Linden Lab – Page 190

February 16, 2012February 16, 2012

Pathfinding Moves Closer

If you want to keep up with technical developments you can go to user group meetings, read forum posts, read the wiki or go and read Nalates Urriah’s blog. I like the latter as it’s a good central repository. This week Nalates has been keep us up to date with the upcoming Pathfinding features, you can read the blog post here.

Pathfinding will help prims navigate around a sim all on their own, this has potential for non player characters, such as pets, barmen (and maids), ambience, bouncers and such like. Pathfinding alone won’t make this happen, as Nalates points out animations will still need to be used but pathfinding is a big step in the right direction of making this more easy to get going.

There’s an alpha overview on the Wiki, which being alpha means we shouldn’t get too excited just yet. The overview informs us of some of the commands and their LSL counterparts. There is also a Pathfinding Alpha Release wiki page which tells us that there will be a development viewer for this, but it has not yet been released. The feature will appear on Aditi first.

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February 9, 2012February 9, 2012

LL Receive Short Shrift From Bloggers

Linden Lab’s call for bloggers has received short shrift from quite a few bloggers, although I’m sure there will be some who will play ball. There have been negative posts from Inara Pey, Hamlet Au, Chestnut Rau, Crap Mariner (very humourosuly too) and another humourous take from Botgirl Questi.

On the official blog post there are also negative reactions, even Marianne McCann pours scorn on the deal, when Mari thinks something is a bad idea you really need to stop and think. Whomever came up with this idea must feel a bit like Andrew Lansley trying to get his wretched NHS bill through the house of commons, however to be fair, Linden Lab’s plan is nowhere near as evil as Andrew Lansley’s NHS bill!

I still think the idea has some merit, it’s not something I would personally participate in but there’s merit to the suggestion. Highlighting other bloggers and their views can help with reach, introduce people to new aspects of Second Life and demonstrate that there’s more to Second Life than a 3D chatroom, of course us Second Life regulars know there’s more to it than that but for someone investigating Second Life, the main website is a good starting point and should be full of the diversity of Second Life.

However, as with a lot of things Linden Lab have done over the years, it ain’t what they do, it’s the way that they do it.

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February 7, 2012February 7, 2012

LL Call For Bloggers

Linden Lab have posted a blog post, which is surprising enough in itself, but it’s also one that could be very productive. Linden Lab are asking for bloggers to submit posts to them for consideration to be published on their community blogging platform. The blog post is here. There are guidelines, which should be observed, the sticking point for some bloggers is going to be Linden Lab’s insistence that the content needs to be exclusive to them, I don’t really understand why they have that restriction.

However overall the idea is a good one because it allows a wider scope for Linden Lab to advertise their wares. I’ve spoken before about how Linden Lab could do with someone blogging about Second Life’s broad range of activities, having bloggers submit posts is one way of addressing that.

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February 2, 2012February 2, 2012

LL Should Consider Group And Event Pages

There has been a bit of a hoo-ha going on about Linden Lab throttling llGiveInventory to 5K per hour per owner, per sim. as explained in Jira-SVC-7631. This sounds like a reasonable limit at first glance, it sounds like an even more reasonable limit on second glance when you consider that a single script couldn’t do this before the throttle anyway. However the ever inventive users of Second Life have got around this limit to allow subscribers to send out announcements quickly. This has unfortunately exposed a security flaw that had to be urgently addressed.

A few things stand out here, one being why the hell do we need to send thousands of notecards and textures to people in the first place. Another, the issue of communications, in this case I’m with Linden Lab, they needed to address a security issue but there remain communication issues. This change will break content.

Reading the Jira, most of the concerns are from people who run mailing lists, there is one major exception in the shape and form of 7Seas Fishing creator Seven Shikami whose game uses llGiveInventory. However it’s mostly about mailing lists, with people concerned that if they use a large mailing list that hits the throttle, all items in a sim owned by them that use llGiveInventory will not work for a while, that includes any scripted vendors that use the function. I don’t know what would happen if the vendors used llGiveInventorylist instead, I’d imagine they’d still be throttled.

However this really highlights a flaw in the group announcement system, delivering inventory to so many users for an announcement, when really we should be just pointing people in the direction of the notice. Google + and Facebook both allow people to create pages for their business or communities, it’s time really to move group notices to the Second Life profiles website and implement this into the viewer. This would mean that instead of people having to have yet another landmark, notecard and texture in their inventory, they’d just follow the link to see the texture, be able to teleport from the link and see detailed information about any new product launch or event.

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February 1, 2012February 1, 2012

Second Life Is Alive And Well

Hamlet has a post with quotes from Stat Goddess Tyche Shepherd, showing that private estates are being shed from the grid. Tyche reported these losses on her excellent grid survey thread over at SLUniverse, the particular post in question has details of Tyche’s private estate survey, you can read the post here.

Tyche’s comment that raises eyebrows, or causes gasps is:

” Taking these figures a good estimate of private estate tier due each month is US$4,920,000 +/- US$58,000 . (Calculated using known grandfathering rates but excludes any academic reductions and is rounded to the closest US$1000), this figure is down on last month’s estimate of US$5,006,000 by $86,000 , a significant fall of about 1.8%. This is the first time the monthly tier figure has fallen below US$5 Million since I began the private estate surveys and the margin of error indicates this is a significant finding. ”

I’m not going to say Linden Lab shouldn’t worry about this, they absolutely should, but it’s certainly not time to man the lifeboats, just under USD$5 million per month in tier for private estates, is still a healthy figure, especially in these tough economic times. I do think tier is too expensive these days, but to lower it Linden Lab need to boost other income streams, slashing tier now would more than likely give a short term boost, but Linden Lab need to play the long game.

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