Just another unauthorised virtual world fansite
I was never a child who wanted a pony, I wanted to play for The Villa, be a superhero, fight crime, but a pony wasn’t on my list. So quite a few days I received an inventory offer from Rodvik, I opened it up and found:
This was most surprising! For a start it wasn’t a bear, as is traditional, secondly, it’s not claret and blue, however it is rather cool, so I left it in my workshop.
If you don’t know what parametric deformation is, you’re not alone. However to put it bluntly, it’s a way of making Mesh clothing more viable, the technical details can be found on Jira SH-2734 and I still don’t know what this Shining business is all about, complete with “Here’s Johnny” type icon.
There was a bit of a hoo-ha when Linden Lab downgraded this Jira to someday/maybe. However someday/maybe doesn’t mean what some people think it means, as Charlar explains on that Jira:
“The fact that the backlog is called “someday/maybe” means that it’s something we want to do, but can’t commit to a timeframe yet. ”
We’ll come back to Charlar later, however matters have taken a different turn on this issue, one that involves private funding, an ex Linden and development of the snowstorm viewer, as reported by Prim Perfect.
Continue reading “Parametric Deformation Project Goes The Private Funding Route”
Rodvik has blogged with too much bold and spelling realise with a Z. This from a man who likes curries and football is not good, he needs a visit home! The blog post is a chirpy upbeat post reporting the best number of new signups for four years in August and that Linden homes are now at record levels too.
Other news includes trying to improve service response times with expanded staffing, which is good news and viewer changes to merge advanaced and basic modes, which is a hmmm we’ll wait and see. The biggest positive about this post is that it didn’t include and price rises or majorly bad news, although traditionally they come at the end of October, full sim price rises were announced near the end of October 2006 and The Openspace fiassco kicked off near the end of October 2008, not until we’re well into November will we be able to breathe a sight of relief!
The big news for me though was the talk of artificial life and NPC’s, although testing won’t start until December on this, it’s something I’m keen to see.
Controversy continues to surround Stroker Serpentine’s full perm release of his Sexgen V5. There are certainly grey areas when it comes to intellecutal property rights, with three other creators involved, Corsi Mousehold, Briggi Bard and Craig Altman.
Craig Altman has commented over at SLUniverse that he has not granted permission for his animations to be released full perms:
“The animations in this item of mine are being used against license, I have no agreement with Stroker for them to be given out in copy and transfer perms.”
Corsi Mousehold talked to The Alphaville Herald the other day and suggested his animations shouldn’t be part of the package:
“I could DMCA but in SL things can spread like wildfire. I would have to DMCA every single person I find that is giving it away. That’s a nightmare.”
I like blogging on a Friday, not sure why, anyway one for the road here which isn’t really Second Life related but more online gaming related. However, having said at that, one area where Second Life has been ahead of the bell curve is in offering a free to play option, I don’t want to get into an “It’s not a game” argument here, the free to play option has been available in Second Life for a number of years now.
During this time I’ve watch Lord Of The Rings Online go free to play, Champions Online go free to play, Star Trek Online is rumoured to be heading free to play. The Daddy of them all, World of Warcraft, isn’t going free to play anytime soon, nor should it. However, if I could pay a reasonable amount a month to play Lord Of The Rings Online, Champions Online and Star Trek Online, I would do so, give me a channel I can subscribe to and a choice of games and I’ll pay.