Tag: Linden Lab

Posted on

How Will Second Life Fare In The Face Of The Rise Of The Sandbox MMO?

Second Life has in many ways been way ahead of the pack. Their free to play model was controversial when launched but has proven to be the right model and now many MMO’s follow this model. Second Life introduced user generated content to 3D worlds and whereas some of that content has definitely been controversial, Second Life trailblazed as a platform of creativity.

In terms of empowering content creators, Second Life has once again trailblazed, by allowing content creators a means to make real money from their creations, Second Life tapped into a massively underestimated market. Second Life has therefore been quite ground breaking in terms of bringing together these concepts, but now others are starting to take note, they are starting to see the potential and they are hoping to get their share of the pie. The people who make content creation tools are also seeing the massive opportunity that is knocking louder and louder, they are making their products more accessible by offering different payment options and making their tools free or cheaper.

The likes of EverQuest Next Landmark are already attracting attention and will allow content creators to build and have the opportunity to make real money from their creations. Others will be watching with interest to see how this pans out. There is without doubt fear about user generated content but the window of opportunity is wide open.

Then there are the tools, yesterday the Unreal Engine 4 was launched with a very affordable licensing model for pretty much anybody.  The full engine and source is $19.95 a month and then 5% of any game sales, in games sales and advertising. The previous Unreal Engine was not an option for indie developers, in an article on Gamautra they  quote Epic’s Tim Sweeney as saying:

it’s typically cost millions of dollars… negotiating has involved teams of lawyers, looking at the shape of the industry now we realize it’s an outdated model, looking at the possibilities for the engine, we started out from scratch. We came up with an entirely new business model for the Unreal Engine which we are announcing today.

Now, absolutely anybody can gain access to Unreal Engine 4 by subscribing to the engine for 19 dollars a month — and you get access to everything” .

Now it dangles there as an affordable option and it’s not just game developers being wooed, they are also chasing content creators:

To help you get started, we’re shipping lots of ready-made content, samples, and game templates.  You’ll find it in the Marketplace in the Unreal Editor. Right now, it simply hosts free stuff from Epic, but its resemblance to the App Store is no coincidence: It will grow into a complete ecosystem for sharing community-created content, paid and free, and open for everyone’s participation!

These platforms, games, development engines etc. are stepping on Second Life’s toes and more of them will be stepping on their toes, will Second Life prosper?

Continue reading “How Will Second Life Fare In The Face Of The Rise Of The Sandbox MMO?”

Posted on

Judge Rules Against Worlds Inc. In Virtual World Patent Claims

Cristiano Midnight over at SLUniverse has posted news of a court ruling in favour of Activision in a patent case brought by Worlds Inc. This is an important case because Worlds Inc. have been challenging a lot of MMO’s and Virtual Worlds over alleged use of their patents.

Cristiano’s post links to a Gigaom article from last week : World of Warcraft beats trolls in fight over 1996 “virtual worlds” patent . One of Worlds Inc.’s patents is US Patent 7,181,690 which makes a claim of :

A method for enabling a first user to interact with other users in a virtual space, wherein the first user and the other users each have an avatar and a client process associated therewith, and wherein each client process is in communication with a server process.

There’s more in the link, but that would cover a lot of MMO’s and virtual worlds were Worlds Inc. to win a case. However in the Activision case Gigaom are quoted as saying :

 U.S. District Judge Denise Casper wrote that patents belonging to Worlds Inc. appear invalid because the inventions they describe already appeared in public before the patents were filed.

Worlds Inc. have in the past said that they may also look to see if Second Life is violating their patents, although a Massively article on the same issue claims:

This isn’t Worlds’ first attempt to sue an MMO studio over these allegations, as it went after (and lost to) NCsoft and Linden Lab several years ago.

Continue reading “Judge Rules Against Worlds Inc. In Virtual World Patent Claims”

Posted on

Fairs Offer A Great Opportunity To Encourage Good Building Practices


Skin Fair 2014

2014’s Skin Fair is now open! That means lots of goodies from skin makers, makeup designers and more. Come see old favorites and find new discoveries in three sims of deliciousness. For more information, be sure to visit http://skinfair.wordpress.com/. At the Skin Fair, you’re sure to find something that tickles your fancy.

