Second-Life

Many people, like me, have been suffering an annoying error message since months now - “Missing object from database.”

It comes upon you without warning. You login, want to rez your favorite chain, skin, whatever, and you only get instead “Missing object from database.” - Bam, you’re blasted! You even don’t get the name of the object at all, so you have to figure it out on your own what’s missing - bummer!

So, what can you do against this? Not much at all. This bug has been bugging residents since months, it’s spreading like a virus and still unfixed. The only thing you can hope for is that the Lindens are fixing it sooner or later, sooner would be better, of course.

There’s an entry in their famous JIRA system for it called SVC-553, take a look at it. Quite interesting read and for sure tell them what you think about it. This is such a fundamental bug, because it’s undermining the trust in the inventory and handiwork of the Lindens at all, that it’s a real shame that it’s still unfixed since August last year!

Consider yourself living on a nice, new sim of the mainland. You’re happy with your small parcel, nice seaview, perhaps, good neighbors and then happening this: a new club is opening its gates.

Worse, this club has many camping spots, to fake traffic and also quite some visitors with the result that its eating up all possible traffic alone for the whole sim.

The result? You’re busted. You cannot use your property anymore, because teleporting and even logging into your home becomes a new kind of adventure. “Is the sim already full or is at least one slot left for me to enter?”

So what can you do about it? Of course, you could tell the club owner to leave. “I am soo sorry, but I want to stay here, I like it and beside, I just own 4096 sqms of land and don’t have the money for a private sim.” Bummer. So he’s eating up the whole traffic of the sim and making it unusable with just his teeny, weeny piece of it.

Since I’ve been away for a while from my time, now the time has come to write some new stuff. I just haven’t been much in a writing mood, that’s all, but still many times in Second Life.

Well, what’s the matter, then?

• Teleports are still as unreliable as ever.
• The usual avatar still has only the possibility to be member in 25 groups maximum. Way too low… there’s been some effort around to persuade Lindenlab to raise this number, but if it is going to be succesful? We’re going to see.
• Virtual banks are no longer allowed in Second Life. A good move, especially after the bad example of Ginko Financial.
• I still don’t see the open sourcing of the official server code, since this is the biggest source for revenue they have. It’s that simple.
• I still wonder what’s the next big thing is going to be. Now that Havok4 is being tested and WindLight is still in the Beta viewers only, SL leaves much room for improvements.
• There’s been no really important open source viewer or fork of it, now one year after the opening of the source code. Why not? Because the server is still closed source.

The pilot is leaving.

Cory Ondrejka aka Cory Linden, one of the longest running employees of Lindenlab and its chief technician (CTO) is leaving. Why? The reasons remain mysterious. Some speculate that he had different visions for the future of SL than Philip Rosedale has. What does this mean for LL? Well, many think that the company is in for a tough ride now and it’s going to be very hard to fill the gap Cory Ondrejka leaves, since he’s one of the few people who can still understand the big picture as it seems. So - we’re going to see.

Our Lindens, who art in the Labs,
Hallowed be thy prims.
Thy Grid-dom come, thy will be done,
On sims, as it is in the preview,
Give us this day our daily crash,
And forgive us our spammery.
As we forgive those, who grief against us
Deliver us from the n00bie ones.
And lead us not into nakie places.

Amen.

Age verification is finally going operational. First it’s going to be on a grid wide beta on the main grid, the impact of it is something to be checked out.

It’s unusual that a beta feature is going to be released on the main grid, but in that case it makes sense. I just wonder what took them over 7 months to get that feature ready; it’s something that’s going to make Second Life more corporate friendly in the future, that’s for sure.

The land prices have been going down, down, down over the last few months. Anyone who’s got a free parcel, either it is free for rent or sale, has quite some problems to find a new owner for it.

Also big players like Dreamland have lowered their prices to get new tenants or sell it. In addition the in world sales of virtual goods are not as quite good at the moment as they used to be, many people in this field are complaining about the lack of sales.

So how does it come? Well, the big hype over SL is over in most countries at the moment, it’s not so unusual anymore, now SL needs to show its value as a tool for whichever need. But end of the hype means also that the stream of newbies flowing into SL has ebbed down great scale.

The next copyright lawsuit about in world theft has started. Virtually Blind has an interesting article about it.

What really baffles me is this quote:

“We originally tried to go through [Second Life Provider] Linden Lab,” said Alderman. “Everybody filed DMCA [takedown] notices. We filed support tickets and abuse reports. We even sent a letter to Robin [Harper, Linden Lab’s Vice President of Marketing & Community Development] and copied Philip [Rosedale, Linden Lab’s CEO]. We got nothing.”

Doesn’t sound like a good customer service, does it? And those are not your mommas designers from the backyard, but some of the leading in world designers and builders. Well, we’re going to see where this lawsuit is going to end.

Second Life’s very own Cassandra and most professional ranter, Prokofy Neva, has been banned at 57 Miles weblog Metaversed.com

This is quite interesting and amusing. Why interesting? Because PN and 57 Miles were on real friendly terms, they made together 12 lengthy podcasts named “Second Rant”. And now they split apart - and it’s the usual picture, PN got banned on the whole website (if possible, that is).

Of course, another lengthy article by PN about this event on his own blog, nothing so far on Metaversed.com yet. The reasons why? Because PN called one on the group channel of Metaversed to “fuck off”, the last podcast was way too critical or so, mostly because PN is not good for his business.

Well - whatever. This is not the last thing we’re going to hear from skipjack Prokofy Neva - just another finished act in the whole drama around this avatar. That’s all.

If you’re running a somewhat bigger group (> 1000 members or so) be careful if you want to use group chat. It’s still broken, meaning quite often message B shows up before your message A does. If you are able to use it at all, that is.

And - you still cannot disable chat for all except some moderators, so a group always tends to get “spammy” from time to time. Many people now have a very short fuse if reading messages from a group chat, too. Most times it’s just a waste of time, anyway.

Like Jenny saying “hi”, Mike saying “hello”, Jenny asking “wanna dance” and so on and on…