June 2014 – Page 5 – Ciaran Laval

June 17, 2014

LL Take Their Eyes Off The Prize With Facebook Competition

Linden Lab have been doing a lot right lately in terms of community engagement and they deserve much credit for that. However it is inevitable that at some point they’re going to miss the mark at some point and so it turns out with Second Life’s 11th Birthday: Celebrating Your Second Life L$10,000 Contest.

A 10,000 Linden Dollar prize is not bad for a snapshot contest, but there’s a hitch and the hitch comes with the method of entry :

Participation is easy – submit your celebratory snapshots from inworld to the contest page on our Official Second Life Facebook Page. Click the contest tab, review the contest information and rules and start sharing. This year you will be able to submit up to one snapshot a day for the duration of the contest. Full rules, submission and voting dates, and details are all on the Facebook page.

Facebook, really? I’ve made no secret in the past that I’m not a big fan of Facebook. This is largely due to their absurd policies regarding pseudonyms and that really gets emphasised here because people who know others by their Second Life username may not know them by their real name, and why should they? They are different circles.

Facebook has a history of deleting accounts that use their Second Life user name, as Hamlet Au over at New World Notes reported back in May 2011. This is Facebook’s call as using your Second Life account name as a Facebook account (rather than Facebook page) is a breach of the Facebook TOS. No real argument from me about that, Facebook’s rules. Personally I think it’s a silly rule that dilutes social networking opportunities, but it’s Facebook’s call to do this.

Facebook can play a part in promoting a platform and I don’t blame Linden Lab for embracing Facebook, promoting Second Life on non Second Life properties is a very sensible idea but it’s really not the place to be running a community wide 11th birthday competition.

Linden Lab could allow entries on my Second Life or their Flickr page (you have to be signed in to Flickr to view that for some reason), or their own forums, Tumblr, Google + too. Hey they may even want to allow entries on Facebook, but it should not be the only place to enter the contest.

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June 17, 2014

Linden Lab Announce That Project Shining Is Complete

One of the best things to happen to Second Life since Ebbe Altberg became CEO is the return of the blog being used as a tool to impart useful information. Some of the information may not be everyone’s cup of tea but Linden Lab are now talking about their core product and it’s such a refreshing change from the sound of near silence that preceded this period.

A case in point is the announcement that Project Shining is now complete. Now Project Shining has been talked of before, so it’s not as if Linden Lab took a vow of complete silence, but these days Linden Lab are talking a lot more, which keeps these projects in the spotlight. Project Shining has been a deep project, and back in 2012 was explained as thus :

Somewhere below the regolith in the Linden Lab secret lunar base, some of the Lab’s top minds have been tackling performance issues in Second Life. The areas of focus range from infrastructure improvements to server-side texture compositing to object caching.

This year, Linden Lab is making the single largest capital investment in new server hardware upgrades in the history of the company. This new hardware will give residents better performance and more reliability. Additionally, we are converting from three co-locations to two co-locations. This will significantly reduce our inter-co-location latency and further enhance simulator performance.

The Shining project is the name given to a recent Lab effort to identify and measure delays and other problems with streaming avatars and objects and to propose and implement solutions. During the Shining project, several small improvements have been identified and deployed. The next small improvement from Shining to be deployed will be pre-rendering the starter Avatars to improve the new resident experience.

As a result of the Shining investigation, the project has been split into three larger performance projects: Project Sunshine, Object Caching, and HTTP Library.

All together, the hardware upgrades and the Shining projects should improve avatar and object streaming speeds significantly. Depending on your unique situation, your mileage will vary.

So investment in hardware, technology improvements, new rendering techniques and the implementation of AISV3, which is aimed at improving how back-end processing of inventory items works, are now all live.

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June 14, 2014

Kitely Replace Metered Worlds With Premium Worlds For Premium Members Only

Kitely recently announced that they will be removing metered worlds and introducing premium worlds. The change is explained in the blog post :

The change that we’re announcing today is that from now on only users with a Premium Account will be able to create Premium Worlds. That’s the reason that we renamed them (from “Metered Worlds”): to emphasize that having Premium Worlds is a benefit that is reserved for users with Premium Accounts.

Despite this change, there are still ways that users with a Regular Account can end up with a Premium World. E.g., if they created the world while they had a Premium Account, but later they downgraded to a Regular Account. In such cases we don’t delete the worlds: they remain in the users’ accounts. However, only users with a Premium Account will be able to visit them: Regular Account and Hypergrid users will be prevented from visiting a Premium World that belongs to a user with a Regular Account. Note that this includes the world manager herself.

