Second Life – Page 145

February 27, 2014February 27, 2014

Is There More To Project Zipper Than Meets The Eye?

The Linden Lab blog post about Project Zipper has so far met with an underwhelming response. Project Zipper, for those who don’t know, is a new Second Life project viewer that apparently improves the installation speed of the Second Life viewer.

My initial reaction to this news was “?!?!?!?! WTF!” I must admit that was my second and third reaction too. I’m not alone in this, others have expressed bemusement as to why this is an important improvement.

The Second Life client download and install times have never been something that has struck me as being problematic. Some third party viewers have larger download and install times, and I have never found that problematic either.

The largely bemused response is pretty much summed up in Inara Pey’s blog post on the subject, Inara tested the install times of Project Zipper and the official Second Life client on her system and the results were:

Second Life release viewer 2.7.2.286707: 35.6 seconds
Second Life Project Zipper viewer 3.7.2.286810: 16.4 seconds

Now you could look at this and say that Project Zipper installs in less than half the time of the current release viewer, which put in those terms is an impressive achievement. However it amounts to just over 19 seconds difference, which in reality is neither here or there. People on other systems may see better or worse results, but I’d imagine in most cases, people aren’t going to be blown away by this.

However a couple of folk have added a bit more detail, which makes this sound a bit more interesting.

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February 26, 2014

StoryFest 14 Issues Call For Performers

I’ve covered storytelling here recently and was pleased to see a post from Inara Pey on the subject : Storyfest 4: Step forward and be heard! Inara’s post in turn links to another post from the organisers of StoryFest 14 : Call for Performers – STORYFEST ’14.

StoryFest ’14 is the fourth chapter in the annual StoryFest event in Second Life, which is quite an impressive feat. The event itself will take place in Second Life on Sunday, March 23rd at “Here Be Pictsies!” in Bran – 10am to 5pm. . So the real question is, what’s the skinny on the lowdown? Well from the organisers site:

“StoryFest” is a partnership between the Branwen Arts Coop, Seanchai Library, and the Stories Unlimited!, Produced by StoryFest Events. Our goal is to present a day of stories presented in a variety of live performance forms: Traditional Telling, Literature, Theatre, Dance etc.

They are looking for performers and volunteer hosts. If you are a performer you need to know a few things. The first is that these are live storytelling slots, not recordings. Next up you need to know that the slots are mostly going to be in thirty minute intervals, although a few longer slots may be available. Slots can be shared, so if you don’t want to do it all on your own, you don’t have to. However, most importantly, no live stream will be provided by the organisers. Those of you who are already storytelling in Second Life will know what to do about that.

The official World Storytelling Day is on March 20th, so you can engage with that in your usual locations and then attend this event in Second Life a few days later. Although world storytelling day has an official theme of “Monsters and Dragons”, you do not need to tell a story in that theme for StoryFest ’14 in Second Life, although you can if you want.

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February 24, 2014

Second Life Grid Achieves Week On Week Growth For The First Time Since March 31st 2013

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd’s weekly grid report has revealed that the Second Life grid grew this week for the first time since March 31st 2013. Tyche reports:

The grid actually grew this week by 14 regions , Private Estates had net growth of 15 while Linden Owned dropped by 1

Total number of Main Grid regions is now 26145 ( 19163 private estates & 6982 Linden owned)
60 new regions were added and 17 returned to the grid, with 63 regions removed (20 were renamed and 0 came and went since last report)

A modest growth this week , the first time the Grid has grown week on week since 31st March 2013 . The growth was distributed across a range of estates – no particular estate exhibiting a significant change in size due to new regions.

However before anyone starts poppnig champagne corks and heralding the dawn of a new age I should add a word of warning. The grid grew by 13 regions back on March 31st 2013 and that in itself was the first week on week growth since June 24th 2012, when the grid grew by 30 regions.

However there are definite positive signs. The loss of regions has undoubtedly slowed down. Let’s take a look at some tables! A point to note here, my calculations could be wrong, I may have made a glaring typo but calculators and stats make my eyes go funny, I think it’s right but if you spot any glaring errors let me know.

The first table I’ll look at is the overall changes between 24th June 2012 and February 24th 2014. This gives us an overall picture.

