Group limit in Second Life raised to 60… if you’re a premium member

Tags

"second life", groups, improvements

As of immediately Linden Lab has raised the group limit for Second Life members with a premium account from 42 to 60!

A gift that is actually useful and will be welcomed by most premium members and may even entice a few people to become one.

Linden Lab announced this today in this blogpost.

I am one of those ‘power users’ Linden Lab speaks of and I’m very happy with this improvement.

For 1920s Berlin alone we have over a dozen groups!

Of course, if Linden Lab followed my advice we wouldn’t need this many groups.
In a previous blog post I suggested adding more functionality to groups, adding subgroups, more roles, selective group messaging, etc.

And as far as I know, the official Linden Lab viewer still does not allow you to turn certain group chats or notifications off, some other viewers do.
So having 60 groups and using the official viewer may mean you’ll get flooded by group chats and spam, even more than before.

Nevertheless, this is a good step forward and I hope Linden Lab gives us more gifts like these that make it actually interesting and worth our while to be premium members.

The SL Go interview; past, present and future of cloud streaming Second Life

Tags

"second life", cloud, sl go, SLGo, streaming

In todays ‘Drax Files Radio Hour’ we air an interview with Dennis Harper, Sr. Product Manager of SL Go.  The SL streaming service that recently announced it would not continue after Sony bought important patents from OnLive, making it impossible to continue the service.

In the interview Dennis talks about how SL Go came to be, the future he imagined for it a, how the SL Go community grew and how SL Go got a huge boost at the very last moment thanks to the inworld paying option.
I’d love to see Linden Lab put that in Second Life, allowing us to pay our tier and premium fee inworld!

About the sale Dennis says that Sony never intended to own or run the service, they were only interested in the intellectual property and patterns. Buying these meant Onlive simply had to stop in their tracks.

Onlive was put on the market because it was not profitable, but they were getting close to turning this around. Cloud steaming itself is a very good business but it just took a lot of investment, time and effort to get the customers they needed.
The long time yield over a customer was just not enough and as Dennis describes it; Onlive just ran out of runway and money.

Onlive was ahead of its time, like Second Life once was.
Dennis feels that they could have made it an incredibly viable business if they had had another year or two. Cloud gaming is the future. Onlive had been looking for a buyer for some time, several parties were interested and some of them did want to take over and run the service, but in the end they decided to sell to Sony.

Linden Lab did show some interest in SL Go and did come to discuss the service, but I personally don’t think they actually made an offer.
Dennis said that Linden Lab and OnLive had some discussions on closer business partnerships, but nothing solid ever came from it.  Ultimately, OnLive might not have been the best solution for Linden Lab, as Second Life represents hundreds of thousands of potential users.  OnLive has a great service, but that number of users may have swamped them.  However, OnLive was actively working on new technology that would allow for this volume of users.  If given time, he is confident that OnLive would have solved that problem.

But the end of SL Go does not have to mean the end of streaming Second Life.
I’ve written before about how I felt LL should offer SL Go as a free or cheap service for premium members and it seems they actually did look into this.

One option could be the service Amazon hosts called ‘Amazon Appstream’, something I never heard of before till I read about it on Inara Pey’s blog.
Amazon has lots and lots of servers all over the world that are far from being really pushed to their limit. Most of the time they even stand idle. Linden Lab could perhaps rent those servers. It is at least something Linden Lab should look at and perhaps experiment with.

Dennis thinks that Linden Lab has now realised the possibilities of streaming SL and what it means to many users and potentially many more people who use their virtual world. Thanks to SL Go, SL finally worked on mobile devices and finally looked good.

Dennis also mentions that now that SL will soon no longer be supported for people using  XP or Vista OS on their computer.
These users, according to a reputable source at least 40-50.000 people, will soon be stuck on older viewers, unable to update to any new feature SL introduces and eventually making it impossible for them to use it.To them SL Go was a (second) life safer.

They will be left in the cold and so will those of us who can’t afford the big computers you need to run SL the way it should be running; with awesome graphics and no lag.

