Virtual Worlds – Page 109

November 22, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 46 – Drax Visits Linden Lab HQ And Finds FIC Cups!

Episode 46 of The Drax Files Radio Hour sees Draxtor Despres visit Linden Lab HQ in San Francisco whilst Jo Yardley stays in an attic in 1920’s Berlin. Drax gets to talk to the Great Bug Hunter Of Olde Linden Town, in the shape of form of saying hello to Alexa Linden! I’m so jealous, Alexa is a legend and yes she does usually work in the Seattle office.

He gets to talk to Michelle Linden who ensures that Ebbe Altberg doesn’t spend all day on Twitter. He talks to Xiola Linden, who has a very cool hat inworld.

He also gets to talk to Ebbe Altberg, Monty Linden who talks about the content delivery network, Brooke Linden who talks about the SL Marketplace and he goes to the basement of the Linden Lab HQ to talk to Shaman Linden and Kona Linden. I used to love playing Monty Mole on the Sinclair Spectrum. Those were the days! Where were we? Oh yes, back to the future. Drax also got a glimpse of the next generation virtual world Linden Lab are producing, whose project name is currently a closely guarded secret, to such an extent that when someone mentions the name in the radio hour, it gets bleeped out and this also meant that an interview with Bagman Linden had to be pulled from the show.

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November 21, 2014

Viewer-Managed Marketplace Available on Aditi

Linden Lab have blogged that the new Viewer-Managed Marketplace is available on Aditi, better known as The Beta Grid. The blog post informs us that :

The new Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM), now available* on Aditi, allows you to easily manage your inventory on the Second Life Marketplace using the Second Life Viewer. Items no longer need to be loaded into the Merchant Outbox or a Magic Box, and are instead sold directly from your inventory.

VMM will allow all Merchants to get off of Magic Boxes in addition to supporting modification of listing inventory directly from the Viewer. While Merchants will still need to go to the Marketplace web site in order to edit listings, they will be able to create listings and list or unlist them from the Viewer.

The blog post is accompanied by a Wiki article and a Knowledgebase Article which both have extra information and instructions on how to use the coming new feature. The Viewer-Managed Marketplace (AKA VMM) addresses some outstanding issues from Direct Delivery. The first is a biggie, VMM allows you to list no copy items. Currently, Direct Delivery does not support no copy items and merchants selling no copy items have had to continue to use magic boxes.

Another issue is that there have been intermittent issues with the Merchant Outbox and VMM addresses those issues too because once this is fully rolled out there will be no need to move items to the Marketplace because they will be being sold directly from your inventory. At this point can I just add, I remain unconvinced that this will end well, but we’ll see!

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November 21, 2014

The Drax Files: World Makers Ep 24 – MadameThespian Underhill

An image should be here — Episode 24 Of Drax Files

Episode 24 of The Drax Files : World Makers features MadameThespian Underhill, Actor-director with the Avatar Repertory Theater and Builder/seller of Victorian homes & items, pianos, harpsichords, pipe organs and scripted music. Then there’s more, MadameThespian is one of those rare beasts in Second Life, she’s a Charter Member! Even Lindens get excited when they see Charter Members. Charter Member status means that someone is rather old in Second Life terms, in this case MadameThespian has a rez date of 18th December 2002.

More importantly Charter Members played a very important role in keeping Second Life afloat during its early days. They paid an upfront fee which I believe guaranteed them a 4096m plot for life with no further land fees. However the upfront fee they paid, around USD$160.00, provided some much needed cash to keep Second Life in development.

Virtual worlds, explains MadameThespian, are an extension to the ancient art of live storytelling. The Avatar Repertory Theater have produced many shows over the years including original productions and adaptations of existing works.

They build their own sets and create some of their own items but sometimes someone else makes a better item and they take full advantage of the fact that there are plenty of other content creators in Second Life who create suitable wares for their shows.

MadameThespian comes from, a thespian background. She was a Chicago based actor through most of the eighties but now lives in the mountains of Montana where she is a member of the Montana Shakespeare company. However there are certain areas of acting where the virtual world provides opportunities for actors where the real world may close doors.

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November 21, 2014

Linden Lab’s Promotional Images Are Great But Why No Location Links?

Linden Lab have done a great job in providing the press with some good images for Second Life related articles. This was exemplified well in a recent excellent interview Ebbe Altberg gave to Dean Takahashi on Venture Beat : Linden Lab explores VR for its next-generation virtual world (interview).

I mean that looks like my kind of village and the next one doesn’t look bad either :

The main difference between the top and bottom one is that I know where the bottom one is because Ziki Questi added a comment on Flickr. The second photo is of a sim called Venexia. Now obviously this Flickr resource is merely designed to provide decent images of Second Life, rather than the old outdated ones, but for those of us who like to explore, it would be nice if at least the name of the sim appeared.

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November 20, 2014

Linden Lab Explain The Reasons Behind Maintenance Week

Linden Lab have blogged about the reasons for the maintenance this week : The Hardware Issues Behind Recent Region Restarts. The problem, the blog explains, was down to a hardware failure which first manifested itself in July when the hardware failure took down four of Linden Lab’s new generation hosts. These things happen and Linden Lab put it down to, these things happen. I’m not surprised, that would be my first port of call too because you don’t want to think it may be a nasty hardware fault.

However in early October the same thing happened with another four hosts, which would have raised suspicions. A fortnight later the same fault manifested itself with another four hosts, at which time Linden Lab fully realised that this wasn’t just one of those things. Linden Lab’s blog post is very transparent on what happened here and also gives us some insight into how things work server side :

Each host lives inside a chassis along with three other hosts. These four hosts all share a common backplane that provides the hosts with power, networking and storage. The failures were traced to an overheating and subsequent failure of a component on these backplanes.

After exhaustive investigation with our vendor, the root cause of the failures turned out to be a hardware defect in a backplane component. We arranged an on-site visit by our vendor to locate, identify, and replace the affected backplanes. Members of our operations team have been working this week with our vendor in our datacentre to inspect every potentially affected system and replace the defective component to prevent any more failures.

Now the question some may have is “Why didn’t Linden Lab explain this at the start of the week?” The answer I suspect is that Linden Lab wanted to be sure that the issue was being fixed during this maintenance window before informing their customers of the details.

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