The Tier Is Too Damn High – Page 2

September 18, 2014

Innsmouth Faces Its Biggest Threat Yet … Closure!

Innsmouth in Second Life is a dark place, abandoned in the 1930’s and with a mysterious sea creature off the coast, it’s a town with a secret. However the dark forces that have plagued the town have not put everyone off, there are still a few hardy souls around. However now Innsmouth faces it’s greatest peril yet, a peril that many have fought within Second Life. Innsmouth may very well disappear from the Second Life grid.

A blog post on the HP Lovecraft Festival site has issued a call for help : SAVE INNSMOUTH SIM in SL. The post explains the very real peril Innsmouth finds itself in :

On September 15th, Darmin Darkes, the owner of the Innsmouth-themed Sim announced the following: “Innsmouth sim is for sale. I’m giving first dibs to you folks in the hopes that someone will want to keep some of the build. Worst case is having to flatten it and sell it. I just can’t afford it any longer. I’m not leaving SL, but I have to cut back my sims. Thank you for your years of support and friendship and the passion you’ve given to Innsmouth. It’s only pixels and I’m sure there are better versions waiting to be built.” — Darmin Darkes

As a result of this notice, a number of Second Lifer have been working together, through a group called, “The Innsmouth Preservation Society,” to help with the upkeep and potentially to purchase this sim, then maintain it.

If you would like to be a part of this important group, please contact Arik Metzer or any member of the group who can invite you. More updates on our progress will be posted here.

**IMPORTANT FIRST MEETING TO DISCUSS THIS ISSUE**: Thursday 18 September 2014 — 2 times: 11 AM SLT and 7:30 PM SLT, both at the Innsmouth SIM .

The first meeting was taking place as I blogged this piece. A second meeting will take place at 7:30 PM SLT today. Whether Innsmouth can be saved only time will tell but it’s a fascinating sim with a theme that is better viewed inworld than in snapshots.

Innsmouth featured on the Eureka Destination Blog back in February 2010 when Limey Linden spoke to the owner Darmin Darkes. Those Eureka posts were good. Anyway, Limey visited back in 2010 and was impressed. At the time, Darmin, who had been a driving force in creating the sim had purchased the sim for herself. At the time Darmin said :

I’ve just purchased Innsmouth, so it will stay as it is until I think of something to tweak and improve. I hope it lasts forever! I like that it’s so low key… no club or shopping to detract from the atmosphere… but that may have to change. I get so many positive comments from visitors and it pleases me to be able to make something they appreciate so deeply. When you see something you love about SL, you should always try and thank someone.

Alas it seems that that will not be the case and I can completely sympathise with Darmin over her decision.

Continue reading “Innsmouth Faces Its Biggest Threat Yet … Closure!”

July 28, 2014

Second Life Private Regions Drop Below 19,000 Mark

Tyche Shepherd reported yesterday that private regions have dropped below the 19,000 mark for the first time since June 15th 2008. There are currently 18,988 private regions on the grid. However it should be pointed out that the rate of loss has slowed down and that is particularly apparent for this year, although the last couple of weeks have accelerated the fall to below the 19,000 mark.

This comes around 53 weeks after private regions dropped below the 20,000 mark. Then the private region count stood at 19,997. However by the end of 2013 there had been a further net loss of 724 private regions, leaving the score on the door of 19,273. At that point a fall below 19,000 looked likely to come in the first couple of months of 2014, but private regions have fought a brave fight against that until the last fortnight. Two weeks ago there were net losses of 39 private regions and this week a net loss of 26 private regions. That means that 65 of this year’s net loss of 285 regions have came in the last fortnight, or to put it another way, 22.8% of this year’s losses have came in the last fortnight.

There’s no rational explanation as to why private region net losses have risen like this, at around this time last year, give or take a week because Tyche went on holiday, there was a net loss of 29 private regions during a fortnightly period. Back in 2012 at around this time of the year there was a fortnightly net loss of 154 private regions. Actually, a fun with numbers quirk from that fortnightly net loss shows that in the first week private regions dropped by 59 and a week later those numbers flipped around with a weekly loss of 95 regions ….. ok it’s just me who finds that interesting isn’t it?

If we go back to the heady days of 15th June 2008, Tyche reported things a little differently, so I don’t know what the net change was but 593 regions were added to the grid that week. Yes that’s right, 593 new regions came online. This was also at a time when Linden Lab could auction new mainland regions and in another, fun facts incident Tyche reported :

Only one new mainland sim was added this week , or more to the point a mainland region has returned to the Grid “The Corn Field” is back since last Monday.

Play spooky music now!

Continue reading “Second Life Private Regions Drop Below 19,000 Mark”

July 2, 2014

Phoenix Firestorm Q&A Session On The Future Of Second Life Featuring Oz & Pete Linden

Today’s Phoenix Firestorm question and answer session regarding the future of Second Life has been filmed and is on youTube. I will also in traditional style embed the video at the end of the post. I will point out that if you’re looking for a chat log, this blog will not include the droids you’re looking for. However the lovely Inara Pey may well provide a transcript in the near future.

The session was hosted by Jessica Lyon who was assisted by Lette Ponnier and featured guests Gray of the Lab from San Francisco (AKA Linden Lab’s Director Of Global Communications Peter Gray) and Oz Linden, Director Of Open development at Linden Lab and chief Second Life man now that some of Linden Lab are working on the new virtual world space. I will hereby label Oz “The Man Behind The Curtain“, because he is bloody important now in terms of Second Life, not that he wasn’t important before of course, but now he is really really important. Oz is the man behind the scenes, pulling levers, pressing buttons and keeping the magic in Second Life and things will stay this way as long as people believe in Second Life. Oz points out in the discussion that this was a position he really wanted, which is very positive indeed.

