Ciaran Laval

June 17, 2014

Linden Lab Announce That Project Shining Is Complete

One of the best things to happen to Second Life since Ebbe Altberg became CEO is the return of the blog being used as a tool to impart useful information. Some of the information may not be everyone’s cup of tea but Linden Lab are now talking about their core product and it’s such a refreshing change from the sound of near silence that preceded this period.

A case in point is the announcement that Project Shining is now complete. Now Project Shining has been talked of before, so it’s not as if Linden Lab took a vow of complete silence, but these days Linden Lab are talking a lot more, which keeps these projects in the spotlight. Project Shining has been a deep project, and back in 2012 was explained as thus :

Somewhere below the regolith in the Linden Lab secret lunar base, some of the Lab’s top minds have been tackling performance issues in Second Life. The areas of focus range from infrastructure improvements to server-side texture compositing to object caching.

This year, Linden Lab is making the single largest capital investment in new server hardware upgrades in the history of the company. This new hardware will give residents better performance and more reliability. Additionally, we are converting from three co-locations to two co-locations. This will significantly reduce our inter-co-location latency and further enhance simulator performance.

The Shining project is the name given to a recent Lab effort to identify and measure delays and other problems with streaming avatars and objects and to propose and implement solutions. During the Shining project, several small improvements have been identified and deployed. The next small improvement from Shining to be deployed will be pre-rendering the starter Avatars to improve the new resident experience.

As a result of the Shining investigation, the project has been split into three larger performance projects: Project Sunshine, Object Caching, and HTTP Library.

All together, the hardware upgrades and the Shining projects should improve avatar and object streaming speeds significantly. Depending on your unique situation, your mileage will vary.

So investment in hardware, technology improvements, new rendering techniques and the implementation of AISV3, which is aimed at improving how back-end processing of inventory items works, are now all live.

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June 14, 2014

Kitely Replace Metered Worlds With Premium Worlds For Premium Members Only

Kitely recently announced that they will be removing metered worlds and introducing premium worlds. The change is explained in the blog post :

The change that we’re announcing today is that from now on only users with a Premium Account will be able to create Premium Worlds. That’s the reason that we renamed them (from “Metered Worlds”): to emphasize that having Premium Worlds is a benefit that is reserved for users with Premium Accounts.

Despite this change, there are still ways that users with a Regular Account can end up with a Premium World. E.g., if they created the world while they had a Premium Account, but later they downgraded to a Regular Account. In such cases we don’t delete the worlds: they remain in the users’ accounts. However, only users with a Premium Account will be able to visit them: Regular Account and Hypergrid users will be prevented from visiting a Premium World that belongs to a user with a Regular Account. Note that this includes the world manager herself.

However these Premium Worlds remain much the same as the old metered worlds in other regards, if non-premium or Hypergrid visitors choose to visit your Premium World, a 1KC (Kitely Credit) per minute fee is billed to the Premium World owner. However other Premium account holders can visit another Premium World without extra charges.

Visitor costs in Kitely have always been problematic when such charges do not exist in Second Life. Originally, visitors had to pay these fees, then Kitely switched it so that region owners paid the fees. The problem with the fees for region owners is of course that costs can be unpredictable, so I’m not sure how attractive an option Premium Worlds will actually be or how attractive they were. Now if you are only allowing Premium members to visit your Premium worlds then they remain a bloody good option. As part of your USD$19.95 you can create up to five of these Premium Worlds without incurring any costs.

So what of worlds who do want Hypergrid and regular account visitors? Well you’re probably better off opting for a fixed world option. A starter world costs USD$14.95 a month and supports 10 concurrent users with no charges for visitors. For USD$49.95 a month you can have 1 or 4 worlds that each support 40 concurrent visitors with no extra charges. An advanced worlds costs USD$99.95 a month and comes with choices of 1,4,9, or 16 regions. All of these options will not incur visitors charges. For full details read the services page on the Kitely website.

