Onlive – Page 3 – Ciaran Laval

August 16, 2014

SL Go Viewer Improvements And Offer Of Paid Work For Viewer Developers

Inara Pey brings news of some improvements to the SL Go Viewer from OnLive. The improvements include SL share for Flickr and Twitter now working as well as a fix that means fitted mesh now works properly via the SL Go viewer. SL Share for Facebook should also work but Inara doesn’t have a Facebook account to test that with.

SL Go offers the potential for people using mobile devices to use Second Life as well as offering the opportunity for people running older hardware to get a better experience. This is because you run the Second Life viewer via Onlive’s hardware and therefore you can have higher graphics settings without bringing your machine or mobile device to its knees and feel like you’re walking through treacle. This of course comes at a cost, which is currently comes with the following options :

$9.95 (£6.95) per month for unlimited access. Starts with a 7 Day Free Trial.
Pay as you go for only $1.00 (£0.70) per hour.

I’m not associated with SL Go in any shape or form, nor am I on their list of bloggers, but I will say that this is not a bad deal at all for those who want to explore Second Life. The system does have some drawbacks, one of which Inara explains in her post :

There is still no capability to save snapshots locally. This isn’t surprising, given SL Go is a streamed service, rather than something running locally with access to the local hard / flash drive, and so is likely going to take a lot more banging on things before it works – if it can be made to work.

As I said earlier, you use SL Go via their hardware and therefore the local disk drive is going to be their hardware. This should not be insurmountable. There are security issues with allowing people access to the SL Go local hard drives, but with some care this could be worked around. Another option would be for a SL Go viewer only email texture option, although this would be rather clunky for end users, it would work.

Inara also posted an very interesting blog about the fitted mesh improvements as well as information regarding paid contract work for viewer developers : SL Go: viewer update fixes fitted mesh issue.

Continue reading “SL Go Viewer Improvements And Offer Of Paid Work For Viewer Developers”

April 3, 2014April 3, 2014

SL Go Updated Pricing Now Includes Unlimited Monthly Subscription

Linden Lab have blogged news of what may well be a very interesting move by Onlive in terms of their SL Go product aimed at mobile devices. The pricing changes include a reduced per hour pricing but more importantly, there’s a monthly subscription plan.

The update prices are :

Monthly unlimited usage subscription plan for $9.95US/£6.95UK. No commitment – cancel anytime
Reduced hourly rates – only $1US/£0.70UK per hour (the free 20-minute trial remains in effect)

However there’s more, when SL Go was initially launched it was only available to people living in Canada, United Kingdom or United States but now the product is available in 36 countries, including The Vatican City, I wonder if his holiness is popping in now and then. The full list of 36 countries :

Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lichtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, San Marino, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Vatican City.

These are really positive and brave moves from OnLive, when the product was first launched there was a lot of debate about hourly fees and what many perceived as a 1990’s pricing model. However Dennis Harper of Onlive did say to Draxtor Despres : “We need to study usage pattern and we may be able to in short order offer a subscription package! “

Well it seems they have indeed studied those usage patterns and decided that a subscription package can be offered.

Continue reading “SL Go Updated Pricing Now Includes Unlimited Monthly Subscription”

March 8, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 9 – SL Go

Not surprisingly, the latest edition of The Drax Files Radio Hour is mostly about OnLive SL Go. The show opens with Draxtor trying to order coffee…. it’s $2.50 and then Drax orders breakfast, after getting Marissa in the cafe or coffee shop to introduce the show. Marissa has never heard of Second Life but she does know about virtual worlds.

Now you may be feeling jaded by all the SL Go talk but I highly recommend you listen to this because Draxtor interviews Nate Barsetti. Now I hadn’t been paying attention to whom Nate was and listening to him I thought “This guy has done his homework, he knows what he’s talking about regarding Second Life“. Then I was made aware of the fact that Nate was once also known as Scout Linden.

Actually I need to pause here because the problem of a podcast is that people pronounce words funny. For example route should sound like root, it shouldn’t sound like rout! Then there’s beta, which should sound like beeta, rather than bayta! Fortunately nobody mentioned anything about a buoy, which should sound like boy. Ok where was I? Oh yes, Nate! The Nate interview is really interesting, he talks from, as I said, a viewpoint of someone who knows Second Life.

The thing is that because Nate knows Second Life, he knows about latency, he therefore knows that the way SL Go works will get away with a little bit of latency. The feedback on latency for SL Go has been good, people have reported scenes rez faster than they do on their own machine, it did for me. So you know, in this sense, the product is on to something.

Nate is also a Second Life resident and involved in some sort of roleplaying according to the interview, the bottom line is he knows his onions. I really enjoyed this part of show.

Drax follows this with an interview with Dennis Harper, a senior product manager at Onlive. Dennis has a long history of the gaming industry and has previously worked at companies such as Turbine, however he explains that he wasn’t familiar with Second Life when the project landed. However Dennis read a book, the title of which I can’t quite catch in the podcast. Dennis explored Second Life, as a beautiful female avatar … and found that people would give him free stuff!