Grid Changes Between June 24th 2012 and February 24th 2014

Type	24th June 2012	24th February 2014	Change	Percentage
Estate	22,864	19,163	-3,836	-16.19%
Linden Owned	7,117	6,982	-29	-1.9%
Overall	29,981	26,145	-3,701	-12.79%

So we can see that during this period of less than two years, the grid experienced a rather whopping net loss of 16.19% of private regions. A much smaller loss of Linden Owned regions doesn’t really tell us much as there are numerous reasons why Linden Owned regions come and go, but I’m leaving them here for reference.

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February 23, 2014

Greyville – A Writer’s Colony In OpenSim Part Of The Hypergrid Stories Project

With many thanks to Talla Adam who is a member of the Opensim Virtual Community on Google+ I have discovered a writer’s colony in OpenSim. I had never been to OpenSim before so the first thing I had to do was to figure out how to get there.

Fortunately for the purposes of this visit, Nara Malone has an excellent blog post on the matter : An Author’s Guide to the Metaverse & How to visit Greyville Colony. After following those instructions I found myself at the Writers and Readers Colony at Greyville. Those who know how to use OpenSim will need to create an account for Naras Nook or go to world.narasnook.com:8900. I’m not sure how this works with Hypergrid.

The welcome centre has a very useful notecard, which is so useful that it basically writes this blog for me! Now the first thing to note is that this is a work in progress. Nara Malone is the brains behind this, she’s the lady whose blog post I linked to above. The notecard includes details of the mission:

My mission here is to introduce authors to the power of the metaverse and all the ways it can inspire stories and assist in creating and promoting their work. I welcome suggestions and content from authors and readers. I expect to see lots of characters interacting with avatars and roaming all the regions here at Nara’s Nook. I have 16 regions for experimenting, exploring and inspiration. I don’t imagine I’ll ever be finished adding to them.

Inside the welcome centre I noticed notice boards for the following authors : Marilyn Campbell, Tracey Livesay, Nara Malone, Shannon Emmel, Leah St. James, Shara Lanel, Sofie Couch, Alexa Day, Siobhan Muir, Elvie Howard, Tina Glasneck, Kelly Jamieson, Denise Golonowski and Brandi Evans.

There are a number of buildings around and again I’ll use the notecard to describe some of the buildings there.

Writer’s Resource Center: The big brick building is the writer’s resource area. There is a classrooom for workshops, a self-guided tutorial area, and a library. I’m adding content as fast as I can. On the right, as soon as you walk through the main door, you will find information on all the authors currently a part of this grand experiment. There a few freebie objects in the library you might find useful.

Internet Cafe: Directly across the street from the landing area is the Dungeon Gourmet’s Internet Cafe. There are laptops there with internet access. Drop in and work on your novel, the page is set to yarn.me, a cloud wordprocessor that works here inworld. It will also allow you to save work to your computer. Try your hand at Yatze. Have a nice couple chat by the fire.

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February 22, 2014

Ebbe Linden Needs To ….

One of the things about being a blogger is finding something to write. A lot of the time a blogger finds the material to base their post on elsewhere, … actually this happens a lot. This post will unashamedly use material from someone else. The reasons for this are because the material is cutting, funny and relevant. I’m heading off to Twitter for this.

There’s a lot of advice going around on what Ebbe Linden needs to do to make Second Life awesome. Both SLUniverse and the official Second Life forums have threads full of advice. However one brave soul has been collecting this advice from Twitter users, adding their own, putting their tongue firmly in their cheek and creating a Twitter account of @EbbeNeedsTo.

Now some of these are funny, some of them may not tickle your fancy, you may found the whole thing a bit silly. The first thing to say is that you should ensure that you have your sense of humour turned on if you read that Twitter feed because some of the posts may be about one of your important issues or pet favourites.

For example:

Bring back Versu! Because… um… okay, you got me on this one. (What the hell is Versu, anyway?)

— Ebbe Linden Needs To (@EbbeNeedsTo) February 21, 2014

I mean come on, Versu is a brilliant project … that Linden Lab decided to ditch because they don’t think it’s so brilliant and they have a lot more information about it than me! Pah, but hey I can take it, healthy disagreement is good. I mean it could be worse, the account could be poking fun at SLUniverse, which is a site I think has a lot of good information on … oh wait …

Join SL Universe! Because nothing works better than following the advice of hundreds of jaded ex-customers who will never come back!

— Ebbe Linden Needs To (@EbbeNeedsTo) February 21, 2014

Noooooo! However this poking fun at suggestions and ideas is actually quite brilliant in so much as it brings issues to light and also brings to light the fact that we don’t all agree. Healthy disagreement is good. There are many more issues raised, far too many for me to post about here, but I will cover some more.

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