Virtual Worlds – Page 140

June 5, 2014

Second Life Group System Still Needs An Overhaul

The issue is an old one, let’s go back to April 2004 for our first exhibit :

Right now, I belong to two groups to manage land, two Linden-sponsored groups (Mentors and Instructors), a resident instructor group, my own group, and a scripting group. This leaves me with 3 groups to use for short term projects or other fun things.

Surely SL is becoming large enough and complex enough that people are getting involved in lots of projects at once, each requiring it’s own group. We need more groups so that we may participate in more projects. More groups encourage more social collaboration.

The issue back then, over ten years ago was that the group limit was just 10 groups. 10! Good grief. Things changed in November 2004, Haney Linden announced :

For those who don’t read the release notes, we are happy to announce that the maximum number of groups you can belong to at one time has been raised from 10 to 15. Let a new wave of grouping begin.

A 50% increase was indeed welcome but it wasn’t what people were asking for, they had wanted more than 15 groups as back then people recognised that groups were an important aspect of Second Life. However Phoenix Linden pointed out some of the reasoning behind upping the limit to 15 groups :

The current messaging architecture for group membership will not support more than 15. Future releases will allow you to belong to an arbitrary number of groups.

The early Second Life residents had to wait until August 2006 for the limit to be raised again, they were raised with the release of Second Life 1.12 along with other group improvements as announced by Jesse Linden :

The Group Membership Limit has been raised from 15 to 25 groups.
The Group Member Minimum has been reduced from 3 to 2 people.
With Members, Roles, and Abilities, you’re finally be able to control “who can do what” within a group, giving organization and flexibility for all kinds of groups.
Group Founders have much greater control over their groups with the ability to stop rogue Officers. Founders can also prevent group land sales, objects being inadvertently or intentionally returned, and worse.
Group Communication has been vastly improved. A ‘Notices’ tab has been added to the Group Information panel. Simply typing up a message and clicking “Send Message” will get the word out to your entire group. In addition, a single item can be attached to notices. This makes distribution of inventory a snap.

After this the drive for more than 25 groups was on, and it kept going on and on and on and on and .. well you get the picture. Then on January 2011 came the news from FJ Linden :

In October, we committed to increase group limits from the current 25 up to 40 in the first quarter of 2011. As of today, group limits have been raised to 42! To add groups beyond the previous limit of 25, you must be using Viewer 2.4 (or a more recent version). And if you’re still using Viewer 1.23, or a third-party viewer based on Viewer 1.23 code, then you can add more groups in Viewer 2.4 and they will still be accessible when you switch back to Viewer 1.23.

So technical improvements, changes to the group system, changes to the viewer have enabled the Second Life group limit to rise from 10 to 42, is it enough? Well a post on the Second Life forums asks : Does anyone else think we need more than 42 group spaces? The arguments are familiar, they are familiar all the way from 10 groups to 42 groups. The issue is that the group system was not designed to be used in the manner it currently is and therefore, this issue continues to raise its head.

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June 5, 2014

The Empire Strikes Back As Linden Lab Sponsor The Drax Files : World Makers

Linden Lab have announced that they are proud to sponsor The Drax Files : World Makers. When I read this blog post I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if a million voices suddenly cried out in terror.

I’m told that during the meeting to finalise the deal Draxtor was told : “You may dispense with the pleasantries, Draxtor. I am here to put you back on schedule.”

Ok ok on a serious note, this does not look like a bad deal at all. The Drax Files : World Makers is an excellent series that gets to the parts Linden Lab have never ever been able to with their video promotions of Second Life.

I’ve said this often enough but one of the reasons Draxtor Despres has been able to do this is because he has an editorial impartiality that Linden Lab do not have. Linden Lab have been accused of playing favourites in the past, indeed at times they have clearly played favourites, but generally, they need to have an air of impartiality. Draxtor doesn’t, so it’s somewhat reassuring to read in the blog post :

This sponsorship has no impact on Draxtor’s editorial independence; we’re not taking control or trying to dictate what stories are told or how they’re presented in the series

The importance of this production to Linden Lab though, and probably one of the reasons for their sponsorship deal is highlighted within the blog post regarding the revamped Second Life homepage. There’s a trailer from The Drax Files : World Makers on the new homepage. As Hitomi Tiponi over at SLUniverse said : “Great to see that Linden Lab are sponsoring this series. It is the best advert for Second Life.”

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June 4, 2014

The Challenges Of Oculus Rift Usage In Second Life

Digital mischief maker Loki Eliot recently posted an excellent blog post : Mapping a Gamepad to Second Life & OculusVR with Voice to Text. This post highlights quite a few issues and challenges for the usage of Oculus Rift within Second Life as well as highlighting issues with Oculus Rift and that level of immersion in any virtual world.

In the post Loki explains how he mapped an old game controller that is compatible with the xBox and mapped the buttons on that to control some of the menus within Second Life. Loki also used a voice to text dictation application to allow him to send voice to, well text, and therefore communicate with other Second Life users in text. I’ll embed Loki’s video at the end of the blog post but you should really read Loki’s post to get a good grasp of the issues.

Loki makes some points I’ve heard before, such as this one regarding the field of view and keyboard usage :

Instead they wrapped EVERYTHING around your field of view and expect you to be able to touch type which i know some superhuman SL users can do. Im not one of them unfortunately.

This emphasises a problem with trying to make Oculus Rift compatible with existing experiences, not just Second Life by the way but Second Life has an additional challenge that many games don’t face because communicating via text in Second Life is massive. That’s why people complain about Group Chat not working as well as they would hope.