Anyway on to the discussion, it runs for almost an hour but if you don’t have that sort of patience you only need to watch the first few minutes to hear Peter Gray reiterate that Second Life is not closing down, Linden Lab have no plans to close Second Life down, investment and development will continue. Rumour has it that if you play this part of the video backwards at the correct speed you will also hear the phrase “The Tier is too damn high” uttered”, but I haven’t been able to confirm that!

Oz makes an early point that is one I’ve long agreed with, people criticise Second Life because they care about Second Life. Oz also talks about the challenges of working with a smaller team and admits that in some ways this is helpful because it helps the team to focus on the important issues. Oz also confirms that whereas the team working on Second Life are smaller than they previously were, it’s still a significant number of people. Oz also adds that the numbers in the team may be dynamic, some people working on the new platform will at times be called upon to work on Second Life and vice versa.

Oz talked of the new experience keys beta, the fact that Linden Lab really are working on improving group chat including hardware upgrades for servers. However there is no quick fix here, it’s going to take a while but they really are working on this. Another part of the team are working on improving the web framework in the viewer where they are moving from webkit to the chromium embedded framework.

There’s also news that they are working on improvements to texture and mesh loading speeds as part of the HTTP Project. Inara Pey touched upon this in her Server Updates blog post.

Continue reading “Phoenix Firestorm Q&A Session On The Future Of Second Life Featuring Oz & Pete Linden”

June 26, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour – Immersive Journalism

Last week’s Drax Files Radio Hour has been put on the back burner because of the news of Linden Lab’s proposed new virtual world and SL11B. This is a bit of a shame because not only does Drax have a fantastic interview about immersive journalism with Nonny de la Pena, but the interview also touches upon some of the pros and cons of Second Life. This is actually extremely relevant when you consider the news about Linden Lab’s new virtual world.

Nonny de la Pena is a journalist and documentary maker who moved from traditional media such as Newsweek to creating immersive spaces in virtual and digital environments to tell news stories, amongst other things. The subject matter is often controversial and political, for example in association with Peggy Weil she built Virtual Guantanamo in Second Life. I’ll embed a 2007 youTube video by Draxtor Despres about that at the end of the post.

Nonny speaks about how the idea was to bring an experience such as virtual Guantanamo to a virtual world environment such as Second Life to bring the news and issues to a more immersive environment. The idea being that this was a different means of raising awareness about such issues. Actually it’s probably better if I quote Nonny’s website about section in part :

The fundamental idea of immersive journalism is to allow the participant to actually enter a virtually recreated scenario representing the news story. The participant will be typically represented in the form of a digital avatar – an animated 3D digital representation of the participant, and see the world from the first-person perspective of that avatar.

This is further expanded upon :

Immersive journalism is a novel way to utilize gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories. Visual and audio primary source material from the physical world reinforce the concept that participants are experiencing a nonfiction story, with the video, sounds or photographs acting on the narrative.

There’s a far more in depth explanation in the link above but the basic idea is to tell a news story in a different environment. Nonny felt that one of the advantages of Second Life was being able to talk and collaborate with people all over the world in a virtual environment as well as being able to bring the news story to people all over the world too. Nonny also feels that in some ways Second Life was ahead of its time.

However there was a downside and that’s in relation to an old bugbear of mine. Virtual Guantanamo is no longer in Second Life and one of the main reasons for that is because …. The Tier Is Too Damn High! I’m not making this up. The expense of land in Second Life stifles development of projects such as this. However Nonny wasn’t put off from using virtual worlds by this and moved on to Unity to build immersive journalism and in doing so highlighted another issue regarding Second Life. Via Unity people can enter the immersive environment without downloading a client, they can enter via the web. This has long been considered a weakness of Second Life, although personally I don’t think it’s a major one, it is an issue that means that people who just want to casually pop in to view something are thwarted somewhat.

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March 14, 2014

Second Life Grid Experiences Largest Week On Week Growth Since 17th June 2012

Over a fortnight ago Tyche “Statto” Shepherd reported that the Second Life grid had experienced net growth of 14 regions, 15 for private regions, with Linden Lab dropping a region. This was the first net growth on the grid since March 31st 2013.

A week later the grid returned to losses, although it wasn’t an awful decline with the grid experiencing a net loss of 10 regions, 11 private regions and a Linden region appearing, possibly the missing one from the week before. However this did buck a trend of sorts, the grid growth of 31/03/13 was followed by a net loss of 16 regions, meaning the grid was smaller than it had been before the growth.

Prior to that, the grid had last grown on 24th June 2012, this is an important date. That week the grid grew by 30 regions, which was the third consecutive week of growth. However the week after that, the grid shrunk by a whopping 237 regions, wiping out all of that three week growth, which in total stood at 149 regions. This is why people shouldn’t get too excited about signs of growth too quickly.

Last weekend, Tyche was busy, it should be remembered that Tyche is pretty much a one woman band, she does have assistance from her survey bot, but a survey bot can only do so much. Therefore there has been no report from Tyche on the scores on the doors last weekend. However there is a backup plan, it comes in the shape and form of Tyche’s fantastic website : http://gridsurvey.com/

There we can see the scores on the doors for last weekend. The total number of Main Grid regions on March 9th was 26,176 ( 19,193 private estates & 6,983 Linden owned). This meant a net rise of 41 regions, all of them amongst private regions, there was no change in Linden owned regions. This is the largest single week rise since the 17th June 2012, although it should be noted the grid has only showed week on week growth four times since then, with last week being the fourth.

Continue reading “Second Life Grid Experiences Largest Week On Week Growth Since 17th June 2012”