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June 13, 2014

Drax Files Episode 2 Wins New Media Festival Best Machinima Award

The Drax Files : World Makers Episode 2 – 1920’s Berlin has won an award for best machinima at the New Media Film Festival in Los Angeles. Unfortunately Draxtor Despres couldn’t be there in person to pick up his award, which is a shame because we have no pictures of him schmoozing with the stars. There’s also no footage of Draxtor doing a video thank you, but this is a very good award.

The blurb for the festival tell us :

An International Festival based in Los Angeles, the New Media Film Festival celebrates the ever-changing world of new media. Declared “worth the entry fee” by MovieMaker Magazine and hailed for making “the cutting edge accessible” by Huffington Post, New Media Film Festival accepts new media entries across a variety of categories.

The jury includes reps from Pixar, Fox and The Caucus, among others. A total of $45,000 USD in awards will be presented at the 5th Annual New Media Film Festival.

Quite impressive praise and jury. However what of the episode itself? I reviewed it back in March 2013 and rather spookily I said the following :

I’ve mentioned before how good a medium this is for promoting Second Life and how it would be good if Linden Lab got in on the act. I’ve also pointed out that there are issues such as editorial impartiality for Linden Lab that Draxtor and others don’t face, so it’s trickier for Linden Lab but I hope they are taking note of the positive nature of these videos. They are at least aiding the promotion by blogging about it.

As Linden Lab now sponsor the production, it seems they were paying attention. They have also promised editorial impartiality will continue, I should have charged a consultancy fee!

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June 12, 2014

Share Your Favourite Virtual Cities With The Guardian

The Guardian is so famous for it’s typos that it has a nickname of The Grauniad, so much so that http://www.grauniad.co.uk redirects to The Guardian website. However, despite their support for The Liberal Democrats it remains a decent newspaper, more so probably for the left leaning types, but it’s a decent newspaper.

They have also long had an interest in technology and that has included Second Life. Back in 2006 Suart Jefferies and Victor Keegan were talking about their Second Life experiences. Victor Keegan’s experience would later turn a little sour as he got involved in a trademark case regarding use of “SLART” over Second Life art galleries.

However The Guardian has boldly continued to cover all sorts of virtual world issues and has now issued the following call :

we want to hear your favourite virtual places – from a beautiful view in GTA to that 20-million-strong SimCity megalopolis you’ve been building (or possibly destroying). What are the best game cities to live in? The worst? Perhaps you’ve designed one you think would be better than your own city?

Second Life users were quickly on the case using Guardian witness, which revolves around user generated content. 1920’s Berlin, New Babbage and Philomenaville have all made an appearance as favourite virtual cities.

Linden Lab have been tipped off about this by 1920’s Berlin owner Jo Yardley. Linden Lab have blogged about The Guardian call and in doing so, exemplified a degree of spotting a good marketing opportunity when they see one :

This is a great chance to share some amazing Second Life locations with The Guardian’s readers. Whether it’s a place you created personally, discovered (maybe through the Destination Guide?) and love, or just a spot you always find yourself returning to, the Second Life locations that ‘wow’ you are great ones to share to help show off Second Life to the uninitiated.

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June 11, 2014

Free SL11B Robot Avatars Available At Hairy Hippo Fun Land

Linden Lab have blogged about a new free gift for SL11B, explaining that it’s a limited edition fitted mesh avatar and therefore you need a viewer compliant with fitted mesh to really utilise said gift. Now you have a choice of where to get the avatar from, you can be boring and get it from The Marketplace or you can be a bit more adventurous and go to the more amusingly named inworld location of Hairy Hippo Fun Land!

There are many advantages of going to the inworld location, you get cake, teddy bears, meet people and try and find a spot to rez your boxed fitted mesh avatar. I actually teleported to a sandbox and TP’d back. However once you are in your avatar please be aware that you may well be expected to follow Asimov’s three laws of robotics, especially the second law!

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

I discovered that people expect law 2 to be observed whilst I was exploring Hairy Hippo Fun Land and someone shouted to me “Oi, oi you, oi, Robot man, where did you get that avatar?” Now being duty bound I led said person to the vending machine that dispenses the avatars and explained to them that they have to keep clicking until the hover text shows Robot Avatar instead of teddy bear, then I ran away, I didn’t see any law of robotics forbidding that sort of action.

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