Autor: Bartholomew Gallacher

„What’s so outstanding about SL that so many people are criticizing it?“

Pham Neutra is asking in one of his blog post what’s so outstanding about Second Life that so many people are criticizing it right now. He only knows one another thing where the discussion about it is equally emotionally heated – nuclear plants.

Well, so why are so many people criticizing it? Because it’s new, it’s hip to criticize it, they don’t have a clue. Just take a look at earlier things like Rock’n’Roll, Skateboards, whatever – when they first became mainstream, many criticized them, there’s a thick, red line of such debates in history. Period.

SL Herald, Plastic Duck and so on

The Second Life Herald is running an article about Plastic Duck’s job inquiry at LL and how the CEO responded. Well, beside the obvious commentary from Prokofy Neva (gna… if he’s so horrible, just shut up and sue him!) it’s a rather heated debate.

Well, from the point of view of Lindenlabs Plastic Duck must be somewhat hard to come by. He’s caused much trouble all over, but also seems to be a very good programmer who knows, what he’s doing. But would it be wise to hire him from LLs point of view, if he really wanted to join LL? I guess not. Therefore it seems he’s done too much in the past to be accepted by the community. Period.

Two buildings utilities

I’ve found two tools which can help you in the respect of building things in SL:

  • A terrain file editor for OS X only named Backhoe. Looks pretty good and snappy to me on the screenshots and if you ever get your own island it looks like a very good way to make a terrain file to give to the Lindens.
  • A script to be able to rez objects made in Maya in Second Life called „Maya -> Second Life: Beta version.“ Maya is one of the best professional 3d editors around there, for many in the industry the 1st choice actually. So how does itwork? It gives you in Maya a new tool box with the prims of SL and the same options. You basically built your shapes in Maya, when you’re finished with it, you export it to your clipboard. Then you login to SL, equip one object with the rezzing script, load the clipboard’s content on a notecard into that object and let it rez the imported structure for you. Then you can texture it and so on and on. That’s it, basically.

Making money with unfixed bugs

Well, the teleporter bug in the client is still unfixed (don’t we love it all?), how to work around it, was explained by Torley Linden in the knowledge base. Simple: press Ctrl-Alt-V, then you’ve got the button back again.

But well, not everybody reads the knowledge base or spreads the word around, many are still complaining about this unfixed bug. Some are trying to make money with it, selling their own teleportation tools right now.

TP Hud

How about fixing the bug or spreading the word to render this device unnecessary, again? This would be great, don’t you agree?