In this post I will review 2014 from a largely virtual world perspective for the months July to December. This is part 2 , part 1 is the post before this one. I’ll combine both posts into another post for easier future reference once they are both completed. These posts will miss lots of big and interesting stories because the nature of the beast demands some brevity. These post may well look longer than they actually are at first glance because of images and pictures. The aim of posts such as these are to give a brief overview of the year, rather than an in depth review. An in depth review is too long for a blog post, it may make for an interesting book.
July
New changes to Skill Gaming policies in Second Life were coming to the fore in July, the result would be a learning curve for Linden Lab, creators and region owners. This was not a smooth process. KR Engineering, creator of the very popular Greedy Greedy announced they would be releasing a free to play only version of the game to ensure they did not have to deal with the Skill Gaming Policy.
Experience keys were the flavour of the month as Linden Lab invited us to the Cornfield to experience the new experiences!
Linden Lab updated section 2.3 of their terms of service. The update wasn’t really convincing and remains problematic. CG Textures, who now forbid use of their textures in Linden Lab products remained unconvinced that any of their concerns had been addressed at all and told Jo Yardley :
I’m afraid this does not change the situation for us.
I’m not sure why it’s so difficult for Linden Lab to address this issue.
Linden Lab announced upcoming improvements to Second Life, including experience keys beta, improving group chat, implementing the chrome embedded framework and more improvements for Mesh and texture loading.
I covered the University Of The West Of England teaching an MA in Virtual Worlds within Second Life. This course was aimed at those who want to teach in virtual worlds but some of those taking the course were actually just interested in the subject matter.
Despite the slow down in the loss of private regions in Second Life, the overall amount was still dropping. Tyche Shepherd informed us that the number of private regions had slipped below 19,000 for the first time since 15th June 2008.
The new Skill Gaming policy in Second Life, which had initially been pencilled in to be enforced from August 1st had its deadline pushed back to September 1st.
August
Tax and Account confusion continued in Second Life, with Psyke Phaeton open sourcing his HS security Orb after being informed by Linden Lab that his account would be terminated at the end of August if he didn’t fill in the paperwork. Psyke’s website is no longer available so I don’t know if he changed his mind, I do know people over at SLUniverse tried to persuade him that some of his fears were unfounded.
Karyne Levy over at Business Insider rubbed Second Life users up the wrong way with an article entitled : Second Life Has Devolved Into A Post-Apocalyptic Virtual World, And The Weirdest Thing Is How Many People Still Use It. This didn’t really end well.
Anshe Chung’s land empire expanded to the Lord British game Shroud Of The Avatar.
High Fidelity were making a lot of noise during August and were exemplifying their early work on pupeteering an avatar via facial movements. The result was Emily Donald singing beautiful.
The discussion about the controversial Linden Lab TOS continued, even the SL bar Association were confused and critical about the TOS.
Improvements to SL GO were being announced, these included implementing SL Share functionality. Onlive also offered paid work to viewer developers to help improve the experience.
High Fidelity were very much making a noise in August, interviewing intern Paloma Palmer who had been using Javascript for her project and measuring the speed of sound in another post :
We are obsessed with reducing latency, because we have observed aspects of 1:1 interaction which are broken by too much latency.
In even more High Fidelity news, Tony Parisi of VRML and Vivaty fame joined the team as an advisor. In other High Fidelity news Ryan Karpf took us behind the scenes to discuss how they had created a video of frogs who are not frogs, sitting on lilypads. A lot of peripherals and software were required but that’s the nature of a developing platform at a time when the industry is moving fast.
Meanwhile in Second Life, the latter part of August saw approved Skill Gaming Ventures appearing on the wiki. This meant that my prediction that the deadline would have to be pushed back again was completely wrong!
September
The Skill Gaming Policy for Second Life kicked in on September 1st but it came with a late twist that payment info on file was required for participants. This was a sensible late twist.