However these Premium Worlds remain much the same as the old metered worlds in other regards, if non-premium or Hypergrid visitors choose to visit your Premium World, a 1KC (Kitely Credit) per minute fee is billed to the Premium World owner. However other Premium account holders can visit another Premium World without extra charges.

Visitor costs in Kitely have always been problematic when such charges do not exist in Second Life. Originally, visitors had to pay these fees, then Kitely switched it so that region owners paid the fees. The problem with the fees for region owners is of course that costs can be unpredictable, so I’m not sure how attractive an option Premium Worlds will actually be or how attractive they were. Now if you are only allowing Premium members to visit your Premium worlds then they remain a bloody good option. As part of your USD$19.95 you can create up to five of these Premium Worlds without incurring any costs.

So what of worlds who do want Hypergrid and regular account visitors? Well you’re probably better off opting for a fixed world option. A starter world costs USD$14.95 a month and supports 10 concurrent users with no charges for visitors. For USD$49.95 a month you can have 1 or 4 worlds that each support 40 concurrent visitors with no extra charges. An advanced worlds costs USD$99.95 a month and comes with choices of 1,4,9, or 16 regions. All of these options will not incur visitors charges. For full details read the services page on the Kitely website.

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June 13, 2014

Drax Files Episode 2 Wins New Media Festival Best Machinima Award

The Drax Files : World Makers Episode 2 – 1920’s Berlin has won an award for best machinima at the New Media Film Festival in Los Angeles. Unfortunately Draxtor Despres couldn’t be there in person to pick up his award, which is a shame because we have no pictures of him schmoozing with the stars. There’s also no footage of Draxtor doing a video thank you, but this is a very good award.

The blurb for the festival tell us :

An International Festival based in Los Angeles, the New Media Film Festival celebrates the ever-changing world of new media. Declared “worth the entry fee” by MovieMaker Magazine and hailed for making “the cutting edge accessible” by Huffington Post, New Media Film Festival accepts new media entries across a variety of categories.

The jury includes reps from Pixar, Fox and The Caucus, among others. A total of $45,000 USD in awards will be presented at the 5th Annual New Media Film Festival.

Quite impressive praise and jury. However what of the episode itself? I reviewed it back in March 2013 and rather spookily I said the following :

I’ve mentioned before how good a medium this is for promoting Second Life and how it would be good if Linden Lab got in on the act. I’ve also pointed out that there are issues such as editorial impartiality for Linden Lab that Draxtor and others don’t face, so it’s trickier for Linden Lab but I hope they are taking note of the positive nature of these videos. They are at least aiding the promotion by blogging about it.

As Linden Lab now sponsor the production, it seems they were paying attention. They have also promised editorial impartiality will continue, I should have charged a consultancy fee!

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June 12, 2014

Share Your Favourite Virtual Cities With The Guardian

The Guardian is so famous for it’s typos that it has a nickname of The Grauniad, so much so that http://www.grauniad.co.uk redirects to The Guardian website. However, despite their support for The Liberal Democrats it remains a decent newspaper, more so probably for the left leaning types, but it’s a decent newspaper.

They have also long had an interest in technology and that has included Second Life. Back in 2006 Suart Jefferies and Victor Keegan were talking about their Second Life experiences. Victor Keegan’s experience would later turn a little sour as he got involved in a trademark case regarding use of “SLART” over Second Life art galleries.

However The Guardian has boldly continued to cover all sorts of virtual world issues and has now issued the following call :

we want to hear your favourite virtual places – from a beautiful view in GTA to that 20-million-strong SimCity megalopolis you’ve been building (or possibly destroying). What are the best game cities to live in? The worst? Perhaps you’ve designed one you think would be better than your own city?

Second Life users were quickly on the case using Guardian witness, which revolves around user generated content. 1920’s Berlin, New Babbage and Philomenaville have all made an appearance as favourite virtual cities.

Linden Lab have been tipped off about this by 1920’s Berlin owner Jo Yardley. Linden Lab have blogged about The Guardian call and in doing so, exemplified a degree of spotting a good marketing opportunity when they see one :

This is a great chance to share some amazing Second Life locations with The Guardian’s readers. Whether it’s a place you created personally, discovered (maybe through the Destination Guide?) and love, or just a spot you always find yourself returning to, the Second Life locations that ‘wow’ you are great ones to share to help show off Second Life to the uninitiated.

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