Linden Lab – Page 162

January 24, 2013

Linden Lab Empire Expands As They Acquire iPad Game Blocksworld

Linden Lab’s empire grows by the day, as they announce they’ve acquired the iPad game Blocksworld, the full press release can be read here. I may follow suit and issue a press release everytime I buy a new game … oh wait they haven’t just purchased the game to play in the Lab, they’ve purchased the whole kit and caboodle along with plans to globally release the game!

Rod Humble is quoted in the press release as saying: “Blocksworld is a great fit with what we do at Linden Lab, It’s a very user-friendly complement to our portfolio of shared creative spaces. We’re happy to have the Blocksworld team join Linden Lab and are looking forward to bringing Blocksworld to the App Store worldwide soon!”

I’m really pleased to see Rod Humble speaking, I wondered where the bloody hell he’d gone! I did wonder if he was in hiding due to the nightmare season Aston Villa are having. Anyway, the next question is, what the bloody hell is Blocksworld? This is a genuine question as I’ve never heard of it!

Continue reading “Linden Lab Empire Expands As They Acquire iPad Game Blocksworld”

January 24, 2013

Those Who Seek Offence Will Find It

I can remember when I was a lad in Second Life that I had a PG parcel. One day, I noticed that next door a Gentleman’s club had opened and I wasn’t happy about this. The outside of the building and even the wording on the parcel was more risque then explicit but hey, this isn’t PG I thought. Stepping onto the parcel I realised the parcel was in a neighbouring sim and on further examination I realised that the neighbouring sim was mature. This was back in the days of only having maturity ratings of PG and Mature.

Now this made the PG rating of my parcel, meaningless, however the neighbouring parcel was not breaking any rules. I decide to pack up shop there and sell the PG parcel. I mentioned the silliness of this situation to a Linden, who agreed that said situation was silly and had been discussed.

Quite a few moons later Linden Lab unleashed the adult category, as with many Linden Lab ideas it had good intentions but was delivered in a very poor fashion. However now we have three maturity ratings, the issue of General sims neighbouring Moderate sims still exists, but adult sims are in their own category and we can filter adult results in our preferences, we can exclude them totally, this is a better situation than we had before because Mature or as it’s known now, Moderate, has quite a wide scope, so excluding adult helps to avoid the more extreme content.

I’m reminded of this because I’ve just read an article, which I’m not going to link to, that complains about extreme adult content in Second Life and in this article, to demonstrate that extreme adult content exists, the author set their preferences to adult and listed events, which included adult content. They also searched for a particular type of extreme adult content and then published the results, with outrage. I’m sorry but if you go out of your way to search for extreme adult content, you’re hardly in a position to complain about finding it. The author could try unticking safe search on Google and searching for similar results, the results will be shocking too.

Continue reading “Those Who Seek Offence Will Find It”

January 21, 2013

Second Life General Discussion Turning Into Schoolyard Farce

I don’t use the Second Life Forums as much as I once did, many reasons for that, the first being that the forums lost their charm when Linden Lab decided to ditch Resident Answers and move from real forum software to an all singing, all dancing, more than a forum software. Since then they’ve moved onto a second version of all singing, all dancing, more than a forum software and it’s still rather cack to me, but these things happen. People who used the really old forums didn’t like the transition to the version of the forums I enjoyed.

The creation forums are generally good and full of helpful advice. The merchants area is an area of healthy and vibrant discussion with some spiky threads and healthy disagreement. The technology forums are full of good information and whereas people can disagree, there’s good participation from Lindens there, which make it more useful. General discussion is an area where you’d think you’d gone back in time to the days when you were at school, with obvious cliques, trolling, flame bait and what seems to be bullying. I refrain from calling it outright bullying because I don’t know if there’s some sort of forum cartel at play feigning injury in order to whip up discussion.

The really sad thing though is that some of the participants in these playground antics have forum ranks of Helper or Advisor, they are supposedly responsible residents and yet they are fully engaged in these silly antics, which quite frankly they should be embarrassed about.

Continue reading “Second Life General Discussion Turning Into Schoolyard Farce”

January 20, 2013

The Trouble With Mesh

I haven’t yet released much into the wild in terms of mesh and the reason for that is largely me being a fussy bugger. The trouble with mesh is also part of the beauty of mesh, you have extra control over mesh and this leads to me constantly deciding I can do this better and never actually finishing my build, ignoring the advice I was given years ago in Second Life that at some point you have to say to hell with it, that will do, or you’ll never finish your build.

Years ago that was with relation to the dotted lines that appear on builds when you have certain settings, I would try and find ways to avoid it, someone then said to me that you just have to roll with it. I’m back there now with mesh, not with regards to dotted lines, but with worrying that I could be more efficient, that I can make the inside a lower LOD than the outside, as the inside doesn’t need to be seen from so far away, whether I should worry about inside faces in the roof space that probably won’t be used …. but what if someone wants to use it? Arghhhh!

I can then build a very basic roof, with insides, all in a low land impact modular roof, but you can’t rez inside said roof, you can drag things inside and rez them that way but that means any scripted items that rez inventory won’t work. This constant second guessing of use cases becomes stifling in the creation process, but I realise it’s me whose stifling myself.

Continue reading “The Trouble With Mesh”

January 17, 2013

With Linden Homes In Short Supply, Is It Time To Bring Back First Land?

Whilst tier is too damn high for many of us, one area where people don’t seem to be able to get enough of homes is with Linden Homes. I’ve seen a few posts now in the forums complaining about the lack of choice and availability of Linden Homes.

Here’s one: Lindens advertising Linden Homes but there is none

“Why are Linden homes being advertised on my dashboard when there is none presently available at the moment. This is supposed to be an AVAILABLE benefit for premium users. I’d rather have a home then an airplane lol.” complains the OP, but that’s not the only thread I’ve seen about Linden Homes.

I think Tyche said recently that Linden Home occupancy had dropped slightly, but was still a very healthy 97%. However the last thing we need in Second Life is for Linden Lab to open a new land mass, so what can be done to help people find their Linden Homes?

Continue reading “With Linden Homes In Short Supply, Is It Time To Bring Back First Land?”