New SL feature; Place Pages

Tags

"second life", improvements, places pages

Linden Lab just announced that they are rolling out yet another feature for Second Life, one I’m very excited about and have been, in parts, suggesting for a while; Place Pages.

They basically give every region and parcel in Second Life a page on the Second Life website where you can find out more information about them.

It is a bit like the information page you see when you use search inworld before you teleport to that sim, but bigger & better.
And all you have to do to visit these pages is click ‘visit this location’ and the teleport window in SL opens.
No more visiting the, if I may say so, confusing map first.

To make such a page your parcel and/or region needs to have “Show in search” activated in the land setting.
Go to https://places.secondlife.com/places to see a list of all these pages and click “my places” to see a list of your sims that you can make a page for.
The rest is self-explanatory.

And rather exciting; you can use 360 degrees photos and even stream LIVE via youtube from inworld!

But it gets better.
Place pages right now is still in the Beta testing phase, so it will get better and how we are going to use these could influence what will happen next with them.
Linden Lab promises future improvements and features, such as an event calendar!

I’ve written before (click here to read) about making more use of ‘my-sl’ profiles and perhaps creating pages for groups in SL.
Finding a way to allow us to stop using Social Media for all these things and start using the official SL website more for this.
Giving us online events calendars for our sims is a huge step towards this.

I hope that in the future the Place Pages for communities will include perhaps also a forum or place where people can chat with each other, an online photo album (or widget that allows us to show our Flickr pictures there),  contact options that allow you to chat directly with admins and managers or at least send them a message, etc.

But above all; an events calendar.
Right now we have to send reminders, have a Facebook calendar, google calendar, etc.
I’d love to have a calendar for a sim that shows you right away ALL the events in that sim, region, all parcels in that region or just selected parcels in that region but that also gives you the option to subscribe to this calendar so you get IM’s when these events are about to begin.
And please, also the option for us to create recurring events so we don’t have to create a new calendar event for those daily or weekly events.

Can you think of more improvements and additions?
Let Linden Lab know, you can follow their forum post by clicking here and file a Jira about bugs or for your ideas and suggestions.

Either way, I’m getting busy making pages for all my parcels and sims!
Starting with this one for 1920s Berlin.

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Sansar Dollar introduced

Tags

currency, dollar, marketplace, sansar

Hot on the heels of the youtube video news a few websites have already published articles on this latest footage but also on Sansar in general.
It looks like Linden Lab played their cards right and kickstarted the publicity in advance of the announcement, making sure a few websites got their interviews ready.

These articles also included new screenshots and interesting news.

A website called Tom’s Hardware announced that Linden Lab introduced the Sansar Dollar today, the currency for Sansar.
Or the S$, I assume.
The creators who have been allowed to take part in the preview can start buying them now and use them to sell and buy things on the Sansar Marketplace.

In an interview Ebbe also says that they will continue to allow new users in throughout the first quarter of 2017.
Which probably means that the official opening in January was a bit too optimistic.

Ebbe also explains that they want to do things differently with Sansar, the hosting fees (tier) will be much lower and that Linden Lab will in stead try and make more money on the G.D.P.
So LL is changing from High property tax and almost no consumption tax in Second Life to lower property tax and higher consumption tax.
Ebbe has explained this before but some people still seem to think we’ll get high tier in Sansar.

You can read the entire article by clicking here, there are also new screenshots.

Sansar Youtube channel opens with impressive new video

Tags

channel, draxtor despres, loz hyde, sansar, youtube

Today the official Sansar youtube channel was officially opened with a brand new video made by Draxtor Despres.

The video shows Loz Hyde (of Meshworx fame) who was invited to join Sansar before its official opening and who has been working on a location he calls The Grand Hall.
And grand it is!

 

I’ve seen probably all the Sansar footage Linden Lab released, what was leaked here and there and all the screenshots I could find but to be honest, so far most of it didn’t look that different from what you could see in Second Life.

But with this video, for me at least, this all changes.
What we see is stunning.
The building is not new, not specifically made for Sansar, it also exists in Second Life
This means that we can actually go inworld to check it out and then compare it to what it looks like in Sansar.
You can find the building inworld by clicking here for a slurl.
I think it looks a lot better in Sansar, the light, the textures, the reflections, the effects, it is all absolutely amazing.
Of course much of that is thanks to the talents of Mr. Hyde, but you can see that the technology of Sansar is clearly superior to that of Second Life and pretty much any virtual world out there at the moment.

I’m the first to admit I’m a little behind on what is going on in the gaming world (the joys of owning a MacBook) but I would even say that the way Sansar looks in this video comes very close to the kind of big commercial games people are playing today.

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In short, for a first official Sansar video, they’ve done rather well and placed something online that is rather impressive.

Drax told me this is the first of a series of Sansar videos he’s making so watch this space.

You can see the video here;