Havok 4 (now belongs to Intel), the recent version of the physics engine Second Life uses, is going into beta test. This is something many people have been waiting for one or two years.
This is first going to be a change under the hood; Lindenlab expects a more reliable SL experience out of it. So you should not expect big changes in the beginning.
Later this could lead perhaps to better prims per vehicle, since many ppl awaited this feature for long. We are going to see.
Now with the integration of voice in the main client some weeks ago already I wonder what the next big thing is going to be in the development of Second Life.
I mean, using voice is not for all and it’s always bringing RL into the game and such, so whta is the next thing going to be when you take in account that LL is making most money with land sales and so on?
I guess those are things that are going to happen sooner or later or might happen:
Just another idea I got in my kitchen: when there’s going to be age verfication and with all the data needed to make it, why not also make voluntary gender verification in it, too?
Meaning: showing a sign in the avatar, if the player behind it is real female or not. I guess, some would really appreciate such a thing and on a voluntary base it should be possible to make it.
There’s been a drastic change to the website of SL: you can see a new graphic and link to a site called "Second Life Grid". It seems that Lindenlabs doesn’t want to rely any longer on land sales alone as main source of income and is now starting to market their grid more for certain 3rd parties, which is a good move to me.
It’s giving some insights in what the grid can do, about the dimensions and so on and on. The website is clearly targeted on corporate viewers, no doubt about that, and telling about how others use it and how you can participate with it. There are the old target groups like Education and Non Profit and Solution Providers, but there’s a new target group, Global Providers. To cite the site about them:
The Second Life Grid Global Provider program is designed to assist
international online communities in creating their own presence on the
Second Life Grid. This program has significant requirements,
obligations, and program fees. It is only available to operators of
existing online communities outside the United States.
So to make it short: who’s the target group? Big communities like internet providers, for example, or perhaps big web communities outside the USA. Since it is not going to be cheap to be such a provider and you should have at least about two million accounts, this is surely not for everybody of us. But it also means that Lindenlab is finally opening up their grid to 3rd parties, for example there’s already a company in Brazil as far as I know that did very much things for SL on their own like giving it away, translating it and so on. Now such a company can open up their own space in Second Life and localize it. I don’t expect existing online games to use it, of course, since they got their own special needs.
This here is about communities, really big communities. So for example, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Tiscali area somewhere in SL or T-Online for example as Global Solution Providers. The benefit side makes the target group even more clear, stating for example this as benefit:
Official designation as a Second Life Global Provider, including program branding and press release support.
So this looks for me basically like that: Second Life should spread even more further, but Lindenlabs is unable to do that in all countries on their own. So they open up their grid for paying 3rd parties, who get certain rights but also the risk, and if those providers work good in their country, they expect to get even bigger user counts. If those providers are now big communities somewhere (like myspace.com, which is not eligable) or internet providers doesn’t seem to count on that point.
So we all should wait and see who’s going to be the first company to open up such a local experience.
Well, lately some of my friends (hello, Aquela, Eve, Kyz and Juliet ^^) either bought a club or are thinking about opening their own club. Since I am a frequent visitor of different clubs, some asked them on my advice how to get it running. Well, there are some insights I’ve got to share with this world about opening a club in Second Life.
So, here we go:
That’s all, folks. Could be, that some would make other main focuses on their own pet club, but those are my experiences so far.
The until now beta tested voice feature of the First Look client has gone into the main client. Thus it is enabled everywhere and now mainstream.
The use of voice is always going to be optional, and estate owners can disable it, if wanted, but it’s now there and without any extra charge at all for the sim owners, as it seems.
While some couldn’t await the arrival of this feature into the main client any longer, others are still sceptical about it and/or don’t want to use it at all. Consider it working under Mac OS X and Windows, but not under Linux yet.
It’s simply not working under Linux because the proprietary binary that’s needed to connect to the servers of Vivox is still non existant, meaning what you’ve got under Linux there is an empty shell so far.
Prokofy Neva and the Second Life Insider are both claiming that the problems we’ve been experiencing with the grid for the last two days are not the result of internal, technical problems but instead of a concerted attack of griefers at the grid.
The exploit used has been reported already at 12th February 2006 and still remains unfixed. They are claiming it is hard to fix, but hey, after more than a year and it being abused to attack the grid, it is time now to do something against it! Neva claims, that the purpose of those attacks is to make Second Life unusable for good use like the Relay for Life event last weekend. Hm, some logic in it, could be, for sure if it was attack this event could have been a worthwhile target for griefers.
What are the conclusions? We are never going to know, if those problems were a gridwide attack of griefers or not, until the Lindens are going to tell us. Some things are clearly pointing into that direction. But if it was a griefer attack, the Lindens should tell so and don’t leave us in the dark about it.
It seems the Vista support of Second Life is nearly ready and well. Well, quite a good thing for all the people out there who are using that operating system.
Oh, and while we are talking about Vista: the CEO of Acer, Gianfranci Lanci, is disappointed with Vista. He’s telling that the expectations they had with the launch of Vista have not met at all. On the contrary, many customers of Acer are asking for Windows XP instead, especially in the business field. One of the main problems according to Lanci has been that Vista was still not 100% stable at its launch and he doesn’t expect that to change in the rest of 2007 at all.
There’s now a 3rd party web based SL client called AjexLife in development and available. So far it has more or less the same feature set as Slink, meaning it’s good for logging into the grid, chatting, sending instant messages, getting notifications, viewing the map and teleporting around. Of course – no graphics. The main focus is on for the main client underpowered machines and communicating so far.
Since this works with AJAX, it should be possible that it even works through most company firewalls – I guess the server makes the connection to the grid, not the webbrowser per se. I wonder under which license this work is going to be put under…
The "new" continent in the East has been named Nautilus. Quite a silly name for a continent, if you ask me, but even better the new, yet to come continent with around who knows sims is going to be named Corsica. Yes, right, Corsica, like the island in the Mediterrenean Sea.
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.
Bartholomew Gallacher