General

In reality Corsica belongs to France, but the inhabitants of it are not happy with that and still many consider the French people as occupants. So now I wonder if the now defunct SLAA and its followers are going to put their headquarters there and are trying to battle LL from there, then. This would be quite ironic.

Another interesting profile, sums up the persistant problems:

Please LL fix SL so I can:
teleport without having butt fur
Rez without thinking I live in the land of gray
And Give me just 1 L for every crash report so I can be rich

Found in someones profile:

IF YOU ARE READING MY PROFILE, YOU HAVE ENTERED THE NO DRAMA ZONE!  I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR DRAMA WITH YOU OR YOUR SL BABY'S MAMA. LOL

and on the 1st life tab:

I HAVE NOT HAD A REAL LIFE SINCE I JOINED SECOND  LIFE.

SO, I WILL NOT ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT MY REAL LIFE!

Some of his points and views are:

• from a creative point of view he's a god. He has been creating a virtual world, which is undergoing its own evolution right now. Humans are building things, communities, are making things better. He beliefs that humans are good and that therefore SL is a good world.
• LL is going to work with local governments, if needed, in legal cases. The best police though is the cleaning force of the community itself.
• No news about age verification, just that's it still on the cooker.
• Many companies are having wrong assumptions about SL and therefore no success. Even if only 10% of all registered residents are playing regularly, that's still a great number, because that's the number big companies like eBay started with.
• Second Life is often economically overrated.
• Why should companies still go into SL? Because it is a big marketing testfield for them.
• If someone wants to have economic success in world, he should use the multimedia features of the world and provide a valuable service for the community.
• Voice is coming, it's done, when it's done. The user interface is being worked on, too.
• The big vision behind SL is some kind of standardized 3d internet.

Well, that's about it, not really new points in it, anyway. The question for me is, if Second Life is really some kind of community or not.

If so, generating value out of the community can be a difficult kind of beast, because often what the community wants is not always what the company wants or is allowed to do by law. For example, the success of Youtube is founded on massive copyright violations, because that's what the community wants, easy access to video clips.

If Google for example really is starting to make Youtube lawful, the community just would find a new service to get their thing and leave Youtube behind. That's the problem with communities.

And some of the steps that LL is going to do in the next time have the potential to alienate great parts of the community, if there is such one thing. And if the alienation is big enough, we could expect to see a big player migration to some other places. That's why opening up their server could still make sense to them, because then people could just host their own thing and LL would not be liable for it, anymore, as it is in some countries still at the moment, and the community would like that step, too.

Well, guess what happened? It turned out into a big disaster. The event did not happen at all. From all four adjacent sims avatars tried to enter the main sim - makes you wonder why they didn't make a design like Pooley stage and used repeaters. The supplied video stream was often not working because of not enough listener slots in the video server. There have been several griefer attacks at the main sim SL4B, mostly poofs, too.

And the best of all - Philip Linden was not able to enter the sim at all, so after around two hours of desperate tries they scratched the keynote and event at all of the agenda. Makes me wonder if they are now going to learn about it and going to implement some kind of bandwidth allocation for entering a sim in kind of a VIP list, meaning: if you got a 40 avatar sim you can say: 35 normal avatars are able to enter the sim and 5 predefined VIPs. When 35 normal avatars are in the sim, it's full for all normal avatars of us, but the VIPs can still enter the sim. This would be handy...

The avatar peak at the main sim was first around 90, later the maximum seems to have been around 40.

And to quote some Lindens:

[13:41] Video Linden shouts: Philip can't get back in
[13:42] Iridium Linden: Folks, Philip can't get back into the clinet.

I guess it's kind of comforting for many SL residents that even the mighty Lindens have problems with Second Life and I think some have been really spiteful about the turnout of those events, too.

Perhaps it is still going to happen somewhat later, but this event has been truly a victim of the success of Second Life. You simply need much better avatar counts per sim for such kind of events at all.

Second Life has now over 7 million residents. Again, no fanfare, big press release or whatever, seems they want to keep their balls low at the moment.

"In Britain, any degree of success is met with envy and resentment." - Sir Christopher Lee. Well, not only in Great Britain...

With IRC around for nearly two decades now, which is real time text based only communication at its best, you should mean that Second Life has learned from it and that groupchat in Second Life si reliable und useable.

