Prim allowance going up by a LOT for everyone!

Tags

improvements, increase, land impact, news, prims

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?

Eventually Patch Linden responded on this forum discussion;

Inara Pey blogged about the prim change as well, promising more information when the official announcement would be published;

https://modemworld.me/2016/11/02/2016-sl-project-updates-441-server-viewer-land/

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The error in publishing was mine, and the article has been withdrawn whilst being completed / subject to final vetting from Linden Lab to ensure the information within it is correct.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.

Happy Primsmas everybody!

New classic starter avatars for Second Life now available

Tags

"second life", avatar, changes, improvements, news, virtual reality

Linden Lab has just given us 16 brand new classic starter avatars for Second Life.
I’ve written about the starter avatars and some of the problems involved here; “The ongoing trouble with the new mesh avatars” and here; “An alternative to starter avatars”, also suggesting that they replaced and improved the old starter avatars in stead of those full mesh avatars.

Last year brand new full mesh avatars were released but many users (especially noobs) soon discovered that they looked nice but sadly were a bit static (no mouth opening when talking for instance) and it was very difficult to adjust them or  even change their clothes.
Full mesh avatars are something even advanced SL users sometimes have problems with so you can imagine that they didn’t make things easier for people new to our virtual world.
And of course making sure they feel at home asap is very important to keep them from leaving.

So these new avatars are the good old ‘system avatars’ we know and love (and hate) but with mesh attachments.
In a way, the best of both worlds…?

I think these new avatars look pretty good, especially the one in the 3 piece suit, even though he needs a haircut.
He is ready to start exploring 1920s Berlin, maybe I’ll even put a box with that outfit as a freebie at our teleport area.
Sadly none of the ladies have 1920s suitable clothes.
Seriously though, of course there are a lot of people who’ll find that a certain type or kind of avatar is missing from this selection.
The one thing I dislike about these new avatars is that they are all young and pretty.
I would have liked people a little older, a little fatter and perhaps a little uglier.
You know, like real life 🙂

Anyway, quite an improvement on the old system avatars, at least at first sight.
I haven’t tried them yet.
But it is a shame that after all these years apparantly it is still so difficult to create avatars that look good, are all mesh, are animated and not so complicated to modify or dress.
Something that seems so easy in games.

But I still think that it would be even better to allow new users to create and already personalise their avatars right there on the website before they even enter Second Life, letting them have some fun and giving them an avatar they’ve already started bonding and identifying with before they’ve even put virtual feet on the virtual ground.
I’ve written more about that idea here; “Starting your Second Life” and here; “Starting your Second Life is still not easy”.

You should be able to try out these new avatars now.

You can read the official Linden Lab announcement here; “New Classic Avatars are Now Available in Second Life!”.

Article gives us a new glimpse of Sansar

Tags

ebbe altberg, ebbe linden, media, news, sansar, wdsu

Today a nice article about Sansar, the next virtual world Linden Lab is building revealed a few new details.

The article was published on WDSU, a NBC-affiliated television station located in New Orleans and CNN Money.

A few interesting things were mentioned so I thought I’d share them here.

Think of it as the YouTube of the virtual world — an entry point for anyone who wants to build a VR experience without investing a ton of time and money.

I think this is a rather brilliant way of describing Sansar, or any kind of user created virtual world.
I prefer it to the WordPress comparison made before.
I also think this is the way to sell Sansar to the world; this is the entry point for anyone interested in creating their own VR experience, just like Youtube has brought millions to the world of making this new kind of Television.

“We know more than anybody else what it takes to do something like this,” said Linden Labs CEO Ebbe Altberg.

Well done Ebbe on sharing that very important bit of information, no matter what you think of Second Life, it has given Linden Lab more of something pretty much nobody has; lots and lots of experience with a virtual online world.

Creating worlds will be more difficult in Project Sansar than Second Life, but Altberg said they’ve made a tool non-engineers can use.

This is both worrying and intriguing.
It is scary to hear that creating is going to be more difficult, but what does Ebbe mean?
Does it mean more difficult than the very basic building with prims or more difficult than making mesh, something many of us already need outside tools for.
I think it is essential for Sansar to succeed to have inworld building tools that make it easy for us to create but also allows us to create things together with others.
So this mysterious tool sounds good but I guess we won’t know how much more complicated it is till we get to try it ourselves or till one of the testers leaks information.
If you’re reading this testers… give me a call 😉

Internally, Linden Labs employees are working on polishing the product, building their own test worlds along the way. They’ve made a desert scene with crazy big machinery, weird futuristic lounges and a famous landmark. They’ve even created an exact replica of a conference room in Linden Labs’ San Francisco office, down to the objects on the desk.

This are some of the first descriptions of what is already being created in Sansar that I’ve found and it sounds good.
It makes the imagination run wild.
If only I could go and have a look myself!
Someone send me an invite already!

Finally, what is it with people adding an S to Linden Lab?
There is no Linden Labs, technically, I don’t even think Linden Lab is one lab, they don’t wear white coats, there are no flasks, no bunsen burners, no brains in jars and they don’t even blow up stuff now and then.

Anyway, make sure to check the complete article out by clicking here.