Good grief what in the name of all things holy is going on, the official blog is allowing comments, this won’t end well! Such has been the sorry state of affairs with the official blog that I’d largely stopped looking there for information and it’s still not a good place for information, however they have unveiled a some interesting concepts, blog posts about resident blogs, such as this post about Honour McMillan’s post about Raven’s Mist, then there are posts about places, such as this one about The Crossword Gallery and they have also been running these flickr pic of the day posts, it would be better if they tagged them all but still, there’s life being breathed into the blog.
However when it comes to information and news, that’s still thin on the ground, Hamlet Au to the rescue then with a couple of interesting posts, one about content speciality roles and one about the product team. There are some potentially exciting developments here, but there’s also going to be an issue of communication and it’s not really clear what channels are going to be open here.
My main interest here is roleplaying, so when I hear talk of scripted NPC’s I start to take note because it’s something I’ve wanted to see for a while. However there are a whole load of roleplaying issues I’d like to talk about, one being linking achievements to someone’s profile feed, as happens with World Of Warcraft. This if course wouldn’t appeal to a lot of people, but I think there’s potential there for those who want to participate, indeed an achievement system we could tie into has potential for lots of uses as long as we can tweak it to our own brands. I’m not a fan of the concept of an overall achievement system for the whole of Second Life where everyone participates whether they want to or not, it should be down to users to decide if they want to participate.
An achievement system could allow sim owners to link up and allow quests or activities to go to a group of sims but really there should be encouragement to discuss different aspects of roleplay with a Linden leading the discussion, this is where I feel this could fall short because if Esbee is getting lots of emails, im’s, posts on her feed, then it becomes messy to collate that information.
Roleplaying isn’t the only speciality area, Art, Gaming & Breedables, Adult, Education, Music and Fashion are also speciality areas and I’m sure that some have been missed off the list. I feel there’s potential for education to take a bigger interest in Second Life again with the development of Mesh because now students can create Mesh items for a “Game” type environment, note I’m not saying Second Life is a game, but there are games within it and having a 3D model come to life in a virtual world gives it more oomph than a colour printout stuck to a wall, if they ever get back to the concept of C# that would be another area of potential for education.
There are a lot of people who would like to discuss these issues, this isn’t easy to organise a structured conversation around, but what is important is that Linden Lab don’t lose impetus here, because this sounds like it’s heading in the right direction, so it’s important to keep the momentum going and answer my emails!
There’s also news that the product team are working on making the basic and advanced viewers part of one viewer, which is overdue because it’s annoying having to close down SL and open it up again because you want to change modes and I’d like to see more modularity there, I liked some of the features of basic mode but without inventory it was severely nerfed.
I would like to see some of this news being posted on the official blog, that’s the place Linden Lab should start discussion, whether or not they want comments there is their choice, it may be better for the conversations to go to the forums, third party sites and blogs at times, but Linden Lab should be telling us more about what is going on, maybe they are all busy working on their product areas and don’t have time but I like to see news from the horse’s mouth at times.