Virtual Worlds – Page 192

June 3, 2013

The Drax Files Episode 7 – Rod Humble

The Drax Files contuinue to impress me and as usual I’ll embed the video at the end of the post, in this edition Draxtor talks to Rod Humble, CEO of Linden Lab and someone who appears to have been missing in action for a while, although I swear I saw that thief style avatar when I was wandering around Fantasy Faire. The only disappointing aspect of this interview is that Rod doesn’t wear an Aston Villa shirt to work, or even a Villa tie!

The interview opens with Rod Humble saying “Most People at Silicon Valley have no idea that Second Life still exists.” The interview is fascinating with Rod making some extremely encouraging comments (for me anyway) in terms of privacy. Unlike those who think we should all be using our real names everywhere we go, Rod sees the value of people having their own space in different environments.

Rod also talks of how he travels around with alts and that this gives him the chance to engage in different ways, ways that he wouldn’t be able to do if people knew he was Rod Humble. This relates to the previous point about privacy and it’s encouraging to see that Rod seems to get the importance of this.

We see Rod in walking into the Linden Lab offices and some of the staff in pose mode, some pondering, others in catalogue style poses, some typing away and pretending the camera isn’t there whilst keeping one eye on it, as you do! There’s talk of performance improvements, with Server Side Baking making an appearance and talk of improvements that will be rolled out this quarter that apparently we will really like.

We see footage of The Dwarfins cave, hurrah! Rod talks of how Second Life is a great platform for creativity and how the content is user created, which we all know of course but as hopefully people who aren’t yet Second Life users will see this, it’s important that the CEO of Linden Lab makes this point.

Continue reading “The Drax Files Episode 7 – Rod Humble”

May 31, 2013May 31, 2013

A Humble Mystery Unfolds

Sighted inworld less often than Magellan Linden in the past twelve months, there have been concerns about the well being of Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble. Had he been kidnapped? Had he been turned into a High Fidelity Voxel? Did he have clowns to the left of him, jokers to the right and was stuck in the middle with you? The search for Rod Humble has been well and truly on.

When you need to find out some information about goings on in Second Life, sometimes you have to go to dark corners, corners filled with fog, hansom carriages, dens of iniquity, places where you have to wave a purse full of gold coins around to get information and being a fearless fighter for truth and justice I have done all of this to try and uncover more about the mystery of the hidden Humble …. and then I turned to Twitter! (dramatic music plays). I’m scarred by it all but I have heard some whispers!

I’m reliably informed that an avatar in an Aston Villa shirt who isn’t Prad Prathivi or me has been known to be roaming inworld. The word on the streets of Bay City is that he has been spotted in Bay City!

Thanks to Daniel Voyager for the snapshot.

There’s also talk that he has time travelled to 1920’s Berlin and allegedly been interviewed by a Barbarian … I mean Bavarian called Drax. However the details of the interview are sketchy, it has been leaked by Frau Yardley that Rod Humble uses alts …. wait, so do I! However this begs the question, who are Rod Humble’s alts?

Continue reading “A Humble Mystery Unfolds”

May 30, 2013

Dwarfins Go Gardening

Another development whilst I was on my travels, was the introduction of gardening for Dwarfins. This is more than just an interactive item for your Dwarfins, although Dwarfins will interact with your garden, it’s a way of growing your own food too and can work out cheaper than buying ham and anyway, who wants their Dwarfins eating ham all the time, that’s not a balanced diet at all!

In order to engage with gardening you will need to buy some items from the Dwarfins store, you will need at minimum:

Garden Plot: Required to plant seeds.
Seeds: A variety of seeds are available to plant and grow.
Water Bucket: You can pick up a free bucket of water once every 3 days. One bucket of water is enough to water a 6 plot garden.

There are a couple of other items you can buy to aid your gardening, these include:

Interactive Neverending Well: A rustic well that your Dwarfins will interact with, as well as providing an endless supply of water for your gardens.
Instagrow: An Elixir that can be used on your plants so that they mature instantly.

Now there are a few things to note, plants will take three days to grow, that is as long as the garden has enough water, if a garden doesn’t have enough water a plant will wither, although this can be rectified it will slow your gardening down. Once a plant is fully grown you have a choice of harvesting it for food, or sending it to your online pantry, where you’ll be able to create recipes.

Continue reading “Dwarfins Go Gardening”

May 30, 2013

The Drax Files Episode 6 – Abramelin Wolfe

The thing about going on holiday is that you miss things and I’ll try and catch up this evening if I can, a bit at least. One of the things I missed whilst walk along the beach in Majorca was episode 6 of the excellent Drax Files, as usual I’ll embed the video at the end of the post.

This episode featured Abramelin Wolfe, AKA Animation King of Abranimations in Second Life, which for those unfamilair with the brand is an animation store, one that even I’ve heard of and as I’m often poked for not wearing an AO inworld, that’s rather impressive! At their store you will also find avatars, skins, games, toys, vehicles and gadgets.

The thing about this interview is that it gives you an insight into the eye watering costs of animation accessories, Abramelin talks of how he purchased his first mocap suit back in 2005 at the eye watering cost of £14,000, the suit also looks very painful. Most people think of Second Life content creators as being plucky amateurs but with setup costs like that, we’re delving into a far more professional world.

Continue reading “The Drax Files Episode 6 – Abramelin Wolfe”

May 29, 2013

The Partially Hidden Cost Of Display Costs

I’ve mentioned the Good Building Practices section of the official Second Life Wiki before, I’ve also mentioned the extremely useful Texture Usage page in that section. The good building practices is an under promoted resource in my opinion, Linden Lab haven’t forgotten about it, I see that they have added a case study on how June Dion used normal and specular maps to add details to a Katana imported from Lightwave. However that’s not what I’m going to talk about today!

The Texture Usage page describes a situation many of us will recognise:

“We have all been there, teleporting to a new location, everything grey, the need to stand there for 10 minutes waiting for everything to load. Even then many textures still remain blurry. Some people give up and teleport away, some people leave to make coffee. Land owners can lose traffic over it. Store owners can lose customers over it. So optimizing your textures to ensure that they load quickly, without losing any of the visual impact, is important.”

The tip is to use as small a texture size as is reasonable, with advice to try and avoid using 1024 x 1024 textures if possible. Now some people will argue this point, because good usage of 1024 x 1024 textures can actually make an item efficient in terms of performance, however as a general rule, you should not use a 1024 x 1024 texture when a 256 x 256 will suffice, but it’s not a simple numbers game because the number of textures you use is also a factor.

I’ll do a small example, I created a prim and used a single 512 x 512 texture on it:

An Image Should Be Here — Single Texture

Now I’m going to click the more info link because that’s where I can find out some extra inforamtion about the display costs of my item:

Now this has a display cost of 404, but what happens if instead of using a single texture, I use three different textures on my prim? Well in this case I’ll use two 512 x 512 textures and one 64 x 64 texture.

Continue reading “The Partially Hidden Cost Of Display Costs”