And here it is, the official LL announcement regarding the prim allowance going up;
New Perk! Prim Limit Increase
Premium members are entitled to a Linden Home and can own parcels on the Mainland. Now, we’re raising the limit on the number of prims you can use in those spaces. This means you will have more prims and creative flexibility to decorate and customize your own space. Land impact (object) capacity on Mainland Regions will go from 15,000 to 22,500 – that’s a lot more building capacity!
In addition to this, we will further carry the prim limit increases to the private estate regions shortly. Keep your eye on our blogs for more information!
An episode of Designing Worlds comes out later this afternoon which talks more in-depth about this new perk. We’ll update this blog once it’s available.
I left out the other stuff about extras you get for becoming a premium member, make sure to read the full announcement by clicking here.
I can’t help thinking that by linking this news to the special premium member deal some people may wonder if the prim allowance will only go up for premium members.
Either way, this explains why you, poor islanders, living far away from the mothermainland, might still not have seen a change in your prim allowance.
Anyway, we’ll know soon.
Today at 2pm there shall be a special Designing Worlds broadcast possibly followed by another post by Linden Lab and Inara Pey blog.
Little bird has told me that there will be more interesting news there.
You can also try and be live at the Designing Worlds broadcast with Patch Linden, more about that can be read by clicking here.
I wanted to wait till this news was official but everybody inworld and on social media has been talking about this for days now so I thought I’d post what I know ahead of time.
Make sure to check back Thursday when Linden Lab makes their announcement.
Recently people have been noticing changes in the land in the prim capacity of their regions, some mainland regions suddenly had a region capacity of 22500 in stead of the regular 15000.
The islanders (owners of private regions far away from the mothermainland, adrift in the wild virtual seas) were getting worried because their capacity was not changing.
What was going on?
Designing Worlds also put this video teaser online;
News that will change your Second Life for ever…
What could this be?!
People everywhere were discussing the rumours and wondering what was going to happen.
On top of that Inara Pay posted a blog ahead of time by accident that seemed to confirm that indeed prim limits were going to rise all over the grid, not just mainland.
A forum post sharing screenshots of that blog has since been removed from the Second Life website.
Before you all get too excited, the information that was shared was not final yet.
As Inara explained;
PLEASE NOTE
The post referred to in this thread was a publishing error on my part, compounded by my failing to noticed that I’d hit PUBLISH rather than SAVE DRAFT,
To be clear: the article was being drafted with the intent to publish on Thursday, November 3rd, alongside an official post from Linden Lab. As such, all information within it was / is subject to change, and should not necessarily be taken as read.
The error in publishing was mine, and the article has been withdrawn whilst being completed / subject to final vetting from Linden Lab to ensure the information within it is correct.
My apologies for any inconvenience caused.
So, officially there is no confirmation yet and we probably won’t get one till Thursday.
Keep in mind that anything shared before that time may be subject to change, including this article.
Nevertheless, everything we’ve heard so far seems to suggest that indeed, prim limits are going up for everyone!
So, if, yes IF the stories are all true, the new prim limits will be as follows;
Full regions: Mainland: 22,500 Private: 20,000
Homesteads : 5,000
OpenSpaces: 1,000
This is huge news.
If this is the way things are indeed going to be, a lot of people are going to be extremely happy, including me!
For as long as I can remember we’ve had to deal with prim shortages, somehow there are never enough prims in the world to make my dreams come true the way I imagined them, and now I can at least get a little closer to how I envisioned things.
The streets of 1920s Berlin and Time Portal will become fuller with cars, rubbish on the streets, posters on the walls.
But if, yes again, IF, this story is true, I will also give all my tenants a few free prims.
The land impact increase probably has something to do with hard-and software improvements but perhaps also to get people interested in Mainland again and of course get more people to rent more land although I think this kind of improvement generally makes people happy who already have land and won’t be that tempting to people who don’t own land yet.
Because unless you own land the prim allowance is very difficult to imagine, 15000 seems like a lot, till you actually start rezzing stuff.
Anyway, go on, check your prim limit, if your region has already had its Tuesday rolling restart, your prim limit may have already changed.
Careful though, the amount is also calculated differently, I’ve heard that it now shows the capacity of the land owned in a region in stead of the overall region capacity.
If you don’t see a change, check again after the next wave of rolling restarts today and tomorrow.
Of course it is not nice for us Islanders to get a smaller increase than the mainlanders.
I’d love to know why this is.
After all, many of us left Mainland out of frustration with neighbours, lack of powers to deal with issues or the lag caused by the 324294 billion prims surrounding us.
I myself left because we had a griever we simply couldn’t get rid of and LL didn’t do much to help.
At the time LL support was much worse than it is today.
So I had to leave Mainland, it cost me a lot of money and work and recently we were given the chance to grandfather but this too cost a lot of money.
And now we get fewer extra prims than the mainlanders?
On the other hand, remembering the challenges of living there, I think the mainlanders deserve a little extra.
Nevertheless, I’m sure this difference will make a few people grumble.
