Opensim – Page 3 – Ciaran Laval

June 10, 2015

Visit Goatswood And Venexia In Second Life Before They Close Their Doors

I was reading Inara Pey’s blog recently when I noticed an article entitled : The passing of places in Second Life. The post deals with the sad news that two absolutely stunning roleplay locations in Second Life are going to shortly disappear. The Regions of Goatswood and Venexia are going to sail off the side of the Second Life in the next ten days or so. I’d advise people to go visit quickly and take snapshots if you want.

As Inara points out, both regions are very photogenic.

Inara’s post links to another blog post on the matter from Miya’s Journal, which also contains the text of the official announcement. The first part of the announcement reads :

ANNOUNCEMENT FROM BAAL AND KORA

It is with great regret that once again the ever present financial burden of the extreme costs of maintaining sims in second life means that we will be forced to close both Venexia and Goatswood.

These closures will take place on 13th June for Venexia and 19th June for Goatswood. Any rentals outstanding will of course be refunded. As Kos still has some active players we will try to keep it running for a while longer.

We would like to say a huge thank you to all those who have over the years contributed so much time and creativity towards the great success of these projects. They have provided us with many lasting memories, and we have derived immense enjoyment from seeing them brought to life by those who have spent time playing there.

We hope that you have enjoyed using as much as we have enjoyed creating them.

Baal and Kora, for those wondering, are Baal Zobel and Kora Zenovka, the duo behind these excellent builds.

Goatswood’s description in the destination guide states :

Delve deep into the dark past of Goatswood, a SGS Victorian role-play sim set in a mysterious English village. Goatswood features an incredibly intricate, detailed world, a unique story system, multiple character possibilities, Victorian social classes, structured role-play and magic systems, covens to join and plenty to explore and do. Will Goatswood be your escape, or is it what you’re escaping from?

Visiting as a visitor is pretty easy, and one that I found a pleasure. There’s information at the landing point and then they have this neat vendor which gives you a three day visitor’s pass, which you wear to indicate you’re OOC. Then you walk to a train, left click and as long as you have the OOC tag on, you will be teleported to the main sim. The three day pass is free by the way and can be renewed when the three days have expired.

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March 16, 2015

Don’t Get Twitchy, Look Forward To Virtual Worlds Best Practices In Education Instead

Iris Ophelia has received a reply from Twitch regarding whether streaming of Second Life via their service is allowed : Update: Twitch Responds With Their Stance on Streaming Second Life. The long and short of it is, that Second Life streaming is indeed prohibited :

Second Life is not permitted for streaming and those accounts reported for doing so will be suspended. Content in this game is unrated and often sexually explicity, which is content we do not allow on our services. We also do not permit Adults-Only rated games and games where nudity is the core focus, feature, or goal.

Please read our Rules of Conduct regarding sexually explicit acts or content for more information:

http://www.twitch.tv/user/legal?page=rules-of-conduct

I could write a long rambling post about this, or point out that Grand Theft Auto, an 18 rated game, is happily streamed. However I’d rather just point people in the direction of The Drax Files : World Makers on YouTube, which is certainly not a series that exemplifies nudity being the core focus, feature or goal.

Another virtual world event that doesn’t have nudity as the core focus, feature or goal is Virtual Worlds Best Practices In Education, which starts on Wednesday of this week and it’s a far more important topic. This is the 8th annual event and here’s a brief explanation of what it’s all about :

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education is a global grass-roots community event focusing on education in immersive virtual environments. This open conference is organized by educators, for educators, to provide an opportunity to showcase the learning that takes place in this community of practice. All educators are encouraged to present, attend and take part in this discussion of collaborative deeper learning and co-presence in virtual worlds and games.

The Opening Keynote speech will be from Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg in Second Life, however this conference does go beyond Second Life, other featured speakers include :

Pam Broviak – Manages the Public Works Group, an online resource offering information related to public works, government, and social media.

Gord Holden – Recipient of the Virtual Education Journal’s Reader’s Choice Award as the Edovator of 2014.

Jeroen Frans – One of the three Founders of the Vesuvius Group, LLC, and functions as Executive Director and Virtual World Technology Specialist.

Sensuous Maximus – Co-founder of the renowned Builders Brewery within Second Life.

Susan Toth-Cohen – Professor and director of the post-professional clinical doctorate in occupational therapy at Thomas Jefferson University.