The Fort Worth Weekly covered singer/songwriter Matthew Broils and his performances in Second Life :
Broyles and the virtual concertgoers are part of an elaborate computer game. In Second Life, their avatars are human-looking, and they interact across detailed replicas of real-world places like New York City and Chicago. Unlike most computer games, which emphasize fantasy universes and defeating opponents, Second Life is for folks seeking to re-create everyday experiences via virtual reality, including music concerts.
On this day, Broyles is sharing the stage with violinist Beth Odets-Brown, a frequent collaborator who improvises over Broyles’ songs, performing from her home in Dallas.
Discover, a Science publication published an article about skin colour in video games. The article was based on research by Jong-Eun Roselyn Lee at Ohio State University and had a Second Life slant as that was the platform used for the research :
She found that black participants reported less willingness in the low-diversity scenario, and that they also created whiter avatars, as judged by objective raters. By comparison, white study participants were largely unaffected by either the high-diversity or low-diversity scenarios.
The research was far from perfect but made for an interesting read. Another issue it raised was Linden Lab’s improved Flickr pool for journalists, which helps to represent Second Life better in the media, as exemplified by the picture that was used for that article.
Nara Malone talked to me about Opensim, Exhibitions, NPC’s and the Open Simulator conference scheduled for November at which she would be taking part :
Nara is a storyteller and of course her stories must be told. However she’s not alone and the exhibit she’s giving me a sneak preview of is part of her group’s work for the OpenSimulator Conference in November. Whereas the big names are keynote speakers such as High Fidelity’s Philip Rosedale and Oculus Rift’s Steve LaValle, many from the general OpenSim community will be there too and exhibiting their wares.
Nara explains to me that her group will have a total of eight examples of their work running at the conference. Whereas there’s a lot of storytelling, there’s also a lot of scripting involved and Nara tells me that scripting guru Fred Beckhusen is on their team.
Sad news reached us that former Linden Lab executive Joe Miller had passed away.
Over at High Fidelity, Dan Hope was taking a look at the work of some Alpha Testers.
Blizzard were gearing up for World Of Warcraft’s 10th birthday with more discussion about their expansion, Warlords Of Draenor, birthday events and slapping their UK based customers in the face by yet again putting up the price for those using pound sterling. There were ways to avoid the rise for those who stayed subscribed. I decided to unsubscribe and therefore save even more money.
Blizzard then announced they were cancelling their next gen MMO Titan. Things just had not worked out for the title. I suggested there were lessons to be learned here for next gen titles ….
Linden Lab announced some updates and performance improvements to Second Life, proving that they weren’t abandoning Second Life for their next gen platform. The improvements included implementation of a content delivery network to try and increase performance for those further away from Linden Lab’s data centres :
Separately, each of these will improve texture and mesh loading performance, but put together, you should really see some exciting improvements in how long it takes to load new areas and objects – making touring the many fabulous places in Second Life you have not yet visited even better!
October
Facebook was in the news for upsetting Drag Queens due to their real names policy. Hamlet Au over at New World Notes wrote : Facebook Apologizes & Tweaks Real Name Policy to Better Support LGBT Community — But Avatar Community Should Stick With Fan Pages. The gist of the article was that Facebook were not likely to extend any changes their naming policy to Second Life avatars.
Meanwhle, in the Gamergate cack, Intel pulled their adverts from Gamasutra after an article by Leigh Alexander rubbed people up the wrong way. I despaired.
I discovered the Virtually Speaking Science podcast, which takes place in Second Life.
October brought no respite to the tax and account woes for Second Life residents. The latest issue was a delay in the length of time it took for the submissions to be processed. Gray of the Lab from San Francisco explained the reasons behind the problem :
Due to a significant volume of payout request in recent weeks, payout requests may take longer to process than expected. We apologize for the delay, and we are working hard on clearing the backlog and process requests as quickly as possible. In the meantime, we advise residents to please address any specific questions through their Support cases. We appreciate the cooperation and patience from all residents, and hope to have payout request processing times back to normal soon.
Designing Worlds 250th edition was held at the spectacular Matanzas sim, owned these days by Skate Foss. The sim had featured in episode 3 of the show so had some historical significance, the show also featured an interview with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg in which Ebbe talked about Second Life and plans for the future.
