Ciaran Laval

June 13, 2015June 13, 2015

YouTube Gaming – An App And Website For Streaming Games Set To Launch This Summer

YouTube have announced that they will enter the live streaming arena this summer with YouTube Gaming. The announcement states :

YouTube Gaming is built to be all about your favorite games and gamers, with more videos than anywhere else. From “Asteroids” to “Zelda,” more than 25,000 games will each have their own page, a single place for all the best videos and live streams about that title. You’ll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTube creators.

The blog post also states :

Live streams bring the gaming community closer together, so we’ve put them front-and-center on the YouTube Gaming homepage. And in the coming weeks, we’ll launch an improved live experience that makes it simpler to broadcast your gameplay to YouTube. On top of existing features like high frame rate streaming at 60fps, DVR, and automatically converting your stream into a YouTube video, we’re redesigning our system so that you no longer need to schedule a live event ahead of time. We’re also creating single link you can share for all your streams.

So this site will have over 25,000 titles, will allow live streaming, but will it allow Second Life? Before people say “Second Life is not a game“, pause to see how Second Life content is currently categorised on YouTube.

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June 13, 2015

A Visit To The French Countryside Of Flux Sur Mer In Second Life

Continuing with the French theme, Sur La Mer in French means on the sea .. I think! I took French a long long time ago. What I can very confidently say is that the French countryside region of Flux Sur Mer in Second Life is both on the sea and absolutely stunning.

The parcel description informs us :

Flux Sur Mer is a detailed and artistically developed French country estate/ full sim, stunningly brought to life by creator and designer Nic Bour (nicbor resident), along with custom mesh designer Imoken Neox.

Stunningly brought to life by the creators is not an understatement.

This is a region that has a lot of depth and is a joy to explore.

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June 12, 2015

The Drax Files World Makers Episode 30 – Listen, Do You Want To Know A Secret … Store?

I’ve known a secret video for a day or two ….

Drax Files World Makers 30

Episode 30 of The Drax Files World Makers features Maylee Oh, Second Life fashion creator and owner of The Secret Store. I’ll follow my traditional pattern and embed the video at the end of this post.

Regular and irregular readers of this blog will know that I’m not a fashionista. Indeed when I realised this was about fashion I thought, “They do it over there, but we don’t do it here …. Fashion!”

However in Draxtor Despres we trust and this is another excellent addition to The Drax World Makers series, with Drax doing what he does best, gaining insight into the person behind the avatar and allowing that person, in this case Maylee Oh, to describe and demonstrate their Second Life and outside of Second Life personality with words, images, video and machinima. There’s also a funky scene near the end in a park with Draxtor and Maylee Oh chatting to each other.

Maylee Oh is 28 years old and lives in Paris. Maylee makes mostly female apparel in Second Life, along with some quirky things, which you will see in the video.

Maylee talks of how she makes commercials for her store in Second Life, using a variety of tools including Adobe After Effects and her own illustrations. This is an excellent example of something that doesn’t really get talked about regarding Second Life or other virtual worlds, the ability to create advertisements in a digital realm.

Maylee admits that she quit art school in her third year, but does not regret it and that via Second Life she has been able to bring her artistic talents to a medium that has allowed her to generate enough income to earn a living. Now, as I have links to education outside of the virtual world I have to frown somewhat at this point and say “Don’t try this at home kids“, please, finish your art school classes and any other classes. Pretty please?

Continue reading “The Drax Files World Makers Episode 30 – Listen, Do You Want To Know A Secret … Store?”

June 11, 2015

Primitar 1.0, James Miller Taxi Company, It’s Second Life History Time

Before looking forward to Second Life’s twelfth birthday celebrations, I think it’s an opportune time to look back. Play funky music, close your eyes, and come with me on a journey back in time ….

Ever want to build a cathedral? Underwater? Change your clothes, your face, your whole body? Fly? You can’t do any of that stuff in real life, but you can do it all and more in Second Life, a startlingly lifelike 3-D virtual world now evolving on the Internet. Unlike other shared online adventures, Second Life isn’t about slaying monsters or zapping aliens. It’s about building things, meeting people and expressing yourself. Even if you already have a life, you may want to get a second one.

The above comes from Time back in 2002 regarding what they considered to be one of that year’s best inventions.

Meanwhile, back in 2004, The Houston Chronicle were telling us :

In the hands of the futurist, the virtual world’s combination of social anonymity and endless digital possibility becomes a conduit for mankind’s basest desires, the triumph of machine over man and a stern warning about technology run amok.

Well, the future is now, and it’s considerably more urbane than anyone expected.

Second Life, a massively multiplayer online PC game, brings us one step closer to a true virtual existence. Even calling it a game is a stretch: Games require an object — a purpose — and Second Life’s purpose is as enigmatic as that of real life.

It’s hard to overstate how genre-busting Second Life is.

That article makes for a fascinating read by the way. Articles such as the above can be found by typing a URL such as :

https://secondlife.com/news/archive/?year=2002

Changing the year at the end will give you news for a different year. Alas a lot of the old articles lead to dead ends, although with a bit of jiggery pokery on The Wayback Machine, you may be able to retrieve them.

Another good source for Second Life history is the old old forum archive. There we can find that in 2004, Robin Linden was informing people that Second Life was up for an award :

Second Life has been nominated as a finalist for Online Game of the Year by Gaming Industry News. Full voting is now open, and GIN readers will be choosing the winners over the next month.

If you want to vote for Second Life, just visit Game Industry News. You have to be subscriber, but subscriptions are free. Every subscriber gets one vote.

That’s interesting not just because Second Life was up for an award, it’s also interesting because Game Industry News had a subscription model back then, albeit a free one.

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June 10, 2015

Second Life Group Listing Changes Are Probably A Matter Of Priorities

Inara Pey has recently blogged : Second Life group list changes explained :

Until now, it has been possible to open the details for any Second Life group you have joined and display all the information relating to that group, including the list of members.

However, with the new update, groups with 5,000 or more members will no longer display the list of members unless:

You are assigned the Owner or Officer role within the group
You are assigned an ability within the group which requires the members list to be displayed (e.g. you are able to assign members to assigners roles, or are able to eject / ban people from the group, etc.).
Instead, and until corresponding changes are made to the viewer, all you will see on opening the members list as a message stating “Retrieving member list (0 / XXXXX)” – where XXXXX is the total number of members in a the group.

Inara also provides pictures to exemplify these changes. This is one of those changes that will not raise an eyebrow from many users, but for some, it will be a great annoyance. Examples of the issues that are likely to annoy people can be found in Jira-BUG-9393 : Important use cases for groups have been neutered by the recent changes on the RC channels to member list loading for large groups.

The annoyances listed include :

You need to find out what role(s) you are in within the group. With the recent change, it is impossible to do so.
You need to contact an owner or officer of the group. With the change, it is impossible for you to find out who to contact that is within certain roles in the group.
You need to know what abilities you have within a group. You can’t with the recent change.
Countless groups in SL function as a “personals” listing of sorts where people can find likeminded individuals for particular interests/activities.

Please read the linked Jira for full details. All of the above is true, but the issue Linden Lab face is whether these changes will be of greater benefit to more people, rather than sticking with the status quo.

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