Posts

Here’s an interesting read from 8th March that shows much of the current problems of SL at the moment. Astrin Few is a musician in SL and giving live performances, being the 4th year in the game; it’s printed in the Second Life Herald.

To cite the main statements of the open letter:

It’s been a long time since Linden Lab put anything really useful into SL that works (and that’s allowing that the addition of the FMOD stream player in version 1.2 “works”). For quite some time now, there has been more and more that is broken and degrades the experience.

I still love performing live shows in Second Life. But that’s about me and my listeners. I’m lucky if my stream works for them when they listen with the embedded stream player. I’m lucky if my event actually made it into the Events listing. I’m lucky if the sim doesn’t crash. I’m lucky if my listeners can chat without too much lag, and I’m even lucky if my guitar rezzes and they can see me holding my electric guitar, and not my acoustic.

[Mehr]

There is Second Life in town, but it’s of course not the only player here at the moment, though the most popular. At least one competitor exists, that has its roots in the academic area and has much broader goals than Second Life: Croquet.

Croquet has far more ambitious goals than Second Life ever could hope to have. To cite their website:

Croquet is a powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable. The Croquet architecture supports synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and multiple devices.

And, in contrary to Second Life, all components of Croquet are already available as Opensource (seems like a BSD-style license to me), so anybody who wants can install a Croquet server whereever he wants.

Yesterday there was a new German whitepaper called “Second Life and business in virtual worlds” released done by Pixelpark AG and Elephant Seven AG.

The content is split in roughly three parts: first an introduction about what SL is, some things about the economics and three strategies how a RW company could make its in world presence, what to expect and what not, the advantages and weaknesses of the system, and how to be succesful with an in world campagne, how to get experience and so on.

The second part consists of many case studies, like Adidas and so on, what companies wanted to do in here and  how they achieved it - or failed to do it.

The third part lists other 3d world projects, lists their attributes, advantages and disadvantages  compared to Second Life.

For short: the target audience of this whitepaper is a project leader who must decide on if to get into SL or not. It tries to be a somewhat unbiased view of the things and of course is more objective than something from Lindenlabs or the main stream press, so it’s worth a read.

Well, after I finished my roundup I’ve found an article from last week in my feedreader run by Infoweek called “Inside Second Life’s Datacenter.” It showed up today at Slashdot, so… it should be already very popular now.

But there are some real interesting facts in this article I’d like to point out:

• the monthly growth rate is about 20% at the moment. That’s big!
• The maximum possible number of concurrent online users at the moment is claimed to be at 100.000 avatars. I don’t believe this number, they’ve got already issues when the number goes about 30.000 anytime at the moment, the grid destabilizes and becomes unreliable. But there’s reliability in this unreliability, since you just need to take a look at the online users count and the rule of thumb…
• Are you seated? Really? Better take a seat. Ok. Their goal is - no joke - to be able to support 10s of millions of simultaneous logins! Bwahaha! Sorry, better first fix the existing login count and make the system scale more well before planning such… high… numbers! *coughs*
• Second Life consists of around 2.000 servers at the moment running on Debian Linux with MySQL. Debian… of all of the systems. Arg. Right, that’s the linux distribution that constantly fails to deliver a new version at the planned timeline reliable (3 years was the worst delay ever, the now planned release of last December is still not there) and is there even more worse in this aspect than Microsoft can ever hope to be! No wonder so much are switching to Ubuntu. Besides, some of the packages are really outdated and some of their maintainers have real weird point of views. And MySQL - well, some still consider it still something of a toy database. It still needs to overcome that image and that’s why always so many recommend LL to switch to Postgresql.
• If the server side part is going to be opensourced or not is still in the discussion. Nothing new there. Many possibilities, not all include an opening of the source code.
• They’re looking for an IT guy who can help them scale their infrastructure from 2.000 servers up to 10.000 servers.
• They’re trying to make the LSL-implementation faster. That’s nothing new so far, too, that’s their Mono-Project. Testing of it should start in the second quarter 2007.
• Something new about LSL: it was written in one week back then, and the Mono-Project will enable to script in other languages like Visual Basic or C#.
• Some new measures under consideration to manage growth: limiting logins at the weekends and moving some of the Second Life experience to normal web servers (rubbish, this should be all in the client IMHO, this is Second Life, not Web 2.0), changes in the database infrastructure and the availability of tools that show you how much computing power your avatar needs, especially when it uses much attachments and such.

Some of it sounds nice, other things - 10s millions of concurrent logins - sound more like Science Fiction at the moment. 100.000 concurrent logins are supported at the moment? Well… yes, could be, but the SL experience then is going to be more like lag hell on earth I am afraid.