This is often not the case. Why? Because compared to IRC Second Life has many pitfalls and annoying things, which IRC has already mastered. Some of those annoying things are:

• Sending messages to a big group is still unreliable. You normally need several tries while the discussion moves on and on, so it is very hard to contribute to a real discussion at all.
• It is not possible to moderate a group or close the group chat at all for the public. This means, only some people with a certain flag can speak, the rest can try to type something in but it will not be shown at the channel at all. IRC has such a thing, it's the +m (moderated) flag for a channel in addition to the +o (operator) or +v (voice) flag for certain users.
• It is still not possible to mute channels. When you want to be in the channel for announcements and notices of the creator but don't want to hear the chatter of the crowd in it, you've got two choices only at the moment: take it and try not to get too annoyed or leave the group in the long run. Of course, when the group is important to you, you get annoyed more and more easier over the time.
• Since always people without good knowledge join groups and use the chats to say "hi" and so on, which most regard as spam, often short conversations happen at times when you cannot handle it or need it, popping up and annoying you to hell. Ignoring this would be the best case, but no, there are always some who make the conversation longer telling how bad this behaviour is on the group chat, calling it spam, whatever, fueling the discussion even more.
• IRC clients work channel based, meaning you get only the messages of channels which you've joined before. If you haven't joined a channel, you don't get the messages at all. Second Life works also channel based, but you'll get the message as soon as someone sent it to the whole group.

So to learn from this proven and reliable technology, how to manage big masses and to adapt those concepts, if possible, would be a very big step forward for communication in Second Life, be it text or voice based, forward into the right direction.

Today I got my hands on the latest and greatest addition of Second Life, Windlight. Lindenlabs bought the company behind it - good to see that LL has some money - and there's already a Firstlook viewer available to get the first impressions of how it might look like.

It's available for all platforms unlike voice and you can play around with it. Of course you need a somewhat decent graphics card to see the effects in action, seems it is programmed with vertex shaders, which means that most of the stuff actually runs on the hardware of the graphics card itself.

So, if you've got decent enough hardware and you play around with it, you might make pictures in game like this:

This shows a typical, default sunset at the sea. Note that this is no mockup picture, but taken in world, click on it for the larger version. Well, and here is another picture.

This is the default setting "midday". Looks also interesting, the clouds are rendered in real time and you can see them wandering around. Last picture for the moment is this:

Never looked a night more darker in Second Life than on this picture. Well, it still needs polishing, of course, the animation goes way too fast - it's more actually screaming "Hey, I am here!" at the moment to all of us, but when it is finished, this is for sure going to be a very good addition to the whole gameplay, even if the guys at the Second Life Herald disagree with me.

Well, have you ever wondered from where your friend has this nifty new hair, shoes, skirt, whatever (s)he's wearing, but (s)he's not telling you from where this stuff comes? There's a simple, builtin mechanism into the client to find it out without the owner noticing it at all.

First, let's take a look at an typical, advanced Second Life avatar - me. Here is a recent picture of myself:

Ok, what are you seeing on this picture? I am wearing some kind of hair, that's made out of prims and attached to my head. My shoes are in reality attachments made out of prims, too. This technic I am describing only works with attached objects to the avatar, be it hair, necklaces, rings, shoes, flexi skirts, weapons and other stuff, even when the attachments are phantom. So it is not going to work just on clothes and other stuff without attached prims to the avatar.

First, let's take a look at our example picture:

In this tutorial we want to locate the creator of the shoe being displayed at this picture. It would also work with the flexi part surrounding the leg, by the way.

The first necessary step is to right click the object of desire, here the white shoe. Your screen should now look something like this:

The selected object is being displayed highlighted and a pie menu is showing up. Select "More >" on the pie menu and left click it. Now you should have something like that:

A second pie menu with just four options; select "Inspect" this time and left click on it. When you've done it right, there' going to be a new window named "Inspect Objects" on your screen which looks something like this:

This window is the object inspection window, showing you the owner of the object being inspected (which is here grayed out on purpose) and the creator of the object. The name of the object is being displayed in the first line of the inspection window, here something like "SILVER/WHT Legacy". This is important to remember if you want to get a copy on your own of this object, later. Left click on the button "See Creator Profile...", then you should see the profile of the object's creator coming up, in this case this profile here:

Voila, we are finished and we've successfully investigated the creator of this object. Normally the store of the object should be available under the Classifieds or Picks of the creator. Go to the store, look for object whose name you've inspected earlier and you're done without the other avatar knowing at all that you've investigated the object's name and creator on him.