Linden Lab announced that Patterns, another product that appeared under previous CEO Rod Humble, had reached its conclusion. Patterns users weren’t happy. However Linden Lab did hold out an olive branch :
Patterns had early promise, and while Linden Lab focuses our efforts on our other offerings, we are still evaluating the future of the Patterns technology. Interested parties are welcome to contact us with proposals.
I don’t know if anyone took them up on the offer to contact them.
Tom Simonite of MIT Technology Review visited High Fidelity and liked what he saw :
Some of what his company is creating is much the same as Second Life. You download some software and then enter a virtual space where you can steer your avatar around and build stuff. This time, though, building is much easier, the lag mostly eliminated, and the graphics more impressive.
I didn’t quite agree about the graphics being more impressive or the building easier, not at this stage anyway, however it’s still early days for High Fidelity.
Linden Lab blogged about yet more performance improvements for Second Life, this time speeding up the marketplace was added to faster texture loading, improving group chat, quicker communications and Linden Lab even invited feedback from users on these performance improvements, exemplifying how much better Linden Lab are these days when it comes to communicating with their community.
November
In the ongoing issue of getting approval for their skill gaming application for Second Life, SL Capital Exchange suspended activity until further notice. This was due to a deadline of November 1st for regions to comply with the policy, even if they still had a pending application.
November was a big month for conferences and events. The OpenSim community conference ran from November 8th – 9th and featured presentations from Philip Rosedale, Nara Malone, Steve LaValle of Oculus and Pathfinder amongst others.
Meanwhile Ebbe Altberg found himself at Engadget Expand in New York to talk about virtual reality from the view of a company who don’t make games.
Meanwhile, Philip Rosedale, fresh from the OpenSim Community Conference was making his way to Gigaom Roadmap where he was interviewed by Signe Brewster.
Back to Second Life and a new funky sim had appeared, Meauxle Bureaux, home of the Second Life moles who work for Linden Lab.
The Lindens invited people to visit and came out in force, Gray of The Lab From San Francisco even made an appearance.
Linden Lab announced that Desura had been sold to Bad Juju Games. Desura is a digital distribution platform that welcomes all sorts of game developers, the press release was complimentary :
Desura is a fantastic platform for game developers and players, and we look forward to seeing it continue to evolve and grow, now as part of Bad Juju Games.
Linden Lab blogged an update regarding the CDN project and acknowledged that some users had been experiencing difficulties :
However, we have also seen that some users have had the opposite experience, and have worked with a number of those users to collect detailed data on the nature of the problems and shared it with our CDN provider. We believe that the problems are the result of a combination of the considerable additional load we added to the CDN, and a coincidental additional large load on the CDN from another source. Exacerbating matters, flaws in both our viewer code and the CDN caused recovery from these load spikes to be much slower than it should have been. We are working with our CDN provider to increase capacity and to configure the CDN so that Second Life data availability will not be as affected by outside load. We are also making changes to our code and in the CDN to make recovery quicker and more robust.
Latif Khalifa, developer of the Radegast Metaverse client posted sad news that due to ill health he would no longer be able to develop the viewer. Meanwhile in gaming news, the latest expansion to World Of Warcraft, Warlords of Draenor hit the streets and was accompanied by the usual impressive promo video from Blizzard.
What a shame that Blizzard Europe seem to have adopted such a bad attitude to their UK customers. Linden Lab had engaged in a week of maintenance on Second Life. Many users were confused as to exactly why this had happened, Linden Lab updated them via their blog :
The region restarts that some of you have experienced this week were an unfortunate side-effect of this critical maintenance work. We have done our best to keep these restarts to a minimum as we understand just how disruptive a region restart can be. The affected machines have been repaired, and returned to service and we are confident that no more failures of this type will occur in the future. Thank you all for your patience and understanding as we have proceeded through the extended maintenance window this week.
Draxtor Despres took his radio hour to Linden Lab HQ, where he talked about the new virtual world venture, although it’s so top secret even the name of it couldn’t be revealed. He also talked to Lindens on various subjects and found Linden Lab swag, including cups with FIC on them.