Forget about Sony. If you want to enjoy SL the way you did with SL Go you need to ask Linden Lab, they are the only ones who could get this done.

Personally I think that SL Go has proven that streaming Second Life works, that there is a market for it, that it means a lot to many SL users and that it could have a drastic effect on the reputation of our virtual world by flooding the internet with amazing high quality graphics and eventually perhaps even machinima.
Linden Lab is going to look running the Next Generation Second Life on mobile devices anyway, so it would be a good idea for them to start experimenting with streaming Second Life now and use that experience to make NGSL even better.

So the ball is in Linden Lab’s corner. They are the ones that could bring back SL streaming and I think they should. Linden Lab has the talent and the technology and the former SL Go staff have the know-how and experience. I also think that if they work together on building something from scratch that will just concentrate on streaming SL, there would be no issues regarding the patents Onlive sold to Sony.

SL Stream will improve SL for a lot of users and may even find a way to get more of them to sign up as premium members or even “Plus Premium” members who’ll pay a little more for the streaming service.

So forget about Sony and politely, patiently and friendly tell Linden Lab why you think streaming SL is a good idea.

Make sure you catch the interview in todays Drax Files broadcast, you can listen to it by clicking here.

To end this article, I’m sharing a few quotes, stories and opinions from SL Go users about what the loss of this service means to them and why it is important to try and find or create an alternative.

Melissa Ussy
OMG i had no idea water was SUPPOSED TO look that way!!!!

Adrian Mondrian
“I’d been hoping to get my mom into Second Life soon. She’s coming to visit me next month, and a tablet would have been a much more feasible purchase right now than a high-end laptop, for both financial as well as technical reasons. With SL Go gone, our options are more limited. I still want to introduce her to the world somehow — I actually think she’d love SL once she got used to it, especially since she feels quite isolated where she’s currently living — but it becomes a more complicated undertaking and not nearly as “accessible” an experience for her as it could otherwise have been.”

Elrik Merlin
I think the loss of this service is a great shame. Although I don’t know how popular the service was, I am sure there are quite a few users who will now no longer be able to access SL, and a great potential for expanding the reach of virtual worlds to people with almost any kind of end-user device, is being lost – at a time when the whole business of virtual reality is getting additional attention and environments like SL are being shown to be a decade ahead of the curve, and when increasingly tablets and mobile devices are increasingly the internet access equipment of choice.

Selena
I am an estate owner and pay the premium membership. Normally I use my own computer to run SL but recently my mother had a life altering surgery that has required me to move in with her and use her new but not meant for graphics computer. SL GO has allowed me to continue to service my estate and keep in touch with my residents. The closing down of SL GO will be a hard blow indeed.

Aelggyva Fenwitch (Effy)
Once i saw what Second life and its many artists and creators meant me to see in previously unattainable graphic settings my virtual life underwent a major change . I was able to visit some astounding visual creations and interact with other visitors in a much more rewarding way.
I am really not looking forward to returning to my virtual life which consists of walking through treacle surrounded by grey blocks.

DevinVaughn
With SL Go, I could be film maker. The frame rates were smooth while normally my computer skips. …And I could do it with advanced lighting too. I could also do amazing things like waltz into the super busy The Arcade sim, and yard sale hunt at Epic without choking on all those avatars, textures, and meshes densely populating a small area. … I even figured out how to use SL Go for my blog photos. SL Go photography saved the day but when I would otherwise crash trying to get the shot. (Yes, I was brutal with SL Go photography, pushing it past it’s limits with ultra advanced lighting, 16x anti aliasing, and trying to do a larger image size than double my screen resolution and it would crash on me of course. lol) But when I needed fast and reliable, SL Go photography was there for me. … I had big plans to use SL Go for my coverage of Fantasy Faire. I was planning to make movies while the sims were crawling with people, filming them all in thier wonderful and wacky outfits, and I would do all it on Ultra settings too. …. It sent me reeling that something so useful, SL Go, was taken away suddenly without warning and no way to fill void left behind. …. SL Go was a great tool and I enjoyed having it. I hope in the future there will be new ways to solve the problems of making VR faster, stable, able to handle busy sims, be beautifully lit, and of course, do it while waiting in line at doctor office or sitting on the beach.

A.
I used singularity – graphics setting as low as they’d go, a draw of 32 – max avis 3 at the most – often 2, so i could see my partner and i dance.
In crowded places, i looked like a whirling dervish – i couldn’t control my movement and anyone moving in front of me took my fps from 7 – SEVEN mind you, at the best – to 2 and i’d crash. You can’t run a venue like that.
Then sl go and FS – and i became so dependent SO very quickly.
I’m so crushed – and i know from using it again now, that singularity is if possible going to continue to be worse.
I’m looking at closing both venues, and leaving second life – i can’t afford a new box.
Maybe going to InWorldz to see if it’s better there, that’s what losing sl go means to me. The fact that i’ve never seen a framerate over 10 in my three years in sl says it all, i think.

Ali V
It means i have to buy or build a new computer in order to continue being on sl.
LL is out “tech’ing” themselves from mainstream people.

Sarah Snow
It means the end of SL as it should be experienced.  for me at least

Jaska BloodMoon
It means my fiancée will be unable to join me in SL until sometime down the road when I’m capable of breaking free from the chains instilled by bills and bloated prices, and finally buy a better laptop that she can use.

Ed Merryman
well it does mean that I won’t be able to use my xp pc for sl much longer,, but LL won’t be worried about that 😛

Jaska BloodMoon
It’s bad enough that I have more money going out to bills than I have coming in right now, paying a bloated price just to stream a viewer so that my laptop can run it just isn’t in the cards for me, at least not at the moment. That’s why I liked OnLive as an option, paying by Linden took quite a bit of weight off my shoulders.
The hardest thing for people right now is that Second Life is changing and becoming more and more demanding of computers. A low to mid-range computer that used to be able to run SL is now barely able to function properly, and these low to mid-range computers are “new” computers that are literally obsolete right out of the box. Most people can’t afford to pay a one lump sum for a high-end rig, especially when the rigs that are capable of running SL the way it’s meant to be run is well over 1 to 2,000 USD. x.x Some folks could probably afford that and save up for it rather quickly, but with so many places price gouging on their Internet services or electric, or what have you, bills just aren’t permitting for some folks. Some of SLs residents draw a monthly disability in RL, and SL is pretty much their reality, and it’s a reality that they can’t truly enjoy.  -shrug- Just my thoughts.

Katy
for me the effect personally is negligible except when i’m away from home and have to use my laptop.  But what bothers me is the large number of people who have had their first experience of being able to see and function in SL as it is meant to be, and will no longer have that ability.

Mesh upload with “NO” limit to amount of faces coming soon

Tags

"second life", ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, improvements, mesh

It has been mentioned before that an update is coming to mesh uploading in Second Life that will allow us to go beyond the limit of 8 faces on a prim.

This is very exciting to us creators, because at the moment, when I build a building, it can only have 8 different texture faces.
So when I for instance want to make a building with several rooms, all with a different kind of wallpaper, nice plaster ceilings, wonderful 1920s façade, ceramic tiles on the roof, etc, etc… you can imagine that I’ll need more than 8 faces.

To still make the buildings I want to build, I therefor have to cut the building into several mesh parts that I then have to stick together again and link.
To make things a little easier, I usually decide to make every floor of a building separately.
And sometimes, this means your land impact goes up.

So learning that this limit was going to go up, was great news and I am an impatient kind of person.
I wanted to know what the new limit would be, so I decided to ask Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, himself;

@1920sberlin No specific limit when it comes out in a project viewer in a month or so.

— Ebbe Altberg (@ebbealtberg) March 29, 2015

@1920sberlin No set limit but something will probably cross the line…

— Ebbe Altberg (@ebbealtberg) March 29, 2015

I’m not a very technical kind of person, most of this stuff is abracadabra to me, so maybe this is not big news to some of you, but to me it is rather exciting.
I think it will make working with mesh more fun.

I still make all my mesh inworld, I use a tool called ‘Mesh Studio’ (you can find it on marketplace) that allows me to keep making stuff with the good old prims and then turn them into mesh.
With the “no faces limit”, I hope to be able to make more stuff with less effort.

And yes, although it seems there won’t be a limit, I am sure some of Second Life’s most creative users will eventually find out how far this can be pushed.
Once that happens, the server farm at Linden Lab will probably explode, causing the rise of the machines and the apocalypse.

Till that happens, I can’t wait to create something new with this improvement.

Another step forward!

Putting yourself into Second Life

Tags

"second life", avatar, SL2, slng

Many, if not most users in Second Life love to be anyone but themselves in Virtual Reality.

But some of us, including myself, would actually love to have their avatar, or at least one of their avatars, look like an exact or only slightly improved versions of their real life selves.

And if VR is going as big as some of us think it will be, we may eventually end up using our avatars for more than Second Life.
Imagine one day using your avatar (Second Life, High Fidelity or Facebook World) to go visit your family who live on the other side of the world.
I bet your aunt might not be too keen to see you appear in her virtual living room covered in scars waving a sword around and wearing a suit or armour, or see you the way you looked when you were dancing on a bar in a ‘special interest’ kind of club last night…
She’d want to see you look the way you do.
And one day when we use VR to do all sorts of things, you may even be invited for a job interview or a chat with a bank manager in VR, again a situation where you may not want to show up looking like Satan or a kitten with a hat on.
Even though nobody can say no to kittens with hats on.

Either way, I think it would be fantastic if Second Life Next Generation would have a tool that makes it al lot easier to make your avatar look like you and in a discussion on the SLUniverse forums I bumped into the two videos below that show some rather cool tech doing just that.

I think that even for people who do not want their avatar to look like them, this could be very interesting.
Because if by using a camera or even a motion sensor device such as Kinect or Leap Motion, you could create an avatar in SL, you would at least end up with a realistic proportioned avatar as a foundation.
Turning it then into a giant, elf, furry or child would be even more fun and you would always have this real grown up body to use as a template, something to compare your fantasy avatar with.
Or maybe you want to give your fantasy avatar your RL face or parts of it.

Anyway, I just think this is rather interesting and fun stuff that I’d love to use in Second Life, so enjoy;

Thank you Wolkenreiter for posting these on the SLUniverse forums.

Linden Lab wants to hear your ideas

Tags

"second life", improvements, linden lab, suggestions

Linden Lab is continuing their new improved active way of communicating and being approachable by creating a new “Feedback & Suggestions” page on SecondLife.com

Here Second Life users are encouraged to leave their thoughts on how their virtual life can be improved.

I have a blog full of ideas and plans, so I’ll be spamming that page right after finishing this blog.

If you have some fantastic plans to make Second Life even better, make sure to let them know.

You can share your thoughts by clicking HERE.

And you can read the full official announcement HERE.

My first suggestion?
Show a message that the suggestion has been received in stead of sending you to the sign in page and then a help page.
I’ve send in the same idea 3 times but have no idea if it has been received.

*Update; it works fine in Firefox but it still happens when I try it with Internet Explorer.

Improving the Second Life social media experience

Tags

"second life", communication, facebook, google+, groups, social media, website

The whole debacle with Facebook being nasty to people who don’t use their real name has made me think about the use of social media in Second Life and the communication tools Linden Lab has given us.
I think these can be improved and it may also remove the need for us to use Facebook at all.

At the moment most of us use Facebook or other social media to stay in touch with our Second Life contacts and communities because it is just too cumbersome to do this inworld, because it is impossible at that moment to start up the SL viewer or because the Second Life communication tools just aren’t good enough.
I use Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Hippogroups, email, Google+, Plurk, etc, etc.

Sometimes we have to talk to people in SL quickly, just a short message, we just want to look at something, read something, quickly in and out.
That is not how I would describe my SL experience.
Starting up Second Life for me means having to get my SL laptop, turn it on and start up a viewer, SL doesn’t really run on my 5 year old macbook I use for everything else and SLGo takes time and makes me use the official viewer I don’t like.
And of course once your SL viewer starts you have to wait for the world to rez, you may be bombarded by IMs from other people, get reminded of other jobs that need doing, etc.

Imagine the situation; there is a big event in 1920s Berlin and I want to make sure everyone knows about it.
I set an event on the facebook group’s calendar, I set it on the google calendar, I send a note to the group inworld, I send a message to my hippo mailing list, I stick posters all over Berlin, I send a message to group chat and finally I send a message to the region…
Phew!

And all the time we’re hoping Facebook doesn’t delete our accounts.
Because replacing a Facebook account with a Facebook Page account means you lose a lot of options, including the ones we use most.

Good or bad, Facebook is the easiest and most versatile tool for us and the one we use the most, for serious important stuff but also for quick little chats, for sharing a funny 1920s themed story, event pictures, etc.
We don’t have to tell Linden Lab that, they know, they use Facebook and they have a Second Life page with more than 360.000 ‘likes’.

It would be fantastic if there would be just one place on the internet where we can do all this.
Some people think that Facebook is enough because we already use it, but because most of us use it with a different name than the one we use for our real life, we already have to log in and out when we have to switch accounts.

A while ago Linden Lab gave us mysecondlife, a good idea but not quite enough to replace all the tools I mentioned above.
For starters, I keep getting logged out by the Second Life website, which is a good security measure but not very handy if you want to use a website for social media, it is not uncommon for people to have their Facebook page online permanently.
And as the name suggests, its a very personal page, a place where you share your stories and your pictures.
But we use Social Media much more for community things, for groups activities.

There used to be something called ‘Avatars United‘, it had many of the options we need but was bought by Linden Lab, eventually shut down and incooperated into the Second Life website, but without many of the options the original version had.

What I would love to see is for Linden Lab to improve and expand the mysecondlife experience, give it more options like Facebook offers.

Make it the one stop website for all our Second Life related out-world activity.
Not just have our own page but also a page for every group we have in world, or maybe even let us build pages for groups we create outworld.
A place where we can upload all the events pictures (into separate folders), have a calendar we can use to set up events, invite all the other members of the group, share links, etc.
And who knows, maybe even have it connected to inworld groups.
Let us send messages, notecards and event announcements to groups in-and outworld via the website or the other way around.

This will allow Second Life users to stay more connected with their virtual lives even if they are not able to actually log in or if one day they lose interest in Second Life, they might still keep using the website to stay in touch with friends and who knows, this may one day make them decide to return.

It would be swell if we could abandon Facebook and Google+ and be happy using ‘Second Life Book+’ for that.
Go to the Second Life website that won’t log you off, where you can check each group to see what is going on, set events on the calendar, share pictures, see who else is online and chat with them, regardless if they are in Second Life or just online on the Second Life website, regardless if you are behind your power computer at home or on a bus using your tablet o mobile phone.
Improve the connectability and interaction between virtual reality and reality, make the barrier between Second Life and Real Life smaller.

Have you got any suggestions or ideas?
Please share them in the comments section below.
I know that a few Lindens follow my blog and are interested in hearing your opinions.

Comparing the official Second Life viewer with Firestorm

I’ve been in Second Life for over 5 years and for almost all of that time I’ve been using alternative third party viewers.

Only recently, when trying the Oculus Rift, I tried the official Linden Lab viewer again and it made me remember why I never use it.

Nevertheless I felt it was about time I compared the two to see if and why I am sticking with Firestorm.

Please take note though, this is a very personal choice, I will judge both viewers by the way I use them for Second Life, you may not need the tools that I find essential.

And also remember that I haven’t used the official viewer in a long time, so I may just not realise that some of the options I am missing are actually there but I just can’t find them.

I first need to install an update, unfortunately that keeps crashing, can’t write some file or another, so I’ll have to skip that.

One of the first things that annoys me about the official viewer is the group chat messages that start bombarding me.
I am a member of about 40 groups, some of them use group chat a lot, so the second I log on, the window pops up with all sorts of chatter I am not that interested in.
Especially when I was trying the Oculus, the last thing I wanted to see was all these windows opening, it wasn’t easy to close them and I even had to remove the headset to do that in some cases.
And if you crash or just want to log on for a short moment, this becomes even more annoying.
In both viewers you can uncheck “receive group notices” but Firestorm also allows me to turn off group chat, which I’ve done with almost all of my groups.
Finally some peace and quiet!

As a builder to me the Firestorm building tools are very important, without them things would be a lot more difficult.
Some of these are missing in the Linden Lab viewer.
For instance, Firestorm allows me to copy the grid position of a prim, size, rotation and the texture settings.
Imagine if you accidently delete a building or even half a city, no problem.
I have copied the exact grid location and put that in the description of the building, so all I have to do is take it from my trash, rez it and put it back in the same position.
Of course I could just manually copy and paste these settings one by one, or even write them down somewhere, but that is just a lot of extra work.
In Firestorm all it takes is a click.
And when you’re very busy building something huge and complicated you sometimes need to copy and paste these settings all the time.
To me this has become a much loved and often used tool that I would miss, a lot, if I returned to the Linden Lab Viewer.

What I also miss is the little Firestorm window that gives you some of the more important settings for easy access.
There are some things you need to change regularly, for instance your draw distance when SL becomes a bit laggy or when you teleport into a very busy sim.
In stead of having to go into your preferences and graphics settings, it’s just handy to have that button right there on your screen, I know, I’m just lazy.
The only option I miss here at the moment is the shadow one, turning that on and off quickly would be great because it has a huge effect on performance but its also one you want to use a lot when making pictures.
But after mentioning this here on my blog, my readers informed me that I could edit this Quick Preferences menu myself and add or remove whatever I wanted, how brilliant is that!

I keep crashing, not sure why.
Every time I start SL again, I get bothered by group chat messages again… ironically enough its usually the Firestorm group chat that pop ups the most.

As a sim owner and manager I have to keep an eye on what is happening, even when I am in my skybox workshop far away.
In the LL viewer I can not see that far, the only name that pop up on my radar is my own.
I can’t see who is in the city in the region next door, if any of these people are potential grievers, if they are following the sim’s dress code, etc.
Even when I teleport into the city, only the person nearby shows up on my list.
There are 4 people here, I don’t know who the 2 others are, if they have been here before, if they are trouble makers, if they are wearing 1920s clothes, nothing.
After looking around with my camera for a long time I find the visitors, turns out one of them is waving a gun around, against the sim’s rules.
In Firestorm I would have been able to see every single person in my region and the ones next door and with a simple double click on their name in the radar my camera focuses on them.
While staying in my skybox workshop I can still keep an eye on what is happening in the sim, I don’t have to stop working to go and check what is going on.

Another thing I really miss in the LL viewer are the contact sets.
These allow you to keep track of your contacts but also of people not on your friends list.
I know, I know, this is all sounding a lot like 1984 Big Brother NSA you’re being watched club day, but if you have to manage a busy community and want to keep people safe from grievers and if you promise them that you will try and keep people out who insist on ruining the 1920s experience by running around in latex miniskirts and with dragon wings, you need to keep an eye on things.
The contact sets allow me to put people in categories and colour their radar name accordingly.
For instance, someone who has been trouble, could be coloured red, people who have been in Berlin before and who have put on the 1920s clothes orange, fellow sim managers blue, etc.
By looking at the name list and even the dots on my radar I can see right away if there is someone who could potentially cause trouble, if another sim manager is there to keep an eye on things, if someone is visiting who has never been before and who might like some assistance, etc, etc.

These are a few of the tools that I find essential, they may have no use to you at all, but I wouldn’t want to go without them and that is why I am staying with Firestorm.

In the end Firestorm just gives me more options, more freedom to use SL in a way I like.

Why do you use Firestorm or do you prefer the official Linden Lab viewer?
Or perhaps you use a different viewer altogether?

Share your thoughts in the comments section!

My beloved radar, showing Orange dots (outfit checked avatars) ad a Green dot (first time visitor)

The ongoing trouble with the new mesh avatars

Tags

"second life", avatar, mesh, problem, virtual reality

I must admit that I was impressed when Linden Lab released the new mesh avatars, they looked better than the very old ones we used to have and looked pretty decent.

However we soon realised that there are a few big problems with them.

One problem was that the faces were stuck like a Beverly Hills ex starlet who’s had too much botox, they couldn’t speak, smile, nothing.

But a bigger problem was and unfortunately still is, that new users find it very hard to figure out how to change these avatars.

Because there really isn’t that much you can change about them and changing your avatar, customizing it to look just the way you want it to look is one of the best features of Second Life.

It is the first thing most new users want and try to do and as I’ve written before, I think that letting new users do this easily helps them bond with their avatar and understand the appeal of Second Life sooner.

I was reminded of this problem today when I spotted one of those brand new avatars in 1920s Berlin today.
Poor chap, turned out he was a 3D creator with years of experience, but Second Life offered quite a challenge when he was asked to change into 1920s clothes for his visit to my sim.

He didn’t quite manage it, ended up wearing part of the free 1920s outfit we offer combined with the modern mesh outfit he got when he joined SL.

Eventually he had to go into his library folder and replace his complete avatar with one of the old ones, it was the only way he could change his outfit.

I fear that this is making things even harder and unwelcoming for the new visitors to Second Life, add this to the horrendous welcoming island experience and its a wonder people still join Second Life.

Luckily the chap in question was so excited by 1920s Berlin that he didn’t think of leaving.

Nevertheless this is turning out to be a serious problem that is damaging SL every day a little bit.
I would consider taking the mesh avatars offline all together and bring back the old ones, although better looking perhaps.
At least till mesh avatars can be improved and made easier to adjust.

I feel that getting new users an avatar they like, they’ve customized and have a bond with is an important part of making them stay in SL a little longer.

The Cornfield returns!

You probably remember ‘The Cornfield’, or at least have heard rumours about it.

It was a place where you could be banished to if you had been a bit too naughty.

Now it is back, but as a playground for us to try out the new ‘Experience Keys’ options.

This will allow visitors to a sim to agree to certain permissions once and then never have to agree to them again.

No more giving a dance system or chair permission to animate your avatar for the 54353245th time.

These and other tools will also give those who want to add a gaming element to SL some extra options.

So go on, test out the new experience keys in the cornfield and enjoy killing some grievers!

You can read the official announcement here.

 

Linden Lab officially responds to the new virtual world story

Peter Linden, Director of Global Communications of Linden Lab, just replied to my email regarding the new virtual world story that is breaking.

He wrote;

Linden Lab is working on a next generation virtual world that will be in the spirit of Second Life, an open world where users have incredible power to create anything they can imagine and content creators are king. This is a significant focus for Linden Lab, and we are actively hiring to help with this ambitious effort. We believe that there is a massive opportunity ahead to carry on the spirit of Second Life while leveraging the significant technological advancements that have occurred since its creation, as well as our unparalleled experience as the provider of the most successful user-created virtual world ever.

The next generation virtual world will go far beyond what is possible with Second Life, and we don’t want to constrain our development by setting backward compatibility with Second Life as an absolute requirement from the start. That doesn’t mean you necessarily won’t be able to bring parts of your Second Life over, just that our priority in building the next generation platform is to create an incredible experience and enable stunningly high-quality creativity, rather than ensuring that everything could work seamlessly with everything created over Second Life’s 11 year history.

Does this mean we’re giving up on Second Life? Absolutely not. It is thanks to the Second Life community that our virtual world today is without question the best there is, and after 11 years we certainly have no intention of abandoning our users nor the virtual world they continually fill with their astounding creativity. Second Life has many years ahead of it, and in addition to improvements and new developments specifically for Second Life, we think that much of the work we do for the next generation project will also be beneficial for Second Life.

It’s still very early days for this new project, and as we forge ahead in creating the next generation virtual world, we’ll share as much as we can.

If we had one message to share with Second Life users about this new project at this point, it would be: don’t panic, get excited! Again, Second Life isn’t going away, nor are we ceasing our work to improve it. But, we’re also working on something that we think will truly fulfill the promise of virtual worlds that few people understand as well as Second Life users.