Continue reading “The Drax Files Radio Hour Episode 9 – SL Go”

March 6, 2014March 6, 2014

SL Go – Feel The Technology And There May Be A Subscription Model After All

First of all, a public service announcement. Many of our dearly beloved bloggers were given equipment and an extended trial to test SL Go by Onlive. This means those bloggers can give a far more informed opinion on the technology than many of us. However please don’t take this to mean those bloggers have been paid, they haven’t. Providing people with equipment and extended free trials is perfectly normal and perfectly above board.

Some of these bloggers are being unfairly criticised over this and I say unfair because those bloggers have declared they were involved in the trial and in some cases provided with the equipment or even working as a consultant. That the bloggers are declaring this is positive, if they were hiding these facts I’d be highly critical of them, but they aren’t hiding these facts.

Obviously this means they have a different perspective on matters in some cases because they have had more time to play with the technology, but they have provided a hell of a lot of important information on this product. Having said that, I can declare I have been given nothing at all and have not been involved in the trial in any way, shape or form. Indeed my sources didn’t even tip me off about this or give me any inside information! My sources are currently being frowned at, a lot.

Now let’s take a look at the actual product. Actually first of all, let’s look at the blurb:

Enjoy Second Life at speeds over 50 FPS with a 512-meter draw distance. During each secure session, a powerful cloud-based server streams SL in full 3D to your mobile device in real time over any fast Internet connection.

Stay connected to your in-world friends and events. Manage your virtual business from anywhere you can get online. You’ll have access to the full Second Life Viewer interface, plus touch controls for navigation. Leave your desktop computer at home and let us do the heavy lifting.

Bold claims, can it deliver, well actually, yes it looks like it can. I’ve tried it for a few minutes on a Google Nexus 7 and for a few minutes on my desktop PC. Let’s just pause here and be a tad critical of the free trial, at twenty minutes long it is nowhere near long enough for people to appreciate this product and therefore want to pay for the service. Having said that, I would highly recommend people who are interested in how this works do engage with the free 20 minute trial, it will only cost you time. Oops, you have to be in the USA, Canada or the UK to try this unfortunately, but the trial, as brief as it is, is worth engaging with.

I’ve been impressed with the performance on both devices. On my desktop, I can set the graphics to a higher setting than my desktop PC suggests I should set them and I can walk around happily with those higher graphics settings.

I did experience a few glitches, yesterday the desktop client informed me I hadn’t configured my firewall for UDP, today it loaded fairly happily. I received a warning about my controller, which isn’t surprising as it’s a Nostromo N52 and I received a warning about low power settings, but it worked, I could login to Second Life.

Now this is where the short trial really is a pain point, it’s easier for me to play around with the desktop client because the controls are ones I’m familiar with. On my Nexus 7 they aren’t, but you feel rushed by the limited trial and so I felt the desktop version was the way to go.

Another glitch was that the text on the menus sometimes went blurry, I’m not sure why that was but as I’m sure some of you will have figured out, I don’t exactly have a state of the art PC!

Continue reading “SL Go – Feel The Technology And There May Be A Subscription Model After All”

March 6, 2014

Price Comparisons For SL Go Are Difficult, But Please Leave Coffee Out Of It

Often when people are debating costs of online services, such as MMO’s or SL Go, the coffee argument will be trotted out. On the face of it the coffee argument is a good one, the cost can be compared to buying a few cups of coffee a month, which is true. The problem with the coffee comparison is that coffee is a consumable product, with little investment opportunity. I mean you may get a coffee loyalty card which can earn you free coffee, but you know that each cup is going to be disposed of in one form or another.

People who spend time in MMO’s and virtual worlds such as Second Life are investing in their avatar, there are various different ways of doing this but people generally don’t think of this avatar investment as a disposable product. They see it as an ongoing cost in developing said avatar.

That avatar investment is extremely important for developers of MMO’s and virtual worlds, it’s the hook, it’s why people are prepared to keep logging on, there’s progression. This is why in MMO’s a hardcore mode where you lose everything if your character is killed is not the norm, some have it as an option, but it’s not the norm because if that were the norm, people would see their character as disposable, like coffee.

Coffee is not a good comparison, nor is Pizza or even a trip to the pictures. This of course leaves one in the awkward position of trying to find a good comparison. In terms of something like The Elder Scrolls Online, it’s other MMO’s, and there are plenty of them with different pricing structures.

In terms of SL Go, it’s a lot trickier because there’s nothing really like it. Lumiya is a mobile client for Second Life, but it doesn’t deliver its service in the same way as SL Go and it won’t provide the same levels of performance. However Lumiya will provide a means of logging into Second Life on a mobile device.

Continue reading “Price Comparisons For SL Go Are Difficult, But Please Leave Coffee Out Of It”