Linden Lab – Page 145

May 30, 2013

The Drax Files Episode 6 – Abramelin Wolfe

The thing about going on holiday is that you miss things and I’ll try and catch up this evening if I can, a bit at least. One of the things I missed whilst walk along the beach in Majorca was episode 6 of the excellent Drax Files, as usual I’ll embed the video at the end of the post.

This episode featured Abramelin Wolfe, AKA Animation King of Abranimations in Second Life, which for those unfamilair with the brand is an animation store, one that even I’ve heard of and as I’m often poked for not wearing an AO inworld, that’s rather impressive! At their store you will also find avatars, skins, games, toys, vehicles and gadgets.

The thing about this interview is that it gives you an insight into the eye watering costs of animation accessories, Abramelin talks of how he purchased his first mocap suit back in 2005 at the eye watering cost of £14,000, the suit also looks very painful. Most people think of Second Life content creators as being plucky amateurs but with setup costs like that, we’re delving into a far more professional world.

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May 29, 2013

The Partially Hidden Cost Of Display Costs

I’ve mentioned the Good Building Practices section of the official Second Life Wiki before, I’ve also mentioned the extremely useful Texture Usage page in that section. The good building practices is an under promoted resource in my opinion, Linden Lab haven’t forgotten about it, I see that they have added a case study on how June Dion used normal and specular maps to add details to a Katana imported from Lightwave. However that’s not what I’m going to talk about today!

The Texture Usage page describes a situation many of us will recognise:

“We have all been there, teleporting to a new location, everything grey, the need to stand there for 10 minutes waiting for everything to load. Even then many textures still remain blurry. Some people give up and teleport away, some people leave to make coffee. Land owners can lose traffic over it. Store owners can lose customers over it. So optimizing your textures to ensure that they load quickly, without losing any of the visual impact, is important.”

The tip is to use as small a texture size as is reasonable, with advice to try and avoid using 1024 x 1024 textures if possible. Now some people will argue this point, because good usage of 1024 x 1024 textures can actually make an item efficient in terms of performance, however as a general rule, you should not use a 1024 x 1024 texture when a 256 x 256 will suffice, but it’s not a simple numbers game because the number of textures you use is also a factor.

I’ll do a small example, I created a prim and used a single 512 x 512 texture on it:

An Image Should Be Here — Single Texture

Now I’m going to click the more info link because that’s where I can find out some extra inforamtion about the display costs of my item:

Now this has a display cost of 404, but what happens if instead of using a single texture, I use three different textures on my prim? Well in this case I’ll use two 512 x 512 textures and one 64 x 64 texture.

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May 25, 2013

The Penny Drops On Why People Used Third Party Exchanges

The whole idea of a holiday is to relax and recharge your batteries. Unfortunately this often isn’t the case and I’ve returned from a fortnight in Majorca and find myself pretty much cream crackered. However it’s a holiday weekend so by my return to work on Tuesday I should be relaxed and have my batteries recharged… alternatively I may just be cream crackered.

Whilst I have been away I notice that Linden Lab seem to have realised that people used third party exchanges for reasons other than just the sheer hell of it and in a blog post they talk of people buying Linden Dollars in different currencies and a new pilot scheme whereby authorised third party sites will be able to sell Linden Dollars, in a variety of currencies if they so wish. This deals with some of the concerns of residents because those third party sites offer more payment options than the LindeX does.

Paypal does not work for everyone, in some countries you can’t withdraw from Paypal to a local bank account, that’s one of the reasons why everyone doesn’t use Paypal and whereas these changes do not deal with cashing out to local currencies, they do deal with purchasing Linden Dollars, progress of a sort there.

The blog post does state:

“We know that users are also concerned about the length of the LindeX’s cashout process and the limited choice of currencies when selling L$. We’re currently investigating ways to improve that experience for users while still providing superior fraud protections, and hope to hasten the cashout process and offer new currency options in the future.”

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May 9, 2013

The LindeX Should Not Be So Uncompetitive

In all the fallout of the Third Party Exchange issue, the LindeX has came under the spotlight and is found to be extremely short of providing the service users crave. There’s no doubt now that Linden Lab are disallowing the use of third party exchanges, Virwox have updated their page to state:

“Linden Lab has recently changed their Terms of Service. Under the new rules, we will no longer be able to offer our service to Second Life residents. Linden Lab insists that our in-world terminals (ATMs) have to be removed.

This means that we can currently not accept Linden Dollars from Second Life or pay Linden Dollars to Second Life. Other virtual currencies are not affected.”

This should really put an end to questions about the blog post contradicting the terms of service, the blog post was correct, use of third party exchanges is not allowed and actions are exemplifying this. However why are people miffed about the end of third party exchanges? The reason is simple, third party exchanges offered a more efficient service with a wider range of payment options. The question therefore is why can Linden Lab not compete?

I’ll give a personal example, this TOS change has left me in a rather large pickle because a transfer to Paypal I was planning via VirWox now can’t take place. Why does this leave me in a pickle? Well that’s my own fault, I wanted to transfer funds before this weekend and was waiting for as much to transfer as possible, by using VirWox I would have been able to do this. However now that I have to use the LindeX, my plans have all gone tits up.

However this isn’t Linden Lab’s fault, it’s my fault because I should know by now that Linden Lab are quite happy to make announcements with no forethought, no warning, no consideration and no respect and as I have long known this, I should make all plans related to Second Life with that in mind, so it’s my fault for forgetting how Linden Lab operate. However the question remains, why on earth do Linden Lab take so long to transfer funds?

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May 8, 2013May 8, 2013

Third Party Exchanges Fallout In Progress

The fallout from yesterday’s terms of service change blog post is now in full swing. The outlook for third party exchanges looks bleak from the posts I’ve seen, but confusion still reigns due to the discrepancy between the blog post, which explicitly stated trading on thier party exchanges is not allowed and the actual new terms of service, which make no such reference. This issue is not just in the area of third party exchanges either, third party viewer developers have also been sent a message relating to the Buy L$ feature in their viewers.

The problems started rather quickly, Maria Korolov over at Hypergrid business reported that First Meta Exchange had announced :

“We are really sad to announce that we will not be doing any linden exchanges from now onwards. Due to the recent changes in SecondLife’s Terms of Service we must SUSPEND ALL LINDEN TRADING IMMEDIATELY. We will be updating you via email with more information soon.”

Meanwhile other exchanges have ceased trading whilst seekig clarification on what the terms of service changes mean, ELDEXchange announced:

“you might have seen the changes of ToS regarding exchanges other than the Lindex. We try to get more information about the consequences. Meanwhile we cant accept new sell orders. We will inform you as soon as we have more information.”

VIRWOX, arguably the largest third party exchange announced:

“We have asked Linden Lab for clarification. Until we know what this all means, we have disabled deposits of Linden Dollars (the terminals will send them back), disabled the “Currency Shop” for Linden Dollar purchases, and disabled the withdrawal of Linden Dollars to Second Life. Other virtual currencies are not affected.”

Moneyslex announced:

“Linden Lab has recently changed their Terms of Service.Trading L$ as Third Party exchange Linden Lab interprets as “unauthorized” as “not permitted”.This would mean that we can at the moment not offer our service to Second Life residents.”

However as the confusion reigns, some third part exchanges are still operating.

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