Ciaran Laval

April 12, 2013

Tier Is Still Too Damn High

I haven’t sold land in Second Life for quite a while. I purchased land many moons ago, when you could pay 15,000 Linden Dollars for a bog standard 1024m parcel. Those days are long gone and I knew that the land market had crashed.

So this week I looked at my bills, looked at the return I’m getting from Second Life and decided it mght be time to tier down. I’m exasperated that Linden Lab seem to have made no obvious attempts to address the tier issue, which remains too damn high. I know I know, cutting tier would be economic suicide right now, it’s better to slowly lose income than cut income too quickly and risk everything, yadda yadda yadda, but Linden Lab need to realise that their pricing model is outdated, that their options, are outdated. There aren’t enough payment options.

By the same token, my inworld business models are outdated, I haven’t moved enough with the times, the fact that my business models are no longer working is my fault, not Linden Lab’s. I mean sure, it’s easy to say they should lower tier, but they haven’t, so it’s up to me to do something about that in terms of moving on to a new business or pulling out. I’m currently in the middle mode of deciding it’s time to cut back. My decision to cut back is long overdue, especially as Linden Lab won’t budge on the tier issue, but ultimately, it’s my fault that my Second Life business isn’t doing as well as it once was.

So anyway, I decided to cut some parcels and test the water with selling some, rather than flat out abandoning, as I have tier capacity to hold parcels, it seems silly to abandon without trying t0 sell. However, I didn’t realise how flat the land market currently is. One parcel I cut, is admittedly rubbish, so I decided to sell this 512m parcel for L$120, it isn’t selling! Goodness knows what price the land bots kick in, although I will have time to test this.

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April 11, 2013April 11, 2013

Official Music And Film Streams Aren’t Quite Ready For Virtual World Deals

The Linden Dollar is in many ways ahead of its time, it’s a micro transaction medium that allows people in Second Life to purchase goods and services without having to signup to a new provider everytime they want new goods and services and of course those micro transactions mean people can spend pennies electronically, something the wider Internet is crying out for, particularly in the newspaper industry.

However due to its nature of being a license to use, rather than a real currency, it hasn’t gained the traction it could. Which brings me to broadcasting. We have in Second Life, Second Life broadcasters. People will setup their own shoutcast stream, play music, provide televisions that show inworld shows, but why don’t we have film direct from a film company or music from an authorised radio station? There’s scope here for companies to not only delve into new areas but certainly in terms of film, there’s opportunity for those companies to bring machinima to an audience outside Second Life.

Fandor are a company whom broadcast films, they have a subscription based model but unlike some of the larger companies, they look for films the mainstream companies won’t, from their blurb:

“At Fandor we believe our job is to connect amazing films with audiences who will love them. Most of our films fall outside mainstream channels and we love that, because there are plenty of places to watch those films online. We specialize in shorts, independents, film festivals favorites, classics and international films.”

Many Machinima films are shorts and they most certainly fall outside mainstream channels. Fandor are also San Frnacisco based and have at some point, maybe still at this point, employed an ex Linden. There’s potential here but I suspect the mechanics aren’t quite right for them to make a deal with Linden Lab to allow their films to be shown in Second Life, although getting films made in Second Life to Fandor may be less of a challenge, it might just not appeal. However going forward I think this is the sort of strategic alliance that does have potential.

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April 10, 2013

The Hunt For Missing Prims And Lindens

There’s something afoot and it involves missing prims! Inara Pey has reported the issue in her update on Interest List and object caching but the problem seems to be spreading and the location of choice to spot the missing prims appears to be Tempura Island, as exemplified in a thread on the forums.

Basically what happens is that some prims aren’t rendering, you’ll see something like this:

If you look closely there’s a girl hanging in the air where there should be a prim, well the prim is there, hence why she looks like she’s floating, she’s not. Now if you look even more closely there’s a Linden in the foreground trying to figure out what’s going on, you get bonus points for spotting a Linden in the wild these days.

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April 9, 2013

Materials Viewer May Bring New Land Impact Accounting System

Yesterday Linden Lab announced that the materials project viewer is now available. This is something that will add some oomph to textures in Second Life and has the added advantage of meaning that people can do things with textures that they may otherwise be tempted to do with Mesh.

Now this is the sort of thing that you need to see for yourself to understand why it adds oomph. There’s a healthy discussion over at SLUniverse where a post from Imnotgoing Sideways gives an idea of what can be achieved with this viewer. Another post from Laverne Unit has a YouTube video comparing two chairs, one with the new materials system applied and the other without, you may need to watch the video at a higher resolution to see the benefits of the new system, but they are there in that video.

There’s also a post from Seven Paragorn demonstrating toadstools, with and without materials applied. In another post Orc posts an animated gif of a Damien Fate dress which exemplifies the system in action too.

The project viewer is available for download and you can get it from here. There are also release notes, which you can read here. The release notes are well worth reading because this is a project viewer, it has bugs, it’s an alpha release and you should most definitely not play around with anything you value whilst playing about with materials. I recommend you only play around with new items you don’t mind losing. The release notes also point you to the material data page, which is also important to understand.

I will emphasise again, do not try this with anything you value, indeed after reading Qie Niangao’s post about the possibility of increasing Land Impact costs, it’s probably best to play with this in a sandbox. Indeed Qie’s post raises a very interesting issue.

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April 6, 2013

No Booze In General!

Last night, whilst reading the Second Life forums I noticed an advert for Stella Artois appear on the adsense adverts. This was quite a surreal moment as at the time I was drinking a can of Stella Artois! Now as it wasn’t my first, the mind goes into the realms of fantasy and imagines a Google Adsense solution based on my eating and drinking habits that Google detect upon a person … one day maybe, horrid thought but I’m sure they’d love to do that.

However far from the Stella Artois advert appearing because I was drinking it, the more likely explanation is that the Stella Artois advert appeared because there are a few miffed and bemused merchants having their items unlisted from the General rating category on The SL Marketplace because they promote cigarettes and alcohol.

There are a few threads on the forums that discuss this issue:

Alcohol & Tobacco Police On The Prowl?

Marking Everything Mature

SL’s Maturity Rating System

The thing to bear in mind is that alcohol and tobacco are not supposed to be listed in the general category and this is not a new rule. The listing guidelines cite as examples of moderate content:

Depictions of or references to alcohol or tobacco use.

So if your item has been moved to moderate when it used to be in General, then it’s a fair cop guv’nor, but that brings us to the next question, who is instigating the crackdown?

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