Development

One of the most annoying and persistant bugs at the moment is the broken friends list. This is a very critical feature since many rely on it working properly. Here is the bug for this in JIRA, the open issue tracker of LL, quite an interesting read about it. It goes back into March, quite a bad thing, if you ask me…

Focus Online, one of the biggest German magazines, ran an interview with Philip Rosedale yesterday. The main focus, of course, has been Second Life, not real much chat about child pornography, whatsoever.

Some of his points and views are:

• from a creative point of view he’s a god. He has been creating a virtual world, which is undergoing its own evolution right now. Humans are building things, communities, are making things better. He beliefs that humans are good and that therefore SL is a good world.
• LL is going to work with local governments, if needed, in legal cases. The best police though is the cleaning force of the community itself.
• No news about age verification, just that’s it still on the cooker.
• Many companies are having wrong assumptions about SL and therefore no success. Even if only 10% of all registered residents are playing regularly, that’s still a great number, because that’s the number big companies like eBay started with.
• Second Life is often economically overrated.
• Why should companies still go into SL? Because it is a big marketing testfield for them.
• If someone wants to have economic success in world, he should use the multimedia features of the world and provide a valuable service for the community.
• Voice is coming, it’s done, when it’s done. The user interface is being worked on, too.
• The big vision behind SL is some kind of standardized 3d internet.

Well, that’s about it, not really new points in it, anyway. The question for me is, if Second Life is really some kind of community or not.

Second Life has now over 7 million residents. Again, no fanfare, big press release or whatever, seems they want to keep their balls low at the moment.

“In Britain, any degree of success is met with envy and resentment.” - Sir Christopher Lee. Well, not only in Great Britain…

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.

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.

The Second Life Herald is running an article named “Blame Europe” about the “virtual child pornography” by Carl Metropolitan (who dislikes it clearly) reported by German reporters.

The main thesis is this:

Sexual “ageplay” in Second Life–as repulsive as it is–would almost certainly be legal under current US law. In the United States, only virtual child pornography that is “indistinguishable from” real child pornography is illegal. [1] However, many European jurisdictions are far more restrictive. In Germany–source of the recent ARD “Report Mainz” news reports–laws against “virtual child pornography” are even stricter, [2] making little distinction between real and virtual child pornography.

[…]

The First Amendment has led to United States having some of the least restrictive laws on freedom of speech in the world. But as Second Life’s real life users become less and less American, and its servers cease to be wholly US-based, Linden Lab will inevitably be forced into more limits on what it can and cannot allow its users to do.

[Mehr]

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.