Cloud Party – Page 2 – Ciaran Laval

December 6, 2013

Come On, Come On, Hurry Up Array, Come On!

We’re going down the pub! Warning, this post may containt geekiness and nuts.

One of the things that has always puzzled me in Second Life has been the lack of arrays in LSL. I mean arrays, they are sexy, they are useful, they store data, they beat lists, strided lists and any other sort of list by a country mile. Basically arrays are too sexy to be bodged as lists.

I didn’t do much scripting in Second Life because scripting consumes much time in my day job, so I felt it would be like a busman’s holiday, but arrays, how can you not have arrays? That was one of my first questions to myself back in 2007 when I joined Second Life and it remains a questions that puzzles me as we come close to 2014.

I was so scarred by Second Life not having arrays that when I took a look at Cloud Party and saw that they supported arrays, I cheered!

The power of arrays should not be underestimated, indexof, finding matches of, adding, removing, substrings, two dimnensional! Arrays are bloody sexy and more importantly, they are bloody useful.

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December 5, 2013December 5, 2013

Second Life – It’s Not In The Game

Over at New World Notes Hamlet Au recently published a post about declining tier income for Linden Lab. In the post Hamlet argues that cutting tier prices is not the way forward, attracting new users is. I agree with him on the tier angle for now, cutting tier would drastically cut Linden Lab’s income. However I’ve long argued that Linden Lab need more income streams, Second Life is too reliant on tier. Hamlet argues that Second Life needs more users, but more users are not the answer to the tier conundrum on their own. They need to be incentivised to part with their money and tier is a barrier not an attraction.

Hamlet also makes the following comment:

“So no, the future for Second Life isn’t private land — it’s new users, and new platforms, and radical experiments in how Second Life is used and designed. For instance, some Lindens have been trying to add game mechanics to Second Life for several years, but have been stymied by bureaucracy and fear of protests by a minority of hardcore “Second Life is not a game!” users. But as we keep seeing, something dramatic has to change, or the hemorrhaging will continue, until it no longer can.”

The problem here is that game mechanics are not going to deal with the income issue, Linden Lab need new income streams which may in turn lead them to be in a position to reduce tier costs. The other issue is that game mechanics will put some people off because Second Life is indeed, not a game, although there are games within Second Life. A Second Life wide gamification system would be controversial. An optional gamification system that people could tie into their own game development would be potentially wonderful. For example a Linden Lab hosted achievement system that you could tailor to the needs of your roleplaying sim or even your store would have potential.

One way of attracting new users to Second Life is to have more games inworld. Linden Lab could develop pathfinding further and introduce skeletons that can be animated and used as NPC’s. That way more exciting experiences could be created, which in turn may attract new users.

However then we’re back to the tier is too damn high because there are not enough people who can afford to throw away USD$295.00 (plus VAT for some) to create the kind of experience that may attract new users. The fact that tier will be due whilst people are planning, developing and testing these experiences undermines the concept even more. Vicious circle indeed.

However there are games in Second Life. Estelle Pienaar’s SL Play Instinct is largely dedicated to highlighting games within Second Life. The destination guide also has a games category with pages of games. Some of the games are made to be played on parcels or breedable games. Breedable games are good for Second Life as they require those involved to have land. Other games are sim wide experiences, the latter are much harder to maintain.

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December 3, 2013December 3, 2013

Cloud Party’s Standard Definiton / High Definition Approach To Avatar Costumes

Although I’ve had a Cloud Party account for a while, I haven’t spent much time there. I have been there a little bit over the last few days playing with the inworld building blocks tools and they are a lot of fun, although my unpublished land currently looks like a rubbish tip.

However what caught my eye this evening was the avatar development kit version 1.0. This is intended for Cloud Party content creators who want to create clothing or animations for avatars in Cloud Party. Now clothing and animations are not my fields but I found this quote from the wiki interesting:

“One problem virtual worlds struggle with is letting users fully express themselves in their avatars while not causing performance problems for other users with slower computers who are nearby. We’ve come up with a way to address that problem: Standard and High Definition modes for avatar costumes.

Each costume part will have at most one mesh/material combination that can be marked as ‘Standard Definition’ (SD). This must be under a certain triangle limit (the limits are defined per slot further down in this document). The other mesh/material combinations will automatically be marked as ‘High Definition’ (HD). HD meshes have no triangle limit.

SD mesh/material combinations will always be drawn, but HD mesh/material combinations will drop out at a distance. The distance it drops out at will vary from user to user. Some users with low-end computers or mobile devices might never see the HD version of the costume.

It’s best practice to make most, if not all, of your costume piece fit within the SD triangle limits. If you don’t, that costume piece will disappear or maybe even never be drawn on certain lower-end machines, even if it’s a shirt or pants. We’ll be providing tools on the marketplace for users to easily see what they look like in SD vs HD. Also, certain costume slots REQUIRE a SD mesh.

An example of a good use of the SD/HD system is a coat with brass buttons. The coat itself should fit within the SD triangle limits and use just one material. The coat can have a separate material with shiny, reflective brass buttons and buckles that will not be drawn in SD.”

Now the first thing I’m thinking here is that surely it’s dangerous, to say the least, to allow people to create a mesh with no triangle limit, however on closer inspection it looks as if those around you won’t suffer if you do go buck mad in the triangle department.

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November 19, 2013

Why Don’t Amazon, Paypal or Linden Lab offer Virtual Currency Exchanges To Other Business?

One of the issues regarding Cloud Party is the inability to cash out. This is understandable as content creators are more likely to be tempted to engage if they can find financial reward. Cloud Party do allow you to pay for services such as island rentals using Cloud Party coins, so there is a degree of economic movement but it stays firmly within Cloud Party.

Kitely on the other hand allow people to list items on their marketplace with the option of a Paypal payment as well as Kitely credits. There’s no cashing out from Kitely but paypal payments are a way of a merchant getting cold hard cash. Again, like Cloud Party, the inworld currency can be used to pay for services.

However what people would really like to be able to do is to sell Cloud Party coins or Kitely credits in the same manner as Linden Dollars can be bought and sold. The beauty of this solution is that it adds an added level of consumer confidence, because when they make a purchase, they are doing so with an inworld currency, they aren’t handing over details to a stranger in a virtual land. That’s the beauty of the virtual currency.

Recent legislation in the USA has given platform providers the heebie jeebies about users selling virtual currencies, hence why they aren’t that widely available. However you would think that someone would seize the opportunity to tap into this market, be that Paypal, Amazon or even Linden Lab.

Now I’m sure plenty of companies would like the idea of selling virtual currencies to consumers, the part they aren’t so keen on is allowing users to sell that virtual currency. Linden Lab of course do this with the Lindex, so why can’t they expand this to offering a service to other companies?

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System Failure