March 2014 – Page 7 – Ciaran Laval

March 8, 2014

Linden Lab Say No To Sale Of IP And Codebase For Versu

Inara Pey has reported that Lab says “no” to an independent future for Versu. Inara’s blog post links to a blog post from Emily Short, who had been trying to negotiate a deal to buy the IP and codebase for Versu after Linden Lab announced they would no longer be supporting the project :

After careful consideration, Linden Lab has decided to cease development and support for dio, Versu, and Creatorverse. We’re grateful for those who took the time to experiment with these products in their early days, but ultimately we have determined that due to a number of factors, we and our customers will be best served by focusing our efforts on continuing to provide exceptional service and compelling new experiences for the users of our other products.

So Linden Lab don’t see a future for the project, but like the boy with the ball, they’ve decided to take their ball home instead of letting someone else play with it. Emily had previously tried to convince Linden Lab to Open Source the project, which Linden Lab refused to do.

Then Emily tried to negotiate a deal to buy the IP and codebase, which as Emily announced on her blog, ended up with a no :

So for those who were curious, Linden has now given me a definite no about selling me the codebase and IP.

However there is another pain point in all of this for Emily. Blood and Laurels, which had just been completed has obviously now been shelved, but as Emily explains in the comments, Linden Lab own the text :

Blood and Laurels can’t meaningfully be rewritten — they own all the text and images as well as the engine it runs on. I was working on that story concept, on and off, for nearly 15 years, so having finally finished it and been really excited about it, only to have it vanish into ether, makes me sad. Still, on a total scale of possible bad things to have happen to one, it’s not very far along the bad thing spectrum. So we go on to the next.

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March 8, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 9 – SL Go

Not surprisingly, the latest edition of The Drax Files Radio Hour is mostly about OnLive SL Go. The show opens with Draxtor trying to order coffee…. it’s $2.50 and then Drax orders breakfast, after getting Marissa in the cafe or coffee shop to introduce the show. Marissa has never heard of Second Life but she does know about virtual worlds.

Now you may be feeling jaded by all the SL Go talk but I highly recommend you listen to this because Draxtor interviews Nate Barsetti. Now I hadn’t been paying attention to whom Nate was and listening to him I thought “This guy has done his homework, he knows what he’s talking about regarding Second Life“. Then I was made aware of the fact that Nate was once also known as Scout Linden.

Actually I need to pause here because the problem of a podcast is that people pronounce words funny. For example route should sound like root, it shouldn’t sound like rout! Then there’s beta, which should sound like beeta, rather than bayta! Fortunately nobody mentioned anything about a buoy, which should sound like boy. Ok where was I? Oh yes, Nate! The Nate interview is really interesting, he talks from, as I said, a viewpoint of someone who knows Second Life.

The thing is that because Nate knows Second Life, he knows about latency, he therefore knows that the way SL Go works will get away with a little bit of latency. The feedback on latency for SL Go has been good, people have reported scenes rez faster than they do on their own machine, it did for me. So you know, in this sense, the product is on to something.

Nate is also a Second Life resident and involved in some sort of roleplaying according to the interview, the bottom line is he knows his onions. I really enjoyed this part of show.

Drax follows this with an interview with Dennis Harper, a senior product manager at Onlive. Dennis has a long history of the gaming industry and has previously worked at companies such as Turbine, however he explains that he wasn’t familiar with Second Life when the project landed. However Dennis read a book, the title of which I can’t quite catch in the podcast. Dennis explored Second Life, as a beautiful female avatar … and found that people would give him free stuff!

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March 7, 2014

Kitely Market Hypergrid Delivery Enters Closed Beta

News reaches me that Kitely and their Kitely Market are moving closer to being able to deliver goods to other grids. This move will mean that merchants who list their items on the Kitely Market will be able to make their merchandise available to other Hypergrid enabled grids.

However, the system is currently in closed beta and this means that things may change before the system is officially unleashed.

Therefore if you are a hypergrid user this feature may be coming to a grid near you soon but please bear in mind if you see any discussion regarding this that this is an early beta system. Features you may hear about now, may not be in the final product, indeed much of what is in early beta could change.

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March 7, 2014

Relay For Life In Second Life Kicks Off This Weekend

The 10th Relay For Life fundraising effort in Second Life kicks off this weekend, even though it’s sort of the 11th, there was a fundraising effort in 2004 but it wasn’t an official Relay For Life event, that started in 2005.

The opening ceremony takes place tomorrow on Saturday 8th March but events start today. There’s a list of events here: http://relayforlifeofsecondlife.org/events-list/ That page gets updated regularly.

For those who don’t know, Relay For Life is a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society and has a long history of being involved in Second Life. There are many events and associated events throughout the year, some you may attend without even realising it’s a relay for life event. For example Fantasy Faire is part of the fundraising.

However this weekend sees the start of the main organisation and overall body for those fundraising efforts. Second Life users have over the years very generously donated Linden dollars which are then converted into real dollars for this cause.

The fundraising started in 2004, when a total of US$2,000 was raised since then a lot more money has been raised:

2005 – US$5,000
2006 – US$41,000
2007 – US$118,500
2008 – US$215,000
2009 – US$274,000
2010 – US$222,804
2011 – US$375,000
2012 – US$375,385
2013 – US$393,000

According to my calculator that’s a total of US$2,021,689 raised by Second Life users.

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March 7, 2014

New Jira Launches With A 12 Fingered Feature Request

Linden Lab yesterday announced that the new Jira, not quite as good as the old old Jira but far better than the previous Jira, was now live. One point that they have highlighted is that the visibility of bug reports made during the dark ages of the Jira will not be reversed, those reports will still only be available to the reporter, Lindens and The Chosen Few, not to be confused with Chosen Few the avatar.

Linden Lab explained their reasons for the decision in the blog post :

One of the questions we’ve seen in the past week is how previously submitted issues would be treated – namely, will those also be viewable by everyone and open for comment prior to being triaged?

While we want to make issues visible for the reasons described in our last post, we’re not going to extend this to old issues, because at the time they were created, users knew that those reports would have limited visibility and they may have included sensitive and/or private information. We don’t want to take information that someone thought would be private and suddenly make that visible to everyone, so the new visibility settings will apply only to new issues.

I can recall arguments like this being made about the availability of old forum content. The old forums required you to be logged in to view them but the archives these days don’t. I know some people weren’t happy about that, for the reasons stated above actually. I’m not 100% convinced by this argument because even with limited visibility people should have been careful with their information, but there’s definitely a case for keeping those issues largely hidden out of respect and it’s really not worth getting in a pickle about this in the grand scheme of things.

One feature of the Jira is the return of the new feature request and as Fenix over at SLUniverse reports, an early feature request in the new form had a rather bizarre suggestion:

Six fingers per hand

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