Linden Lab – Page 172

December 5, 2012December 5, 2012

Seanchai Spreading The Old Art Of Storytelling.

Tonight at 7pm SLT Caledonia Skytower will be doing a reading of Mircale on 34th Street at Seanchai Library. The reading will be in voice, which means it won’t be suitable for all and the reading is at 7pm SLT, which means it won’t be suitable for all! However that’s the nature of a worldwide platform. However this is a seasonal tale to get you into the spirit of the season.

The story will be read in two parts, with part two on December 10th, I believe! Seanchai isn’t the only place in Second Life that engages in storytelling, indeed we have storytelling on one of my sims, but not anywhere near as regularly as Seanchai does and with nowhere near the variety, but it does happen and I’m happy to see it happening.

I do believe that storytelling and even reading, within Second Life, is an undervalued art. Reading of course has its own pitfalls, texture loading times or reading notecards, it’s not exactly easy on the eye and yet, with 3D props, it has potential to add to the form of storytelling by recreating locations, or readers getting in character.

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December 4, 2012

Darrius Gothly Launches Virtual Landmarks

Back in July, Toysoldier Thor blogged about virtual landmarks. The basic idea here is that your landmarks can follow you, the same as a domain name follows people and companies around. Toysoldier came up with this idea because he was in a position whereby he needed to move the location of his art gallery, this move meant that all the landmarks out in the wild, would become redundant. People who used those landmarks, would not land at Toysoldier’s new store, they’d arrive in the sim location where the store used to be.

Toysoldier created a Jira, which can still be read, on the issue. However it should also be noted that Ann OToole created an earlier Jira, back in 2009, on similar lines. Toysoldier links to this in his proposal. The proposals are slightly different but they address the same core problem, other people may have created Jira’s or proposals too. However Toysoldier’s proposal gained traction via a forum post on the official forums and it was discussed at the simulator user group meeting on 3rd August, in attendance there was Cheesey Linden ….. seriously!

On the 7th September, Toysolider reported in another forum thread:

LL has finished the phase of investigating the idea of VLMs and they have determined that VLMs are feasible enough to warrant moving it to the next phase of determining DEVELOPMENT PRIORITY !!

I asked if this is good news and Cheesey said “yes – that is progress”.

After the meeting I did some further investigation and asked a Linden if he/she seriously saw VLMs having a legit hope or am I wasting time pushing this idea. I was told that he/she was surprised how much traction the VLMs got internally. The LL techs grasped the concept and value very quickly and that the VLM solution could potentially help LL with several other functions (especially the centralized VLM-MS service).

See, Cheesey was involved! However since then, there has been little word on progress, until an independent development was announced by Darrius Gothly yesterday, whereby Darrius has come up with his own solution to address the issue.

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December 3, 2012December 3, 2012

Firestorm Now With Improved Photo Tools And Legacy Search

Inara Pey is the viewer release Princess of all goodness when it comes to looking at viewers. I’m more of a traditionalist and generally stick with Official Linden Lab viewers. However something caught my eye about the latest release of Firestorm (4.3.1.31155). Inara took a look at the beta release last month.

The things that caught my eye about this release were the legacy viewer 1 search and the photo tools. Although there’s a hell of a lot more to this release than that, for full info read the release notes. Now first things first, when I first installed Firestorm, I couldn’t move because there’s a preference for wasd to control chat, not movement. This needed to be changed for me to even get going:

An Image Should Be Here — Firestorm Movement

Chatting away to myself wasn’t much fun, do people prefer the default to be local chat for wasd? Anyway it was a simple change once I found it, so off I went exploring.

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December 2, 2012December 2, 2012

Tyche Shepherd’s Private Estate Survey November 2012

Tyche Shepherd has published the findings of her November 2012 private estate survey, which took place on December 1st. The survey uses a random sampling of 5,000 private estates to draw its results.

I’m not going to publish the findings in full, as Tyche already does that, however I’ll highlight a couple of points. The survey estimates that there has been a small drop of 0.1% in terms of tier income this month, down to US$4,316,000 +/- US$54,000, whereas last month’s estimate was US$4,319,000, so it’s down by around US$3,000. The survey uses known grandfathered rates for its results but doesn’t include any academic discounts or obviously, any deals between Linden Lab and landowners as these aren’t public knowledge. The figures are also rounded down to the nearest US$1,000.

The top ten landowners account for 27.4% (+/- 1.2%) of privately owned land, which is down 0.3% since last month. The movers and shakers seem to be Zoha Estates, who are estimated to be up 0.5% and RGF estates who appear to be down 0.8%.

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November 30, 2012November 30, 2012

Unhinged Merchants – A Look At Ailsa Muliaina’s AMU

This City of Heroes shutting down business has upset me more than I thought it would, I haven’t played for a while! Although it would have been nice to go back for a last hurrah. Anyway, let’s go back to Second Life for another look at Unhinged, which made the destination guide as a featured event. The fundraising side has been quite successful so far. I’ve covered some of the partying but I haven’t covered the merchants, yes you can shop at Unhinged too! There’s plenty of time to shop too as the festival runs until December 15th.

Now I don’t do fashion, so I picked art. I don’t do art either, I’m artistically challenged! However my eye noticed that Ailsa Muliaina had a stall there, well I got the blogger pack first, then I went to the stall! Aisla, whose inworld brand is AMU has a set for Unhinged:

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