Virtual Worlds – Page 137

June 22, 2014

SL11B Opens Today

Today sees the start of SL11B, to celebrate the official eleventh birthday of Second Life. A bit like The Queen, there’s more than one birthday for Second Life, which is why avatars such as Steller Sunshine are already older than eleven, but June 23rd is the anniversary that is officially recognised based on a Philip Rosedale post from June 23rd 2003 :

Residents and prospective residents,

Welcome to Second Life!

I am pleased to announce that today, Monday June 23rd, we are releasing Second Life version 1.0, and opening the service for general availability.

We’ve been able to reach this milestone through a combination of very hard work in creating a unique new technology and product, and the amazing efforts and engagement of our Early Creators and beta residents.

A ‘ball-drop’ ceremony was held in-world last night to celebrate the release.

Along with the many early residents of Second Life, let me salute our entire team of ‘Lindens’ for bringing this amazing experience to life. It has been a tremendous effort and, well worth it.

Philip Rosedale

aka Philip Linden

This year the theme of the birthday celebrations is based on a quote from Winston Churchill – “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

A whole host of events are planned for today to get things started with a bang.

Continue reading “SL11B Opens Today”

June 21, 2014

Bagman Linden On Why The Virtual World Market Is Ripe For Bigger And Better

It’s a comparison I’ve made many times before, Second Life and World Of Warcraft both sit proudly at the top of their respective classes. Despite technologically superior newcomers arriving, they have both fought them off, they both contain the social ingredient that has allowed them to thrive and enjoy greater longevity than many believed they could. I made the following point in a post at SLUniverse regarding the hurdles a new venture faces :

Second Life has a lot of similarities to World Of Warcraft, right place, right time, and they bagged those interested and despite falling numbers continue to have more than enough to make other ventures jealous beyond belief, despite others offering more modern options.

Along came Bagman Linden, AKA Jeff Petersen, Vice President of Engineering at Linden Lab who on his arrival at Linden Lab introduced himself via a blog post :

For me, the challenges and the opportunities at the Lab are a perfect fit for my background. I come to the Lab with over 20 years of experience as a game developer and engineering lead, primarily in the MMO area. Prior to joining Linden Lab, I spent 10 years working for Sony Online Entertainment doing MMO RPG development (with a focus on the networking, servers, and core technologies), along with PS3 and PSP development. Some of the titles that I worked on include: Everquest, Everquest II, Star Wars Galaxies, Planetside, Untold Legends PS3, Field Commander PSP, FreeRealms, and CloneWars Adventures.

Bagman disagreed slightly with my comparison of Second Life and World of Warcraft, Bagman feels that virtual worlds haven’t reached the World of Warcraft stage and that Second Life is more akin to Everquest, as he explained in a reply :

It’s interesting that you compare Second Life to World of Warcraft, as I have made similar comparisons myself, but come to different conclusions.

Before I joined Linden Lab a little over 3 years ago, I was at Sony Online Entertainment for over 10 years. I was part of the EverQuest development team for years, and at the time, EverQuest was the biggest MMO RPG on the market by far, and with the revenue it was generating, it was the envy of the industry.

For years EverQuest had similar user engagement and revenue to what Second Life has. I remember well at the time the common belief at Sony and in the rest of the industry was that EverQuest was a smashing success and people would be thrilled to match it.

Then Blizzard came along and created World of Warcraft, a product that was ultimately over 30 times more successful than EverQuest. We can speculate why that is, but I personally believe it came down to the quality and polish of their product. Fundamentally, the game was very similar.

The comparison that resonates with me is between Second Life and EverQuest. Both are similarly aging products with similarly sized user bases. Both at the top of their market segment. Both had countless people trying to bump them off with little success. We know how the story ends with EverQuest.

I believe the virtual worlds market is ripe for their own ‘World of Warcraft’ to come along and show us just how much bigger this market could be. And I don’t think you need to leave behind anything (concept wise) that made Second Life successful in order to see that growth. But you do need to raise the bar, and that is exactly what we intend to do.

Interesting stuff. I haven’t played Everquest, but I can see where Bagman is coming from here. He’s basically making the point that the virtual world market is ready for something really big to catch people and that what’s happened before is impressive, but possibly way below potential.

Continue reading “Bagman Linden On Why The Virtual World Market Is Ripe For Bigger And Better”

June 21, 2014

Ebbe Talks Of Linden Lab’s Next Generation Platform

So Linden Lab’s next generation virtual world platform is most definitely more than a rumour and Ebbe Altberg has been leading the discussion. However it should be pointed out, that Rod Humble discussed other worlds too, as Inara Pey points out in her blog post on the subject :

Back in October 2012, I was pointed to an interview with former Lab CEO Rod Humble in Gamesbeat, in which he talked about the Lab’s (then) new products, the Lab and Second Life. In reviewing that piece, I picked up on a statement that Linden Lab is “still investing in 3D virtual worlds.”

