Ciaran Laval

April 7, 2017

Linden Lab Roll Out Improved Region Capacity In Second Life

On Tuesday Linden Lab announced : Improved Region Capacity and Access. This involves a region now being able to support more avatars and the headline grabbing figures are :

The default limit on the number of avatars in each region type is increased

Full Regions by 10% (100 to 110)
Homesteads by 25% (20 to 25)
Open Spaces by 20% (10 to 12)

The devil however is in the detail, the extra spaces are reserved for Premium Members only, as the blog post explains :

This new bonus capacity is, however, available for entry purposes only to Premium users – for Basic users the occupancy limits remain the same. For example, when a Full Region with a limit of 110 users has 105 users in it, Basic members will be unable to enter – they will see the region as full – but 5 more Premium users will still be able to enter.

The interesting aspect here is that there has long been rumour, unconfirmed rumours and suggestion that Premium Members would get priority when the grid was getting full, now Linden Lab have actually implemented a solution that does this and personally I think this is a good idea, with an exception that I will get to later.

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April 7, 2017

Still Time To Fill The Cauldron

Filling The Cauldron, a fundraiser to help Second Life creator Elicio Ember and his family is still very much running, indeed it runs until April 9th, so there’s still plenty of time to visit.

The event has featured people whom I’m familiar with from Fantasy Faire, such as Sonya Marmurek and Caitlin Tobias who are amongst the artists mentioned in a Meet The Artists blog post :

Filling the Cauldron features eight art displays in the main event space, located next to the Welcome Area. The art of display comes from a mix of Invited and Guest Artists, and has a focus on Elicio Ember’s creations.

Our Invited Artists are Alisaundra Andel, the official Fantasy Faire photographer; Sonya Marmenuk, official Fantasy Faire webmistress and talented photographer and Caitlin Tobias, official fantasy faire blogger and photographer. Our Guest Artists are Ursula Floresby, Deoridhe Quandry and John Brianna, all of whom responded to our invitation to artists to display their art at Filling the Cauldron, and they are joined by Vecchio Barbosa and myself.

You can read more about the artists in that blog post.

There’s also a blog post about the marketplace at the event, this mentions my chief elf!

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March 31, 2017

Filling The Cauldron – A Fundraiser For Elicio Ember And His Family

Most of the words in this post are brought to you via a press release for Filling The Cauldron, a fundraiser for Second Life creator Elicio Ember and his family at a time of great distress for them, which will be explained in those words.

Inara Pey and Saffia Widdershins are very much involved but I would also like to thank everyone who has helped, who will help, who are creating sparing their time and donating funds for this event. The rest of this post is from the press release.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DATE: March 29th, 2017

CONTACTS: Inara Pey (inara.pey@gmail.com)
Saffia Widdershins (saffia.widdershins@gmail.com)

WEBSITE: https://cauldronweb.wordpress.com/

FILLING THE CAULDRON: ARTISTS, MUSICIANS, AND CREATORS
COME TOGETHER TO SUPPORT ONE OF THEIR OWN

Residents are familiar with the large scale fundraising activities on the Second Life Grid: mustering a world-wide volunteer base on an economic virtual platform to raise thousands of dollars for such causes as the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life, Live and Learn in Kenya’s “Feed a Smile,” Creations Park’s work to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. Hundreds of volunteers donate time, talent, and treasure to make these virtual activities have a real world impact.

Every now and again the opportunity comes along for such efforts to be personal. Filling the Cauldron – Saturday April 1st through Sunday, April 9th – is such an opportunity.

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March 31, 2017

Draxtor Despres To Talk At VWBPE Conference On April 1st.

Draxtor Despres (AKA Bernhard Drax), of The Drax Files : World Makers fame, is scheduled to speak at Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education on Saturday April 1st at 3.00pm SLT.

Draxtor’s discussion is entitled : “Will VR Matter in Education? Lessons Learned from a Second Life Documentarian’s 10 Year Life“.

Draxtor’s talk is part of the Above The Book sessions at this year’s conference and from that link we can see that Draxtor has a very wide level of experience in media and virtual world creativity.

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March 31, 2017

High Fidelity Partner With Limitless To Bring Interactive NPCs To VR

High Fidelity have announced that they have partnered with Limitless to bring Interactive NPCs to the High Fidelity Virtual Reality platform.

First things first, you may be wondering who or what Limitless are. Limitless have been making headlines for being a content creation platform for creating animated characters in VR.

Now they are making headlines for creating a toolset that allows people to create their own interactive VR creators, as Charles Singletary reports over at UploadVR in a chat with Limitless CEO and Founder Tom Sanocki.

I particularly like the view that Tom Sanocki takes regarding putting the perspective of the creator at the heart of creating an interactive experience :

“This means we always have something that is usable, simple, and shippable,” he says.”Our path to improving it always focuses on the needs of the storyteller, not the engineer,” he says.

I’m a huge fan of storytelling and Limitless aim to bring creation of artificial intelligence in VR to storytellers and creators, rather than those storytellers and creators also having to be experts in AI.

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