Autor: Bartholomew Gallacher

Business

Age verification – where is it now?

When you take into account, which big waves the announcement from 05/04/2007 of the age verification system made and that Lindenlabs wanted to implement this on really short notice and since then it has been over one month of time and it is still not there nor any new announcements about it, it makes you wonder – when is it going to happen, finally?

I haven’t even seen a public beta test of it so far, and if you consider how fast Windlight was integrated in the client, which is a far more complex piece of technology – what is taking Lindenlabs so long? And why?

General

Why group chat in Second Life is often plain annoying

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.

To sum it up: public channels, especially big ones, in Second Life are pretty useless and often annoying as hell. If you really want to reach your broad audience, better switch to other means of communications. Second Life has some design differences to IRC. IRC itself is a proven and reliable way to communicate with masses, the biggest nets like Quakenet have got over 180000 users at peak using it every day. And those counts are not decreasing despite the other means of communications.

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.

General

The newest eye candy: Windlight

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.

Personal

What I hate: howling in clubs

It happens at some places more or less, depending where you go to dance: howling of the guests. Some consider it fun. Well, it is – the first time. The second time you can live with it, but the more and more often you hear it, the more annoying it gets over the time. Why? Because it’s ruining the atmosphere, it is rude behaviour and most people over the grid just use the same two or three sound clips that are around to do it. 

Oh, and many don’t only howl, no, when many howl the macro also makes big ASCII art of wolves and or other things in open chat, too, while howling. So that when you’ve disabled noise you still know that they’re howling. Arg!

Personal

One of the best kept secrets: Philip Linden’s office hours

While most of the Lindens have office hours on a regular base and you can look them up on the web, it is of course some kind of different matter, when you want to meet the CEO of Lindenlabs, Philip Rosedale better known as Philip Linden in world.

Yes, he’s got office hours, too, but normally on short notice. You won’t find them on the schedule, you’ve got to lookup his profile and take a closer look at the tab "1st life" – that’s the place to look for this information. Today there were indeed scheduled office hours at 9 AM SLT at his office in Waterhead.

So, since I still remembered the masses of avatars attending the technical town hall meeting, I was one hour before there. Well, nothing happened at all, I just sat there and talked with my friend via messages. I wondered if he really is going to show up or not, but around perhaps 9:03 AM SLT he showed up and sat down, rezzed some chairs for other guests to sit down, if they come by, and was ready to talk.

I talked a little bit with him for over 5 minutes, no other guest showed up at all, so he put his office hours in the motto of the day of the Second Life login and other avatars began to show up, too. Well, the office hour lastet about one hour, it was nice to chat with him and in the end there were perhaps 10 avatars at all. You should expect really more when the CEO of Lindenlabs moves in world and is at his office, but what the heck, it was far nicer that way.

So here’s a little picture from the first minutes of the office hours, when I was still alone with him (just click on the thumbnail):

The talk was nice, he wanted to know different things, for example where Lindenlabs does right, where it does wrong, which features we’d like to see in upcoming versions and so on, but the whole bunch of us talked not only about Second Life.

Some points being discussed and insights were:

  • Philip Linden likes putting his office hours in that kind of manner like described to get a random set of people,
  • he tries to become an in world art collector,
  • he’s been happy so far from the technology perspective with what they’ve been able to achieve, though he did not really knew when exactly this would all take off and he’s happy that at least now people get why the virtual world is so important,
  • when comparing his company with a baby, he considers himself a very proud father,
  • another attendee raised the point that when accounts are cancelled or deactivated that the group membership of the avatar should cease, too, he considered that a good point,
  • he asked how our Second Life experience was this weekend in terms of lag and other potential problems,
  • he thinks that Lindenlabs needs a better survey tool to know when lag and stuff is getting better or worse,
  • he’s unable to reverse gravity in a sim,
  • I asked him if he feels that there’s now a shift toward more companies entering Second Life, he answered that he doesn’t know, he thinks the majority of signups by a long shot are normal people, but there are a lot of new biz apps in SL and they don’t really know since they don’t have any sort of relationship with companies in SL,
  • he thinks it’s great to have creative energy, people trying to find new stuff and that in any case marketing and advertising in SL will be more interesting than in RL,
  • he stated that it is hard to find the right balance between fixing and developing – true,
  • I mentioned to him as a possible new feature the group IM muting, he said he is going to consider that

and much more things. It was really interesting to get in touch with him and discuss Second Life with the founder of the whole show, and it seems he really wants to know the unfiltered opinion of the community and what is going well and what they should make better. That’s a good policy to run a company in my opinion.