Second Life Content Creators Should Pay Attention To Penny Patton

Skara Brae Statue

To some Penny Patton is like a broken record, calling for people to change their camera angles, change the way they use textures, change scale, change their perceptions. However Penny’s content creation tips for Second Life should be heeded, even if you don’t agree with all of them. Penny’s site has a lot of good information but the post I’m going to highlight today is : Building A Better Second Life.

Skara Brae Tavern

Most of the tips Penny advises content creators to follow actually work to improve Second Life performance, for example:

Textures eat up bandwidth to download, processing power for the sim to retrieve them from the asset server and deliver them to your viewer, and then your videocard needs to store them in memory and render them. Too many large textures are one of the biggest reasons SL gets such poor framerates and why everything takes so long to rez.

This is undeniably true. Larger than needed textures hit performance, using too many textures will also hit performance too.

Skara Brae Buildings

Penny doesn’t just provide tips and sit back and hope people notice, she allows people to call her bluff because examples of Penny’s work exist within Second Life and there are no two ways about this, performance is generally extremely good where Penny builds. Textures load fast, you can move around, you’re not sat there waiting for grey buildings to rez.

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The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 8 – Draxtor Meets Pamela

Episode 8 of The Drax Files Radio hour is out and it doesn’t disappoint. Draxtor takes his avatar to the real world and meets Pamela. Pamela does not engage with Second Life, although she has heard of it. There’s a fascinating discussion between Drax Pamela as Drax emphasises the beauty of virtual worlds and Pamela extols the virtues of the physical world.

In reality this boils down to a richness verus reach argument with both parties making good points. Drax argues that virtual worlds enable people to link up and share advice with people all over the world, Pamela argues that the real world allows more tangible goodness and that people are less likely to be hiding behind a mask.

At the end I came to the conclusion that they were both right, but that the ideal scenario is for people to enjoy the benefits of both the real and virtual world. Of course some people aren’t in a position to do so and find one or the other more productive, but really, it’s a matter of balance if possible.

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Fantasy Faire 2014 Scheduled For May 1st – May 11th

Sonya Marmurek

Sonya Murmarek announced on February 17th that this year’s Fantasy Faire is scheduled to take place May 1st – May 11th. However due to the success of Fantasy Faire, there are not yet any open applications for merchants to display their wares, as Sonya explains:

There are currently no applications for merchants. The Faire is old and established and there are plenty of creators who are as much an integral part of it as the Fairelands themselves and we will first scribe in those registrations.

The first invitations to the merchants will be sent out by the end of February.

The open applications for merchants will begin some time after March 15th.

Obviously it will be disappointing if no new merchants get a look in, but it seems as if they will. I’ve blogged Fantasy Faire for the last three years, it’s a magnificent event, truly magnificent. During that time I’ve met the weird and wonderful creations and characters in the Second Life fantasy scene. I’ve met baking gnomes:

Baking Gnome

 

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Realm Of Usk To Close

Daniel Voyager has already spread the news that dieselpunk sim Seraph City will soon be closing. Inara Pey has informed people that Anita Witt’s full region art gallery of Dryland is closing down. Over at SLUniverse, Naseby Girl has posted that Realm Of Usk is closing down.


Realm of Usk

Welcome to Usk, a historically-based place where you’ll find friendly folks who enjoy 14th century medieval role-play. Travel back to 1300 AD Wales, where you’ll visit a community for creating and sharing experiences based around the lives of knights, nobles and local citizens.

Visit in Second Life

Realm Of Usk is a roleplaying sim and community, which is the sort of project that is dear to my heart so it’s disappointing to read that they are closing their doors.

Inside Realm Of Usk Walls

I don’t know why Realm Of Usk is closing but I do know about the difficulties of helping a Roleplaying sim in Second Life make its own way. For some the tier is too damn high, for others it’s the amount of time managing the project or keeping content up to date.

Realm Of Usk Castle

Others find getting enough others engaged to help with storylines or management difficult. There’s a lot of work that goes into a roleplaying sim and community, much of it in the background and away from the roleplayers themselves.

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Jira Wars Episode VI – The Return Of The Jira

In a galaxy far far away Darth Linden and The Empire had dealt The Jira Knights a crushing defeat. Removing their ability to effectively collaborate and greatly nerfing their powers.

The Jira Knights tried to protest, they tried to reason, but The Empire were having none of it and cackled into their bug fixing. The Jira Knights went into hiding, licking their wounds and wondering if they would ever be able to return to their old haunts.

The Empire held firm, until very recently when The Emperor resigned and a new Emperor arrived. The Jira Knights now had a new hope … wait that was episode IV, the Jira Knights saw this as a new opportunity and secretly sent a droid to greet the new Emperor in his office. The arrival of a droid certainly surprised the new Emperor, however he was even more surprised when upon touching a button on the droid a hologram of Princess Inara appeared with the message “Help us Ebbe Wan Kenaltberg, you’re our only hope“.

I haven’t been called that for … well I’ve never been called that” muttered Ebbe.

Princess Inara’s hologram frowned, which was quite impressive for a recorded message “You’re in Ciaran’s blog, play along.

Oh!” said Ebbe, looking around nervously, “How can I help?

Princess Inara informed Ebbe of the problems the revised Jira had caused not only the Rebel Alliance, but also The Empire and convinced the new emperor that it would be best all round if a compromise was made. The new Emperor agreed and was soon publically responding to questions about the Jira : “Funny, both engineering and product heads here also didn’t like that jira was closed and want to open it up again. Proposal for how is in the works! I hope we can figure out how to do that in a way that works/scales soon.

The plan was now in full motion and today, the rebel alliance scored a major victory when Linden Lab announced : Changes To Our Jira Implementation.

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