For now I’m too happy with what I’ve been given to grumble myself, but I’m sure this topic will be revisited in due time.
Conclusion;
It looks like LL will announce Thursday that the prim allowances are going up everywhere.
But officially, till this announcement comes, everything you read and hear is speculation.
Remember, they may still find something that went wrong after the change on mainland and decide to postpone or alter the numbers.
Nevertheless, I’m putting virtual champagne on ice.
Ebbe showed the Wall Street Journal a short demonstration of Sansar at the WSJDLive conference.
In an apartment he moved a few items around, quite easily and with the use of a little Hand-held (virtual) device.
He also moved himself around by clicking a spot on the floor, we see an icon on the floor with two feet on them.
Going around a virtual world by clicking where to teleport is of course far from ideal but until we can get good and affordable omnidirectional treadmills that actually work well, this is a solution you can see in most virtual games, worlds, etc.
One of the presenters asked if he had any food in his apartment, unfortunately I have not yet been let in so he couldn’t even offer them a glass of schnapps.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Ebbe also mentioned that a few hundred users are now in Sansar, no I’m not one of them, I know, it is a scandal isn’t it?
How on earth do all those poor avatars manage surviving there without my schnapps?!
Well… it is my birthday but even though everyone at Linden Lab thinks I’m really cool and great (I supply them with virtual schnapps after all), this wonderful addition to the SL viewer being released today may have been a coincidence.
The ability to make 360 snapshots from within your viewer is now available for testing at the Project Viewer.
They are still working on it but they’ve added a few examples that already look pretty nice.
I think that this will eventually go beyond just a fun way to make pictures and I hope to see these 360 snapshots appear on marketplace, in the destination guide, etc.
Because they are a great way to sell something or show people what a sim has to offer.
You can read the full official announcement by clicking here.
Beau Hindman, a games writer and youtuber, recently visited the 1920s Berlin Project and decided to stream his exploration of our neighbourhood live.
It was fun to watch, Beau is very enthusiastic about Second Life and wants to show his viewers how wonderful our virtual world can be.
He has streamed visits to Second Life before (check out his playlist by clicking here) but of course when he came to Berlin us locals paid even more attention.
See him struggle with the idea of locked doors, peek through windows, bump into a few people, plan to rob our baker and above all, enjoy himself and be impressed with our little city.
yes we are back: i know you missed jo and drax and our guest this week [roblemvr]. what are we talking about except oc3 and google vr? well, perhaps the title is an indicator. enjoy [and keep in mi…
Recently 360 degrees screenshots and video shot within Second Life have been the talk of the day.
Last August the first 360 degrees video was shot inworld (in 1920s Berlin) by Electric Shepherd and and Draxtor Despres, using a camera rig build by Arduenn Schwartzman (read blog about it here).
And Illiastra Ascendent (nvzn Resident) (aka James Reichert) then worked on the 360 degrees photo making technology (see this blogpost).
Well it turns out that Linden Lab was impressed and realised the great potential for this technology because they are now adapting it into a SL viewer, including the stitching together of the images bit!
I think this is great, being able to share wonderful 360 pictures of your top location with other friends in SL but also with people who are not even familiar with our virtual world is a great tool.
I hope LL will also start using these pictures themselves, for instance in the Destination Guide but perhaps also in Marketplace.
It would be great to give people a 360 tour of the house you’re selling!
If you want to read more details and listen to Oz Linden’s talk about the subject, check out Inara Pey’s blog on the subject by clicking here.
Recently I spotted a lovely little animated picture on Loki Eliot‘s Twitter stream, one of those fun (and/or annoying) Gifs that you can find all over the internet.
He shared a link to the software he used to make them and now I’m making them myself all the time.
In a way they are moving screenshots, or short videos you can very easily shoot within Second Life.
We would of course love to make wonderful machinimas and show everyone with ultra graphics what our sims and our virtual world looks like, but alas, for this you need a pretty strong computer and it often involves setting up and running complicated and demanding software.
And right in the middle of a crowded events, our poor computers have to work hard enough already to simply make everything look half decent.
Anyway, this software is easy to figure out and works very well.
It is called Giphy and you can find it by clicking here.
Next time you’re in SL, activate Giphy, drag a window over your screen and click record.
Once done, edit it if need be, save it and upload it directly to the Giphy website.
Done!
I just love these little tiny films I can now make, but more importantly, they are such a great way to share your virtual adventures all over the internet.
I’ve been making a lot of them and people love seeing them, even friends and family who have never been in Second Life or don’t understand or even like it.
So I thought I’d go and share this nifty gadget and maybe you’ll like it as much as I do.
I look forward to seeing more and more animated Gifs from Second Life on Facebook, Twitter and even here on WordPress.
Last April, Ebbe Altberg (CEO of Linden Lab) spoke at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality convention.
The full video has finally been uploaded to Youtube.
And although Ebbe’s chat has been discussed plenty since then and has no real news, I thought I’d share it anyway, just in case.