In the middle of the comments following that article, Rod himself popped-up to reassure people that the Lab was (and is) still committed to Second Life. In this comment, he also acknowledged the use of the plural – “virtual worlds” – stating:

My comment about also investing in virtual worlds is correct. As you know I don’t like to detail things until we are close to something actionable, but we absolutely are investing in the large virtual world space which I think will make Second Life users, business owners and developers very happy…. but its a ways off 🙂

Inara as usual is on the ball and her blog post carries the audio recording of Ebbe Altberg’s discussion regarding Linden Lab’s next generation platform at the TPV developers meeting. I will also insert the YouTube video of the entire meeting at the end of this post, but more on that later.

Obviously this news has generated a lot of discussion and Linden Lab have been in responsive mode, with first Peter Gray contacting some bloggers to inform them :

Linden Lab is working on a next generation virtual world that will be in the spirit of Second Life, an open world where users have incredible power to create anything they can imagine and content creators are king. This is a significant focus for Linden Lab, and we are actively hiring to help with this ambitious effort. We believe that there is a massive opportunity ahead to carry on the spirit of Second Life while leveraging the significant technological advancements that have occurred since its creation, as well as our unparalleled experience as the provider of the most successful user-created virtual world ever.

The next generation virtual world will go far beyond what is possible with Second Life, and we don’t want to constrain our development by setting backward compatibility with Second Life as an absolute requirement from the start. That doesn’t mean you necessarily won’t be able to bring parts of your Second Life over, just that our priority in building the next generation platform is to create an incredible experience and enable stunningly high-quality creativity, rather than ensuring that everything could work seamlessly with everything created over Second Life’s 11 year history.

Does this mean we’re giving up on Second Life? Absolutely not. It is thanks to the Second Life community that our virtual world today is without question the best there is, and after 11 years we certainly have no intention of abandoning our users nor the virtual world they continually fill with their astounding creativity. Second Life has many years ahead of it, and in addition to improvements and new developments specifically for Second Life, we think that much of the work we do for the next generation project will also be beneficial for Second Life.

It’s still very early days for this new project, and as we forge ahead in creating the next generation virtual world, we’ll share as much as we can.

If we had one message to share with Second Life users about this new project at this point, it would be: don’t panic, get excited! Again, Second Life isn’t going away, nor are we ceasing our work to improve it. But, we’re also working on something that we think will truly fulfill the promise of virtual worlds that few people understand as well as Second Life users.

Ebbe Altberg himself has also been out and about making a visit to SLUniverse to discuss the matter. I know this always rubs some people up the wrong way because they believe Ebbe Altberg should be discussing such issue on Second Life’s official forum, but he chose to go to SLUniverse to chat to the cool kids, so that ruled me out! I’m not going to post all of Ebbe’s SLU post but a few select one’s are below the cut.

Continue reading “Ebbe Talks Of Linden Lab’s Next Generation Platform”

June 20, 2014

Breaking Rumour – Linden Lab Working On Nextgen Virtual World?

I have received an unconfirmed report that the following is happening :

Linden Lab is working on a next generation virtual world
Most of Lab’s development resources are already working on it.
Smaller dev team headed by Oz Linden remains working on SL.
The new worlds will be closed sourced, and not backward compatible with content from SL.

This information is allegedly from Ebbe Altberg who apparently dropped by the third party developers meeting to share the news.

Latif Khalifa of Radegast shared the news on SLUniverse, where Catznip developer Trinity Devaju also hints that this was said, although they are being a bit coy right now.

Continue reading “Breaking Rumour – Linden Lab Working On Nextgen Virtual World?”

June 20, 2014June 20, 2014

Sony Player Studio Extends To Landmark Marketplace But Don’t Expect Second Life Style Freedom To Create

Sony Online Entertainment’s Landmark, formerly known as Everquest Landmark has issued a call to arms for the creative types to sell their wares on the Landmark marketplace via their player studio :

Player Studio offers players the opportunity to create in-game items that can be sold in the marketplace for royalties (i.e. real world money!)

After you’ve mastered building in Landmark, take your creations to the next level! Save a piece of your creation or the entire project as a template. Price them and place them on the Showcase Marketplace and earn real money when other players purchase them.*

Get to know the builder audience, understand their needs, keep tabs on what is available on the Showcase, and build things that players will need or want. You can contribute to the Landmark community while earning real money. Turn your hobby into a profit center.

The email I received about this had some additional information regarding who can participate, which is rather an important piece of the pie :

Player Studio registration is available for Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. More countries coming soon!

There are other important points to note, some of them very important. The FAQ makes for interesting reading, especially the part about how player studio works :

SOE’s Player Studio program invites players to download sample geometry files for actual in-game objects and through the use of standard third party art tools, learn how to develop, design and personalize items of their own – from re-coloring and re-texturing, to reshaping an item’s geometry. Once complete, players are encouraged to name and create a description for their item, describe how the item will fit into the game’s ongoing narrative storyline, and submit it to SOE for review and possible inclusion in the SOE Marketplace. If a player-created item is selected for inclusion in the SOE Marketplace, SOE will share 40% of the net amount it receives from the sale of the item with the player that created the item.

The free nature of the Second Life marketplace definitely has advantages over Sony Online’s player studio, both in terms of commission and in terms of freedom to create.

Continue reading “Sony Player Studio Extends To Landmark Marketplace But Don’t Expect Second Life Style Freedom To Create”