Visit in Second Life

The Skin Fair is in full swing and will be running until March 30th. Script limits will no longer be enforced as is oft the case with script limits, enforcement was causing upset. The usual reason for the upset is that people find themselves teleported home or find themselves booted out of Second Life because of teleport failure before they’ve even  realised they are being informed they have breached a limit. The really bad part of this is that in many cases, the combination of a scripted device scanning new arrivals and then the teleport process of booting them out is actually causing more load on the sim than the visitor who is deemed to be too heavily scripted.

Ideally there would be a better way of doing this, some sort of arrivals area where people were kept until such time they had reduced their scripts. However that’s not an easily achieved goal in Second Life. Fairs in Second Life are often busy events and the organisers rightly want to minimise causes of latency. The problem is that all too often scripts are seen as the be all and end all, when there are many other factors, especially in terms of textures.

Therefore fairs offer an ideal opportunity for Linden Lab to discuss the concepts outlined in their good building practices wiki guide, they could even point organisers in the direction of Penny Patton’s Building A Better Second Life guide. Penny has some brilliant suggestions around reducing texture sizes and using fewer and more efficient scripts.

Continue reading “Fairs Offer A Great Opportunity To Encourage Good Building Practices”

Posted on

Versu’s Emily Short Extends Gratitude To Rod Humble And Linden Lab

New World Notes has recently published a couple of articles about Linden Lab’s decision to end Versu. The first by Iris Ophelia entitled Versu’s Epilogue: How an Interactive Fiction Pioneer’s 15 Year Project Ended Up in Limbo at Linden Lab laments the loss of the title. This is a very good read and I agree with much of what Iris has to say.

The second deals with feedback to that article, Limbo Status of Emily Short’s Long-in-Development Interactive Fiction Project at Linden Lab Goes Viral and highlights a tweet from Gamastura’s Leigh Alexander:

 

From there we can go to Gamasutra itself and find an article by Chritsian Nutt : The end of Versu: Emily Short looks back. This article includes commentary from Emily Short and highlights points Emily has made on her own blog, Emily is extremely grateful to Rod Humble and Linden Lab for supporting Versu in the first place. I’ve seen Emily make this point more than once, if it wasn’t for Linden Lab’s support, Versu would not have reached the stage it did.

This is a point that could easily be lost amidst all the disappointment over how things turned out but it remains a very important point. Emily is quoted in the gamasutra article as saying :

I want to stress this because some of the people I’ve talked to about the closure of Versu don’t seem to understand this point: I remain hugely grateful to Rod Humble and to Linden for picking us up when they did, and for giving us the run they gave us. There are so few opportunities to do this kind of research within existing companies, and if Richard Evans and I had taken venture capital, we would have had to spend a lot more of our time trying to learn to run a business and a lot less writing stories and code.

And that doesn’t begin to count the other resources besides financial support that Linden put at our disposal, such as a hugely devoted and enthusiastic QA team, or the opportunity to work with other experienced interactive-story authors like Deirdra Kiai and Jake Forbes. Both of them not only wrote content but contributed useful thinking about how to develop the system as a whole.

Continue reading “Versu’s Emily Short Extends Gratitude To Rod Humble And Linden Lab”

Posted on

Draxtor Despres – A Dish Best Served Independent

Botgirl Questi recently tweeted the above and whereas I wholeheartedly agree that Second Life’s public image could be revolutionised via such a campaign, I would hope it would be one done without Draxtor Despres and I say this for totally selfish reasons.

The Drax Files and The Drax Files Radio Hour are absolutely superb mediums of promoting Second Life. However one of the reasons Drax can reach the parts other mediums cannot reach is because he’s editorially independent. I doubt this would be the case were Draxtor working on behalf of Linden Lab, rather than working on behalf of his love of Second Life.

An example here is that Drax will soon be talking to Emily Short who was a lead developer of Versu. Linden Lab have of course, very disappointingly ditched Versu, but I would certainly fear that a Linden Lab sponsored Draxtor Despres would be unable to engage in an interview like that or with any other former Linden due to a conflict of interests.

This works in other ways too, for example on The Drax Files, Drax has interviewed content creators, would he be able to do this were he sponsored by Linden Lab? I ask this question because I feel a lot of content creators would cry foul about Linden Lab playing favourites by promoting certain content creators if Drax was endorsed by Linden Lab. However as Draxtor is independent, he can interview who he likes, when he likes and not be questioned over his choices. This allows for some superbly positive interviews and Draxtor delving into all sorts of areas.

Continue reading “Draxtor Despres – A Dish Best Served Independent”

Proudly powered by WordPress
Follow

Get the latest posts delivered to your mailbox: