Linden Lab – Page 121

March 8, 2014

Linden Lab Say No To Sale Of IP And Codebase For Versu

Inara Pey has reported that Lab says “no” to an independent future for Versu. Inara’s blog post links to a blog post from Emily Short, who had been trying to negotiate a deal to buy the IP and codebase for Versu after Linden Lab announced they would no longer be supporting the project :

After careful consideration, Linden Lab has decided to cease development and support for dio, Versu, and Creatorverse. We’re grateful for those who took the time to experiment with these products in their early days, but ultimately we have determined that due to a number of factors, we and our customers will be best served by focusing our efforts on continuing to provide exceptional service and compelling new experiences for the users of our other products.

So Linden Lab don’t see a future for the project, but like the boy with the ball, they’ve decided to take their ball home instead of letting someone else play with it. Emily had previously tried to convince Linden Lab to Open Source the project, which Linden Lab refused to do.

Then Emily tried to negotiate a deal to buy the IP and codebase, which as Emily announced on her blog, ended up with a no :

So for those who were curious, Linden has now given me a definite no about selling me the codebase and IP.

However there is another pain point in all of this for Emily. Blood and Laurels, which had just been completed has obviously now been shelved, but as Emily explains in the comments, Linden Lab own the text :

Blood and Laurels can’t meaningfully be rewritten — they own all the text and images as well as the engine it runs on. I was working on that story concept, on and off, for nearly 15 years, so having finally finished it and been really excited about it, only to have it vanish into ether, makes me sad. Still, on a total scale of possible bad things to have happen to one, it’s not very far along the bad thing spectrum. So we go on to the next.

Continue reading “Linden Lab Say No To Sale Of IP And Codebase For Versu”

March 8, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 9 – SL Go

Not surprisingly, the latest edition of The Drax Files Radio Hour is mostly about OnLive SL Go. The show opens with Draxtor trying to order coffee…. it’s $2.50 and then Drax orders breakfast, after getting Marissa in the cafe or coffee shop to introduce the show. Marissa has never heard of Second Life but she does know about virtual worlds.

Now you may be feeling jaded by all the SL Go talk but I highly recommend you listen to this because Draxtor interviews Nate Barsetti. Now I hadn’t been paying attention to whom Nate was and listening to him I thought “This guy has done his homework, he knows what he’s talking about regarding Second Life“. Then I was made aware of the fact that Nate was once also known as Scout Linden.

Actually I need to pause here because the problem of a podcast is that people pronounce words funny. For example route should sound like root, it shouldn’t sound like rout! Then there’s beta, which should sound like beeta, rather than bayta! Fortunately nobody mentioned anything about a buoy, which should sound like boy. Ok where was I? Oh yes, Nate! The Nate interview is really interesting, he talks from, as I said, a viewpoint of someone who knows Second Life.

The thing is that because Nate knows Second Life, he knows about latency, he therefore knows that the way SL Go works will get away with a little bit of latency. The feedback on latency for SL Go has been good, people have reported scenes rez faster than they do on their own machine, it did for me. So you know, in this sense, the product is on to something.

Nate is also a Second Life resident and involved in some sort of roleplaying according to the interview, the bottom line is he knows his onions. I really enjoyed this part of show.

Drax follows this with an interview with Dennis Harper, a senior product manager at Onlive. Dennis has a long history of the gaming industry and has previously worked at companies such as Turbine, however he explains that he wasn’t familiar with Second Life when the project landed. However Dennis read a book, the title of which I can’t quite catch in the podcast. Dennis explored Second Life, as a beautiful female avatar … and found that people would give him free stuff!

Continue reading “The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 9 – SL Go”

March 7, 2014

New Jira Launches With A 12 Fingered Feature Request

Linden Lab yesterday announced that the new Jira, not quite as good as the old old Jira but far better than the previous Jira, was now live. One point that they have highlighted is that the visibility of bug reports made during the dark ages of the Jira will not be reversed, those reports will still only be available to the reporter, Lindens and The Chosen Few, not to be confused with Chosen Few the avatar.

Linden Lab explained their reasons for the decision in the blog post :

One of the questions we’ve seen in the past week is how previously submitted issues would be treated – namely, will those also be viewable by everyone and open for comment prior to being triaged?

While we want to make issues visible for the reasons described in our last post, we’re not going to extend this to old issues, because at the time they were created, users knew that those reports would have limited visibility and they may have included sensitive and/or private information. We don’t want to take information that someone thought would be private and suddenly make that visible to everyone, so the new visibility settings will apply only to new issues.

I can recall arguments like this being made about the availability of old forum content. The old forums required you to be logged in to view them but the archives these days don’t. I know some people weren’t happy about that, for the reasons stated above actually. I’m not 100% convinced by this argument because even with limited visibility people should have been careful with their information, but there’s definitely a case for keeping those issues largely hidden out of respect and it’s really not worth getting in a pickle about this in the grand scheme of things.

One feature of the Jira is the return of the new feature request and as Fenix over at SLUniverse reports, an early feature request in the new form had a rather bizarre suggestion:

Six fingers per hand

Continue reading “New Jira Launches With A 12 Fingered Feature Request”

March 5, 2014

SL Go – Brilliant Technology Shame About The Pricing

First things first, I haven’t been involved in the beta testing for SL Go, I haven’t been lent a tablet by the people behind the project and I haven’t spent much time using it. If you want an in depth and what appears to be a very balanced review, go and read Inara Pey’s blog post on the matter. Inara’s post is important as it explains some of the pitfalls of SL Go and how it’s not the full Second Life experience, due in part to security issues. However it’s not that watered down an experience.

If you’re wondering what SL Go is, Linden Lab have blogged about it:

OnLive, the leader in cloud gaming, today released an exciting new service for Second Life users. SL Go, now in open beta, is a mobile Second Life viewer for Android that delivers a fully immersive desktop-like experience on tablets.

With SL Go, you can experience Second Life from anywhere you have Wi-Fi or 4G connectivity, with ultra high-quality graphics, full shaders, shadows, and the Advanced Lightning Model on Android devices. Not only can you get high-quality graphics on a low-powered device, but you also don’t have to sacrifice frame rate or draw distance for high fidelity inworld explorations. Thanks to super-fast gigabit connections with OnLive’s high-performance gaming servers, objects and textures rez quickly when logging in and teleporting. OnLive has clocked the SL Go viewer at upwards of 200 fps set to Ultra with Maximum Render Distance, allowing people to participate in events, engage in combat games, and generally enjoy immersion in Second Life at a level never before possible on a mobile device.

With SL Go, OnLive has brought touchscreen interaction to the Second Life experience, but if you prefer keyboard and mouse, you can opt to connect these devices and interact with your friends in the same way you always have. SL Go gives you access to edit menus, inventory, preference settings and chat management just like the Second Life Viewer on your home computer.

There are more details in the blog post, such as how you go about signing up for an account, pricing etc. First things first, it works and it works bloody well. There are no two ways about this, even during my brief testing period I could see that this service delivers.

Obviously the experience is different to using Second Life on a PC. Movement and such like are different, but for those who have experience with tablets and especially playing games with them, the experience is likely to be quite rewarding.

Point and click and mouse view, concepts I barely touch in Second Life on a PC are life savers on a tablet for me, but of course with a tablet you also get to pinch, zoom and drag, which actually adds something to the experience.

Continue reading “SL Go – Brilliant Technology Shame About The Pricing”

March 4, 2014

Adult Content And TOS – Which Way Will The Wind Blow?

I think it’s fair to say that Ebbe Altberg has made a positive start to his Linden Lab leadership. Ebbe has helped return the Jira to a semblance of sensibility and made positive strides to addressing the Marketplace and communications issues.

Ebbe hasn’t said anything about tier yet, but as that’s a long standing issue I’ll leave that aside for now. However two areas where Ebbe has been a little more uncomfortable shall we say, are the TOS and adult content.

On the TOS, Ebbe has said :

I’m still getting up to speed on that topic. I’ve had several discussions about it. It’s not a simple topic.

Trust me. It’s not becuase we have an intent to arbitrarily profit from your stuff without your permission. That would be very bad for us as we’re all about user to user. We could seriously harm ourselves if we started doing that.

But, the edge cases and the potential cost to us in certain scenarios are quite substantial.

Making the spirit and the language match up seems to be very difficult. I’ll learn more over time but for now I can’t promise anything other than what I said above.

What these edge cases are remain a mystery and obviously it may be difficult for Linden Lab to discuss edge cases because it may cause problems. However from a standpoint of transparency, it would be better if Linden Lab would at least enter into a dialogue with content creators because the TOS remains content creator unfriendly. I absolutely believe Ebbe when he says Linden Lab have no intent to steal content and yes, it would seriously harm Linden Lab if they did. However the question remains as to why it’s so difficult to change the wording to reflect that.

I know some people have tried to address the Lab over the TOS changes, and as far as I know, they haven’t got far, but this is an issue that needs to be addressed.

The other issue is adult content and what will happen with it going forward.

Continue reading “Adult Content And TOS – Which Way Will The Wind Blow?”