Virtual Worlds – Page 244

June 18, 2012June 18, 2012

Kitely v Second Life And Finding A Happy Medium

I think it’s fair to say that Kitely’s pricing model rubs some people up the wrong way. People look at the pricing plans and feel that a metered based world is not a good place to socialise, and perhaps they’re right. Kitely’s pricing plans look like this:

Monthly Plan Cost Minutes KC Free Worlds

Free Plan Free 120 0 1

Bronze Plan $5 1200 300 2

Silver Plan $20 5000 1000 10

Gold Plan $50 12000 3000 30

Platinum Plan $100 Unlimited 5000 100

Now compared to Second Life, this looks both great and bad, depending upon which end of the spectrum you’re coming from. Social users on a premium plan of just USD$72 a year can use Second Life unlimited, have a small plot of land, for free you can use Second Life unlimited anyway. However people who like to build, well the Kitely Silver Plan gives you 10 sims, 100,000 prims each sim, costs less a year than sim in Second Life does for a month and there’s no upfront purchase cost. Ok you haven’t got unlimited access on that plan, but it’s still over eighty hours a month.

Ideally, I can see the Kitely model complimenting Second Life, rather than competing with it.

Continue reading “Kitely v Second Life And Finding A Happy Medium”

June 18, 2012June 18, 2012

SL9B – I Know Nothing

Second Life’s ninth birthday celebrations have kicked off, and I know nothing about them! I’ve not seen any previews or been to visit any of the sims. Work, WoW and Euro 2012 are eating my spare time, although I have time off work so I may get to see some of it!

However, I know a man and woman who do know about SL9B, so if you want to get the skinny on the lowdown, go read:

Inara Pey’s in depth guides to what’s going on.

Crap Mariner’s Performance Schedule, complete with Google Calendar awesomeness so it should update nicely.

Visit the SL9B blog.

I’ve also figured out how to add the events calendar! See below the cut for that.

Continue reading “SL9B – I Know Nothing”

June 17, 2012

Blender 2.64 To Have Second Life Options

I’m seeing Second Life adverts in my Google Adsense stream again, I haven’t noticed these for a while but it looks as if Linden Lab are utilising adsense again in another marketing campaign, which is good to see. However this post is about the forthcoming release of Blender 2.64 and new features that have Second Life in mind.

Gaia Clary, who has been working hard with others to ensure Collada support in Blender is improved and maintained, brings us news on the official forum of new features in Blender 2.64. Collada is the format we use to import Mesh objects to Second Life, Blender were talking of dropping support for Collada as it was a buggy format, but Gaia and others have risen to the challenge of helping to improve it.

Blender 2.64 isn’t officially released yet, but the new improvements include:

Geometry data is now again named similar to the Object names (Object names are preserved).
The order of export for objects can now be sorted (avoid LOD matching problems).
Apply modifiers is non destructive. You no longer have to apply the modifiers before exporting. This works also with Mirror Modifiers and Shape keys.
You can now export a rig with stripped control bones as long as the deform bones define a complete SL Skeleton.
The reimport of exported collada files to Blender is still not fully fixed. But for static meshes it now works reasonable well (not so important for Second Life users though).

Gaia goes into further detail in a blog post on the subject, including a photo of an export option for Second Life, which will load some presets that you’ll generally want when you export your Mesh to Collada for use in Second Life.

Continue reading “Blender 2.64 To Have Second Life Options”

June 17, 2012

Flickr Pickle

Linden Lab have recently found themselves in a user permissions pickle over their use of pictures for their pic of the day blog posts. Wizard Gynoid pointed this out to me in a recent comment, whereby Whiskey Monday surprisingly found that her picture had been used.

The main issue is a lack of communication, nobody from Linden Lab told Whiskey that her picture had been selected. Photos submitted to the Second Life group pool on flickr were being used on sites such as Facebook, Tumblr and Google +, no matter which rights had been selected by the author on flickr. There are two problems here, one is ignoring permissions but probably the larger issue is not informing the author. Most people would be happy to allow Linden Lab to use their photos for promotional purposes, as long as there’s attribution and communication.

However in this case, Linden Lab have decided to make some changes, as Whiskey Monday outlines here and create a new Flickr Group, with new terms and conditions.

Continue reading “Flickr Pickle”

June 16, 2012

A Year To Forget, But I’ll Never Forget It

This post may be a bit rambly, is rambly even a word? This post is also likely to be a bit disjointed, but on with the show!

2012 has not been a good year, to be frank, and Frank isn’t my real name, it has been the worst year of my life. The Villa were crap, in a painful way, but that was put into perspective by a bigger personal tragedy for me that I’m struggling with and will continue to struggle with, which is why my blog has been a bit awol for the last couple of months, emotional pain scars and it leaves long lasting marks but that’s life and we all have to deal with things like this, no matter how painful it is, it comes to pretty much all of us.

The weather has been crap too, here in England it has been raining for two months and in a land where rain is not a surprise, this amount of rain is depressing, of course we also have a Tory Government and misery and Tory governments do go hand in hand, so there’s that to consider.

On the virtual world front, I’ve sort of lost my mojo this last year, the excitment has gone, that’s what happens I guess but I’m so out of the loop when it comes to socialising in Second Life. A performer handed me a notecard the other week asking if she could perform at my sim, it actually made me smile that someone made the effort to say they wanted to sing. I’ve always felt that LL have been missing a trick in not promoting Second Life as a live music venue.

Continue reading “A Year To Forget, But I’ll Never Forget It”