July 2015 – Page 2 – Ciaran Laval

July 25, 2015

SOS! Kinderdorf Greece – SL Planetarium Event In Second Life

Unfortunately I don’t speak German, so details here are going to be a tad sketchy. However, the SL Planetarium are holding an event, you can read more about it here : http://buktomblog.blogspot.de/2015/07/sos-kinderdorf-griechenland-das-event.html.

The above link goes to a German site, you can try and use Google translate as I did, but that didn’t help me that much.

The event is described on The Destination Guide as :

Experience live music and contribute to a good cause in this multi-day German language charity event, held through Aug. 3. Unter diesem Motto veranstaltet das SL – Planetarium und die Freie Bibliothek PEGASUS ein Benefiz – Event. buktomblog.blogspot.de/2015/07/sos-kinderdorf-griechenland-das-event.html

So what we can work out is that there’s an event in Second Life that is raising money for a good cause. The event is being held on a German speaking region, hence why the information is in German. Second Life is a global virtual world, so it’s fair enough that there are regions who speak in languages other than English.

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July 25, 2015

Le Quartier Francais – A Very Photogenic Shopping Region

There are plenty of shopping locations in Second Life. Some of them are very well presented and Le Quartier Francais definitely falls into that category. The region is the home of the MoDANNA mainstore, which sells apparel for males and females.

There are also other stores with a presence here, including Ariksea, Serenity Style, Glamrus and Wolf Fram.

The region is very picturesque and is described on The Destination Guide as :

This beautiful French-inspired sim is decorated with taste and harmony for all the photography lovers, shoppers and fashionistas. Explore beyond all the little details and discover the hidden details in this magnificent shopping environment.

The region certainly has a European feel to it, I wanted to sit down outside a cafe and eat a baguette.

The owner of MoDANNA is Lisanna Lauria and she has done some fine work in creating a fun and interesting environment. I’m not sure exactly what the story of the creation of the region is but the theme is very well done. The streets are spacious and you can roam around without feeling like you’re treading in treacle.

I stopped outside Wolf Fram and considered getting a haircut and a beard trim, but time was against me.

However it seems that visitors in this region come in a variety of modes of transport. These Police Boxes turn up in a lot of regions in Second Life, maybe I should invest in one and see if that helps with my issues with not having enough time!

Le Quartier Francais is well worth a visit even if you’re not a fashionista or a shopaholic, it is a very photogenic and impressive region.

SLURL to Le Quartier Francais : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Le%20Quartier%20Francais/128/133/24/

July 24, 2015

Microsoft Tech Evangelist Deploys OpenSim To Microsoft Azure But Pricing Is Confusing

Over on Gamasutra there’s a sponsored blog post from Microsoft, the post is from Amanda Lange, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft : Sponsored: How to simulate a tiny universe in Azure.

Microsoft Azure is open to all kinds of open source code projects, so I thought it might be neat to try running my own OpenSim on an Azure server.

OpenSim is a bit like Second Life, but open source. Anyone can create their own shard worlds to manipulate however they wish. It allows for a very private virtual world for use in role play gaming, education, or just to build out your own environment however you like and play with some 3D construction tools.

This sounds interesting and the blog post gives very detailed instructions on how to deploy OpenSim to Microsoft Azure. I’m not going to detail the instructions here, if you’re interested read the linked post near the start of this post, but it’s not a plug and play process, you will need to use the likes of Visual Studio. However these days Visual Studio comes in decent form for free in many cases.

Now if you’re wondering what Microsoft Azure is, here’s some of the blurb :

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, a growing collection of integrated services – analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage and web – for moving faster, achieving more and saving money.

Now if you’re still unsure, you can read more here : http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/what-is-azure/

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July 23, 2015

Project Sansar To Offer Instancing And Perhaps A Different Approach To Branding Experiences

Scientists have announced that they have found “The closest twin to earth outside the solar system“. The name of the planet is Kepler 452b and it’s considered Earth’s older and bigger cousin. However that’s not really what this blog post is about. No, this blog post is about me finding “The closest article to the article I found yesterday about Project Sansar, outside this blog“.

I have discovered the article at none other than Variety. The article in question is Second Life Maker Linden Lab Wants to Build the WordPress of Virtual Reality by Janko Roettgers, Senior Silicon Valley Correspondent for Variety.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, yesterday I blogged Ebbe Altberg And Peter Gray Talk To MMORPG About The Future Of Online Experiences, which was based on an article on MMORPG by Neilie Johnson entitled “Linden Lab Looks to the Future of Online Experiences“.

The article in Variety covers a lot of the same ground but it also has some additional and rather interesting information, for example, when it comes to how many people may be able to visit a build in Project Sansar, the Variety article states :

Why spend a lot of money to build a presence in Second Life if it could only be visited by only 70 people at a time? Project Sansar wants to solve this issue by allowing for unlimited copies of an experience. In other words, instead of just opening one restaurant, McDonalds could open hundreds or even thousands of eateries in the new virtual world, and open and close them based on customer demand.

This does indeed mean instancing! Now if you’re not familiar with instancing, imagine a Second Life region that is full. Instancing would address this by creating pretty much a copy of that region on demand, to allow more people to enter the experience. The obvious issue there is that you may not be in the same instance of the region as your friends, but we can worry about things like that later because instancing is a bloody brilliant concept.

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July 22, 2015July 22, 2015

Ebbe Altberg And Peter Gray Talk To MMORPG About The Future Of Online Experiences

First things first, some readers may find the website of MMORPG a little garish, it’s a bright site and very busy. I mention this because this post is about an article by Neilie Johnson on MMORPG; Linden Lab Looks to the Future of Online Experiences. The article is based on an interview with Linden Lab’s CEO Ebbe Altberg and Linden Lab’s Senior Director of Global Communications, Gray Of The Lab From San Francisco (AKA Peter Gray).

Whereas there are no ground breaking secrets revealed in the interview, it is worth looking at some things again. Firstly the proposed land model for Project Sansar, or what is known about it so far. The article reiterates that the plan for Project Sansar is to have much lower land costs than the USD$295.00 a month region cost in Second Life, with sales tax on the increase compared to the 5% Marketplace commission. There are no figures provided but I think it’s fair to say that this has been mentioned enough times now for it to be a reality.

The article also touches upon the fact that Linden Lab have learnt a lot from Second Life. Although the minimum age requirement will be 13, Linden Lab feel that they will be able to segregate content so that minors aren’t running into unsuitable content.

One of the things I’ve seen said about Project Sansar when comparing it to Second Life is that the Project Sansar development team will look at the way some things are done in Second Life and decide they would not want to start from there to achieve that in Project Sansar. Content and land restrictions are areas where Project Sansar can take a new approach and one that could very well deal with some of the problems we’ve seen in Second Life. The experience of the issues that have been raised in Second Life are an advantage here.

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