CNNmoney.com ran an interesting article about „Second Life’s looming tax threat.“ What stays in world is in world and not interesting for the IRS. But when you’re trying to convert it into real money that’s quite a different matter.
It is about the possibility that you’ve got to pay income tax in the future to the IRS if you’re earning money in SL and other games like WoW and whether it’s possibile or science fiction. An interesting read.
The Netzeitung runs an article today how the German criminal law is applicable to Second Life and not.
To sum it up in short: if you’re going to make pornography publicly available there, it is applicable; also child pornography falls under it. Sex between furries – is against it. A dutch attorney is already investigating in case of „child age play“ as an act of child pornography.
Well, some new insights, it sums it up to – better don’t do anything evil and be sure with whom you’re interacting.
The Lindens are putting together another of the so called First Look Viewers. Nothing wrong about that one. But what strikes me is this passage in their posting:
Also, regarding the removal of the old particle systems. We are evaluating whether or not we can transparently migrate the deprecated functions to use the new system. If you have any information about how best to map the old functions to use llParticleSystem, please IM Steve Linden in world. Surprisingly, we no longer have anyone here who is familiar with the old particle systems (one of the reasons we want to remove them entirely).
I mean, what’s the problem there? They should have documented it entirely in house, they have the code, so they should really, really know how it works.
And if not, they should know how to get in touch with former employees who know how it works. But this? Very, very strange…
There’s been a somewhat quiter time now in Second Life, especially in terms of media coverage and company news, but now again the hype is heating on.
Here are some of those events:
My experience told me normally that especially handicapped people like to experience and try to live in games like Second Life what they cannot do anymore in real life. For example it can be very nice for blind people to play in a MUD to socialize with other people, or for deaf people to play in Second Life.
It can also be very accomodating for people who cannot walk anymore and need wheelchairs to play Second Life to forget about that for a little while.
Well, but not all wheelchair users seem to feel that way; there is a usergroup of people who are unable to walk in real life anymore in Second Life who don’t want to hide this behind there avatar, quite the opposite. They’re saying this is an undeniable part of myself, of my life, whereever I am and I want to show it.
So they are going around in Second Life in wheelchairs, a very uncommon sight. I’ve seen such an avatar yesterday in the garden, it just happened by chance that I saw her and you rarely see such avatars at all. Why? Because most people want to be beautiful, want to forget about it, that’s why.
So here is a picture of this avatar, I was quite impressed by the openness of the person.
I’ve been programming around a little yesterday and made my first simple LSL-script – a notecard giver keeping track of unique visitors. Really simple when you get the heck off it and quite useful for different things, not so far fetched to turn it into a greeter, visitor counter and other things, also or make it into a big whole-into-one-package.
What bothers me, though, is that LSL is unable to save data into a notecard stored into the object. This seems to be really a big drawback of the language – hopefully there is going to be some support for this in the future. So, in the meantime, you have to save data – if you need it – on external webservers with llHTTPRequest() – seems that’s the only possibility when you don’t want to use instant messages or open chat, to have a nice formatted file of data. Bummer.
I hate that!
While it is still not available on our computers, it’s in the making at the moment: raytraced computer games engines. For the record: almost any modern 3D computer game, like Second Life, uses so called raycasting as computing method, which is a much smaller version of raytracing itself. To sum the differences up in short: raycasting cannot compute reflactions, retractions or shadows at all; raytracing can. This makes raycasting of course much, much faster, while raytracing was still slower in these days, but produces much more realistic pictures in the end. Movie productions, like Shrek for example, are all made with raytracers and big rendering farms in the background, as raytracing needs much more horsepower in your computer to work sufficiently than raycasting needs.
Popular raytracers for the normal human being are for example Blender, which was used to produce the movie picture „Elephant’s dream“ or the Persistence of Vision Raytracer, short Povray. For examples, how raytraced pictures can look like, take a look at the Internet Raytracing Competition. This competition began back in 1996, there are six rounds every year, running for two months under a certain theme, everybody can apply with his own pictures and in the end the winners are voted. Many pictures there are really artistic and it is a nice showcase to demonstrate what modern raytracers are capable of; also a good showcase to get an impression of the rendering times for those pictures, if you take a look at the commentaries. For example a picture like this one or this one could never be done with a raycaster. Period. If you want to get an impression, what animations made with raytracers can look like, take a look at the animations there or download Elephant’s dream, since it is for free and a good showcase of what Blender is capable of (a new version of Blender was released some days ago, so it can now do even more).
So, to sum it up: raycasters are the way modern 3D computer games do their work. It is the technology that has been used by good old Doom, Unreal Tournament, Quake and is also used by Second Life and many other games. It’s the industry standard for computer games. It is a subset of the possibilites what raytracing is capable of. Raytracing itself has been probably around even longer, but the CPUs were not fast enough until recently to use raytracing in gaming engines, until now, so it seems.
The University of Saarland is doing research in this field and a group around Professor Slusallek is using a new raytracing code that makes use of multicore CPUs and modern GPUs. They are going to showcase their software at the CeBIT and are claiming, that it is already good and fast enough for usage in modern computer games. There has already been a project around, called Quake 4 Real Time, that has enhanced the old Quake engine to raytracing usage. There are also many screenshots and a video on that page to showcase how such a game looks like and no, it’s not for download.
If you take in account, that they are using high end CPUs at the moment to achieve their goals, but the technology is already around and the software now, too, as it seems, then it would be not surprising to see raytracing game engines in around 3-5 years entering the computer gaming market, since until then the technology is more at the mid to low end and should be around in masses. This could be definitely the next big step in computer gaming and is worth watching it.
To sum the outcome up: at the moment a game designer has to work around the shortcomings of raycasting and its shortages. But with raytracing capable game engines this would be gone, you can build what you like, but of course you must place your light sources better.
The Register ran a story one week ago about the economics of Second Life. They are taking a very close look at the hard facts of the economics in Second Life beside the hype. Some measures are really interesting and were even new to me.
First, there is the churn rate. Only about 15% of the people who create an avatar in October 2006 logged in again after their first 30 days in SL. Very interesting measure, indeed. This drastically reduces the number of real residents, of course. Even more when you take all alts out.
There are about 4 million residents at the moment, when you do the math, this means that there are really about 600.000 residents who login regularly (alts included in this measure).
They are also pointing out that the maximum number of avatars in one sim is around 100 at the moment; also a very important restriction on doing business in SL. But then again, the business in SL has found ways around it.
70% of the revenue of Lindenlabs is generated at the moment by land sales and tier fees. No surprise in there. It’s a bubble at the moment, bound to burst sooner or later. Of course, LL would like it to burst later to generate more profit out of it.
Last number is that there are around 50.000 premium users at the moment; that’s not really much for such a big game/platform/whatever.
It’s a nice article with some new insides beside the mainstream and definitely worth a read.
It seems, the more people are online, the more the almight lag continues to grow. SL is no fun noawadays when more than 30.000 people are online at the same time.
There is lag, lag, lag, teleporting issues, chat lag and other stuff, that turns down your experience. I just hope that the staff of Lindenlab is able to adress at least some of these issues on Wednesday at the scheduled downtime!
Today the resident count has reached a new peak – there are now over 4 million residents in Second Life. Again without much fanfare, like it was already when the 3 million mark was reached. This is no wonder, when you consider the problems that SL has in the moment and hopefully the next maintenance slot is somewhat going to fix.
Now let’s see how fast the 5 million milestone is going to be reached; I guess this milestone will be then again covered by a press release.
Bartholomew Gallacher
