Ciaran Laval

April 4, 2015

Second Life Premium Membership Offer Is Served With A Twist

Linden Lab have once again made a discount offer to entice people to engage with Premium Membership in Second Life : Don’t Miss This Limited-Time Sale on Premium Membership!

You know how this goes, Linden Lab offer a discount on quarterly membership and throw in a gift. However, in a bid to ensure we’re all paying attention, Linden Lab have changed the offer!

If you’ve been waiting to upgrade to a Premium account, now is a great time, because today we’re kicking off a great new sale: from today until April 13, 2015, you can upgrade to Premium subscription for less than $5 for your first month! That’s a 50% discount off the regular rate, and this offer won’t last long. Upgrade today and start enjoying Premium benefits at our lowest-ever monthly rate.

Wait, what? Let’s check the small print on this :

TERMS & CONDITIONS FOR 50% DISCOUNT This limited-time discount offer is available only for purchases of memberships on the Monthly billing plan. Discount will be applied to the first monthly billing cycle only, and all future charges will be at the regular Premium price ($9.95 USD, excluding VAT where applicable). Sign-up bonus will be paid upon 45 consecutive days of membership. To qualify, Second Life members must have an active Basic account or create a new Second Life account. Discount offer begins on Friday the 3rd of April at 8:00 am Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) and expires on Monday the 13th of April 2015 at 8:00 am Pacific Daylight Time (PDT).

So this offer is based on monthly membership, rather than the traditional quarterly offer and there’s no gift!

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April 4, 2015April 4, 2015

Austin Tate’s Progress Of High Fidelity Posts Are Now Public

High Fidelity recently moved to the Open Alpha stage and with that they also removed their request for people to not blog about some of the inner workings of High Fidelity. The reason for the request was completely understandable as High Fidelity was in the closed Alpha phase when the request was made and public blog posts could make some misleading representations about the platform.

I would still advise people proceed with caution when blogging about High Fidelity because it is still in Alpha and things can change quite dramatically during this phase.

However you can get an insight into the progress and development that has been made so far with High Fidelity thanks to Austin Tate, who has been quietly blogging about High Fidelity during the closed Alpha phase, but kept his blog posts private.

The posts start in May 2014 : High Fidelity Alpha Tests – First Screens, in which Austin took a look at building tools, mesh, chat, using scripts and much more.

There’s also an interesting post about NPC Bots as Assignments, which as you’d expect, covers how one would implement NPC’s within High Fidelity. I’ve had a play around with that myself and it worked quite well as an initial test.

Another interesting post covers Experiments with Oculus Rift DK2, in which Austin talks about how Oculus Rift worked with High Fidelity at the time.

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April 3, 2015

Remnants Of Earth Sci-Fi Roleplay In Second Life Attracts The Attention Of Kotaku

I took a brief look at Remnants of Earth back in February when I boldly went in search of Science Fiction action in Second Life. However it’s worth revisiting again because it’s now being discussed by a wider audience, even beyond the Second Life blogsphere.

Remnants Of Earth is a cyberpunk roleplay game in Second Life and was recently covered by Hamlet Au over at New World Notes : Remnants of Earth, a User-Made MMO in Second Life.

However now news of the world has gone beyond Second Life, thanks to Hamlet Au’s post, Patricia Hernandez of Kotaku has noticed it : Players Built An MMO Inside Of Second Life, And It Looks Wild.

The article consists mostly of screenshots from the Remnants of Earth website, which is an impressive website on its own, although be warned, it is quite bright and has some flicker.

So first of all, just what is Remnants Of Earth?

Remnants of Earth is a cyberpunk-fantasy role playing game within the metaverse of Second Life, with a heavy basis around classic pen and paper RPGs elements, like; dice rolling, stats, monster fighting, story driven events, MMO-like adventuring, and gathering. RoE is the first second life pen and paper table top game in SL, while still keeping the core features of any other roleplay sim. Players can interact with NPCs and other players to accomplish goals, and even engage in heated PvP faction wars. We even have a full crafting and mining system! Think of RoE as a fully functioning table top game in SL, like Dungeons and Dragons, or ShadowRun.

The world is extremely photogenic and has a definite cyberpunk feel to it. However as I haven’t engaged with the world properly, therefore I am unable to review the game mechanics.

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April 3, 2015April 3, 2015

Scepticism Of Cloud Gaming May Be The Real Reason SL Go Is Closing

A blog post from OnLive sheds a lot more light on the Sony deal : A Bright Future for Cloud Gaming at Sony. The post also confirms my thoughts that it’s unfair to paint Sony as the evil corporate villain in all of this, because there are some cold hard facts about the viability of the business are explained in the blog post.

One important point to note is that the blog post suggests that OnLive were indeed looking for someone to purchase them, and this section of the blog post spells out the situation quite clearly :

Since 2012, the company has dramatically improved its technology and business models such that all of its 5 services are gross margin positive, ranging from 43% to 86% margin. The fact that we had such positive margins should prevent repeat speculation that we were “crushed by infrastructure costs.” The company also was able to achieve conversion rates from free trial to paid of between 64-78% for its services. Despite these positive metrics, the lifetime value (TLV) of a subscriber was still less than the cost to acquire subscribers (CPA), but they were converging. While we knew we could not get to break-even on our own, we believed that there were many large companies who would be able to get there due to: 1) being able to communicate broadly and inexpensively (lowering CPA), 2) having their own distribution platform for the service, and 3) being able to license the most popular games and MMO’s, the latter 2 would have had the effect of both reducing CPA and reducing churn (thereby raising TLV). Despite these positive developments, we were unable to entice an acquirer who wanted to continue the service, and Sony already had their own service.

Therefore OnLive were seeking assistance in terms of breaking even and whereas some of that assistance could come from companies such as Linden Lab, they needed more companies to jump aboard the ship to make this project viable in the long term.

Step forward Sony. Unfortunately for us SL Go users and those who use OnLive Desktop, Sony have absolutely no need for a streaming service, as they are already running one in the shape and form of Playstation Now.

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April 3, 2015

Sony’s Gain Is A Loss For Some Second Life Residents

It was with great sadness that I read that SL Go from Onlive will be closing its services on April 30th. Sadness may be an understatement, there was much profanity. The reason for the closure of not only SL Go, but other OnLive games related services is due to Onlive selling patents to Sony as Kyle Orland explains over at Ars Technica.

Sony are of course a corporation and therefore it would be easy to paint Sony as the evil corporate villain. Fans of Science Fiction know where corporations are leading us, but to be fair to Sony they have a fairly decent reputation, therefore they’re not exactly in the same league as the Tyrell Corporation or Omni Consumer Products. More importantly, there’s probably more to this than meets the eye. The details of the deal haven’t been made public. I’ll find it hard to stay annoyed at Sony, especially as my annoyance may be misplaced.

In Kyle Orland’s article there’s a quote from a statement by Sony Computer Entertainment VP of Global Business Development, Philip Rosenberg :

“These strategic purchases open up great opportunities for our gamers, and gives Sony a formidable patent portfolio in cloud gaming,”

“It is yet another proof point that demonstrates our commitment to changing the way gamers experience the world of PlayStation.”

The point being missed there, by a country mile, is customers of OnLive were not playing on the PlayStation. However there may be some good news for those who would like to give SL Go a try, even though it’s closing down on April 30th.

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