General

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.

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.

We all are members of more or less big groups, some are really spammy in the time being. I’d like to be able to mute all or certain groups e.g. during a meeting, so that I am not disturbed by them at all. When the meeting is over, I want to be able to unmute them, so that I can hear again, what’s happening on it and attend them, too. So, deal?

If you ever wanted to use the bugtracking system JIRA, but were afraid or confused about it, then fear no more, here is a nice introductional tutorial about how to use it.

A few things to come in the future in my opinion, sooner or later:

• income tax paid to your national government on virtual earned revenues,
• more CAD tools like now this exporter named Henshin (AutoCAD to SL),
• strict enforcing of this adult flag,
• a 3rd party API to extend the client with plugins like importers, adding client side scripts etc.,
• saving contents with LSL to notecards,
• some sort of external backup,
• regulation of the Linden Dollars, perhaps by the Fed, if it becomes popular enough,
• some kind of interests on credits, defined by whomever,
• more law rushing into SL (it has never been out of SL),
• some kind of external grid/corporate grid, well new grids anyway,
• the sale or IPO of Lindenlabs,
• some bridge to existing instant messaging networks like ICQ, MSN or Jabber.

About one week ago there has been a report that aired on German television about the depiction of child pornography in Second Life. It sent out massive waves through the whole community, the Lindens even wrote an article about the whole case on their own blog.

The whole case broke down into this parts:

1. the depiction of child pornography in Second Life, meaning: an avatar in child form having sex in world with an adult avatar and
2. the exchange of real life pictures of teens and preteens in questionable poses (nude and more heavy stuff, it seems) as textures in world between some avatars.

The first case is not illegal in all countries; for example in the USA some could just say “heck, those are virtual things and just adults playing behind the whole scene, no real child has been harmed at all while doing this, and it is not illegal, either, so what’s the ruckus?” The final decision on it has to be made by a judge.

Ok, here are now two useful tips to use the client a little bit better:

• Tired of sorting out your inventory? Wish, there would be more windows open than only one at the same time? This is possible, but well hidden in the client. Just open the first Inventory window, go in the File menu there and select “New Window”. That’s it. You can have as many windows open as you like.
• Offering teleports is broken again, you cannot give it to friends (yes, still happens sometimes to me)? Just press Ctrl+Alt+V, then you can offer it to anybody, don’t worry about the other options, they are not going to work at all.

The Second Life Herald has a very interesting, but also opiniated, piece about the last town hall meeting earlier this week with Cory Linden. To put it simple: the writer was not impressed at all and thinks that the Lindens are working on the wrong priorities right now.

One thing I agree is, that we still need to see how this often referred next generation architecture is going to work. One of the main problems of SL is load, big, heavy user load. This is something you cannot get on the beta grid, where perhaps maximum 100 avatars are online at the same time. This is something you get either with automated test clients - lots of them on the beta grid, or on the main grid. Since automated test clients don’t behave like humas do, the real beta grid is the main grid. The beta grid is just there to iron out the real big problems you can already see there, but the rest is only going to be visible on the main grid under heavy user load. It’s that simple.

According to the Lindens there is coming an age verification to us in about one week. If I read the FAQ correct, it is done by a third party company and you’ve got to provide them some info, e.g. social security number, drivers license number, passport number, to verify that you are over 18 years old. If you provide the info successfully, then you’ve got the “age verified” flag and are allowed to enter parcels with “adult content” flag. If you don’t have an age verification, you still can play in Second Life, but don’t enter such regions anymore.

The question I asked myself can be split up in two parts: how is this going to influence the game and is this verification process going to be really secure?

Well, the first part is: I expect, who until now enjoyed adult content, are going to leave the game, since they are not willingly going to provide the necessary infos. I can understand them. If you take a closer look at the search and don’t check “mature content” in it and search for some things, like escort, you’re still going to find such content. Now the Lindens want that the people rate themself or they are going to take measures against them. If you take the big size of SL into account, it is not hard to predict that many people are not going to rate themself properly and that, if any, actions are going to be taken against them, this would take quite some time and they would still try after that, again.

…at Monday this week I’d like to see regional datacenters, like in Europe or Asia, today is technical town hall and what can I hear there?

[12:50] Cay Trudeau: Do you think arranging physichal server on other continents, like Europe for instance, would ease up on the server load, ease the connections and allow better performance for European residents? Would that also lift the load from sending texture data across the wire?
[12:40] Cory Linden shouts: We absolutely want to deploy servers overseas. We have an architectural quirk in how we talk to the dbs – a layer of single threaded dataservers –

Neat! And, another quote, by the way:

[12:44] Cory Linden shouts: As I previously mentioned – and was in the blog post – 69% of development is currently on bugs and scaling. That number will increase this month as we continue to hire.

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