John Fillwalk – Serves as the senior director of the Hybrid Design Technologies initiative [HDT] and as the director of the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts [IDIA Lab} at Ball State University.

Jay Jay Jegathesan – Holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Hons) from the University of Western Australia (UWA), majoring in management and marketing.

For more detailed biographies about these speakers go here : http://vwbpe.org/conference/vwbpe-2015-keynotes-and-featured-speakers

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February 21, 2015February 22, 2015

Talking To Lani Global About OpenSim SciFi At The Second Life SciFi Convention

OpenSim SciFi may seem like an odd fit at the Second Life Science Fiction Convention, indeed your first thought may well be “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.” However you would be wrong because in a similar fashion to storytellers, SciFi spread across OpenSim and Second Life with the communities working together even if the technologies don’t. I caught up with Lani Global to chat about OpenSim SciFi.

First things first, I had to make sure that Lani wasn’t an evil sith Lord or lady, she frowned and then replied :

“I doubt that the OpenSim universe has been conquered as an empire yet, but there are many trying!”

However more importantly, how popular is SciFi in OpenSim, this was a question that received a warmer reply :

“Sci Fi is probably one of the most popular themes in OpenSim.” Lani told me, she also told me that she has her own Hypergrid enabled OpenSim location “My main region called “Lani” has been enabled for HyperGrid since 2010. It gets about 15,000 unique visitors per year, and about 20% of them are via HyperGrid.”

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January 8, 2015

The Virtual Reality Battle For Standards Is Coming

There’s a lot of excitement around about the future of Virtual Reality (VR from now on). There are a lot of gadgets, devices and potential. However there’s also going to be the inevitable battle to win the war on standards and protocols.

We’ve been here before in many ways, Blu-Ray v HD-DVD. Those of us who are a bit longer in the tooth can remember VHS v Betamax. There will be lots of other examples. Arguments will always rage about which format was the better one and why the better one doesn’t always win, but generally one format wins and the same surely has to be true for VR.

Initially we’ll probably find experiences optimised for the Oculus Rift, or optimised for a rival headset. Eventually, for the sake of consumers, that optimisation for a brand will need to be replaced by optimisation for a standard. For example consumers won’t want a headset for Second Life, a headset for Linden Lab’s next gen Virtual World, a headset for OpenSim, a headset for a game or MMO and so forth. Consumers will want a choice of headsets that work pretty much across the board. Obviously some headsets will be better than others but they should all work to a set of standards and protocols that mean software developers optimise their product for those standards and protocols.

At CES 2014 the BBC reported that Valve were making steps in this direction :

Valve designer Brian Coomer says the company is “days away” from releasing a VR software development kit that will give game makers a standard way to provide an interface for VR controllers.

I’m not quite sure what happened there because I haven’t heard much about this since. However at CES2015 noises are being made in this direction by Razer with their Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) Hacker Dev Kit.

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December 31, 2014

2014 Reviewed All In One Post

If you’re read my other two posts reviewing then there’s nothing new here in this one, it’s just a merging of the two posts to make it easier for future reference. This means it will be a long post, with pictures, videos and probably some errors.

January

January started with a look back to 2013 and the number of private region losses. The scores on the door from Tyche Shepherd displayed a slow down on the number of regions leaving the Second Life grid, something that would continue during 2014.

2012 Net Private Region Losess – 2865 (12.0%)
2013 Net Private Region Losses – 1719 (8.2%)

The virtual world of Kitely moved to a different pricing model which largely did away with the pay by the minute options as these had not been popular.

Blackened Mirror poster should be here — The Blackened Mirror Poster

Season 2 of The Blackened Mirror was taking a mid-season break but would return by the end of January. The show was recorded in Second Life.

Linden Lab were Raising The Roof : The HTTP Project. This project, which had started in 2012 was aimed at improving HTTP communications to improve the end user experience. Linden Lab would continue working on improvements during the year.

Second Life users were getting frustrated by tax and account information requests from Linden Lab. They would continue to be frustrated by these requests throughout the year despite Linden Lab improving their communications and information on these issues.

Second Life got a mention in the comedy show, 2 Broke Girls.

Then came the storm to warm up many a chilly January evening, Cloud Party announced that they would be closing their virtual doors on February 21st.

This was quickly followed by even more news to warm up January, Aston Villa fan and Linden Lab CEO, Rod Humble, was leaving Linden Lab. This created a Twitter storm.

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