Virtual Worlds – Page 5

February 22, 2014

Ebbe Linden Needs To ….

One of the things about being a blogger is finding something to write. A lot of the time a blogger finds the material to base their post on elsewhere, … actually this happens a lot. This post will unashamedly use material from someone else. The reasons for this are because the material is cutting, funny and relevant. I’m heading off to Twitter for this.

There’s a lot of advice going around on what Ebbe Linden needs to do to make Second Life awesome. Both SLUniverse and the official Second Life forums have threads full of advice. However one brave soul has been collecting this advice from Twitter users, adding their own, putting their tongue firmly in their cheek and creating a Twitter account of @EbbeNeedsTo.

Now some of these are funny, some of them may not tickle your fancy, you may found the whole thing a bit silly. The first thing to say is that you should ensure that you have your sense of humour turned on if you read that Twitter feed because some of the posts may be about one of your important issues or pet favourites.

For example:

Bring back Versu! Because… um… okay, you got me on this one. (What the hell is Versu, anyway?)

— Ebbe Linden Needs To (@EbbeNeedsTo) February 21, 2014

I mean come on, Versu is a brilliant project … that Linden Lab decided to ditch because they don’t think it’s so brilliant and they have a lot more information about it than me! Pah, but hey I can take it, healthy disagreement is good. I mean it could be worse, the account could be poking fun at SLUniverse, which is a site I think has a lot of good information on … oh wait …

Join SL Universe! Because nothing works better than following the advice of hundreds of jaded ex-customers who will never come back!

— Ebbe Linden Needs To (@EbbeNeedsTo) February 21, 2014

Noooooo! However this poking fun at suggestions and ideas is actually quite brilliant in so much as it brings issues to light and also brings to light the fact that we don’t all agree. Healthy disagreement is good. There are many more issues raised, far too many for me to post about here, but I will cover some more.

Continue reading “Ebbe Linden Needs To ….”

February 12, 2014

Enter Sandbox – Take My Hand, We’re Off To Never Never Land

It seems very likely that the freedom people have to create local regions or islands within Second Life with different forms of governance will result in many different utopian ‘experiments’. This is something that will be fascinating to watch, and may even inform decisions about the real world.

Philip Rosedale 13th April 2006 – INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP ROSEDALE, SECOND LIFE

In my opinion the solution is focusing a lot more on letting players make and be content for each other. Battlegrounds are an excellent example of an Evergreen style of content where it’s the players themselves that actually create the content. Auction houses are another example. So are things like storytelling tools in SWG.. or the brilliant music system in LOTRO. Building systems into the games that let the players interact with each other in new and unique ways gives us the ability to watch as the players do stuff we never anticipated. We’ll see a lot more creativity in action if the players are at the center of it. Imagine an MMORPG of a massive city.. and the Rogue’s guild is entirely run by players. Where the city has an entire political system that is populated by players who were elected by the playerbase.

John Smedley 11th February 2014 – The Sandbox MMO

I’ve opened with the above quotes to demonstrate firstly that eight years is not as long in technology circles as many think. Secondly it’s to emphasise that sandbox concepts are spreading and are going to create virtual worlds galore. John Smedley is the president of Sony Online Entertainment and in the blog post I’ve linked, makes excellent points about the power and potential of a sandbox MMO. Sony Online Entertainment are really starting to impress me lately, Everquest Next Landmark will allow user created content.

They are also dipping their toes into the water of allowing players to sell content. They are bringing together some of most wonderful concepts of Second Life in a more controlled environment, but they also recognise the beauty of such an environment.

So why is it that when we see talk of sandboxes and user generated content, the media shy away from talking of the ultimate sandbox that Second Life is? Why is it left to people such as Draxtor Despres to highlight the many wonderful use cases of Second Life via The Drax Files? Part of the problem of course is the mainstream media who don’t want to talk about the brilliant sandbox that Second Life is when they can create seedy headlines instead. This is why people don’t realise there are Orcs in Second Life!