DX Exchange, who had until this point been largely known for running a virtual currency exchange, entered the virtual Marketplace market.
December
Err not a lot happened in December! I mean there was the whole Christmas thing of course, but in terms of news, there wasn’t a lot!
Target Australia engaged in what looks more like a PR stunt than a stance when they removed Grand Theft Auto 5 from their shelves but kept lots of other R18 products on them.
Linden Lab announced a new way for people to share their ideas and feedback regarding Second Life :
What’s the one thing Linden Lab could do that would have the biggest impact on further improving your Second Life experience? Many Second Life users have thoughts on this – from different approaches for the way things are done today, to brand new features that could dramatically improve their experiences, to seemingly small things that could have a big impact. Today, we’re launching an easier way to share your ideas with us, a new “Feedback & Suggestions” page on SecondLife.com. You can also find this page by going to Help and finding New Feature Suggestions in the drop down.
SL GO from Onlive was back in the news because they now offered the option to use the Firestorm client, which was a very sensible move. The Firestorm team were certainly excited about it :
We are very excited to announce that OnLive has just released Firestorm in their SL Go app, allowing you to run it on your PCs, Mac computers and soon on mobile devices! What’s most exciting about this is how it enables residents on older computers and less capable laptops to experience Second Life and Opensim on ultra graphics without spending hundreds or thousands to upgrade their systems. It’s an affordable way for everyone to experience the full potential and beauty of SL with high framerates and great performance!
A Change.Org petition appeared calling for Second Life avatars to be allowed to have a Facebook Page. They meant a full Facebook account in their Second Life avatar name.
Linden Lab ended the year by announcing a snapshot contest for Second Life residents and offering residents a gift.
There ends the year. Linden Lab’s communications have improved greatly, although some issues still remained when it came to tax and account and skill gaming policies. The Second Life TOS remains problematic but overall, this wasn’t a bad year for virtual worlds at all. Whereas Cloud Party closed, High Fidelity certainly arrived and with a next gen virtual world from Linden Lab in the progress, the future looks bright.
Associated Links
damn it I am still sitting on 23 minutes of edited interview with Bagman Linden on the new world thingie…oh my if you guys only knew WHERE THEY ARE HEADED….O M gggGGgggGGGGggg
I doubt if where they are headed will be very profitable for them in the years to come. HTML5 is great technology yes, it has never been more easy for people to render 3D content. The technology did evolve from the need of very expensive simulators and servers to being able to host a virtual world on simple webpages for almost nothing in cost.
The internet is flooded with webmasters and coders knowing java and having the capicity to come up with all kinds of tools, frameworks and infrastructure needed for cheap.
I have my doubts what market segment Linden Lab will be able to take.
yes OMG OMG but Linden is not behind that this time. I suspect Linden is coding on top of the available libraries which are open source, just like Blue Mars did code on top of the Crytek engine and like High Fidelity is doing now using webGL.
Linden is keeping their lips sealed hoping people will buy into it.
Mr Doob is the one making the OMG this time.
A lot of the jobs LL are advertising are looking for people with C or C++ skills. I’m sure at one time they were looking for people with Unity skills but I may be mistaken there.
WebGL and HTML 5 are indeed impressive technology.
I’m not sure what market segment Linden Lab are going to take with them either because it’s not just about technology, it’s also about community and that’s a far more difficult trick to pull off than producing a decent product.
Time to OMG http://helloracer.com/webgl/
Ciaran time to wake up they are writing even in German already after seeing what I did post.
http://echtvirtuell.blogspot.de/2014/12/webgl-demos-von-helloenjoy.html
Nothing to wake up here. After more than 2000 postings about the unmatched Second Life, I sometimes enjoy it to write about such small platforms.
Another good example of WebGL development ist Blend4Web. Try these demos:
https://www.blend4web.com/en/demo/
In my my personal opinion, Linden Lab will not go the way of WebGL for their next generation platform. This would be a step back compared to what they have today. 🙂
High Fidelity are more likely to embrace WebGL as Tony Parisi has been advising them.