Virtual Worlds – Page 203

March 26, 2013

Common Sense Required Regarding Incorrect Category Decisions

There have been numerous reports of merchants being bemused as to why their item listing is removed from the marketplace for being in the wrong category. Sometimes it’s clearly an issue that the item is in the wrong category and sometimes it’s not so clear.

The Dwarfins Marketplace store has suffered a blow due to Dwarfins food being removed from the Marketplace due to it being deemed to be in the wrong category, the wrong category in this case being breedables. This is a rather odd move being as the breedables category has food for Meeroos, Amaretto Horses and Ozimals.

However it should be noted that Fennux and Snuffles food can be found in Animals/Animals & Pet Supplies/Animals Feed & Water Supplies. This sort of inconsistency is not helpful and really there should be some common sense applied in these situations. The Animals & Pet Supplies category is not suitable for Dwarfins items, being as they aren’t pets and as breedable animals do not belong in the animals category in the first place, it seems silly for Linden Lab to agree with whomever flagged Dwarfins food.

Now it has long been suspected that Linden Lab only respond to flagged items, they are not proactive, they probably don’t have the time to be proactive but a cursory glance at the breedables category shows breedable food items in that category, ergo breedable food should be left there.

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March 24, 2013

Is Lilith Heart A Secret Griefer?

I purchased some bushes once from Lilith Heart. They were nice bushes, helped to design the border for a park I once had in Bedos back in the days when I could afford to own a park. The sim where I purchased the bushes from was a nice sim, peaceful, the sort of place that could very well be a front for nefarious goings on.

These sort of suspicisons are confirmed by Lilith’s own hand, on Friday, Lilith Heart, part time plant maker became Lilith Heart, ban hammered, as explained in Lilith’s blog post: Lilith Heart Back From Ban-cation.

There’s no smoke without fire, as they say in the trade. One has to suspect that amongst the bushes, plants, flowers, Lilith may have been harvesting some sort of questionable weed and that Undercover Linden busted her in some sort of honey trap!

Lilith, whose marketplace store lists a rather large number of potentially nefarious plants is none the wiser as to why she was temporarily banned. Joking aside, this is probably the bigger issue here.

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March 23, 2013

Linden Lab Could Do More To Encourage Good Building Practices

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of Linden Lab’s wiki page of Good Building Practices. However now I think it’s time to turn this up a notch with Linden Lab actively promoting said resource and part of the reason for this is my own stumblings with Mesh. The thing is, these tips are good for all of our Second Life experiences.

The thing with Mesh is that you can reduce the number of faces on a cube and still display all you need to, you can also reduce the number of textures that need to be loaded, which in turn reduces the amount of work our video cards need to do, which improves the Second Life experience as a whole.

The other thing with Mesh is encouraging people to build more efficiently full stop. User generated content is an important factor in Second Life, it’s what makes the world vibrant but it also has the potential to cause problems, often unintentionally because people don’t have the resources available to encourage them to build more efficiently. This leads to people feeling that all Mesh is bad for Second Life, it’s not, but the lack of promotion of available material can leave people with a bad impression.

There are good and bad practices with Mesh, high poly models are not ideal for Second Life, they may look beautiful in a static environment but in the more dynamic environment of Second Life they can be problematic to say the least.

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March 22, 2013

The Drax Files Episode 2 – 1920’s Berlin What A Good Place To Be

So what happens when someone from Amsterdam is a fan of the 1930’s to such an extent that they dress and decorate their home in the style of that era? That’s right, they come to Second Life and build a 1920’s Berlin roleplaying location with future plans to build a sim in the style of 1940’s London….. wait, what? Well all is revealed in The Drax Files episode 2: Jo Yardley (embedded at bottom of post) which takes a look at 1920’s Berlin and the voice of the 1920’s Berlin Project, the very enthusiastic Frau (Jo) Yardley. The result is yet another stunning example of good promotion of Second Life by Draxtor Despres.

The epsiode is largely narrated by Jo Yardley, who doesn’t have a television or mobile phone in her own home, but does have a computer from where she brings her vision of 1920’s Berlin to life. Draxtor Despres and those involved in this production have done an excellent job of bringing 1920’s Berlin to video, to such an extent that initially I didn’t realise it was Second Life!

In this episode Draxtor once again uses inworld footage as well utilising already made outside footage of Jo in Amsterdam to show the person behind the wares in their real life environment, which brings home the message that the person behind the avatar is real. I’ve mentioned before how good a medium this is for promoting Second Life and how it would be good if Linden Lab got in on the act. I’ve also pointed out that there are issues such as editorial impartiality for Linden Lab that Draxtor and others don’t face, so it’s trickier for Linden Lab but I hope they are taking note of the positive nature of these videos. They are at least aiding the promotion by blogging about it.

In this episode Jo talks about her love of the era on which her sim is based, the style, the architecture as well as how she’s a fan of such dress sense outside of Second Life too! Jo also does look scarily like her avatar, no no no, stop right there, she’s not seven foot two with gravity defying double D boobs, neither is her Second Life avatar, which probably explains why her RL self looks so similar to her Second Life self.

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The 1920s Berlin Project