It’s been a while since my last blogging spree that I’ve posted any new article at all. So, without much foreword, some new thingies:

• Dedric Mauriac blogged about the in world building of Packaging and Converting Essentials. Seems he really likes the place.
• The picture that I made of the P&CE building is now used in their in world ad with permission. Nice. Perhaps I should start a career as photographer in Second Life. Then again my photo editing skills are surely not high enough, I am more a technician than anything else.
• A change of one of the last updates that not everybody has notices comes into effect now - you can spend maximum 999.999 L$ per classified now instead of 99.999 L$ before. This means the maximum went from something like 357 US$ up to 3571 US$ per week. And there are already ads in the system where the author of it plays around 200.000 L$ per week for it, that’s about 714 US-$ for the sum in real money. So these guys are either very wealthy or making much money in world already.
• Some days ago the Second Life Herald run an article about ageplay. While normal ageplay is nothing to say against it, there’s also sex ageplay in the game (child escorts/teen escorts), and this seems to has a market, too. Now how sick is this? It’s even against the law in many countries. Of course, the normal ageplayers are not against the law at all, but the growth rate is amazing: 1 % per week. This means exponential growth of course and is something that cannot go on forever.
• The next planned downtime this week brings us again no update of the primary client, while the First Look client got some of them already. Could be, that they need the whole timeslot, could be not. But they should finally take some time to fix the most annoying bugs in the main client, namely the inability at the moment to offer teleports to avatars who are not your friends and the annoying water-bug. Or they should finally setup a source repository and give some well accredited programmers from the community write-level access. Then it would have already been fixed since ages!
• Here’s another blog entry from a journalist of the Handelsblatt about SL in general. The essence of it is: Second Life is mostly an Empty Life, sex is the most driving force behind the in world economy, rw companies normally don’t blend in real well and it’s overhyped at great lengths. Period.
• And now for something completely different: wannabe terrorists planned to attack a very important Internet node in London. They were captured before they could act on their plan. This still shows us: without a first life there’s no second life and we should be thankful they were captured beforehand.

What’s the use in running a scheduled downtime from 5 hours in under 2 hours, which looks first like great work, when then some hours later the inventory database has hiccups and issues are showing up again? I don’t know.

I know Flumm Melendez since some time, comes from because she’s been an avid writer to the group “SL Deutschland”. The first time I saw her profile, Flumm Melendez was a female avatar, earning her money in world as an escort and with making and selling tattoos.

After some time, though, this became boring or whatever, so she started building her own club, I guess its name was “Ice cube” or something like that. I was there back then and helped her testing a door for the nudie room.

Then after a short while the avatar turned into a male, also showing for some time a RL picture of the player behind it in the profile. 27 years old, male, from Berlin, Germany. Quite a change.

Now I’m hopping to a new sim, Berlin City, and guess who’s the landbaron there? Flumm Melendez, also most of it crowded with buildings and sold. Not far away from this sim is another new sim, Cologne City? Owner? Flumm Melendez. So - the real money in Second Life still is in selling and renting sims and building.

I’ve included the RSS-feed of the SLLA blog some days ago to my RSS aggregator, just because I’m curious and wanted to know this group a little better beside the media coverage they got last week.

Well, I read the article about “army rally and protest.” They’re claiming that they want to install a government in SL made by the people. Sounds like a nice idea at first, but I’ve read that about 2-3 years ago the Lindens already asked the people if they want such a thing - the answer was a big NO back then.

Two quotes from the article are:

Our demand is clear: we want a debate between SLLA and Governor Linden. Where was the openness for dialogue when First Land was taken away, or when Linden Labs started selling chunks of our world to IBM, Sony and Warner Brothers?

[Mehr]

The Second Life Herald ran an interesting article how to look good with freebies (and nearly freebies) with many pictures included and landmarks to the points. Definitely worth a read when you’re short on money, don’t want to buy it, but want to look good!

I’ve taken the good, old Bartle-test to see what kind of player in MMORPGs I am. Ok, some of the questions don’t apply to SL, of course - like killing dragons, gaining experience points - but when you carefully answer the questions, you got a real good picture about what kind of player you are.

So I am an ESAK. This means:

Based on your answers, you are ESAK. Breakdown: Achiever 33.33%, Explorer 86.67%, Killer 13.33%, Socializer 66.67% ESAK players often see the game world as a great stage, full of things to see and people to meet. They love teaming up with people to get to the hard-to-see places, and they relish unique experiences.

Some further explanations show the four categories. The categories mean:

• People with high Achiever scores tend to prefer collecting points, levels, treasure and accomplishments that set them apart from other players–or simply present challenges.
• People with high Explorer scores tend to enjoy finding all of the unique areas of the world, often enjoying the immersion of the experience. Finding a place with unique monsters and seeing what those monsters do is usually more fun for an Explorer than defeating the monsters themselves.
• People with high Killer scores prefer the player-versus-player aspect of any game more than anything offered by the environment. They often relish the adrenaline and challenge of pitting themselves against real players.
• People with high Socializer scores enjoy interacting with other people, forming organizations, and finding cooperative solutions to the challenges within the virtual world.

Although the test is now somewhat old, the results are still a very good match. If you want to try it on your own go to this page and just answer the 30 questions. That’s all, done in under 5 minutes and it’s fun.