However Loki’s use of a game controller reminded me of people I know who swear by game controllers. I actually have one but hardly ever use it, although it’s a chicken and egg situation because I’m sure if I used the game controller more often, I would be far more impressed by it. However the people whom are fans of game controllers in general are, gamers. No surprises there but as Second Life isn’t well known for attracting gamers, it highlights another challenge for Oculus Rift and Second Life harmony.

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June 3, 2014

June Highlights For The Years 2007 – 2009

By 2007 Linden Lab had moved their communications away from the forum and to a shiny new blog. At this point a few things should be noted, firstly, Linden Lab made great use of the blog and engaged in some excellent communications. However Second Life was growing, fast. This meant that blog posts attracted a lot of comments and many of those comments were of a negative nature.

Linden Lab employees must have found this frustrating and some people speculate that Linden Lab moved away from communicating due to the level of negativity. However users were engaged and negative though many comments were, they were of a cruel to be kind nature because people would not take the time out to be heard if they were not engaged with the platform. This sort of thorny situation plagues many a company when it comes to communications.

June 2007

Daniel Linden blogged Keeping Second Life Safe, Together. Ok, this was blogged on the 31st May 2007 but the ripples ran into June … ok feeble excuse but this was a controversial post. Daniel was asking for users to keep reporting questionable content. However some users felt that this post was a dig at adult content in Second Life full stop and took umbrage with the post. The controversy seemed to revolve around the term “Broadly Offensive” which was used in the post.

Torley Linden blogged First Look: WindLight update – beauty & bugs! This post, not surprisingly, concerned Windlight which was new at the time. The feature looked very exciting with talk of multiple suns, moons, region owners being able to control visitor settings and making it easier to edit presets. I think it’s fair to say that although Windlight was a great addition, it has never really fulfilled its potential.

Jeska Linden blogged Voice First Look Viewer Available for the Live Grid. Strange as it may seem these days, voice did not hit the grid until 2007 and was considered a controversial move. This blog explained that there was a voice viewer available and that Linden Lab would be seeking feedback. Ah they really did engage with the community back then.

Sabin Linden blogged Día de la Liberación and Het-Grid. Unfortunately the Second Life blog archive appears to have eaten that post, but it can still be found on the wayback machine. This was a bold move in which viewer updates would be optional and server updates were set to be released only to certain parts of the grid if circumstances dictated. This was of course the forerunner for what we see today with server channels for updates.

Sardonyx Linden blogged An open source community update. This was a post that thanked the excellent work they had engaged with to help fix bugs and add patches. The problem Linden Lab had was that they did not have enough developers to implement these updates, but this post suggested that developers had been hired which was allowing Linden Lab to implement these fixes. Many residents were credited for their help, far too many for me to list but they included the likes of Nicholaz Beresford, Alissa Sabre, Tharax Ferraris, Fremont Cunningham, Dale Glass, Able Whitman, Thraxis Epsilon, Peekay Semyorka, Argent Stonecutter, Jacek Antonelli, SignpostMarv Martin and Strife Onizuka.

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June 2, 2014June 2, 2014

June Highlights For The Years 2003 – 2006

Second Life officially hits eleven years old this month, although if you count closed beta it’s older than that. I’ve decided to delve into the annals of history and look back at some June highlights from the early years of Second Life.

I’ll take a brief look at some topics from June 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. This covered a period of major growth in Second Life, especially 2006 when users were no longer required to provide billing information, there also seemed to be a lot more competitions back in these years.

I provide this information courtesy of the old old old forum archive at : http://forums-archive.secondlife.com/120/1.html

There’s a lot more information there but I can’t fit that all in one post!

June 2003

Robin Linden confirmed that the NDA had been lifted and people were free to build Second Life websites, they even provided some resources to help with those websites.

Tanya Linden announced that someone had won the free use of an Island for three months as well as as well as an NVIDIA nForce™2-based computer, including an NVIDIA GeForce™ FX 5900 graphics card, courtesy of NVIDIA. The computer comes equipped with the Cordless Elite Duo, state-of-the-art wireless mouse and keyboard, courtesy of Logitech.

Hunter Linden announced that groups would now need to consist of at least three people after three days of existence or they would be disbanded.

Haney Linden announced that the payouts from voting stations would be increased from 10,000 Linden Dollars to 12,000 Linden Dollars. Now if you’ve ever wondered what the purpose of those voting stations around the grid was, this gives us a bit of a clue.

James Linden announced that there would be some downtime to roll out patch 0.9.1. Highlights included Trying to link a tree to a primitive does not crash the simulator (it will quietly fail) and a rather worrying look at how things used to be in the shape and form of Sandbox simulators being tax free.

June 2004

Robin Linden announced that Philip Rosedale would be appearing on CNN News.

Catherine Linden announced that someone had won a lifetime membership which came with a free 4096M parcel.

Robin Linden announced a big technological breakthrough that would allow content developers to tie in-world objects together with programs written in languages like Perl, Python, PHP, or Java. XML-RPC was fully functional and live.

Haney Linden announced that there would be a gala to celebrate Second Life’s 1st birthday. Highlights included a parade, which attracted so many attendees that it pushed Second Life past its technical limits, as Haney explained :

This afternoon’s parade attracted so many viewers that it pushed past the limits of Second Life’s current technology. The brave float drivers experienced major problems especially at sim boundaries.

Problems at sim boundaries hey …….

Magellan Linden announced that a resident needed to be sacrificed to satisfy a newly discovered volcano of Mt. G’al. I do like Magellan Linden!

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