Second-Life

Today was the planned 4th birthday event with Philip Linden as key note speaker at a new made sim named SL4B. The event was supposed to start at 12:30 pm SLT with the sim going public for arrivals at around 12.00 pm SLT.

Well, guess what happened? It turned out into a big disaster. The event did not happen at all. From all four adjacent sims avatars tried to enter the main sim - makes you wonder why they didn’t make a design like Pooley stage and used repeaters. The supplied video stream was often not working because of not enough listener slots in the video server. There have been several griefer attacks at the main sim SL4B, mostly poofs, too.

And the best of all - Philip Linden was not able to enter the sim at all, so after around two hours of desperate tries they scratched the keynote and event at all of the agenda. Makes me wonder if they are now going to learn about it and going to implement some kind of bandwidth allocation for entering a sim in kind of a VIP list, meaning: if you got a 40 avatar sim you can say: 35 normal avatars are able to enter the sim and 5 predefined VIPs. When 35 normal avatars are in the sim, it’s full for all normal avatars of us, but the VIPs can still enter the sim. This would be handy…

There’s an article in the Information Week, citing Mitch Kapor:

But virtual worlds have a long way to go until they become mainstream, Kapor said. They need the equivalent of the Web application server -- building content in virtual worlds is still equivalent to hand-coding Web pages and code. They need an improved user interface; Second Life is dificult to use. They need to be decentralized, to permit creation of private spaces – the equivalents of intranets and extranets.

Linden Lab is taking steps to decentralize. It open-sourced the client in January, and plans to allow people to put up their own servers and attach them to the main Second Life grid. They’re moving to eliminate proprietary protocols. The company is driven to do this by the conviction that its biggest threat is not an existing company, but rather a future virtual world that runs on those principles.

[Mehr]

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…

SLMillions, the in world lottery where you could win one million Linden dollars, is gone for good. Seems to me that this project was creating way too much loss for the people behind it to let it run much further.

When you take into account, which big waves the announcement from 05/04/2007 of the age verification system made and that Lindenlabs wanted to implement this on really short notice and since then it has been over one month of time and it is still not there nor any new announcements about it, it makes you wonder - when is it going to happen, finally?

I haven’t even seen a public beta test of it so far, and if you consider how fast Windlight was integrated in the client, which is a far more complex piece of technology - what is taking Lindenlabs so long? And why?

With IRC around for nearly two decades now, which is real time text based only communication at its best, you should mean that Second Life has learned from it and that groupchat in Second Life si reliable und useable.

This is often not the case. Why? Because compared to IRC Second Life has many pitfalls and annoying things, which IRC has already mastered. Some of those annoying things are:

• Sending messages to a big group is still unreliable. You normally need several tries while the discussion moves on and on, so it is very hard to contribute to a real discussion at all.
• It is not possible to moderate a group or close the group chat at all for the public. This means, only some people with a certain flag can speak, the rest can try to type something in but it will not be shown at the channel at all. IRC has such a thing, it’s the +m (moderated) flag for a channel in addition to the +o (operator) or +v (voice) flag for certain users.
• It is still not possible to mute channels. When you want to be in the channel for announcements and notices of the creator but don’t want to hear the chatter of the crowd in it, you’ve got two choices only at the moment: take it and try not to get too annoyed or leave the group in the long run. Of course, when the group is important to you, you get annoyed more and more easier over the time.
• Since always people without good knowledge join groups and use the chats to say “hi” and so on, which most regard as spam, often short conversations happen at times when you cannot handle it or need it, popping up and annoying you to hell. Ignoring this would be the best case, but no, there are always some who make the conversation longer telling how bad this behaviour is on the group chat, calling it spam, whatever, fueling the discussion even more.
• IRC clients work channel based, meaning you get only the messages of channels which you’ve joined before. If you haven’t joined a channel, you don’t get the messages at all. Second Life works also channel based, but you’ll get the message as soon as someone sent it to the whole group.

To sum it up: public channels, especially big ones, in Second Life are pretty useless and often annoying as hell. If you really want to reach your broad audience, better switch to other means of communications. Second Life has some design differences to IRC. IRC itself is a proven and reliable way to communicate with masses, the biggest nets like Quakenet have got over 180000 users at peak using it every day. And those counts are not decreasing despite the other means of communications.

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.

It happens at some places more or less, depending where you go to dance: howling of the guests. Some consider it fun. Well, it is - the first time. The second time you can live with it, but the more and more often you hear it, the more annoying it gets over the time. Why? Because it’s ruining the atmosphere, it is rude behaviour and most people over the grid just use the same two or three sound clips that are around to do it.

Oh, and many don’t only howl, no, when many howl the macro also makes big ASCII art of wolves and or other things in open chat, too, while howling. So that when you’ve disabled noise you still know that they’re howling. Arg!

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.

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.