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February 8, 2014

One Small Step For An Avatar, One Giant Leap For Virtual Worlds, One Black Hole Still Exists

On the 10th October 2007 the Reuters news agency in Second Life published a news story : IBM, Linden Lab seek open borders for virtual worlds.

IBM and Linden Lab said on Tuesday they will work on ways to let people use a single online persona in different online services.

Interoperability is emerging as a key goal of the nascent virtual world industry, which attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment on the hopes that video-game graphics and rich 3-D environments will supplant flat Web pages.

The idea was that you’d be able to create an avatar in one virtual world and take that avatar to other virtual worlds. This was an extremely interesting development. There’s a quote in that article from then Vice President of business at Linden Lab, Ginsu Yoon:

“When you talk about avatars going in and out of virtual worlds, we truly believe that expands the market …..It’s not a situation where there is a fixed pie and everyone is fighting for slices. It’s really key to making the market bigger.”

So Linden Lab were interested and within a year, further exciting developments would be unveiled. On the 8th July 2008 … I think .. American dates are arse about face, yes I’m sure they mean 8th July 2008, anyway on this date, Hamilton Linden revealed that a major breakthrough had been achieved in Virtual Worlds :

This is a historic day for Second Life, and for virtual worlds in general. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another. It’s an important first step toward enabling avatars to pass freely between virtual worlds, something we’ve been working toward publicly since the formation of the Architecture Working Group in September 2007. These are still early days, however, so amid all the excitement, we thought it would be helpful to clarify exactly what we’ve done — and what still lies ahead.

There was even a video, directed by Torley. The existence of the video of course led to accusations that the whole thing was faked, that the OpenSim grid landing never really happened and people pointed out that a flag was waving when it should not have been as there is no air in the OpenSim atmosphere. Others suggested that there should have been a crater or at least some imprints from the landing from one distant virtual world to another. However I disagree with the conspiracy theorists, this really happened and here’s the video to prove it:

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January 24, 2014January 25, 2014

Another One Bites The Dust – Cloud Party To Close February 21st

In a not that surprising announcement, Sam Thompson has announced that Cloud Party will close on February 21st. I say not that surprisng because Cloud Party users had been commenting on the lack of updates during December, prompting Sam Thompson to say on the forums:

We see you’ve noticed how quiet we are. Things always seem to slow down around here this time of year, and this year is no exception. We’re going to pick it up a bit on the bug front over the next couple of weeks and make sure we are catching those. Be sure to use the in-world bug report feature, we try to follow the forums but sometimes bugs reported on the forums slip through the cracks.

Right now we are having another time of introspection while we figure out where we want to go next with Cloud Party. We will be talking with everyone more before the holiday break, so please be patient with us. Hope you are having a great holiday season so far!

Cloud Party had some wonderful concepts, some excellent building tools and being browser based meant that people didn’t have to fuddle around with a client. However they couldn’t quite gain enough traction to make an identity of their own for enough people to embrace the product in my view. Content creators were also shy of investing too much there as cashing out proved problematic due to new financial regulations.

The blog post says:

We’re excited to announce that the time has come for the Cloud Party team to start our next adventure. We are joining Yahoo! The last two years have been an incredible experience for everyone here. We’ve been continually amazed by your creativity and the worlds you’ve built and shared with us.

Cloud Party will continue to run until February 21, 2014. We want to support our community during this transition. In the interest of preserving your extraordinary Cloud Party creations, we’ve added export tools and written this guide to help you export your content. If you have any questions, please contact support.

We are privileged to have had so many wonderful users share ideas and creations. We are excited to bring our vision and experience to a team that is as passionate about games as we are. Thank you all for sharing in this journey with us, and we hope you stick around for what’s next!

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I’ll stick around to see what they do with Yahoo! considering the steaming mess they’ve made of Flickr since May 2013, Yahoo! are not a company I have great faith in, but I will give anyone a fair chance and it may be that Yahoo! with the Cloud Party team do come up with something useful.

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