kim’s dodgy looking hair is due to the lag! That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. As Kim was so quiet, it’s hard to know exactly what she achieved in her time at Linden Lab, but there have been improved marketing initiatives during her time here.

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November 21, 2011November 21, 2011

Improved Login Screen Has Received Little Fanfare

One of my beefs with Linden Lab lately has been that they don’t talk enough, I guess the counter argument is that they’re busy doing things to improve the experience and don’t have time to discuss them all with us, however I think this is a bit of a shame. I keep discovering little gems … largely by mistake, because I don’t even realise they are there!

Viewer 3 has a much improved login screen which has the destination guide and events at the fore, but also links to the blog. However a big improvement is how well this screen now reacts, when you mouse over a destination guide location, you get some blurb and you click to select the login location to that of the destination guide location you just moused over:

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November 21, 2011November 21, 2011

Inworld Classifieds Deserve Some Loving

The latest edition of the official Second Life viewer isn’t too bad, it has some nice features, the ability to be able to put buttons on toolbars and move things around means the experience has a better level of customisation but one area where it falls down badly is with regard to inworld classifieds, which really are in need of some care and attention from Linden Lab.

Let’s start with the most obvious problem, the create a new classified link doesn’t work, so how do you create a new classified, or even find your old classifieds to edit them? This is where you start to realise how shoddily inworld classifieds are being treated, because it’s not obvious at all.

To get to your classifieds you need to get to your picks, and these aren’t the picks on your web profile, they are a different set of picks, well they’re the same picks in a different module, but they aren’t the droids you’re looking for if you want to play with classifieds, the picks you need are a toobar button, so to get started you need to go here:

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November 18, 2011

Sand Castle Studios Keep On Winnington

Gianna Borgnine got a lot of attention earlier in the year because her company, sand castle studios, were nominated for an Emmy for their work on Deep Down Mine project. The project, which covered the plight of Appalachian coal miners in East Kentucky was a superb example of the way Second Life can be used to crossover into other mediums.

Sand Castle Studios have also benefited from the work of Qarl Linden Fizz …. Karl Stiefvater! Karl has helped them with the scripting. However Gianna is still around, still enthusiatic about virtual worlds and still getting publicity, as exemplified by this excellent interview with Delaware Online.

I do wish Linden Lab would bring back that blog idea where they blogged Second Life in the news stories …. hmm wait, then what I would blog about … hmm still, I liked it! Anyway, back to Gianna’s interview!

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November 18, 2011November 18, 2011

Linden Lab Developers Releasing And Developing Treats

Last Christmas someone bought me “TISWAS – The Album” which rather than being snippets from the series, is a treble CD of songs by artists from around that era, so currentlly I’m rocking out to Tom Robinson and 2-4-6-8 Motorway! With some Boomtown Rats, Tenpole Tudor, The Stranglers and Skids to look forward to, this post may take a while to get done! Anyway, on with the post!

I’ve complained, more than once, that Linden Lab don’t talk to us, like lovers do. Therefore I have to go looking for the goodies in the official forums myself, because there is bloody good information in there. There are bug fixes, new scripting functions, new inventory developments, lots of newness!

Let’s start by looking at Oskar Linden’s bag of goodies in the server deployment posts, this week for example there are some nice developments, which you can read here. One of the highlights (for me anwyay) is:

Implemented llSetKeyframedMotion (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSetKeyframedMotion), I’ve had a little play with this, it has potential for being quite funky for lifts (Elevators if you must), vehicles, sliding doors etc, it seems to work quite well from my basic testing.

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